UK-Mauritius Agreement on the Chagos Archipelago

Lord Houghton of Richmond Excerpts

Monday 30th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Houghton of Richmond (CB)]

My Lords, I echo the words of those who have said, and will no doubt go on to say, what a pleasure it was to be in the Chamber to bear witness to a most delightful maiden speech and an equally thoughtful valedictory one.

The treaty relating to the Chagos Islands and the potential transfer of the sovereignty of those islands to Mauritius has received much parliamentary scrutiny in committees over the past three months. That scrutiny has thrown up multiple issues that many people are justifiably passionate about—the plight of the Chagossians, the protection of the marine environment, and concern about a superficially bizarre treaty that will cost us a lot of money to surrender the benefits of sovereignty. My principal interest, however, is the one that I deem the overridingly important one: the role that Diego Garcia plays in our strategic relationship with the United States of America.

On a personal level, I am very familiar with the UK base on Diego Garcia. It was part of my overseas command responsibilities when I was Chief of Joint Operations. I have visited the base and know from my time as Chief of the Defence Staff the critical role it plays in exercising UK sovereignty and therefore justifying the UK’s position as part of the legal chain that authorises the forward deployed forces of the United States the freedoms they need to prosecute offensive operations. It is not an overstatement to say that our role as the sovereign power enabling the United States the freedoms it needs to use the base in accordance with international humanitarian law represents an enormous contribution to the defence element of the special relationship.

My primary concern, therefore, is to help ensure that the treaty, if ratified, represents the best way of preserving those freedoms. Superficially, I am reassured. After all, the treaty has been subject to detailed scrutiny by both the UK and US Governments and enjoys the support of our Five Eyes partners and many other interested parties—yet I have some lingering doubts that I at least want to place on the record. My doubts emanate from two concerns that relate to the relatively, though not entirely, novel forms of warfare. One is political warfare and the other is a form of legal warfare that most now simply refer to as lawfare.

Political warfare is best described as non-military efforts to coerce or intimidate a country or an individual into actions that benefit the perpetrator. The form of political warfare I envisage as relevant to this treaty are actions by a hostile power to coerce or intimidate key individuals in the international criminal justice system or individuals in key positions in relevant Governments. Lawfare refers to the strategic use of legal proceedings to achieve a political or military objective, effectively using the law as a weapon. A number of witnesses to the International Relations and Defence Committee proffered the view that the need to enter into this treaty in the first place was primarily prompted by successful lawfare, which culminated in the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice that has been referred to already.

My worry therefore emanates from the concern that this treaty might, in the relatively near future, fall foul of future political and legal warfare acting in concert. In this context, I have two principal concerns. The first relates to the worry that the transfer of sovereignty of Diego Garcia to Mauritius will bring it under the provisions of the African nuclear weapons-free zone treaty, designed to keep the area free of nuclear-powered or armed submarines. Currently, Diego Garcia sits outside the treaty provisions, but is there not a significant danger that this exemption will come under legal scrutiny and challenge as soon as this treaty is ratified?

My second concern is perhaps more substantive. It relates to the issue of sovereign responsibility. To me, the treaty as currently drafted masks an incompatibility. It clearly states that on treaty ratification the sovereignty of the Chagos Islands passes to Mauritius. But it also implies that the administrative authority to agree the United States the freedom to operate the Diego Garcia base for military operations is retained by the United Kingdom.

My concern here, although I am not a lawyer, is that a country cannot abrogate, alienate or transfer its sovereign responsibilities under international humanitarian law. So, will not the prosecutors of lawfare simply start to exploit the view that international humanitarian law negates a bilateral agreement and that the UK is no longer the relevant administrative authority when it comes to agreeing military action by our principal ally? I sincerely hope that my concerns are either ill-judged or misplaced, but I would like the Minister to reassure the House that these concerns have been fully considered.

A final and completely unrelated concern, which my noble and gallant friend Lord Craig separately thought should be raised, although the risk may be small, is potentially the greatest existential threat to the Diego Garcia base, and it is not from hostile activity but from rising seawater, tsunamis or earthquake. The airfield at the base is barely a metre above sea level. Does the treaty allow for early termination in the event that natural causes render the base inoperable? A hundred years is a long time to be paying for something that cannot be used. The Minister’s assurance on this would be welcome.

National Security Strategy

Lord Houghton of Richmond Excerpts

Thursday 26th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

I am sure the noble Lord has looked very carefully to find it, so this question of which page might be rhetorical. No, I cannot direct him to a page, but if he looks across the range of documents we have produced he will know how much we value relationships. He is right to emphasise the importance of soft power, including that of the Commonwealth. One of the problems we have had in the past is that our relationship with Europe has had to be reset and renewed. Our relationship with America is one that we value, as, of course, are those across the world, including with the Commonwealth. We must have, build and value those relationships. It is not just soft power; it is actually a harder-edged thing as well. I will find it in some documents at some point, I am sure, but the noble Lord has only to hear Ministers speak to know how much that relationship is valued.

[Lord Houghton of Richmond (CB)]

My Lords, I congratulate the Government on the strategy, which is both considered and sobering. It is considered because it strikes all the right balances between reinvesting in the conventional deterrents through NATO—the deterrence of Russia by NATO—and building resilience domestically, on which it is strong. The defining feature of the strategy is that it is a fundamentally grim read. It cuts out any niceties or talk of values and looks as though it has been written to give society an enhanced sense of threat awareness and prepare it for some hard choices.

My first question is: has it been written for that purpose? If so, I further congratulate the Government on it, because the threat awareness of society needs enhancing. Secondly, does the Minister appreciate the degree to which the slowness with which investment is made—with, as the noble Baroness opposite said earlier, very little in the lifetime of this Parliament and most of it in the imagined world of the next—undermines that message? Is it too much for me to hope that somewhere within government there is a hope that this investment might be accelerated?

[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble and gallant Lord. It is interesting to hear the cheers from the party opposite to his last point, because this is a generational increase in defence spending that the previous Government did not match, although their members are calling for us to go faster and further now, which we always want to do. It is worth noting that, under NATO’s new estimate, we think we will get to over 4% by the year after next.

The noble and gallant Lord made an interesting point that I had not thought of because I was not involved in the drafting of the document. The purpose is different, but he is right that we have to not only make this an issue for government but give a real understanding of how the nature of threats is changing and how we have to work across all branches of government, including local government, and society as a whole. He is right in saying that the document draws that out. It is a grim read, but in some ways it is also an encouraging read, because unless you recognise the threats and understand what you are facing, it is very hard to address them.

What came across when I read it was where the linkages are with other actions across government—whether it is the Department of Health looking at resilience or the industrial strategy looking at resilience, they link together. The strategic defence review has been so important to this country, and I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, and his co-reporters on this. Without that strategic defence review, this document would have been weaker. It has helped to define some of the threats we face and looks at ways to address them. But if assurance is needed, I can give the noble and gallant Lord absolute assurance that we will do everything we can to not only reach these spending levels but, through other avenues of government, enhance the impact they will have.

One Hundred Year Partnership Agreement between the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and Ukraine

Lord Houghton of Richmond Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd April 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Houghton of Richmond (CB)]

My Lords, I am delighted to follow my good friend, the noble Lord, Lord Marland, and have this opportunity to make a small and relatively brief contribution to this debate. I do not have anything to add to the International Agreements Committee’s excellent observations on the agreement itself. I agree with the prevailing view expressed so far that the partnership agreement does not present any specific new obligations; there are no specific deliverables and there is no measurable or accountable substance to what is being offered.

I recognise that one of the principal purposes of the treaty is, therefore, purely its symbolic signalling of enduring support to Ukraine. However, I find this lack of definition in respect of deliverable substance somewhat disconcerting, especially in the area of hard and tangible military support. I say this because we are enjoying—if that is the right word—unusual levels of geopolitical uncertainty at the moment and it is very difficult to understand how our assessed national security policy objectives are being prioritised in order to inform the optimum use of the very welcome uplift in defence expenditure that the Government have recently announced.

To expand on this further, I offer at least six national policy objectives that are potentially vying for military resources at the moment. The first, obviously, is the need to make our national contribution to re-establishing conventional deterrence against Russian expansion in Europe. I say this in the context of our extremely poor national record of meeting our NATO targets over the last 15 to 20 years. The second is the need to enhance the resilience of our own domestic critical national infrastructure against conventional and increasingly hybrid threats. The third is the need to support Ukraine either in continuing to fight Russia or, in the context of a potential ceasefire, to enhance rapidly its fighting power and deterrent capability.

The fourth is the potential requirement to lead and significantly contribute to an enduring operation to oversee a potential ceasefire agreement in Ukraine—the nature, demands and risks of which are yet far from clear. The fifth is the emerging requirement to refashion the delivery of European security in the context of the United States of America withdrawing its security guarantees to Europe. The sixth is something of a catch-all: to meet whatever residual global security role the Government believe we should retain the national capacity to fulfil. I include in this such diverse commitments as the security of the overseas territories, South Korea, AUKUS, the evacuation of citizens from danger overseas and so on.

I fear that we face at least two significant challenges in meeting the demands of these six potential policy requirements. First, we simply cannot meet them in the context of any current projection of defence expenditure, so we have to prioritise. The second is the hard reality that the capability demands of each policy requirement are to some extent either marginally or completely different. The choices to be made are not so much ones of where to use capability as what capabilities we invest in to optimise the reduction of strategic security risks.

I suggest that, as of today, the policy decision over which we have the least control—the one that is infinitely the most worrying and would result in the most expensive capability deficiencies—would be the removal of the current US security guarantees to Europe. This scenario underpins my concern about entering into partnership agreements with countries without being absolutely clear about the defined extent of our military commitment. I would extend my concern to the need to be even more careful about committing forces to a ceasefire monitoring role without an absolutely clear understanding of the associated risk, and in the context of a partner to that ceasefire that is now proven to be wholly malevolent—in this case, Russia.

In closing, will the work of the strategic defence review, which feels increasingly overdue, provide the capability recommendations needed to meet these various policy objectives? What priority is being applied to them? Does the Minister share my concern that the affordability considerations might result in the need to take intolerable risk?

UK Strategy Towards the Arctic (International Relations and Defence Committee Report)

Lord Houghton of Richmond Excerpts

Thursday 9th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Houghton of Richmond (CB)]

My Lords, I welcome this opportunity to debate this excellent report regarding the UK’s strategy towards the Arctic. I share the view that this has been a somewhat neglected area and is now of increasing strategic importance, as the report clearly lays out. Obviously, the report was completed and published under the previous Government and was not intended to inform the current ongoing strategic defence review. However, it is more in the context of that review that I want to offer some observations, and I do so because since the publication of this report the strategic context has moved on.

Regardless of the specifics of how the situation in Ukraine is resolved, my view is that the position of Russia looks weaker. It is facing the reality of its own military limitations. By contrast, the relative strengths of European NATO are becoming more apparent, particularly given the additional membership of Finland and Sweden and the upward trend in defence spending of many NATO countries. Moreover, the advent of a Trump presidency looks set—I would say, wholly justifiably—to coerce all of NATO in Europe, including the UK, into assuming an ever greater responsibility for its own security. I am not suggesting that the threat from Russia has gone away. I am suggesting that it is now increasingly likely to manifest itself as malevolent activity below the threshold of formalised warfare, the human and material costs of which are huge.

In this changing context, there may be considerable good sense in the UK reimagining its commitment within NATO, and doing so in ways that play to our natural military strengths and permit the necessary enhancements to national resilience, doing so in a manner that might just be affordable within a defence budget of 3% of GDP.

The SDR will undoubtedly confirm that some of our defence expenditure is non-discretionary: most obviously, the deterrent. We must also now recognise our vulnerability to the threat of ballistic missiles, a threat to which events in both Israel and Ukraine have now sensitised public awareness. We obviously need to invest in those areas which give us a technological edge, especially where automation and autonomy relieve the pressure on physical numbers. But, more fundamentally, a strategic choice needs to be made in respect of where, within a newly configured and energised NATO, we should develop and focus the more conventional elements of our force structure. In deciding this, we need to better evaluate the balance between conventional deterrence and the active interdiction of sub-threshold threats. We need to do this in a way that is orchestrated on a NATO-wide basis.

To me, although it pains an infantryman to say it, logic and geography suggest that we should consider focusing on a leadership role in the maritime and air domains of NATO’s northern flank—a flank which should be envisaged as including the Baltic, High North, Arctic and north Atlantic. We should adopt an operational posture that is a combination of conventional deterrence and the active interdiction of sub-threshold—particularly subsea and airborne—threats. We should build on the innate dependencies and mutual trust born of our leadership of the Joint Expeditionary Force, which now needs to be renamed, and we should build on this in respect of capability development and procurement.

Because cost pressures will dictate, we should probably worry much less about mustering a significant high-readiness land commitment to central Europe, a contingency which, in societal terms, we seem, on a national basis, either disinclined to or incapable of embracing, and for which many continental partners display far greater national urgency due to geographic realities. This does not mean that we do not need an Army: far from it. The combination of national resilience, national regeneration and constitution, and what I would call focused lethality, which I use as a term for a more technically enhanced set of specialised forces, will more than justify a significant force structure.

But I simply cannot see how, in the changing strategic environment and with the cost pressures that seem set to remain, we can continue to delude ourselves that we are much more than a regional power, albeit one that more than delivers its fair share of regional security, particularly when the nuclear deterrent is costed in. I appreciate that these remarks fall well outside a more disciplined commentary on our strategy towards the Arctic but, to me, the true excellence of the report lay less in what it specifically said and much more in what it teasingly forebode; namely, that the security dynamics of the Arctic and northern Europe are now more interconnected and that the Arctic itself is potentially far more contested. The report offers the strategic defence review much food for thought regarding our national strategic options.

G20 and COP 29 Summits

Lord Houghton of Richmond Excerpts

Monday 25th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

The noble Baroness will have seen the clean power objective—the plan that will be coming out before the end of the year—which I think will address many of these concerns. I understand her concerns about the last COP just gone, but we have to build on this. There are two alternatives: either we give up and walk away saying, “We did not get what we wanted, so why continue?” or we just have to keep going, because each time progress is being made. The noble Baroness will know that nothing happened for 11 years about the issues that were agreed in Paris to proceed on carbon markets; at this COP, we finally agreed the rules, so progress is there. It is not enough, and it is not fast enough, but that is why we have to keep on going. The noble Baroness will see that we are making progress on clean power. To respond to the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, we have already started working with Brazil about what will happen at the next COP. Perhaps I am just an optimist, but I think we just have to try to make progress at every stage we possibly can.

[Lord Houghton of Richmond (CB)]

My Lords, I heard what the noble Baroness said about the Chagos Islands and Diego Garcia. Surely the strategic issue to be squared within the treaty is not the security of the base but the permissions of the US forces stationed there, particularly the B52 bombers, to prosecute operations from there without being subject to any form of a red card from the Mauritian Government. Can she confirm that the wording of the treaty is sufficiently clear that American operations mounted from Diego Garcia will not in some way be prejudiced?

[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

The noble and gallant Lord raises an important point. We are confident that the treaty does provide those assurances. That was part of the discussions which took place during the last Government prior to the treaty being signed.