UK–EU Defence and Security Co-operation

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 3rd July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Coaker (Lab)]

The fundamental point is that you cannot access the Security Action for Europe framework unless you have a security partnership agreement with the EU. That is the gateway to it. The fact that the Government, on 19 May, agreed the security and defence partnership means that we now have a gateway to the €150 billion loan available within SAFE. If we had not negotiated that partnership, there would be no gateway. On the loan money that is available, my understanding is that the first loans that could be made available will be towards the end of this year.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, on Tuesday, the Minister made it clear that the United States remains Britain’s prime ally. Does that imply that this is very much a secondary partnership with the EU, or are we engaged in a delicate balancing exercise, recognising that our dependence on the United States is no longer as secure as it used to be and that American priorities are moving away from Europe and we therefore need to prioritise our security relationship with Europe more than we used to?

[Lord Coaker (Lab)]

I think that is in our interests. To run through this, NATO is our prime alliance and something of which we can all be proud—we have been a member for decades. Alongside that, having a better, more secure relationship with Europe and working with it where that is appropriate, whether in Bosnia or in other missions, such as in Georgia or Moldova, is in our interest given the threats that we face. It is in our interest to pursue that. Let us be absolutely clear that, alongside NATO and the security and defence partnership with the EU, the US and the UK standing together is of immense importance to our own security, as well as to the security of Europe and global security. That is the point that we continue to make. It was the policy under the last Government and is the policy under this Government. The US-UK relationship is fundamental to global security. We of course pursue other alliances and agreements where we need to, but let us always remember the US-UK relationship. It has kept the peace for years and will do so in the future.

F35A and F35B Jets

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Tuesday 1st July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Coaker (Lab)]

The answer is yes to all those points. The F35As come from the F35 schedule, so 12 of the additional 27 will be F35As instead of F35Bs. F35As are some 20% cheaper than F35Bs, so the noble and gallant Lord is right: that creates an additional sum of money which can be used in a way that the Government feel is appropriate and consistent with the SDR. He is right about the refuelling capability; there will need to be allied support for that. Many of our capabilities require allied support and help to function. I do not see a particular problem with that, but he is right to point it out.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, the SDR and the national security strategy emphasise the threats to us locally and regionally, as opposed to the global projection of power to Singapore and the South China Sea, which is what the aircraft carriers are for, above all. Are we sure that we still have our priorities right in wanting to stand firm with our prime ally, the United States, in the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea, or should we pay more attention in our defence priorities to the North Sea, eastern Europe, the Baltic and that part of the world which is closest to our insecurity?

[Lord Coaker (Lab)]

I understand the point the noble Lord makes, but I do not agree with it. We, with our allies, simply have to guarantee the security of regions across the world, whether it be the North Sea, the Mediterranean or the Indo-Pacific. Our carrier went through the Red Sea, through the BAM into the Indian Ocean, which is under threat from the Houthis. The sailors and others on the ship had to write a letter home saying what might happen. We should celebrate the fact that we have people with a sense of duty that allows them to put their lives in danger to ensure that trade, communication and all the things we depend on can get through that narrow bit of sea. If that did not happen, our shops would soon be empty and our data would not work. Many of the things on which our standard of living depends would not function.

That is why it is important that we go to the Indo- Pacific and stand alongside the Americans. Let us be clear: we do not go there because only we want to—Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Singapore and Malaysia want us to go there. All those countries ask us to go there because they recognise the importance of ensuring the global trade routes stay open—it is the trade and prosperity on which our nation, and the nations of the world, depend.

UK Weapons Systems

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Tuesday 1st July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Coaker (Lab)]

Well, “independent” means what it says. I can reassure the noble Lord, Lord Empey, and the House, that we have complete operational use in terms of independence. We can use all our weapons systems in the way that His Majesty’s Government choose to. Of course there are arrangements about how you maintain that and what you do, but independence means independence and we work to ensure that we maintain all our capabilities to the standard that the noble Lord and this House would expect.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, when the Conservative Government announced in 1957 that we had again an independent deterrent, they meant independent of the United States—a British warhead and a British weapons delivery system. Since then, we have compromised the delivery system with dependence on American missiles, and the recently announced airbase delivery will also have an American warhead. If I understand it correctly, some of those warheads will be stored on US bases in Britain. How far does that mean we can depend on the next American Administration, let alone this one, to give us permission when needed, in what might be a prolonged war rather than an immediate crisis?

[Lord Coaker (Lab)]

We need to unpick that. It is a very good question the noble Lord asks, but no Government will comment on the storage of nuclear weapons, for obvious reasons. The strategic nuclear deterrent is completely operationally independent. It cannot be used without the agreement of the United Kingdom Prime Minister. As for the F35A, which I presume he referenced with respect to the Government’s announcement, that forms part of the nuclear mission of NATO. For that capability to be used for a nuclear mission, it will require the agreement through the nuclear planning group of the United Kingdom Prime Minister. So both the strategic deterrent and the fighter deterrent of the 12 F35As will require the authorisation of the United Kingdom Prime Minister.

80th Anniversary of Victory in Europe and Victory over Japan

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Friday 9th May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, only the oldest of us can remember VE Day—still less the Second World War itself. Exceptionally, the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, will be able to remind us. For our grandchildren, this is relatively ancient history, and the issue for us is what aspects of that history we choose to emphasise. What lessons should we say they should learn from the chaos, the cruelty, the slaughter and the sacrifice, the final victory and the contested peace that followed?

The two world wars remain central to Britain’s national identity. My own grandchildren have been learning about them in school over the past year. We have taken them to the Western Front, to walk over the fields where in the spring of 1918 my 18 year-old father joined the Highland Division and lost so many of the friends he had trained with. We have taken them to Bletchley Park, where my parents-in-law worked during the Second World War. We tried to explain to them what it meant to my mother to lose her younger brother—my godfather—when his Lancaster crashed on a training flight. For all of us, linking historical narratives to personal stories is a way to help the younger generation understand the past.

I have been struck by how quickly my grandchildren understood that neither war was one in which Britain actually stood alone. There are monuments to Canadian and Australian troops on the Western Front, and we saw references to French, Portuguese, Indian, Moroccan and Belgian troops alongside the British, and to the Chinese Labour Corps that maintained British tanks in 1918 and dug trenches and graves. Some 20 years later, Poles provided crucial help for decryption in the early stages of Bletchley Park, and an American contingent arrived there in 1942. There were Polish fighter squadrons in the Battle of Britain, when Britain was “standing alone” against the German threat, and I was surprised to discover when we visited the Yorkshire Air Museum that there were a great many Belgian pilots in Bomber Command.

The Imperial War Museum’s display on World War II shows us something of the Caribbean contribution to Britain’s war effort, in all three armed services. I felt it underplayed the importance of the 2.5 million Indians in the British Imperial Forces, and the role Indian divisions played in Burma and the Eighth Army, fighting—alongside Polish and South African divisions, as well as the American Army—across North Africa and Italy.

Recalling this part of our wartime history matters because the descendants of those Allied soldiers and airmen have now become part of our national community. My parents-in-law are buried in a Bradford cemetery alongside well-kept Polish and Ukrainian sections, the latter containing the bodies of displaced persons—we used to call them “DPs”—unable to go back to their homeland as the Russians reasserted hostile control. I have met many Sikhs and south Asian Hindus and Muslims in Yorkshire whose grandparents fought for Britain in World War II, most of their grandchildren and neighbours unaware of what they did. This should now be an intrinsic part of our historical understanding of today’s British national identity.

What should we tell today’s children about why we fought the war, beyond the immediate threat of Nazism? We should teach them about the war aims that the British and Americans agreed on behalf of the world’s beleaguered democracies. The Atlantic Charter, drafted by the British and revised by the American President, declared in August 1941 that its countries

“seek no aggrandizement, territorial or other; … they desire to see no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned; … they desire to bring about the fullest collaboration between all nations in the economic field with the object of securing, for all, improved labor standards, economic advancement and social security”.

President Roosevelt’s speech to the US Congress earlier that year had spelled out why the United States was already acting as “the arsenal of democracy”. He said:

“We look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want—which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear—which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point … that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor—anywhere in the world. … The world order which we seek is the cooperation of free countries, working together in a friendly, civilized society”.


Yesterday, our Defence Secretary reminded us also of Ernest Bevin’s Western Union speech, delivered to the Commons on 22 January 1948 as the Cold War began to end the hopes that the victory of 1945 would lead to global peace. Bevin declared that

“the free nations of Western Europe must now draw”

closer

“together. … Our sacrifices in the war, our hatred of injustice and oppression, our Parliamentary democracy, our striving for economic rights and our conception and love of liberty are common among us all. Our British approach … is based on principles which also appeal deeply to the overwhelming mass of the peoples of Western Europe … If we are to preserve peace and our own safety at the same time, we can only do so by the mobilisation of such a moral and material force as will create confidence and energy in the West and inspire respect elsewhere, and this means that Britain cannot stand outside Europe and regard her problems as quite separate from those of her European neighbours”.—[Official Report, Commons, 22/1/1948; cols. 395-97.]

I listened to Nick Thomas-Symonds, our Europe Minister, also quoting those words a few weeks ago.

We all recognise how far short our world today has fallen from these ideal objectives. The current US President has repudiated Roosevelt’s international and domestic legacies. Globalisation has spread global prosperity but has also fed a degree of inequality within and between states which threatens social cohesion and leaves too many unfree from want. We are learning again the lesson of the 1930s that constitutional democracy and open societies are not the natural order. Populist politicians offer easier answers, and authoritarian regimes are hard to dislodge.

Our British public do not yet appreciate how difficult are the domestic and international challenges we now face. We have managed to hold taxes down by skimping on public investment and cutting defence expenditure to fund the rising cost of health and welfare for our ageing society. Now, we have to raise defence spending and engage our citizens in national security. The war in Ukraine is a threat to our security to which we must respond. The Chinese drive to dominate global manufacturing and high technology also requires greater public and private investment. Yet there are populists out there still pretending that taxes can be cut while spending more on defence and without cutting public services.

History does not repeat itself, but it does offer warnings. Our divided and complacent country in the 1930s was slow to respond to the threat of authoritarian fascism and Nazism. We now face threats to the liberal international order that Roosevelt and Churchill led the allies to build, and to the peaceful Europe that the end of the Cold War promised. Temporarily or permanently—we hope only temporarily—we have lost American support and leadership. It is our shared duty to work together to carry the public with us, and to work with our democratic allies, in Europe and beyond, to defend the principles for which our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents fought more than 80 years ago.

Defence: 2.5% GDP Spending Commitment

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Tuesday 17th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Coaker (Lab)]

First, I congratulate the noble Lord on his service and all that he has done. He makes a good point about the importance of the cadet service. We all recognise the importance of cadets and their valuable contribution to social mobility, social cohesion and the rest. Certainly, I will reflect on the importance of that and see where we go to in discussions with government colleagues.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, if the strategic defence review recommends and the Government accept that we need to spend more on defence because of the deteriorating international environment, can the Minister assure us that the additional spending will be taken out of additional taxation and not out of cuts to domestic programmes such as education, prisons and local government, and that the Government will come clean to the public that this is what they are doing and therefore, the additional taxation will be necessary?

[Lord Coaker (Lab)]

I do not think that I am going to answer that. We have no plans with respect to additional taxation. I am trying to sound like my right honourable friend the Chancellor now.

On the serious point the noble Lord makes, the defence review will come forward and will put forward the threats we face as a nation and how best to meet them. We have set out the Government’s expenditure plans. I gently say to noble Lords who talk about the need for increased spending that it is important that we spend it on the right things, the things that will make a difference. Waiting for the defence review for us to determine how we best meet those threats is a sensible policy option.

Relations with Europe

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 10th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I was puzzled by the assumption in the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Hannan, that while the European Union’s negotiators have not been entirely rational in their approach to bilateral relations with us, the British negotiators since Brexit—David Davis, Boris Johnson, the noble Lord, Lord Frost, and others—have been entirely rational actors. That is perhaps something that the noble Lord will cover in a future Telegraph column.

I want to talk about the situation that we are in now. We are in a very dangerous situation for British foreign policy. For the last 60 to 70 years, we have assumed that our closest and most mutually trusting relationship is with the United States. In four weeks’ time, there will be a presidential election, which will give us either a second Trump presidency—it is highly unclear what that will mean for transatlantic relations, as he pays little attention to Britain except for his golf courses—or a Harris presidency, which will arrive contested, with law suits and quite possibly disorder, and will also distract the United States. We will have lost American leadership. In this situation, we need to go as far as we can to develop the closest possible relations and better mutual understanding with our neighbours in Europe, because those are the most trustful and important partners we have. If we are going to build closer mutual understanding, it has to include a range of relations, formal and informal, at all levels.

That is why so many of us think that youth exchanges are very important. When I first started studying the European Union, I remember discovering how much effort the French and the Germans had made to rebuild relations between their countries by encouraging student and youth exchanges and putting money into them. When we joined the European Community, as it then was, the then pro-European Conservative Government tried to do something similar, and in 1973 suggested a range of those models. Of course, in 1974, the then anti-European Labour Government cancelled those, and we have never put enough effort into it since. I say to the Minister that the argument against going back into Erasmus is that more students come to Britain than British students go there and it therefore costs us more money; the argument for going back to Erasmus ought to be that we need more British young people to travel abroad and more British students to study at European universities and learn the language. That is a matter of sufficient importance for the future of British society and British foreign policy to make going back into Erasmus worthwhile.

Furthermore, we need to have exchanges not just between parties and parliamentarians, which has already been discussed, but between police. We have lost that through leaving Europol. There is no organised crime that is purely national these days. Cross-border contacts and understanding between police forces are very important, as they are between officials at all levels. We have lost our European cadre in the Foreign Office, and the European Union works the way it does precisely because there are intense and regular contacts between officials from different countries, bilaterally and multilaterally. That is what we need to regain and what this Government need to begin to build. At that point, we will have again the mutual understanding that we need.

These are our neighbours. We need to understand each other, to work together and to negotiate with each other. For that, we need to change the way that we behave in our relationships.

Situation in the Red Sea

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 29th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Minto (Con)]

The noble and gallant Lord makes an interesting point. As part of the international force dedicated to degrading the Houthis’ effectiveness, our partners are diverting and searching vehicles, both at sea and elsewhere, to ensure that as much as possible can be stopped from arriving in Yemen. At the same time, we are looking at disrupting the manufacturing capability behind this, which of course is based in Iran.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, in lessons learned, I hope the Government are also looking back at Operation Atalanta, which the noble Lord may recall was an EU operation commanded by the UK through Northwood, dealing with the Somali threat. Indeed, I recall—I was then a Minister—that there were some informal contacts between that UK-led force and Chinese naval vessels, which were also in the area. On the question of degrading, if the Houthis are mainly using speedboats and drones, how easy is it to degrade their capability over more than a very short period? Those are cheap and easy to move and therefore able to operate through all sorts of places. Are there limits to how far we can maintain having degraded them for more than a few weeks?

[The Earl of Minto (Con)]

My Lords, the point is extremely well made. All parties are conversing at a certain level. Degrading these small drones and unmanned boats is not just a question of physically destroying them but also of disrupting their ability to land where they are supposed to.

Armed Forces

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 7th September 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, it is difficult to assess what size and structure of Armed Forces Britain needs without a coherent understanding of Britain’s place in a very rapidly changing world. The last Prime Minister but one was an enthusiast for turning away from commitment to the European region, with a tilt to the Indo-Pacific, for which we would need a larger Navy, and expeditionary forces able to operate at long range from the UK. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has brought attention back to European security and two changes of Prime Minister have lessened the underlying antagonism to co-operation with our neighbours, but no strategic foreign policy has emerged from recent Foreign Secretaries or Prime Ministers.

For as many years as I can remember, British foreign policy has been based on the foundation of British-American partnership, with the effectiveness of our defence forces judged by how seriously the Pentagon takes our contribution. We have to face the real prospect now that our partnership with the USA may be withering. The next presidential election could bring back Donald Trump, or see a Democratic President hamstrung by a Republican Congress sceptical of supporting Ukraine and content for European states, including the UK, to defend themselves, as we hear presidential candidates saying.

It has to be a foundational principle of British defence policy, therefore, to share in maintaining the security of our own region, extending as far as the Mediterranean, north Africa, the Baltic, the Arctic and the Black Sea. In practice, our forces have co-operated closely with the French, Dutch, Belgians, Norwegians and others for many years. A Conservative Secretary of State once said to me: “I don’t mind our doing that, so long as we don’t have to tell anyone”. I think he meant his own Back-Benchers and the right-wing press. It is high time that we made the best of working with our neighbours and recognised that in a context in which we can hardly afford to maintain the pretence of a full-range defence capability, our security is best protected by sharing tasks, training and equipment.

Part of the long-term problem of UK defence procurement has been that the effort to match the Americans in high-end war capability has led to rising costs, changing specifications and overcomplex weapons systems produced in small numbers and unattractive to export markets. One of the lessons of the conflict in Ukraine is that a larger number of lower-capability weapons may be worth more than a handful of sophisticated systems so expensive that commanders hesitate before committing them to action. The more sophisticated the systems are, the more likely that they will break down. Our Navy now consists mainly of a small number of highly sophisticated ships, many of which seem to break down frequently. Ukraine is teaching us that rapid adaptation of far cheaper and simpler civilian systems can make a real difference, and that larger numbers of units count in both attack and defence.

Another lesson of the Ukraine conflict is that you do not have to train military forces for long periods in order for them to be effective, particularly when commanders can draw on skills already acquired in civilian life. For centuries, British forces have been based on the assumption that we need long-term professional engagement for expeditionary service abroad, and that reserves are of doubtful use and unlikely to be ready in time for any unexpected crisis. As the size of our Armed Forces continues to shrink, there is a powerful case for a substantial increase in reserves.

The noble Lord, Lord Soames, mentioned the yeomanry. I am conscious of the contribution that forces from the London Scottish, now a reserve company of the Scots Guards, have made in recent years. They are valuable—they can make an enormous contribution. Ministers should now be emphasising the positive role that well-trained reserves play in strengthening the UK’s security and expanding the reserves.

The need for home-based reserve forces becomes even clearer when we take into account the importance of improving the UK’s resilience in the face of a changing pattern of threats. We have far fewer organised groups to assist with civil contingencies than many of our neighbours, let alone the USA. Assistance to the civil power used to be a significant part of the responsibilities of our forces, but they are now too small to fulfil that role.

However, as the noble Lord, Lord West, said, little can be achieved without more money. So long as the overall priority of the Government and of the Conservative Party behind them is to cut taxes, and therefore to hold down public spending across the board, little can be done to improve our security and resilience. If the choice is between an early tax cut or an improvement in our national security, which will the Chancellor, the Prime Minister and the Conservative Party choose?

Wagner Group

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Tuesday 11th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

I think there will be a lot of sympathy with my noble friend’s point. The UK continues to highlight Wagner’s reprehensible actions. We do that around the world in whatever fora we can find, and we are not without allies and support in pursing the objective of constraining Wagner. My noble friend makes an important point, and I will certainly relay it to my noble friend Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon and undertake to try to give my noble friend Lord Bellingham a fuller response.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, there are consistent reports that Wagner has been making profits from gold mining, diamonds and other minerals in Africa and that it is profiting through exporting them via the Gulf states. Have we had conversations with the Governments of the UAE and the other Gulf states about this trade? It is evading sanctions and is clearly immiserating the countries from which it is stealing these things. This is clearly a problem also in terms of Russian sanctions.

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

We are aware that Wagner has historically drawn its funding from three main sources: direct payments from the Russian Government, as President Putin has publicly admitted since the insurrection; cash payments from Governments, regimes or organisations employing Wagner, as in Libya; and natural resource concessions. We also know that Prigozhin has sought to evade sanctions through front and shell companies, both in and outside Russia. The noble Lord makes an interesting point to which I do not have a detailed response, but I shall make inquiries and respond to him if I can.

UK Undersea Infrastructure: Hostile Activity

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Tuesday 25th April 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My, Lords, other noble Lords have asked about the national response to this international, shared problem, but it is very clear that what has to be done is a common effort by navies and air forces around the North Sea in particular. I am aware that there is very close co-operation between the Royal Navy and other navies around the North Sea, and with the Royal Air Force. I am also aware that Conservative Ministers prefer not to talk about it. Could the Minister try to encourage the Ministry of Defence to celebrate more the effectiveness of the co-operation we have with the armed forces of other countries in facing shared threats such as this?

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

I am not normally accused of taciturnity, so I shall try to encourage the noble Lord. He is aware, certainly, that in relation to recent activity for Ukraine the MoD has been outward facing. We have released intelligence that we have been prepared to comment on. The noble Lord is quite correct that we continue to invest in strong working relationships, partnerships and alliances, such as NATO. We co-operate on the development of new capabilities, such as the MROS vessel I just spoke about. We act in concert with our international allies. That is a very important part of the collective endeavour to try to manage risk.