Strategic Defence Review
Lord Robertson of Port Ellen Excerpts(1 month, 3 weeks ago)
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Lord Robertson of Port Ellen
That the Grand Committee takes note of the Strategic Defence Review.
Lord Robertson of Port Ellen (Lab)
My Lords, after the election in July, I was asked by the Secretary of State for Defence and the Prime Minister to lead a team of three to do a unique strategic defence review, working with, but not to, the Ministry of Defence. I was delighted—I think that is the word—to accept this task. I am here today to give Members of this House the opportunity to offer a view on what should be in that review and how Members of the House might want it to conclude.
This debate today will add to and contribute to the 14,500 submissions made so far to the secretariat of the review. They have come from the services themselves, from other government departments, from academia, from think tanks, from industry, from our allies and from the public. It is, quite frankly, an unprecedented exercise in participation in one of the most important issues of our time. I am working on this historic endeavour, as reviewer, with General Sir Richard Barrons, who was the chief of Joint Forces and previously deputy Chief of the Defence Staff, and we have been joined by Dr Fiona Hill, formerly a senior official with the United States National Security Council and presently chancellor of the University of Durham.
We are the three reviewers, but we have been assisted in this exercise by a defence review team of six experts, including an assistant Secretary-General of NATO, and by Sir Jeremy Quin, the well-regarded and well-respected former Conservative Defence Minister and former chair of the Commons Defence Select Committee. This is, therefore, emphatically not a Labour defence review; it is the British effort to ensure that the United Kingdom is secure at home and strong abroad. Its terms of reference and the instructions to the review have been publicised and are on the GOV.UK website. I am sure that all Members of the House have carefully consulted them all before the session this afternoon.
As noble Lords will know, this is not the first strategic defence review that I have led. I did it in 1997 and 1998, which was, after all, only 26 years ago. It is worth reflecting that at that time we had 20,000 troops either in Northern Ireland or preparing to be in Northern Ireland. We had just signed the NATO-Russia Founding Act—I still have the cufflinks that were made to commemorate that—China was in the shadows and globalisation was hailed as a prosperity machine. There was no perceived danger to the British homeland at that point. That world has gone and it has gone for ever. So too have the subsequent worlds that were looked at and examined by reviews since then.
I have been reminding people that, when I concluded the review, I said that if it was a success it would be known as the SDR 1998, but that if it was a failure it would be known as the Robertson review. I am delighted to announce that it is commonly—universally—known as the SDR 1998.
This country now has to contend with a volatile and complex world of great power competition, with a war in Europe initiated unprovoked against a peaceful neighbour by a permanent member of the UN Security Council, with a horrific conflict ongoing in the Middle East and with enduring challenges to do with climate, grey zone attacks, nuclear proliferation, global inequality and greater mineral competition—and from the same failed and fragile states. It is a formidable cocktail for us to contend with.
This review must therefore chart the reset of defence, dictated by these factors, if we are going to keep our country safe and secure. There will, of course, inevitably be choices in any review. Some of them will be hard choices indeed, but they will have to be made, and denial of the problems is not among the choices that we have today. The purpose of the review is clearly set out: to make sure UK defence has not only the capabilities required but the new roles and reforms in place to meet the challenges faced by the nation and the world.
NATO is the bedrock for the review. As the first and, as yet, maybe the only person to invoke Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty myself, I know the value and importance of our NATO allies and their strength. They, too, like our adversaries, acknowledge and value our independent nuclear deterrent, which will remain a central feature of UK defence.
As I told the 300 top officials in the Ministry of Defence just two weeks ago, there can be no business as usual in defence. There is no business as usual among our adversaries and our potential adversaries, and there can be no business as usual for us. We dare not do it. Therefore, we are interested in the views of Members of the House, as distinguished people with expertise and background. I look forward to listening to those views today and I give your Lordships the promise that they will be taken account of in the review and its challenge process, which is being undertaken at the moment, involving some distinguished Members of this House. That process will make a contribution to the recommendations that the review will ultimately make to both the Defence Secretary and the Prime Minister, in the interests of a strong and enduring defence policy for this country. I look forward to listening to this debate.
Lord Robertson of Port Ellen (Lab)
My Lords, tempted as I am to intervene in this debate to answer some of the points that have been made—or even to endorse the concept of me putting on my Islay boots and doing something violent to the Chancellor of the Exchequer—I am going to restrain myself, because this was designed as a listening exercise. It was an opportunity for Members of the House of Lords to have a say and to have those views then incorporated into the process that we are undertaking at present. As I said, 14,500 submissions have already been made, some of them very substantial and a lot of them coming from organisations with different views. They will be considered properly and so will the outcome of this Grand Committee.
During the last review that I did, as part of the consultations that took place we had a dinner in Admiralty House for former Defence Ministers. I had the privilege of sitting around the table with Denis Healey, Peter Carington, George Younger and a number of other Ministers who had served in the Ministry of Defence in order to hear their views about defence. It was a very rich experience and a very entertaining evening, which largely involved anecdotes about gifts that people had received—always an entertaining subject for Ministers and former Ministers, it has to be said.
At the end of it, Lord Carrington got up and said: “We thank you very much for the opportunity of coming along this evening. We’ve all enjoyed the dinner and the conversations about it but frankly, in terms of the defence review, you’re much closer to the subject than we are, so we’re going to leave it to you—and once you’ve reported, we’ll attack it”. To avoid that fate, I thought it would be useful to have this debate in the Grand Committee. Much has been gained from it and members of the review will certainly be reading the debate with enormous interest. I beg to move.
King’s Speech
Lord Robertson of Port Ellen Excerpts(4 months, 1 week ago)
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Lord Robertson of Port Ellen (Lab)
My Lords, I congratulate my noble friends who have made the transition from Opposition to Government swiftly and highly successfully. They are good, clever people and the country and its defence are in good hands.
Secondly, I have to make an apology. On 25 April this year, I asked a question in the House of the noble Earl, Lord Minto, and inadvertently omitted to preface my question with a reference to my main entry in the register of interests. I apologise to the House for that error and refer today to my current and more innocent entry.
As many noble Lords have said, the gracious Speech says that
“my Government will conduct a Strategic Defence Review”.
As so many have already said, the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for Defence have asked me to lead that review, along with General Sir Richard Barrons and Dr Fiona Hill. With great pleasure, we have agreed to do that.
This will be my second strategic defence review but probably the more difficult. The world has changed dramatically since the last one in 1998 and, in the intervening period, the range of challenges, threats, complications, instabilities and fragilities has multiplied. The sheer volatility of events in the world today has combined with the velocity of dynamic change to produce new vulnerabilities in our society. We must all face that new global turbulence with serious intent. Therefore, our Armed Forces must be agile, lethal, survivable and robust enough to deter any threat to our country. That is the imperative.
I do not intend to give a running commentary during the period of the review. After all, we are out to listen and consider, but not yet to proclaim. I just make two brief points. First, we invite the maximum input to our review, including from parliamentarians. I am conscious that Select Committees of both Houses will not be able to give us an early submission, but they will be taken into account. What we mainly seek in this review, from all people, are solutions and frankness about the choices before us. We all know the problems. However, we need honesty about the answers and the trade-offs that are involved in confronting these problems, and we would like to hear all views on that. Send your views to SDR-Secretariat@mod.gov.uk.
Secondly, we and the country need to recognise that the threats to our country and citizens are no longer theoretical. They are no longer a distant possibility. They are alive and well in Ukraine today. Vladimir Putin’s Russia has brutally invaded and sought to occupy a peaceful neighbouring independent sovereign nation state. Anybody who needs reminding of what is at stake in the world today needs look only at the depraved conduct of Putin’s occupiers in those parts of the Donbass and Crimea that they presently and temporarily occupy. In that changed world, we have to look afresh at how we keep our people safe from that grim reality and other deadly and disruptive threats—not just now but for decades to come. It is a daunting task for this review, but I hope that we will help point a way towards a more secure and safer future.