Somalia: Piracy (EUC Report)

Lord Radice Excerpts

Monday 11th March 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Radice]

I agree very much with what the noble Lord, Lord Jay, has just said. I would like to congratulate the chairman, my colleagues and the staff on what is an excellent report. It is a tribute to the chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, and I would like to pay him a general tribute as he is stepping down. He has been an excellent chairman of this committee and we have produced a number of very good reports in recent years.

I turn to the report. Operation Atalanta has been a success, as has the EU’s foreign policy—there is no question about that. This is due partly to the efficiency of the operation under UK leadership, which I hope people will focus on. We saw that leadership in operation at the command and control centre at Northwood, which we visited as a committee and very much admired. It is an amazing place and it was quite spectacular to see it in operation. Of course there has also been the co-operation with the other international organisations: the US-led combined maritime force; the NATO-led Operation Ocean Shield; and with other countries such as Russia, China and India. All that has obviously been very helpful, too.

Then, of course, we have the game-changer of putting armed guards on ships, which has been backed by a regulatory system that is becoming increasingly effective. As colleagues have noted, the committee changed its mind on this. The facts changed and so we changed our minds—that is a sensible thing for a committee to do. The truth is that having armed guards on ships has proved a highly effective deterrent. So far, no ships carrying armed guards have been successfully pirated. That in itself speaks for that idea.

I should also mention the building-up of a judicial system to deal with culprits. There are 101 in prison in the Seychelles and 147 in Kenya. I hope we are going to hear something from the Minister about this. I am not saying that he is responsible for what the Somali President has done, but it is important. It ostensibly drives a coach and four through the whole policy. If the Somali President comes along and gives amnesty to 959 pirates, what are we to say about the rest of them in prison elsewhere? This will clearly have to be looked at rather more carefully.

The most important point in the report is that the mandate of the operation should be extended beyond December 2014. That is an important signal that the EU and the international community are not going to walk away from their obligations to clear the Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Aden of piracy. Interestingly, there was a meeting of the European Economic and Social Committee on 24 January, attended by the shipping industry and seafarers generally. They very much endorsed the position in our report. The noble Lord, Lord Jay, made strongly the point about the importance of attending to the political development in Somalia and of getting rid of the conditions in which piracy can flourish.

Our report also strongly supports the Horn of Africa strategy: the combination of diplomatic, financial and operational tools which provides some opportunity for a sensible and coherent response to all the awful crises facing the region. Alongside Atalanta, you now have NESTOR—the EU’s training mission for Somali security forces—as well as the appointment of the special representative for the Horn of Africa, which we welcome in our report.

Like the noble Lord, Lord Jay, I turn to the west African issue. The trouble with piracy, particularly if it is successful, is that it is very infectious. Although the background is different, Somali piracy is increasingly mirrored in what is happening in west Africa. Armed hijacking is on the rise in the Gulf of Guinea, the waters of Nigeria, Benin, Togo and Ivory Coast. It is interesting that many of these incidents involve vessels transporting petroleum products. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime explains this by the booming black market for fuel in west Africa. Clearly, this is a rather sinister situation growing up here and it needs watching very carefully indeed. It is essential that there should be a response not only by the region’s Governments but by the international community so that west African seas do not become as dangerous as the Indian Ocean has been, but—fortunately—now is not.

I want to ask the Minister several questions. What are the UK Government and the EU doing to meet the threat? Can the Minister—I share the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Jay, here—confirm that the Royal Navy is deploying units to west Africa and working in conjunction with France and the United States? Is there a case for applying some of the lessons that have been learnt in Somalia and the Indian Ocean in west African waters? Can the strategy and models that have been used successfully in this area be used also in west Africa? I know that it is a different situation but we ought to learn some lessons.

As a last point, we must not forget the cost of piracy. At the European Economic and Social Committee meeting which I was referring to, Dr Anna Bredima, who is vice-president of the Employers’ Group, said that piracy costs the global economy $12 billion a year. She went on to say:

“Piracy is not only a maritime problem. It is also a humanitarian, trade and global one, affecting consumers and taxpayers around the world”.

I also saw in a paper for Nautilus International, the seafarers’ organisation, a rather graphic description, drawn from the Times of India, of 23 crew members who were taken hostage from the cargo ship “Iceberg”—this is the human cost—and held for three years by Somali pirates. One died of malnutrition, and the Times of India told how the rest spent,

“four months next to a freezer with a body inside”,

and how officers were,

“hung upside down and tortured and the ears of a senior officer [were] … chopped off”,

for failing to move the ship. Pirates would beat or whip crew members if aircraft passed overhead. It is not surprising that these men are haunted by such memories. It serves as a reminder to us when we write our reports of why the pirates have to be fought, pursued and prosecuted.

Defence Capabilities: EUC Report

Lord Radice Excerpts

Wednesday 24th October 2012 Grand Committee

[Lord Gilbert]

My Lords, I am afraid that I am going to be in a very small minority today, probably not for the first time, which gives me no tremors whatever, as I am unable to add to the fulsome welcome that this report has received.

Before I turn to the substance of the report, I wish to draw the Committee’s attention to some of the stylistic matters that caught my eye. I do not normally care to read reports, but I intended to read this one from cover to cover. However, I gave up on page 10, actually only the fifth printed page of the report, where there is a misplaced apostrophe. Noble Lords will ask, “Why am I wasting the Committee’s time on a misplaced apostrophe?”. On the previous page, page 9, there is one of many subordinate clauses without any commas at either end, so you have to read the sentence over and over again to find out what it actually means. On page 8, going backwards, there is an egregious spelling mistake that any child of 15 would be punished for making. On page 7 we have a sentence starting with a conjunction.

The real blow, though, comes on the very first page. I am now going to read out to the Committee a direct quote from the middle paragraph of the summary:

“By better coordination of forces and most of all by ensuring that forces are capable of, and willing to, deploy Europe can achieve this now”.

I will happily buy lunch for any member of this Committee if he can show me how to parse that into an English sentence; it is not capable of being made into a sentence. It really is disgraceful.

This accumulation of grammatical solecisms, misspellings and punctuation errors says to me one of three things: that the members of the committee read the report and did not notice these things, which I find unbelievable, seeing how talented they are; that they read the report and did not give a damn about them, which I do not think would be the case; or, much more likely, they never read the report. That is the most charitable explanation. The noble Lord, Lord Roper, may frown, but his name is on this report. He is chairman of the committee and is responsible for putting the report in front of us with the House of Lords imprimatur on it.

[Lord Radice]

I am loath to intervene on my noble friend’s speech because I am sure that it is going to be extremely good, but I suggest that the noble Lord reads the sentence before the one that he has criticised. He might then find that it was more intelligible. It is a good thing to read a couple of sentences rather than just taking one on its own.

[Lord Gilbert]

Of course, I read the whole page. The noble Lord is right, but that sentence is rubbish. It is not even a sentence and it should not be in a House of Lords report. I ask the noble Lord, Lord Roper, to ensure that in future any reports from any sub-committee of his committee are written in decent English. I have got that off my chest, but I stand by what I said. It seems to be perfect evidence that the people who wrote the report did not read it before it was printed.

Now we come to the substance of the report. Of course, the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, has been overwhelmed with congratulations at how wise and timely it is, but I am afraid that I am rather bored with this report. Why am I bored with it? Because it does not say anything new. Why does it not say anything new? Because I have heard the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, say it 16 times before. He told us himself that he had, over and over again. What is in this report? It is in the speeches of the noble Lord, Lord Robertson.

I hesitate to point this out to my noble friend, who was my boss at one time, but I think Albert Einstein pointed out that to say the same thing over and over again and expect a different result is a higher form of lunacy. Why has the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, had to make the same speech over and over again? For the very simple reason that everybody ignores him. They all say, “What a wonderful speech”, but the continentals do not do anything and are never going to. That is the point. All the Eurofanatics sitting on this side of the Room are in denial. They think by saying that Europe has to do this or that, Europe might do it. However, Europe has never done it. It is not going to do it and has no interest in doing it—and we all know it.

It is high time that the House comes to recognise what I have said many times: this country’s friends are not the other side of the North Sea or the English Channel but in the English-speaking world. We have talked about taking the lead in cyberdefence, but we are doing that with the Americans and the Australians. As you would expect, that is where our friends are—in the English-speaking world. I am afraid I have no great enthusiasm for this report.

Coming to a subject close to my heart, I draw your Lordships’ attention to paragraph 93, on page 42—

[Lord Radice]

The noble Lord said he did not get beyond page 10.

[Lord Gilbert]

I dipped into it. Of course I did not read through it. The noble Lord, Lord Radice, is very active on this. I am very interested. They found some idiot called Pierre Vimont—what a lunatic. This is what he is summarised as saying:

“Despite the limited success of the A400M”.

I would like to hear anybody else in your Lordships’ committee talk to me about the “limited success” of the A400M—it is a disaster, but there is not a word in this report saying why it is a “limited success”. The paragraph goes on:

“We also heard evidence that money could be saved by collaboration”.

That is a deep insight. Before that, the report notes that Pierre Vimont also suggested that,

“it was important to continue with such projects”

as the A400M.

For the benefit of noble Lords who do not keep up to speed on logistic arrangements, the Americans have found the combination of the C130 and the C17 quite capable of satisfying all their airborne logistical requirements, as have the Canadians, the Australians and the Indians—and so, up to now, have we. When we finally procure this A400M, we will be abandoning the C130 and so will lose interoperability with the Indians, the Canadians, the Americans, the Australians and, by that time, quite a lot more people.

I have been told by a former Conservative Defence Secretary that the Americans were going to close down the C130 production line. That is rubbish, and simply not true. If you read the most recent edition of Defense News, you will see that they are going to go on with more and more sophisticated C130s. The C17 has also proved itself capable of undertaking tactical missions. The A400M is a complete, absolute wanking disaster, and we should be ashamed of ourselves. I have never seen such a waste of public funds in the defence field since I have been involved in it these past 40 years.

I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, takes this all in the spirit in which it is offered. It is not a personal criticism of him, but this report is nothing new. My noble friend Lord Robertson has said this many times before, and nothing is going to happen from it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Radice]

I cannot claim to be a defence expert, but I am perhaps one of the few Members on my side of the House who was actually in the Armed Forces. I was a national service subaltern in Her Majesty’s Coldstream Guards, but I cannot be said to be an expert.

I just wanted to make a couple of remarks. First, our report is useful not only for the conclusion that it reaches but for the information and the facts that it actually contains. It is well worth reading beyond page 10 rather carefully because it is a document that will be very useful to noble Lords.

I want to say a word or two about the NATO common security and defence policy split. NATO, to which 21 out of the 28 EU members belong, must come first. As all our witnesses made clear, it is the organisation of choice in large-scale military operations. Even if the US did not wish to lead or be involved and European nations took the lead, as happened over Libya, it would still be a NATO operation because it is large scale.

Where the common security and defence policy should come into play is for smaller complex interventions where there is a mix of political weight, economic know-how and development, and sometimes military capacity might be needed. That is where you need the CSDP. My belief is that the two organisations, in most cases fit very neatly together. There should not be an ideological argument—although there sometimes has been—about their respective roles. As our witnesses made absolutely clear, they are basically complementary. Those who have worried about this in the past should not have any worry at all.

To finish, as far as NATO is concerned, the two key issues here are first to ensure that the US continues to participate, despite its increasing focus on the Pacific. Of course what that means is, secondly, that Europe takes greater responsibility for its own security and defence, as we were told in the wake-up call from Secretary Robert Gates in his retirement speech—a very good speech it was too. That is clear for NATO.

As far as the CSDP is concerned, it must not just be a talking shop. It must be able to deliver. That means first that military missions should be properly financed. Secondly, battle groups must be able to be deployed and not just a fancy set of figures and drawings on a piece of paper. Thirdly, operations must be planned efficiently and pragmatically using both national and EU resources.

We should move beyond the rather sterile argument that we have had about what kind of operational headquarters one ought to have. We can arrive at a perfectly sensible arrangement to ensure that some of these really rather effective operations are properly planned and properly deployed. That is all I have to say in the rather short time that I had to make a speech.