UK-US Co-operation on Using Atomic Energy for Mutual Defence

Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd October 2024 Grand Committee

[Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, on not only the skill with which he introduced this debate but his patience and skill in presiding over the whole business of producing these agreements. I do not know whether it is realised what a cascade of international agreements and treaties pass through the hands of the committee and our excellent staff. It is enormous and seems to be growing. Some of them are gloriously minimalist, such as worrying about driving licences for British citizens in Portugal after Brexit; I know it is important, but it is very small. Some look simple, but are actually enormous and have vast hinterlands of implications behind them. The words in the treaties may be simple, but what lies behind them is enormously significant for the future of this country.

These two agreements that we are looking at—the MDA and the AUKUS agreement—are definitely both in that second category. I am not sure that that is fully appreciated or realised by the machinery which enables us to have a debate here in the Moses Room. These are giant issues that will shape the entire future of our nation and its safety and security. Neither of them has really been given anything like the adequate time needed to go into the thinking behind them and where they are heading.

As the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, eloquently said, the whole Constitutional Reform and Governance Act process—the CRaG process—really will not do any more, I am sorry to say. Some of us pressed the previous Government and are pressing the present Government on this. In this populist age, if we want our Parliament to perform, be trusted and be able to genuinely scrutinise major issues and acts of the Executive, we have to go back to that Act and reform it. I hope that will be a high priority for the new Government.

At first glance, these two treaties look quite separate from each other, but they in fact overlap, not only in not being given enough time to be examined but in that, together, they raise enormous questions about the pattern of our future war weaponry, defence equipment and entire security stance in a totally changed world in which power has changed, threats are coming from different directions from ever before and in unfamiliar forms. Many people do not seem to be geared towards this entirely new situation.

Again, as the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, and others said, the MDA takes away the 10-year rule and the chance for Parliament to scrutinise an enormously rapidly evolving world of nuclear weaponry and technology—and, of course, civil nuclear technology as well. I am not sure that Congress in the United States or the Parliament of Australia—or, if there are any newcomers to AUKUS, the Parliament of Canada or Diet of Japan—would put up with this sort of thing. They would not tolerate a truncated, short session after which the Executive carry on as before, which is more or less what happens. This is a very unsatisfactory situation, which is very bad for Parliament and will, I hope, be changed.

As for the AUKUS naval treaty, it is all to do with nuclear marine propulsion—not to be confused with nuclear weapons, of course—for a new generation of submarine vehicles for the Australians. It looks quite small; it is mostly about pillar 1 of the two pillars of the AUKUS treaty but, if you start looking at the implications of AUKUS 1—and indeed, AUKUS 2, which will presumably be covered by the same sorts of agreements in due course—you see that it takes us into a new defence world altogether. It is a vast Aladdin’s cave of new technologies, some of which hardly ever come into the media discussion because they are not understood. Some of them are already being used: there was a gentleman here from Ukraine last week who informed some of us that the military plus semi-private enterprise organisations, which organise the battlefield planning for the Ukrainians on all their fronts, are now also in control of the direction, effects and supply of about a million drones. That covers, if you think about it, the control of their production, maybe in remote spots, their deployment, their decision to go into Russian territory and all the rest. That is beyond what any Government or any military organisation can manage alone. It now has to be managed by a whole series of fascinating new enterprises of vast complexity, all relying on the very latest technologies of every kind, including AI, to see that there is a flow and supply chain of drones, and that they go in roughly the right direction. Of course, they are not always co-ordinated at all, which produces some quite sensitive results.

Nevertheless, we are looking at is an entirely different defence world and, as I said, an Aladdin’s cave of new technology. I have just glanced through pillar 2, which is relevant to pillar 1 and the AUKUS treaty. Pillar 2 refers to advanced capabilities, the areas in which we, the British, are now implicating ourselves, not sacrificing sovereignty in a major way but nevertheless weaving our future defence plans into other people’s—America’s and Australia’s. It is welcome and good, but we should be aware of it in a way that I do not think we are.

First, “undersea capabilities” sounds innocent enough. What that is to do with is whether submarines are going to cut our north Atlantic and Atlantic cables and literally slice off the entire British economy. That is a major consideration, fear and danger. The development of proper undersea capabilities and unmanned submarines in due course, which are also on the list for discussion, is a central part of our national survival.

Quantum technology obviously comes at the centre of this, described by the previous Government as a priority of our defence development. Artificial intelligence and autonomy are obvious ones. Advanced cyber is already going ahead, and then there are hypersonic and counter-hypersonic capabilities, which are desperately needed, as the affairs in the Middle East demonstrate particularly clearly. There is all the electronic warfare and innovation of every kind, in relation to the traditional visions of defence, including tanks, rockets, soldiers, guns, warfare, battleships and so on—all that sort of thing—with electronic co-ordination, in entirely new ways. There is information-sharing, which of course is intelligence, and advanced radar, in which we were once the world leaders—but now of course the Americans have rather taken over, and the Russians as well. They are particularly well advanced in radar. These are areas that are not usually associated in people’s minds with defence, yet this is the defence of tomorrow, and this is where we are being taken by the two treaties that we are discussing today.

It is a very new area indeed. I cannot help feeling how maddened Mr Putin must be when he was talked into going into Ukraine by generals who probably did not have the slightest idea what they were heading towards—the idea that there could be 1 million drones halting all their attack advances and causing chaos, and the idea that they themselves had to invent new technologies in drones, as the Russians have done with some success. That is something that he must regret bitterly now.

Eric Schmidt, the former head of Google, was remarking in Foreign Affairs a couple of days ago that the US is unprepared for this sort of world and pattern, and he urged certain changes. Obviously, Russia was completely unprepared and has been caught hopping, and Ukraine has had to invent itself as a new force based on these new technologies, totally different from anything that we have ever known before, even though there are a few relics of the old technologies—like the Battle of the Somme and trench warfare. That goes on, but on top of it an entirely new pattern of hostilities and conflict has emerged, with autonomous weapons driven by gigantic algorithms now dominating the scene.

Putin regrets it, and America may be trying to get ready. I hope that we are ready, although you do not hear much about it, and perhaps the Minister will have a word or two to add to the debate today. I think that we are bright and resilient enough not to fall into the same trap. As long as Parliament is given a chance to speak, and the experts in Parliament—and, dare I say it, the experts in your Lordships’ House—at the right times, we shall be able to keep up with affairs. If the MDA will not allow a 10-year review automatically, so what? We can put down a few Motions and have a debate ourselves every 10 years. Actually, I think we will need one every five years, because these things are evolving so fast.

As I said, we must not fall into the old trap of fighting the last war with the last war’s weapons. It is an entirely new world, and these treaties open the gates to understanding it in a more effective way. To finish, I add—rather impertinently and cheekily, because I belong to a rather defeated party at the moment—that I hope all our new Ministers will remember that they are also parliamentarians.

End of Custody Supervised Licence Scheme: Extension

Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts

Monday 13th May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bellamy (Con)]

My noble friend makes a very serious point, which has considerable force. The Government are well aware of it and will take it forward.

[Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)]

My Lords, 50 years ago, when the prison population was about 40,000, some of us proposed radically—and, it was thought at the time, dangerously—that non-state or semi-state organisations, institutions and enterprises should play their role in reorganising the Prison Service and that there should be a radical appraisal, as we heard called for a moment ago, of the nature of custody and penalties so that we could be more in line with other countries on the proportion of people in prison in relation to population. We are still miles ahead, except for America. Can my noble friend reassure us that, whichever party is in government, there will be a serious, organised effort to grip this custody issue and bring us into line with civilised patterns in other countries and away from the problems with overcrowding and drugs and the endless stories of difficulties to which we are at present subjected?

[Lord Bellamy (Con)]

My Lords, if my noble friend is suggesting that we need a radical and thorough debate on sentencing policy and the use of custody, I entirely agree with him. Any Government would need to take that very serious issue forward.

Lord Chancellor and Law Officers (Constitution Committee Report)

Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts

Thursday 20th July 2023 Grand Committee

[Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)]

My Lords, I join other noble Lords in congratulating the noble Baroness, Lady Drake, on her skilled chairmanship of the sessions of the committee that gave birth to this report. It was not an easy task at all. I also echo strongly the words of welcome to the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy. It is marvellous to see him again. Although we have both long since been rotated off the committee, we worked together on earlier reports. That was a real honour and a pleasure, and something to keep in my memory. I greatly look forward to what he has to say in a few moments.

My contribution will focus not so much on the role of the Lord Chancellor and the law officers in upholding the rule of law—on which we have already heard some wise words—as on the first section of the report, which interestingly analyses what the rule of law really means today, and to what that rule extends.

First, I add briefly my agreement with the report’s finding that the Lord Chancellor must be a massively credible figure and the pillar not only in advising the Cabinet what is or is not constitutional and robustly defending the judiciary but in ensuring that no one is above the law and that it applies equally to both rulers and the ruled. That fundamental point seems to have escaped the comprehension, for instance, of the autocrats in today’s world, particularly the Chinese leaders, who often assert indignantly that of course the law applies to the people—but not to the leaders of the Government or the all-powerful Chinese Communist Party. That is the big geopolitical dilemma we all face.

All this begs the key question for us, which the report bravely faces in its first few pages, of what exactly the rule of law means and, especially, what it means in an international context, where other parties outside our national judicial space may not be playing quite the same game as we are. As one witness to the committee’s inquiry put it,

“One person’s legal nicety is another person’s rule of law”.


Other witnesses talked about the rule of law as a “protean”—presumably meaning “evolving”—concept, or, in one case, as being “somewhat nebulous”. There is also the dilemma, put to us by several very senior legal figures as witnesses, that when it comes to what some deem our international legal obligations, Parliament can legislate to the contrary, and since the will of Parliament is the law of the land, it must take precedence in the enforcement of the law in the courts.

The gospel to which many legal minds seem to return in untangling this dilemma—and to which the report itself returns—is the opinion of the late Lord Bingham, whose views get a whole half-page box in the report. Tom Bingham was pretty unequivocal about the rule of law applying just as much in the international legal order as in national domestic law. Others were more doubtful about that and that identity, arguing that international law raises quite different and changing issues. Personally, I share their doubts perhaps a little more strongly than the report consensus does.

It seems obvious to me that where one side in an international agreement or treaty is a foreign power or institution which then bends or even flouts the spirit of the agreement or treaty, or interprets it in unexpected ways, the other side—meaning us—has every right to alter its stance. Where dispute machinery exists, as in Article 16 of the EU withdrawal treaty, plainly, that should be the first port of call. That is obvious. The Vienna convention on treaties—which does not get much of a mention—makes allowance for this, in Article 60 and possibly Article 62 as well, if the dispute machinery fails to get a constructive and satisfying consequence, or in some cases is simply disregarded, as, for example, the Chinese nowadays often do.

In these circumstances, it seems to me that a unilateral response, even if temporary, to a unilateral move by another party may well be justified. Frankly, I am sorry that we did not go deeper into those kinds of circumstances. Moves by the UK Government such as the famous—some claim notorious—two clauses tacked on to the internal market Act, which were deemed to be in breach of UK treaty obligations, seemed to be assumed from the start to be “legal sins” rather than moves in an unfolding and wider drama. I know that that will not have the support or agreement of many colleagues. This all requires more careful thought before rushing to judgment.

The report both begins and ends its summary by emphasising the vital link between upholding the rule of law and the whole health of our modern democracy. That means being open-eyed and honest not only about the unfolding meaning of the rule of law but about our liberal democracy and how in the digital age it is evolving rapidly in response to the revolutionary change in the way people and institutions relate—indeed in all relationships, from the humblest, the family, up to the highest level of international exchange.

Democracy is not in decline, but it is certainly under attack. We must attend to what Alexis de Tocqueville called “the errors of democracy” if our rule of law is robustly to uphold democracy’s health as a better performer than the authoritarian alternatives. That is surely better than just standing by and letting democracy’s obvious errors and weaknesses grow or complacently assuming that it all works fine and needs no defence or adaptation.

Warning against that dangerous tendency is one more major task for a truly influential Lord Chancellor at the heart of the Government and the Cabinet but also at the heart of our independent judicial system—he or she is the bedrock—but that is clearly a task for another day and, maybe, another report.

EU Referendum and EU Reform (EUC Report)

Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts

Wednesday 15th June 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Pearson of Rannoch, has certainly raised the temperature of the debate. I would say on his behalf that he is a reminder in the calm Chamber and calm wisdom of your Lordships’ House that outside, the temperature on this issue is rising—certainly at the more excitable end of the media—to boiling point. It is also worth commenting that so far in this debate—indeed, in the very facts that the noble Lord, Lord Boswell, set before us—there is now an assumption that Brexit, or leave, is a possibility. Indeed, the report addressed itself to how that possibility would unfold.

I was not in the excellent and learned team of the noble Lord, Lord Boswell. He has produced a very interesting report, which makes one think a great deal about these different possibilities, although there is one omission from the report, which I shall come to in a moment. I am not really surprised that, outside this House, in the wider world, the stay campaign is now on something of a back foot. You would have to be completely deaf not to hear the dismay and grumbles from many people—I suspect the majority in this country—who feel that this is the wrong debate about the wrong issues altogether. They believe that the renegotiation, which was attempted but has been somewhat forgotten, as the noble Lord, Lord Boswell, reminded us, was on the wrong basis and assumptions.

On the generality, although the big markets of the future are most probably in Asia, Africa and the Commonwealth, geography and history nevertheless keep us firmly in Europe. Every attempt to stand on the sidelines or wash our hands of continental European development has always ended in disaster, as the Prime Minister pointed out. In Britain, we have always, in the end, been drawn in. So for us, the sidelines, as we should long ago have discovered and as we have discovered, just do not exist. Incidentally, we keep being told that countries such as Canada and Japan have a perfectly good access to the single market without being members of the European Union. I have looked in the history books and I cannot find any time when Canada or Japan were in Europe—we are, and that is the basic difference.

The referendum project and the negotiation project started from the right point. The first sentences of the Prime Minister’s Bloomberg speech of 23 January 2013 made it clear that the task was to be about the reform and future of the European Union to meet 21st century conditions, not just the reform of UK relations within it on a bilateral basis. But then something went wrong, and the debate lost its way. Experts crowded in to insist that all should be reduced to a sort of shopping list of British demands, and that was what the negotiations had to be about, and that the fundamentals—the pillar principles of EU architecture—should on no account be touched, because they were the ark of the covenant. So what should have been from the outset to be a European question—I believe the Prime Minister wanted it to be that way—became a British question, and an increasingly narrow one at that. For example, reputable think tanks such as the Centre for European Reform advised loudly that on no account should the Prime Minister even try to address or look at fundamental changes in the Union. Yet far from not touching on the fundamentals of the European model, it was always those basic features and principles that needed addressing and opening up. Why? Because the EU is a 20th century construct, rooted in and founded on 20th century concerns, which it addressed to great effect. But it is trying now to operate in a totally transformed world environment where big data and new platforms have completely revolutionised markets, business models and trade patterns, and are about to change much more—and, of course, where huge migrant flows have become a permanent feature, and will get much worse.

The digital and big data age invalidates all past precepts. There is simply no need for the doctrines of centralisation, integration and control in Europe; nor is this any longer the path to efficiency and innovation in our respective economies. With not only trade but actual production processes being globalised, the very concept of a single, tariff-protected goods market, as was designed in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, begins to melt away. Instead, the technologies cascading out from digitalisation permit and demand decentralisation, flexibility, differentiation and localisation. Those are the underpinnings of what should be the vision that the report has been looking at. The age of platform technology not only alters radically the relations between consumers and producers but places individuals—voters or the grass roots, call them what you like—in a completely different relationship to the governing authorities. The ground beneath the feet of the ruling caste who created the EU hierarchy is being visibly washed away. We should be aware of that and should not shut our eyes to it.

My one criticism of the report is that it does not come to grips with this vital aspect of what is happening as opposed to what we think, from our various standpoints, ought to happen. Common sense, when it is allowed into the debate, confirms that neither of the extreme campaigning poles—the leavers’ nirvana of pure sovereignty and control snatched back from some embryo superstate, along with a magical insulation from migrant flows, versus the remainers’ happy and overcomplacent idyll of staying in the EU in its present form—is remotely available in the real and changing world or will ever be. The centrifugal powers of the information age, the ever-stronger restraining interdependence of all modern states, the absolutely unavoidable need for massive and continuous reciprocity and the spaghetti bowl of new types of trade and supply chains across the planet, which are now mostly in data and information form, will put paid to both those dreams. Big changes are certainly coming, but not the ones that either camp predicts, and we should surely be warned about that.

Whatever happens on 23 June, the time has come to analyse coolly the very fast-changing international order of things and put deep and serious intellectual effort into redesigning and preparing the European region—our region, whether we like it or not—for the torrent of changes from the wider world and the storms to come. Some, like the migrant flood, have already arrived. The global repositioning of Britain should be a central part of this story. Our relations not just with a changing EU but with America and the whole gigantic Commonwealth need revisiting. They are all relevant to the renegotiation approach. Meanwhile, we are being asked to travel on a wrong and fruitless route with the possibility of some very nasty shocks along the way immediately ahead. A still, small voice should be reminding us that as a nation we are making fools of ourselves instead of offering the best of ourselves, which could be very good indeed, when confronting the real issues and threats.

The debate now should be a negotiation—if that is the right word—about how Britain can help lead the European Union out of the trough and the time warp in which it has become entrapped. On the morning of 24 June, whether in or out has won, we will still find ourselves enveloped of necessity in a common purpose: to help reform and equip the European region in which we live for its survival in a totally transformed international milieu. It will be a context in which, with skilled statesmanship, bridges can be rebuilt between the bitter antagonists in this debate. Why? Because in today’s hyperconnected world all the countries of Europe, including Britain, are functionally inseparable. That is the reality that has to be faced or, to put it in more homely terms, the egg that cannot be unscrambled, Brexit or no Brexit. The EU today, troubled though it may be, is our village and our neighbourhood, but it is not our destiny. We should remain good neighbours but lift our vision to much higher challenges ahead.

European Union Referendum (Date of Referendum etc.) Regulations 2016

Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd March 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome the statutory instrument, which should clear the way nicely to the referendum. I dislike the way in which the whole debate has become somewhat personalised, obviously with the eager help of the media. I assure your Lordships that I have good friends on both sides in this argument and I intend to keep it that way. I hope that we can stick, as the late Tony Benn always used to say, to the issues.

I can put my own view quite simply. First, I believe that Britain joined the EU, when it was the European Community, at the wrong time and is trying to leave at the wrong time—or is at least talking about it. We are discussing getting out just when the whole EU is evolving in entirely new directions, driven by major new world forces—a change which seems to have escaped the notice of many of the leavers, and indeed some on the remain side as well. Secondly, I greatly admire the tenacity and energy shown by my right honourable friend the Prime Minister over the deal which we are debating. However, I do not think that it will be an entirely central influence on the way that people vote in the actual referendum, although it has certainly opened up all sorts of reform ambitions in other member states all over Europe, as anyone can see by reading the continental newspapers.

I believe that the way in which people will be influenced to vote is by one overriding and much deeper issue. That is whether they think that the EU is heading inevitably for an integrated, superstate political union—centralised, with an all-powerful euro currency and dragging us into the mangle against our interests—in which case we should certainly leave and stand clear, or whether Europe is in reality evolving by necessity into a new model under outside and global impacts both good and bad, as we can see in the daily papers, which will compel us and the EU to become far more flexible and much less centralised. In that case we would be very unwise indeed not to stay and help steer the new model into being.

My own judgment goes to the latter case and to staying on board, for three main reasons. First, the peoples of Europe clearly do not want more integration and uniformity than they already have, whatever their leaders may say. The White Paper which we are debating, The Best of Both Worlds, asserts:

“Some … countries have chosen the path of deeper … integration”,

but I wonder whether that is in fact right. Which are these other countries, except perhaps Luxembourg? Some countries may not want to go back beyond the existing co-operation but I see no popular support whatever throughout Europe for a lot more pushing together in the digital age, with more integration, centralisation and intrusion—on the contrary.

Secondly, over the last decade or so new trade patterns, supply chains and modes of production have been utterly transforming the old EU model. Even the single market is not what it seemed in the last century, certainly not for services where a single market in Europe barely exists, despite services being 80% of our GDP and at least 46% of our export earnings, as the Government’s papers remind us. As for the eurozone, while that is depicted as a dominant and fearsome force ganging up against us from which we must be sheltered, it is in fact deeply and chronically sick. I see nothing but crisis and division ahead within the eurozone. I do not know whether the former Governor of the Bank of England, the noble Lord, Lord King of Lothbury, is here but I am glad that he now agrees with me on that.

Thirdly, huge new markets outside the EU are opening up which are not alternatives to the EU region but ones in which we must succeed. Asia, Africa and Latin America are where the big prizes are. The Commonwealth network ought to give us unique advantages in these markets, providing that we use it properly.

In short, we have to ride both horses. The immediate priority here in Europe is, and has been all along, reform—deep reform throughout the EU to meet the digital age and totally new world conditions, not least the total transformation of world energy that is now going on. As The Best of Both Worlds White Paper says repeatedly, that work is not over. Indeed, it is just beginning and in that work, all our history tells us that we can and must play a central part.

Magna Carta: 800th Anniversary

Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts

Monday 17th December 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord McNally]

My Lords, I am sure that Sir Robert welcomes all suggestions. That sounds like a very good one. In addition, a lot of work is being done, not least by the towns and cities of the United Kingdom which have historic relations with the Magna Carta, and in other parts of the Commonwealth and English-speaking world. The noble Lord is right: the 800th anniversary will be a great celebration and work is well under way to make it so.

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

My Lords, is the Minister aware that at about the same time or maybe sooner, what might be called a maxima carta will be signed and sealed, upholding the rights of 2 billion citizens across the entire Commonwealth network? Will he ensure that when it is signed, quite shortly, it also gets appropriate commemoration and possibly full approval and validation in this House?

[Lord McNally]

Again, I sincerely hope so. I also know that the Magna Carta committee is determined that the celebration of the 800th anniversary will be a Commonwealth celebration, since Magna Carta means so much to so many Commonwealth countries.