Strategic Defence Review

Lord Verdirame Excerpts

Wednesday 9th October 2024 Grand Committee

[Lord Verdirame (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, for securing this debate. The starting point of the review will be the changes in the threat picture. A number of noble Lords, including the noble Lords, Lord Robertson and Lord Kerr, have already eloquently explained how that threat picture has changed, so I will not repeat that. To appreciate how fundamental this change has been in a short period of time, it is useful to recall that the 2021 integrated review, which provided a very thoughtful analysis of the main trends in the international security environment, said:

“The realistic optimum scenario is an international order in which these trends can be managed effectively”.


It is fair to say that this optimum scenario is no longer realistic and now seems implausible.

This fundamental change of circumstances gives rise to at least four challenges, which I hope will be addressed in the review. First, the most pressing question is whether we are adjusting to this new reality fast enough; it seems to me that we are not. It would be important for the review to provide an assessment of the strategic cost of delay, including further delaying a decision to increase defence spending.

The second challenge concerns our posture towards the international order. Quite rightly, British defence reviews have historically emphasised our commitment to the rules-based international order and its importance for our security. As an international lawyer, I very much welcome that, and am sure we will maintain that commitment, but in light of the changes in the threat picture, we also need to be alive to the risk of the international order, its rules and its still-fragile institutions, being instrumentalised and in some cases perverted.

Russia or Iran do not sit outside the rules-based order; they are part of it and they use it, sometimes quite effectively, to advance their interests and undermine ours. The UN Human Rights Council is a lamentable example of an international institution that has been quite successfully perverted. Beyond restating our commitment, we need a degree of clear-headed, strategic thinking—and perhaps hard-nosed realpolitik, to echo what the noble Lord, Lord Bew, said—to find ways of defending these institutions from autocratic capture and sometimes to stand up to them.

Thirdly, there is the issue, on which I touched in the debate on the Loyal Address in July, of differential treaty obligations within NATO but also between us and our potential adversaries. In essence, since the end of the Cold War, a split has emerged between the US and European allies. There are a number of treaties that are very relevant to the conduct of hostilities, to which we have chosen to become parties and the Americans have not. In the days of the war on terror—the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, will remember these discussions—it was generally assessed that we could maintain adequate interoperability within NATO, notwithstanding these differential treaty obligations. We are now dealing with a very different situation: one where the British and Europeans may do much more of the heavy lifting and the fighting than was the case before.

In addition to that, we may soon also face a split within Europe. Lithuania is withdrawing from the Convention on Cluster Munitions, and other states in the Baltic region are considering their position under both that treaty and the Ottawa treaty. These are new challenges that we need to consider. We may also soon be faced with pressure to enter into new treaties on artificial intelligence. I very much agree that this is an area where we will need international legal regulation, but decoupling from the United States on that regulation in particular, as concerns the defence and security applications of AI, would be a very serious error and one which I hope the review will warn against.

The fourth challenge concerns the industrial base, which is part of the review’s terms of reference. Our share of the world’s arms exports has declined considerably. For most of the post-war period, we were the third-largest arms exporter, and 15 years ago we had about a 5% share of the world’s arms exports—now, I think we have just above 3%. There are many reasons for this. One may be our regulatory approach to arms exports.

In the last five years alone, there have been at least three situations where we stopped arms sales to countries with which we have important strategic partnerships. In 2019, we temporarily stopped arms sales to Saudi Arabia as a result of a Court of Appeal judgment. After that, we had an arms embargo, alongside other European countries, against Turkey; it is well known that that embargo, which has now been lifted, posed a serious obstacle to securing Turkish support for Ukraine and for Finland and Sweden joining NATO.

More recently, we had the decision to suspend the 30 arms licences to Israel. The Government presented that decision as one required by law and published an assessment of their reasons for the decision. A very concerning aspect of that assessment is that they said that not a single instance of violation of the IHL rules on the conduct of hostilities was established, with or without British weapons. I think the noble Baroness, Lady Goldie, commented that it seems no longer to be the case that there should be concrete and specific evidence of a nexus between British weapons and violations. A legal arms embargo is different from a political one. Legal risk, unlike political risk, will eventually apply equally to everyone.

A key question for the review to consider is whether we are still a reliable arms exporter in the eyes of our strategic partners. Countries considering buying British weapons may conclude that, if they are at war, they are unlikely to receive essential components of those weapons, as a result of our approach to policy, and may therefore decide to buy elsewhere. If we lose these contracts, we lose business; we weaken our industrial base; and, crucially, we lose influence. These are strategic costs that I hope the review will address.