Parking (Code of Practice) Bill

Lord Hunt of Wirral Excerpts

3rd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 4th March 2019 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Hunt of Wirral]

That the Bill do now pass.

[The Minister of State, Ministry of Defence (Earl Howe) (Con)]

My Lords, I have it in command from Her Majesty the Queen to acquaint the House that she, having been informed of the purport of the Parking (Code of Practice) Bill, has consented to place her interests, so far as they are affected by the Bill, at the disposal of Parliament for the purposes of the Bill.

[Lord Kennedy of Southwark (Lab Co-op)]

My Lords, I join the Minister in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, and the honourable Member for East Yorkshire, Sir Greg Knight. I agree entirely with the comments that he has made.

[Lord Hunt of Wirral (Con)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend the Minister and the Opposition spokesperson for their kind words. I pay tribute to Sir Greg Knight for his initiative in bringing forward a Bill that will be widely welcomed. The only additional congratulations that I would like to give are to the Bill team, the clerks and all those who have helped to give the Bill smooth passage through this place, as well as through the House of Commons. I beg to move.

Bill passed.

Brexit: Armed Forces and Diplomatic Service

Lord Hunt of Wirral Excerpts

Thursday 8th December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Wirral (Con)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Sterling of Plaistow for introducing this important debate. I agree that the most fundamental function of government is to protect the security of the realm. Post-war, the United Kingdom was first to the table when Harry Truman promulgated the North Atlantic Treaty, but we were all too slow in signing up to the development of the European political movement.

There is little point in lamenting the lost opportunities of history, especially when the challenges of the future are so severe. The post-war settlement is now unravelling. The referendum result, the disobliging comments about NATO from President-elect Trump and the rise of far-right populism in Europe all make that abundantly clear. If NATO and the EU are now in danger of crumbling away, we need an urgent rethink of our domestic policies and priorities. I am conscious of the considerable burden of responsibility that our Armed Forces place on us to safeguard their interest. I want to focus on three points.

First, there is a great deal of misleading information available about our defence capability which could make us complacent. I have studied our own Library Note for this debate, and was surprised to read the summary of current equipment on page 2. I fear it is fanciful in the extreme to claim that maritime forces could generate 76 surface vessels, that land has 31 regular and 14 reserve battalions and that air has 724 fixed-wing and 372 rotary-wing aircraft. Would that it were true.

My second point is that conventional, or non-nuclear, forces act as a considerable deterrent in the current world. We would be foolish in the extreme to suppose that potential aggressors do not monitor our military naval and air strength very closely indeed looking for signs of weakness. This conventional deterrence is delivered in many ways, more often than not by the presence of a company of infantry, a section of Tornados or a frigate quietly patrolling an area of perceived tension. We have a clear, unequivocal responsibility to ensure that these forces are suitably equipped, armed and supported to be able to carry out these tasks and to react with appropriate force if threatened. We also have to have enough of them. I certainly did not enjoy seeing those pictures of HMS “Ocean” taking over from the US navy carrier in theatre with a solitary helicopter.

Thirdly, we must not take the relative silence of our Armed Forces as acquiescence in inadequate support. In this modern age of instant communication, I marvel at how the young men and women in the services and their families maintain their dignity and composure in the face of significant provocation. They do not react, because they place their faith in us to make their case, and we have an obligation to do just that. I was therefore delighted to see that moves are now under way to remove the dreadful pursuit of unwarranted claims against service personnel by unscrupulous claims firms.

My contacts tell me that there is considerable concern in the services about fighting capability and our willingness to invest in enough of it to keep them safe and in a position to respond to the demands that government makes of them. We must not forget that. We need to dig below the oft-quoted headline figures for investment in defence and to ensure that operational capability is maintained, particularly in ammunition and missiles for all three services. Nothing corrodes morale more quickly than a failure to invest in real fighting capability. It must not be hollowed out, and it must be capable of living up to the strong reputation that our service men and women continue to earn and deserve from the rest of the world. Having expressed those fears, I feel confident that, in his closing remarks, my noble friend will put my mind to rest.

Iraq Inquiry

Lord Hunt of Wirral Excerpts

Tuesday 12th July 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hunt of Wirral (Con)]

My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Birt, but I part company with him when he says that the Chilcot report “takes the wisdom of hindsight a little too far”. I agree with him that it is an impressive report but what I find particularly striking from Sir John Chilcot’s statement on 6 July was his consistent stress on the importance of his main objective of identifying lessons for the future, so if the noble Lord will forgive me, I want now to concentrate on one of those recommendations:

“The need to ensure that both the civilian and military arms of Government are properly equipped for their tasks”.

There is much-needed emphasis on the wisdom of foresight. I am reminded of a famous phrase from when I was a student, in 1962, which everyone knows off by heart. I declare my interests as recorded in the register, including being a student at the time. I heard the former US Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, say, on 5 December 1962, and he caused a considerable furore with this comment:

“Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role”.

We are still struggling to identify that role, and that very struggle lies at the heart of today’s debate and of so many other debates going on at the present time. It is also a struggle that has generated an existential crisis within our armed services.

In the Clinton-Blair years, the concept was born of the United States, the one great superpower, reinventing itself as a world policeman, supported, if one could be conjured up, by a “coalition of the willing”. Compared with the supine failure of the United Nations in Srebrenica in the summer of 1995, of which the noble Lord, Lord Soley, has just reminded us, that decisive, US-led NATO intervention in the Kosovo war seemed to mark an entirely new development. No longer was narrow, national self-interest alone the decisive factor in going to war. Sometimes, all that was required was a humanitarian impulse to curb the suffering of civilians, even in,

“a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing”.

This world policeman role has continued to this day, but I agree with noble Lords that by far the most foolish and counterproductive instance of it has now been seen to be the decision to support a military intervention in Iraq. The effect on Iraq itself is now well known, and our hearts go out to the victims of the continuing terror campaign that afflicts the people of that land. What also concerns me, however, is the effect of this new philosophy on our Armed Forces.

Our armed services are indeed our pride and joy, but they are trained—brilliantly trained—for combat, not for police duties. During that early phase of the occupation of Iraq, before the Sunni uprising began, we heard reports of how our troops were winning the hearts and the respect of areas of Iraq where they were in charge, and we felt proud. Were we not, perhaps, using our troops as policemen, not soldiers? But they were playing the part of “nice cop” to perfection. Our troops wore caps; the Americans wore helmets. But it did not last long.

I have had the privilege of attending so-called war Cabinets in the past. Particularly memorable was being in the margins of the meetings that Margaret Thatcher convened during the Falklands conflict. I remember clearly how the Chiefs of Staff would come and give their military advice, then there would be a debate among Ministers, and then a political decision would be taken. It was a clear and logical process. So long as the information is openly and honestly shared, it is a good process. When information is deliberately withheld—the existence of the Sèvres protocol in 1956, for instance—it comes to grief. But otherwise, the separation of the question of what is militarily feasible from the question of what is politically desirable is a very good one.

Unfortunately, as Sir John Chilcot’s report reveals, in the case of the Iraq war that straightforward honest logical process was smudged by the meddling of press secretaries and diplomats of a worryingly political hue, and by the spin, spin, spin of the Whitehall machine. That is not a recipe for good decision-making. The armed services—the poor bloody infantry, to coin a phrase—then got caught in the crossfire, literally as well as figuratively. Our armed services are rightly regarded as the best in the world. Not only should we allow them to do their job, but we should respect their expertise before, during and after any debate and decision about whether to go to war. This clearly did not happen in 2003, and the disastrous consequences speak all too eloquently for themselves.