The Ukraine Effect (European Affairs Committee Report)

Lord Liddle Excerpts

Thursday 21st November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, first, I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Levene, for his decades of very distinguished public service. We all owe him a great deal for what he has done. Secondly, it was a great pleasure to serve on the European Affairs Committee under the chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Ricketts. He was a brilliant chairman but greatly assisted by a highly capable team of staff to whom we owe a lot.

We are in a pretty gloomy place at the moment. I often reflect on how different it is from the optimism of the late 1990s, when we thought that democracy was going to spread across the world in a victorious way. My noble friend Lord Robertson of Port Ellen as Secretary-General of NATO was welcoming the Russian top brass into NATO and the accords were agreed for co-operation with Russia. I also remember, when I worked in No. 10, my Prime Minister’s real optimism about the future when Vladimir Putin took over as Russian President and his intense attempts to engage him in co-operation on the challenges facing the world then. It is a very difficult time now. The invasion of Ukraine by Russia was shocking and now we have President Trump again in the White House. To those who think, “Oh, well, it might be all right”, it might be all right, but the fact is that the Republican Party has already contributed to the great weakening of Ukraine’s position by delaying US aid to Ukraine for some six months in Congress. We should not forget that. We are in a bad way.

Let us think about what really matters for the future. First, even if there is some agreement with Putin next year, as long as he or someone else like him is there, he is going to remain a great threat to us in Europe and we have to resist that threat with all the power we can. This will be the big challenge for UK foreign and defence policy in the years ahead. Defence spending is going to have to rise, and that is going to create great difficulties for taxation and public spending, but it must. As part of our resistance to imperial Russia, as I think it now is, we have to get much better at defence, particularly at defence procurement, and we need to have much stronger collaboration with our allies and partners.

We should be open-minded about the European Union’s efforts to make this process more efficient. Wherever possible, we should co-operate. The old argument was that NATO was the thing, and European defence got in the way of NATO. I think that, in this present situation, the argument is the other way around. If we are to save NATO with the Americans, Europe has to act collectively to convince President Trump that he should continue to back us.

I favour a single market in defence equipment, which there is not at the moment. The UK should try to be part of it, even if we are still outside the EU. We have to take more responsibility, which requires a much closer relationship with the EU. I am very encouraged by the way our new Prime Minister Keir Starmer is pursuing a new security deal with the EU. That is absolutely essential and will put us in a good position for the future.

Of course, I think we should treat Donald Trump seriously. We have to work with him and hope that we can influence him—although I think that, too often in the past, Britain has exaggerated its influence in Washington. He wants, apparently, to do a deal with Putin on Ukraine. We have to persuade him that it should be a deal that is fair to Ukraine, and he has to recognise that Ukraine’s central ambition is to be part of the European Union. Its European vocation is driving those soldiers to resist the Russian attacks. I think we can play our best part in this by rediscovering our own European vocation.