Register of Hereditary Peers
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(7 years, 4 months ago)
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, does the Minister recall that the insertion by Lord Cranborne—now the noble Marquess, Lord Salisbury—of this dimension into the 1999 Act was intended precisely to make it more difficult to put in a halfway reform and to ensure that when we moved further on the question of elected hereditaries, we moved towards some form of comprehensive reform? Does he also accept that the main thrust of the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, in this is to get rid of the elected hereditaries, but to stop there and go no further?
Chagos Islands
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(7 years, 6 months ago)
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, the Government have established a large and very impressive marine conservation zone around the BIOT. There have been some suggestions that that needs policing and that therefore there are jobs for Chagossians who might not just visit but work on the islands. How do the Government intend that that marine conservation zone should be policed against the many fishing fleets that would like to use it? Have we consulted with the Americans about this, and do we expect the Americans to be on the Chagos Islands for the foreseeable future—for the next generation? If we are talking about the future, how are we planning for the long term?
Earl Howe
My Lords, what has happened is a rollover of the current agreement, which had a break clause at the end of 2016. By not breaking silence, as it is officially termed, we are allowing that rollover to take place for the next 20 years. We declared the marine protected area that the noble Lord referred to in 2010. It is highly valued by scientists from many countries. They consider it a global reference site for marine conservation in an ocean that is already heavily overfished. We are aware that some concerns have been raised about the motives for the creation of the marine protected area; in other words, that it might have been designed to thwart future resettlement. I categorically repudiate that suggestion. We are very serious about conserving that area. Unfortunately, I am not aware of any employment prospects that could arise from this.
Russia: Baltic States
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(7 years, 6 months ago)
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Earl Howe
My Lords, the UK’s decision to leave the EU has not changed our position on Russia. We will continue to protect the UK’s interests and those of our allies and partners. We will continue to engage with Russia in key areas of shared interest to promote our values—including the rule of law, human rights, and so on—and to build stronger links between the British and Russian peoples, as I have said. NATO will remain the bedrock of our security.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, cyberattacks of one sort or another have been a frequent way of trying to destabilise the Baltic states. Can the Minister say how closely we are working with the Baltic states in coping with this form of hybrid warfare?
Earl Howe
The noble Lord is right. We are developing a better understanding of the tools and levers that Russia may seek to use. We know more now about how Russia plans, conducts and controls hybrid activity, including the use of cyber. Russia is modifying its approach. We are trying to stay a step ahead. To that end, we are pursuing a coherent approach. We have a long history of effective co-operation and co-ordination with our allies. As the noble Lord will know, we have created the National Cyber Security Centre, and we work closely with our allies in this field.
Royal Yacht
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(7 years, 6 months ago)
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, given that the Royal Navy is already short of manpower, it is quite likely that any royal yacht would have to be manned by people recruited from abroad. Does the Minister consider that we would do better to recruit them from within the European Union, or given that this is a more traditionally imperial matter, from Calcutta and Hong Kong?
Queen’s Speech
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(7 years, 12 months ago)
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, I hope I speak for all sides of the House in saying how much we appreciate the openness of the Ministers from the international departments to Members of this House interested in international affairs. It makes for a more informed debate, and I hope that it helps Ministers that there are so many people in the House who go to very many parts of the world and come back with their own impressions. We do not take this for granted and are very appreciative.
Britain’s foreign policy is shaped much more by events beyond our borders—“Events, dear boy”, as Prime Minister Harold Macmillan once said—than by government Bills set out in the Queen’s Speech. The speech itself touches on,
“climate change and … major international security, economic and humanitarian challenges”,
that we face, with specific references to the Middle East and to the pursuit of sustainable development. However, it does not place these remarks in the context of the relatively peaceful and prosperous 20 years that we have enjoyed since the end of the Cold War, and the much darker economic and security prospects we now face. Looking back, I am afraid that our historians may see the 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century as a happy interlude of liberal internationalism, under largely benign American leadership, before the world returned to greater global disorder. My noble friends on the Liberal Democrat Benches will touch on other issues, in what will be a long debate, but I want to stress some broader themes.
First, whoever wins the American presidential election, it seems clear that the United States is no longer capable of playing, or inclined to play, a central role in maintaining global order or, in particular, in providing a security umbrella for Europe. When people in Washington now refer to NATO, they seem to mean the European allies rather than the American security commitment—Donald Trump has even suggested he might want the United States to withdraw from the alliance. US attention is fixed on east Asia, above all on China, and on Latin America. The US looks to the Europeans to play a larger role in coping with regional disorder across north and central Africa and the Middle East—we have to do more ourselves.
What we face across Africa and the Middle East, stretching into south Asia, is a long-term crisis resulting from the exposure of traditional societies to very rapid modernisation and from the consequent retreat to fundamentalism and authoritarian government, compounded by climate change and—above all—by the unsustainable growth in their populations. The noble Lord, Lord King, remarked last Wednesday that the population of Kenya has multiplied since he was a young Army officer serving there from 5 million to 45 million. The population of Africa as a whole has trebled in 60 years, and across the Middle East it has grown only a little more slowly. There is not enough water, not enough jobs and often not enough food, as well as often only corrupt and brutal government. So frustrated young men, without the prospects of work or marriage, fall prey to radical ideologies or struggle to reach the richer and safer countries of Europe.
This is the long-term migration crisis with which we will have to struggle over the next 10 to 20 years and more: not the hundreds of thousands who travel across Europe to work in each other’s countries, many of whom eventually return, but the millions and tens of millions who see no hope in staying in their homelands and push north across the Mediterranean. Migration Watch has its emphasis wrong: it is not European migration that is the problem; it is global migration.
That is what justifies the development spending to which we are committed and which we rightly use to co-operate with like-minded Governments—the French, the Norwegians, the Danes, the Dutch and so on—to moderate the social and economic tensions from which developing countries are suffering. We have learnt that focusing on the role of women, as the Minister said in her opening speech, and improving their economic and social position, is key to slowing the growth of population and promoting sustainable development.
I hope, after the anti-corruption summit, that we have also learnt that allowing those who have captured control of such unstable states to hide their wealth in London, or in offshore centres under British sovereignty, contributes to the flow of the desperate and the poor. I look forward to seeing the detail of the criminal finances Bill to tackle corruption and money laundering promised in the Queen’s Speech.
Then there is the puzzle of Russia: a weak economy with a declining population puffing itself up by threatening its neighbours and Europe as a whole. Its aircraft test our maritime borders, its propaganda efforts reach into our media and its intelligence services murder Russian citizens on British soil. We have no choice but to work with our neighbours and allies to contain the Putin regime.
Liberal Democrats in the coalition Government welcomed the growing foreign policy, security and defence co-operation between the UK and our partners across the channel, and fought hard to persuade our Conservative partners to inform Parliament and the public about how close that had become. We strongly support the analysis of chapter 5 of the 2015 Strategic Defence and Security Review that the EU and NATO make “complementary” contributions to European security and that:
“We will also continue to foster closer coordination and cooperation between the EU and other institutions, principally NATO, in ways which support our national priorities and build Euro-Atlantic security”.
We also strongly support the developing UK-France defence and security relationship, which involves all three services and which plans to have a combined joint expeditionary force operational by the end of this year. Conservative Ministers seem shy of telling the British public—or even Parliament—how valuable this co-operation is to British security, let alone about the work to which the SDSR refers in chapter 5, paragraph 37,
“to intensify our security and defence relationship with Germany”—
and with other European partners. Perhaps I can persuade the Minister, in summing up, to tell us a little more about that, without upsetting the Daily Telegraph and the Europhobes within his party.
We cannot manage any of the difficult international issues that we face without co-operation with our European neighbours. I emphasise that co-operation is impossible without trust and mutual respect or in an atmosphere of suspicion, hostility and accusations of conspiracy. That is why the decision on 23 June about whether we remain in the European Union or leave is central to British foreign policy and British international interests, and to all of those networks within which we work multilaterally, from the EU itself and NATO to the G20, the OECD, the OSCE and the United Nations and its many agencies—no European policy, no foreign policy; no trust in our democratic partners, no capability for promoting British interests abroad.
As the newly elected leader of the Conservative Opposition said in the Commons in April 1975, looking ahead to the previous EU referendum,
“I believe … that the paramount case for being in is the political case for peace and security … I think that security is a matter not only of defence but of working together in peacetime on economic issues which concern us and of working closely together on trade, work and other social matters which affect all our peoples. The more closely we work together in that way, the better our security will be from the viewpoint of the future of our children”.—[Official Report, Commons; 8/4/1975, col. 1022.]
I like to think that was drafted for Margaret Thatcher by the young Michael Forsyth—perhaps I am mistaken. Margaret Thatcher was right then and remains right now.
Immigration Bill
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(8 years, 1 month ago)
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“(4) Section 87 shall not come into effect—(a) before 31 March 2018; and(b) until transitional provision has been made for institutions in the public sector.”
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, last week, the Centre for Policy Studies, a respected Conservative think tank, published a paper entitled Dangerous Trends in Modern Legislation. It warns that,
“the length of new Bills and the number of clauses they include is becoming so great that Parliament is unable to properly scrutinise them … There are often lengthy and significant parts of a Bill that receive no detailed scrutiny at all at any point in its Parliamentary passage”.
Clause 87 of the Immigration Bill provides a prime example of this problem. In the Commons it had five minutes in Committee and none at Report. We reached it late in Committee in the Lords, where the Minister was unable to answer the questions raised, telling us that,
“there will be an opportunity for an informed debate on the details”,
when the regulations—that had not yet been drafted—would be laid before the House. He specifically stated that,
“no decision has yet been made”,—[Official Report, 9/2/16; col. GC 174.]
as to the impact on healthcare of the imposition of the charge.
Those of us who took part in that debate received no further communication from the Government between Committee and Report, unlike the usual custom, and no invitation to discuss the issues raised. We reached this clause on Report at 12.30 am on 21 March, at the end of a very long day. The Minister did make a significant concession in his reply on exempting university-level appointments from the new levy, but he declined to tell us when the Government’s response to the report from the Migration Advisory Committee, on which these proposals rested, would be published or to answer other questions raised. The noble Lord, Lord Bates, did at least say that, “Given the hour”, he was,
“happy to put further thoughts in writing … if that would be helpful”.—[Official Report, 21/3/16; col. 2210.]
He then disappeared for a rather long walk. The noble Earl has indeed sent us a letter but it does not answer any of the points on the public sector or public sector training which we had raised. The noble Lord, Lord Trefgarne, then moved, I assume on behalf of the Government, to oppose withdrawal of the amendment to shut off further discussion at Third Reading. The chairman of the MAC was allowed to brief parliamentarians on this charge on 22 March, the day after Report ended. The Government then slipped out their response to the MAC report two days later on the Thursday before the Easter weekend—a quiet news day.
This is not the way to make legislation, as the Centre for Policy Studies paper noted. The Government have not explained the implications of this significant new charge, and in particular its likely impact on the public sector; nor have they provided any coherent rationale for imposing it on the public sector. The Minister did, however, in responding to the debate, say that,
“I will give further consideration to when they”—
the charges—
“are introduced”.—[Official Report, 21/3/16; col. 2212.]
He specifically mentioned that they were looking at the issue of phasing in the charges on the public sector. This amendment returns to exactly that issue, asking what further consideration the Government have given this and whether they will now accept that the current provision to rush this charge into operation only two months after the Bill is passed—as Clause 96 states—is mistaken, incompatible with allowing an informed debate on the regulations that will have to be pushed through, and damaging to the finances of schools and hospitals throughout the country.
The noble Lord, Lord Bates, reiterated that the aim of this charge is,
“to bring about some behavioural change in the way that people think about recruitment”,—[Official Report, 21/3/16; col. 2210.]
encouraging employers to look for recruits from within the UK rather than from outside, and to invest in training those recruits in the skills needed. That is fine for the private sector. However, the Government are the employer in the public sector: they set the quotas for teacher and nurse training, and they encourage—or discourage—doctors to stay and work in the NHS rather than going abroad. So here we have the Government encouraging themselves to expand training to fill skills shortages in schools and hospitals by fining those schools and hospitals—out of government funds—for recruiting from outside the UK and the EEA. That is absurd.
There have been a succession of announcements of government policy that the likely impact of this charge will undermine. There are plans to expand and extend maths and technology teaching in schools, but no mention of the existing shortage of maths teachers in this country and of the active efforts that schools are making to recruit from Australia, Singapore and elsewhere. Hospitals have announced that they need to recruit some 15,000 nurses a year from abroad to fully staff their wards, from the Philippines, South Africa and so on. We have just read that the NHS is planning to recruit 4,000 doctors directly from India. These are large numbers of predicted immigrants, recruited to fill avoidable skills shortages within the UK—significant numbers pulled into the UK by our failures in skills training: 30,000 or so a year. The Government should therefore act to provide the training to reduce the necessity to pull such numbers in.
We have asked repeatedly what plans the Government have to increase incentives for maths teachers and to launch crash courses to train them, but there appear to be no such plans. We have also asked about rapid expansion in nurse training and efforts to improve retention of nurses in post. Again, there are no plans to do so yet. So within the next 12 months the Government will start to fine schools and hospitals £1,000 a year per skilled person recruited from outside Europe—fining them from the funds that the Government have just given them.
The noble Lord, Lord Bates, suggested on Report that,
“schools … can seek maths teachers from the whole European Economic Area market”,
to avoid the charge for recruiting them from outside that market—to do that, it was implied, rather than to have to train more of our own or to pay British teachers well enough to stay in post. The Daily Mail will love that as a proposal from a Government who are supposed to be trying to reduce the pull factor in immigration from within as well as outside Europe, but I leave that to the Government to answer.
We were assured on Report that:
“The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills has confirmed that it will continue to consult with stakeholders”,—[Official Report, 21/3/15; col. 2211-12.]
which in this case presumably means to negotiate with the Department of Health and the Department for Education on how to limit the damage to school and hospital budgets. But BIS, the Times told us last Saturday, is planning a major cost-cutting exercise, shrinking the staff of the Commission for Employment and Skills and the Skills Funding Agency by 40% to 50%. So it is likely to lack the capacity to manage the expansion of training schemes which the Government have promised us, either for the public or the private sector.
In short, the Government have failed to make any case for their proposed rapid implementation of this ill-thought-out scheme. Their failure to answer legitimate questions raised in Committee and on Report, in spite of promises so to do, has fallen well below the normal standards of this House. I hope that the noble Earl, Lord Howe, gallantly stepping into the breach, will concede that this has not been well done and will accept the rationale for delay which justifies our amendment. I beg to move.
The Earl of Listowel
I attended a meeting of maths teachers earlier this year in Parliament and was sad to learn of the serious shortage of maths teachers in this country, of so many of our children being taught by people with very low qualifications in maths, and of physical education teachers trained up to teach maths desperately trying to fill the gap. The recent concerns expressed by the Chancellor of the Exchequer that our children should have a good understanding of maths brought home to me the real concerns raised by those maths teachers about the inadequacy of supply of maths teachers. So it concerns me to hear the noble Lord say that schools will be penalised for the shortage of maths teachers. I am afraid it does not seem to be the schools’ fault but somebody else’s. This is not a Department for Education debate, but my experience in this matter coincides with what the noble Lord has expressed. Certainly, one should not penalise schools for a shortage they are not responsible for.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, I am a little reassured but I have to say that I am still left in much confusion as to how the Government intend to get from here to where we all wish to be. The ability of the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, to raise a very large number of fair questions about what is intended by all this simply demonstrates how unclear many of us in this House and outside are about how the Government will ensure that the extra skills are provided from within this country. I entirely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Green, that there is a long-term problem of companies in Britain finding it cheaper and easier to recruit direct from abroad rather than spending money on training their own employees. That applies not just to the Indian IT sector but also to long-distance truck drivers and all sorts of occupations in the private sector.
However, in the public sector the Government are responsible for training. As regards when we introduce this charge, I simply point out that it takes two or three years to train a nurse and longer to train a doctor, let alone a good maths teacher. Therefore, a year is not enough. We will find in the interim period that schools and hospitals will pay sums out of their flat budgets, out of which they are already paying for additional pension increases—so budgets are being squeezed—before any new training schemes have provided the additional skilled recruits from within the United Kingdom. That is part of the argument we are making about phasing in for the public sector.
I very much hope that we will have Labour support on this occasion. As I understand it, the Labour Party supports the public sector. I have heard reports that the Labour Party in the Commons has instructed the Labour Party in the Lords not to support this measure because it is a Liberal Democrat amendment and it is a bit queer about supporting Liberal Democrat amendments. I very much hope that the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, will be able to bring his party along. However, I appreciate that sometimes in the Lords the Labour Party Front Benchers have to defend positions they are not entirely happy about, as, indeed, do the Conservative Party Front Benchers.
Lord Rosser
I reassure the noble Lord, who is clearly very concerned about my present state and what I have had to say on this amendment, that I fully support an agreement—obviously, to his surprise—regarding what I said from this Dispatch Box. Interestingly enough, the noble Lord has not responded to the objections that I raised on his amendment.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
My Lords, I hope that the noble Lord has not yet got out his walking maps, but we shall see. I conclude by pointing out that the phasing argument is about the time it takes to train the people from within the United Kingdom who we need to supply skills in our schools and hospitals. We have not yet been informed about the new schemes which the Department of Health and the Department for Education will undertake to provide. However, we know that from April 2017 schools and hospitals will pay an additional £1,000 per person per year for everyone recruited from outside the European Economic Area, although I think I may have heard the noble Earl say that independent schools will have to pay only £330 because they are charities, which raises some interesting questions to which we may also wish to return.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire
We are reassured by that, but I may wish to take it up further with the Minister. Meanwhile, we are not satisfied. This imposes additional charges on the public sector which is already hard pressed. We have not yet heard sufficient about the additional training which the Government, as employers, need to provide from departments other than the Home Office. We are depressed by the news that the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills is cutting the staff it has to promote skills and employment within the United Kingdom. We therefore wish to test the opinion of the House.
Europe: Renegotiation
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(8 years, 6 months ago)
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The Earl of Courtown
My Lords, the noble Lord mentioned treaty change, and of course it will eventually have to be made in various areas. As for the first part of the noble Lord’s question, I will write to him.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, in these negotiations, will the Government be sure to look after the interests of the 2 million British citizens living elsewhere in the European Union? As the noble Lord, Lord Lawson, reminds us so frequently, people like him who are residents of other EU countries would be adversely affected if we were to leave, and we would naturally wish the interests of the noble Lord and others to be fully protected in these negotiations.
The Earl of Courtown
My Lords, this has also been debated during the course of the European Union Referendum Bill. The noble Lord is quite right, of course—the interests of 2 million citizens have to be protected.
Counter-ISIL Coalition Strategy
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(8 years, 10 months ago)
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Lord Rosser (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for repeating the Statement already made in the other place by the Secretary of State updating the position in Iraq and Syria in respect of action against ISIL. The Secretary of State has also issued a Written Statement today on the subject of UK embedded forces in which he confirms that,
“up to 80 UK personnel have been embedded with US, Canadian and French forces”,
since the international coalition commenced military operations against ISIL last year. The Secretary of State went on to say:
“A small number of embedded UK pilots”—
I think it was five—
“have carried out airstrikes in Syria against ISIL targets”,
although,
“none are currently involved in airstrikes”;
and:
“Ministerial approval is required for UK embeds deployed with allied forces on operations”.
The House of Commons voted against military action in Syria in 2013 and parliamentary authority has only been given to UK air strikes against ISIL in Iraq. The Prime Minister told the House of Commons on 26 September 2014:
“I have said that we will come back to the House if, for instance, we make the decision that we should take air action with others in Syria”.—[Official Report, Commons, 26/9/14; col. 1266.]
That undertaking has clearly been broken, unless the Minister is going to tell us that neither the Prime Minister nor the Secretary of State for Defence knew what was going on with UK pilots carrying out air strikes in Syria. Can the Minister tell us, therefore, if the Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for Defence knew? If they did, when did they know, and which Minister gave the required approval, and when, for these UK embeds to be deployed with allied forces on operations? Were they aware that in so doing, they were authorising UK pilots to carry out air strikes in Syria against ISIL targets?
Did the Prime Minister know that embedded UK pilots had carried out, or had been authorised to carry out, air strikes in Syria against ISIL targets when he made his statement on 26 September last year? If the authorisation for UK pilots to carry out air strikes in Syria against ISIL targets was given during the time of the previous coalition Government, can the Minister say if the then Deputy Prime Minister would have been advised of, or his approval sought for, a small number of embedded UK pilots carrying out air strikes in Syria against ISIL targets?
The involvement of members of our Armed Forces in Syria has come to light only as a result of a Freedom of Information Act request, and the future of that Act is now under threat from this Government. Without that ability to make a Freedom of Information Act request and secure an answer, the involvement of members of our Armed Forces in Syria would not have come to light since it is clear that neither this Government nor perhaps the previous coalition Government had any intention of telling either Parliament or the British people, even though Parliament had voted against military action in Syria and the Prime Minister had pledged to come back to the House if the decision was made that we should take air action with others in Syria.
In his Statement, the Secretary of State said:
“UK personnel have embedded with other nations’ air forces since the 1950s”;
and in the House of Commons today, the Secretary of State sought to say that the Government had actually been quite open about what had happened because they had responded to a freedom of information request. Can the Minister tell us the last time embedded UK forces have been involved in operations and military action in a country when the House of Commons has voted against our Armed Forces being involved in military action in that country and has not subsequently changed its decision?
On the Secretary of State’s claim of openness by the Government because they had responded to a freedom of information request, the reality is that without that request—and most people would have assumed that, in the light of the Prime Minister’s undertaking last September, there would be no British military personnel involvement in operations in Syria—the first the nation might have known about this activity would have been if something had gone wrong. Can the Minister now give an undertaking that there will be no further use of embedded forces in Syria without parliamentary consent, in accordance with the Prime Minister’s undertaking?
We share the Government’s abhorrence of ISIL’s cold-blooded terrorism and we remain ready to work with the Government to defeat ISIL and will carefully consider any proposals that they decide to bring forward. In so doing, we would need to be clear about what difference any action would make to our aim of defeating ISIL, about the nature of any action, its objectives and legal basis. But going behind the back of Parliament and keeping it in the dark, as it is clear the Government have done with the forced disclosure that UK pilots have carried out air strikes in Syria against ISIL targets contrary to Parliament’s decision, does not help.
Somebody in government has tried to be too clever by half by maintaining, as the Secretary of State for Defence has done in his Written Statement, that the Prime Minister’s undertaking excluded UK personnel embedded within other nations’ armed forces operating in Syria, on the basis that it applied only to the deployment of UK forces. The Prime Minister certainly did not make that exemption, and neither did Parliament in its decision. That somebody has done a disservice to the nation, to Parliament and to our Armed Forces—which have served, continue to serve, and will always serve us with great bravery and commitment.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, I am most worried about the statement in this Statement:
“There is a well-planned, integrated strategy to defeat ISIL”.
That is not what it looks like to many on these Benches and elsewhere. We are in an extremely complex situation in the Middle East in which some of our partners are on our side in some respects and on the other side for other purposes. I was being briefed at lunchtime today about the complexities around the Kurdish forces which are involved in the conflict both in Syria and in Iraq, and the deeply ambivalent attitude of the Turks and of the Iraqi Government to their activities. That is merely one of the many complexities that we face.
The coalition, after all, includes Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and many others, many of which have reservations about how we see the conflict. For many purposes, Iran is effectively now an additional member of the coalition, and one of the strongest forces opposing ISIS. I wish I could see a well-integrated strategy. I fear that it is not possible to have one, given the complexity of the situation facing us.
We are talking about local forces that are engaging ISIS. Jabhat al-Nusra is one of the forces that engage ISIS but I am not entirely sure that we want to support it or provide it with more assistance. Some of the Shia militias in Iraq are not as easy as we would like, and sadly the Free Syrian Army, which we have been training, is not one of the strongest forces in the land. I was also worried by what the Prime Minister said at the weekend about domestic radicalisation and counterterrorism because we are all clear that there are direct links between domestic radicalisation and the actions of some of our allies and partners in promoting radical and jihadist versions of Islam against moderate Islamic practices.
We recognise that the Government are edging towards asking for British planes to be involved in bombing in Syria. A small number of British planes bombing ISIS in Syria is no more likely to resolve the multiple conflicts across the Middle East than bombing Damascus would have done two years ago. There is no shortage of aircraft in the Gulf states and Turkey that are quite capable of bombing ISIS from the air. It worries me that we are told that 30% of the surveillance activities over Syria are being conducted by British planes. That suggests that not many other planes apart from American ones are flying over Syria.
Sadly, some of the Governments have themselves supported radical Islamic groups and are still ambivalent about attacking Sunni groups, however radical or brutal, such as Jabhat al-Nusra. It is not in Britain’s interests to cling to the hard-line Sunni side of a developing Sunni-Shia conflict. Nor is it in our interests to present ourselves to ISIS as an existential enemy—I note that the Statement downgrades “existential threat” to “direct threat”, which is perhaps a little better—when ISIS is a much more direct threat to moderate Muslims and to regimes across the Middle East. We should be working with others to promote a coherent response from the neighbours of Syria and Iraq, which we can support, not repeating the mistake of the 2003 Iraq war when we followed the Americans into bombing and then occupying an Arab country.
Some of Britain’s allies in the Middle East have actively funded radical Islamic mosques and movements in the UK and elsewhere. The Prime Minister’s commitment to combat radicalisation within Britain would be more persuasive if he spelled out to the Saudi Government, in particular, our condemnation of Saudi money funding radical groups, and that the Saudis must now themselves take responsibility for containing violent jihadism among Sunni Muslims.
The Prime Minister responded positively to a request from our Middle East partners that we should conduct an inquiry into the Muslim Brotherhood. It is now time for the Prime Minister to ask them in return to conduct an inquiry into the funding of radical Islamic groups in our territory.
I have some questions, if I may. Which local forces are responding? Do they include Kurdish forces in Syria and Iraq? Do they include the Shia militias? What is their attitude to Jabhat al-Nusra? How many of our Middle Eastern partners are currently flying air strikes over Syria? I was told the other day that only one was doing so—Jordan. In terms of embedded personnel, how many RAF pilots are embedded in US drone units, which are flying drones, including armed drones, over the Middle East? How many embedded personnel from other states are currently embedded in British forces? I have been told that French pilots are flying in RAF strike fighters, for example. We, of course, know about the Dutch in the UK/Netherlands Amphibious Force. Are there others? Would it not be proper, either now or later, to give us at least a Written Statement telling us what the position is the other way round as well?
Earl Howe
My Lords, I am grateful to both noble Lords for their comments.
The implication, if not the overt proposition, of the remarks made by the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, was that Her Majesty’s Government had been guilty of bad faith towards Parliament. I ask him to accept that there has been no bad faith towards Parliament. Indeed, that is the last thing that Ministers want.
I take the House’s mind back to the vote that took place in the House of Commons on 29 August 2013. The context of that vote was a proposal to approve UK military action to prevent and deter the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime. The Motion before the House was not about, and significantly did not cover or forbid, anything else. It explicitly did not recognise the rise of ISIS, which had not by then occurred. What has ensued from those votes?
At no time have British pilots or British aircraft been involved in strikes against the Assad regime under the British flag. The will of Parliament has, therefore, not been flouted in that sense. Indeed, the United States has not been involved in air strikes against the Assad regime. In accordance with a decision of the House of Commons on 26 September 2014 we have been involved in coalition operations against ISIL in Iraq, and we have supported our allies in their operations against ISIL in Syria—notably in surveillance operations. There have not, on the other hand, been any UK airstrikes over Syria. What we are talking about now are US airstrikes against ISIL in Syria, which have included some embedded UK pilots over the last few months.
Embedded personnel are not acting under a UK chain of command. That is why Ministers did not think it incumbent on them to report to Parliament about the potential use of those embeds. I was asked when formal authority was given. I understand that it was given in early October last year by the Secretary of State for Defence and the Prime Minister. Operations conducted by the United States did not in our judgment fall within the scope of the Government’s commitment to return to Parliament if the UK were ever to propose to take military action in Syria.
I naturally regret it if the noble Lord feels that he would have taken a different view. However, it has been long-standing practice by Governments of all colours not routinely to publicise embeds, as they are not our forces or indeed our operations. Those operations are a matter for the forces concerned. The view of Ministers was and remains that there was no need to change that position as these pilots were operating as members of the host nations’ military, so the House should be clear that this is not Britain conducting airstrikes in Syria. However, of course, we confirm the position, if asked. When my department received a request we were happy to set out the position.
I can say, too, that there is a clear legal basis for coalition operations in Syria, which governs any activity that takes place in that country. Any activity by UK personnel embedded within US or Canadian forces will be conducted in accordance with the UK’s interpretation of international law, and of UK law and the appropriate rules of engagement.
With regard to the future, the House will be aware that we do not regularly update either House of Parliament on this routine area of defence activity. As I said, we respond to parliamentary inquiries when those are put to us. UK forces are regularly embedded in the forces of other nations. They have been for many years, and we have a long-standing exchange programme with allies, meaning that there will always be a small number of UK military personnel operating under the command of foreign nations. It would be quite impractical to have some kind of unwieldy, running commentary on military operations conducted by other nations.
I turn to the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, many of which I welcomed and agreed with. ISIL cannot be defeated on the battlefield alone. We continue to work to support the kind of inclusive political settlements that would help to deal with the causes of ISIL’s rise. In Syria, this means that we are working to support the moderate opposition and to push for a political settlement.
The noble Lord said that, in his perception, there was no visible sign of a strategy. However, I bring his attention to the fact that there is a very concerted political mechanism overseeing the campaign against ISIL, of which the military component is only one part. That strategy involves a number of key nations. There have already been two significant meetings, at Lancaster House and in Paris, to draw up and take stock of the strategy. It has five strands, as the Statement indicated: counterinformation, the flow of fighters, the humanitarian dimension, countering the financial flows that ISIL receives, and military operations. We are supporting the Iraqi Government in their commitment to inclusive governance and reconciliation between communities, particularly as they re-establish security and governance in areas liberated from ISIL’s control. We are also pressing Prime Minister Abadi to progress his national guard law to strengthen the Iraqi security services’ accountability.
The noble Lord asked me what the value-added of a UK component in offensive operations in Syria would be, were we ever to come to Parliament to seek permission for that. He asked me a number of detailed questions. If he will allow me, I will reply in writing to the extent that I have the information, but the United Kingdom can and does offer some unique capabilities that would undoubtedly be seen as extremely helpful if we were to join offensive operations over Syria, not least a capability for precision bombing.
I also ask the House to reflect on the overall context of what we are talking about. ISIL is a ruthless organisation. It has murdered several of our innocent citizens in Tunisia and in other parts of the world very brutally. It is right that we support our United States allies in what they are doing to counter ISIL. As the Statement made clear, ISIL’s centre of operations is in northern Syria. While we are not proposing ever to flout the will of Parliament in terms of conducting offensive operations against Syria ourselves, nevertheless we will continue to play our part in what has become a very effective coalition.
Defence: Budget
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(8 years, 11 months ago)
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, I want to follow the line that the noble Lords, Lord Ramsbotham and Lord Luce, have taken and focus on long-term foreign policy and national strategy—because we are not at all clear on what either of them are. In the course of this debate, it has been mentioned that we should provide military force against China and build up our forces in the Gulf. I am very surprised that noble Lords have not spent more time talking about the problem of Africa, where we are going to have to be engaged in conflict prevention, state rebuilding and active peacekeeping in the next 20 years, partly because as those states collapse their desperate people will try to flood across the Mediterranean to Europe.
We do not know what our foreign policy is about, and that means it is very difficult to have a coherent defence policy. A Conservative MP of my acquaintance said in a private meeting some months ago, “Of course, our problem is that we don’t know who we are and we don’t know where we want to be in the world”. That is a huge problem. We have lost our standing in Washington over the past five years. There is a strong perception in Washington that we are, as the noble Lord, Lord Luce, suggested, withdrawing from a wish to be a power in the world.
We are also renegotiating our economic relationship with the rest of Europe without recognising that the European Union was always a security system as well as economic arrangement: that our Foreign Secretary negotiates and consults on foreign policy and security policy with his opposite numbers within the European Union framework much more frequently than in any other multilateral framework; and that in Washington NATO is regarded as “the European allies” and the message from Washington is that NATO and the European Union should work more closely in containing Russia and dealing with Ukraine. The question of whether we wish to be involved in containing Russia and dealing with Ukraine is there in the Foreign Secretary not being present when our German and French counterparts negotiate with the Russians on Europe. That is as visible a sign of lack of cohesion, lack of coherence and withdrawal as one could possibly have.
The noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, talked about the 200th anniversary of Waterloo. Waterloo was Britain with our allies: the Germans, the Dutch and the Belgians. The question of whether we are standing alone and how far we are working with others is also fundamental to our defence policy. I welcome the extent to which over the past 15 years we have built a close defence relationship with the French, reinforced our relationship with the Dutch and helped the Nordic countries and now also the Baltic states. I deplore the extent to which Conservative Ministers have attempted not to tell the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail or Parliament the extent to which we now co-operate with them.
I agree strongly that sharing facilities, assets and procurement is one way to make short defence money go further. That is an important part of where we should be. However, unless we know what our relationships with France, Germany and the Nordic countries are, we will not go far enough. So, yes, we need a coherence defence budget—but first, we need a coherent national strategy and foreign policy.
Queen’s Speech
Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts(8 years, 11 months ago)
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, I welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, back to her seat. I am deeply grateful to have had a very professional and constructive relationship with her in the last Government. She is a very good Minister; it was a very good coalition in that respect. I compliment her in particular for maintaining the important work on interfaith relations, both domestically and internationally, which her predecessor—the noble Baroness, Lady Warsi—undertook. I hope that that will also continue under this new Conservative Government.
I want to talk about the area of the Queen’s Speech on international affairs and the insistence that,
“my Government will continue to play a leading role in global affairs”,
with specific references to remaining,
“at the forefront of the NATO Alliance”,
to maintaining pressure on Russia over Ukraine, to an active role in international efforts on combat terrorism in the Middle East, and to pursuing,
“an enhanced partnership with India and China”.
It goes on to say, as the noble Earl remarked, that they,
“will undertake a full strategic defence … review”,
within the next year. In a separate section of the Speech, the Government promise to,
“renegotiate the United Kingdom’s relationship with the European Union and pursue reform of the European Union for the benefit of all member states”.
I leave to one side the underlying contradiction in this sentence, between “renegotiation”, in which the UK faces the other 27 member states and asks for a series of special concessions and opt-outs for ourselves alone, on the Danish model, and,
“reform … for the benefit of all”,
in which the UK works with like-minded Governments to achieve common objectives. You cannot do both at the same time, and the Prime Minister remains deliberately ambiguous as to which he intends to pursue.
I want to focus on the assumption that there is little connection between our relations with the EU and its other member states, our foreign policy, and our role in the world. Many members of the Government are in denial of the reality—that Britain does not have a foreign policy, or a role in the world, unless it has a European policy. One of the established myths of the Eurosceptic media and political right is that we were never told when we joined the European Community that it had implications for foreign policy, and that it was just a common market, a trade arrangement without political implications. That is a convenient myth, but it disregards what Harold Macmillan as Prime Minister made clear to his colleagues when the question of membership was first raised; he recognised that it was a major shift in our international role, a commitment to European security and closer co-operation, which the United States was pushing the British to accept, and which in particular necessitated closer co-operation with France and Germany. Edward Heath spelt out the same message clearly, most explicitly in his Harvard lectures in 1969, well reported in the United Kingdom, and so did Sir Alec Douglas-Home, as he took the accession Bill through the Commons as Foreign Secretary. Jim Callaghan as Foreign Secretary was one of the first enthusiasts for European foreign policy co-operation; in 1980, the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, drafted the London report on strengthening foreign policy co-operation. The EU was always about security as well as trade, about containing Germany and Russia, and about resolving competing nationalisms among European states.
British foreign policy for centuries has been about competition and co-operation with France, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain; that has shaped our national identity and history, and it is the continuing reality today. William Hague has negotiated with Iran and on other Middle East issues in the forum of the E3+3: Britain, France and Germany, together with the United States, Russia and China. Britain, France and Germany are clearly more closely aligned with each other than with any of the three others. In containing Russia over Ukraine, the European members of NATO have worked closely together, imposing EU sanctions to parallel NATO measures. I took part earlier this week in a NATO conference in which the constant message from Americans and Europeans is that, if we are going to cope with the Russian pressure on Ukraine, the EU and NATO have to work closely in harmony, using all the measures at their disposal. They are not in entirely different worlds. The UK appears to have opted out in many ways from relations with Ukraine, so that it is Germany above all, with France, that is leading the negotiations with Russia and is the United States’ leading partner in Europe.
One recent academic study of 25 years of voting in the UN since the end of the Cold War shows that the French have voted in the same way as the British in 95% of UN votes and the United States has voted together with the British in 65%, which suggests perhaps that French and British interests are more closely aligned than those that we have with the United States. In containing disorder across north Africa and the Sahel, we already work very closely with the French in Mali and elsewhere. In containing disorder and piracy off the Horn of Africa, the European headquarters for the operation is in Northwood, in spite of the fact that very often the British have not contributed a frigate to that joint operation. The Franco-British defence co-operation arrangements launched in 1998 under the Blair Government and renewed in 2010-11 under this Government have become the core of where we are going, but the Government have always been deeply resistant to Liberal Democrat pressure to tell anyone in Britain about it for fear of the Daily Mail. We also work closely with the Dutch and the Nordic countries in pursuing closer defence co-operation.
We hear a lot of noise from leading Conservatives about what sort of future relationship they would like us to have with the European Union and its leading member states. For example, last weekend, Owen Paterson suggested that Switzerland or Norway are the models we should follow and that we should focus instead on reviving the Anglosphere. That brought back memories of my first visit to the United States when Eisenhower was President and white Anglo-Saxon Protestants still ran the United States from the east coast. That has gone. When we first negotiated to join the European Economic Community, we spent a lot of time defending New Zealand butter exports and Australian pineapples. That has also gone. We are in a different world. The United States has Korean and Hispanic congressmen and the Republicans will not win unless they have Spanish-speaking voters. The world is no longer the Anglosphere.
The Foreign Secretary appears to prefer the Danish model with a formal opt-out but following most EU legislation. The Danish Foreign Minister made a speech yesterday warning the United Kingdom against it, saying: “It has given us nothing but problems”. Daniel Hannan and UKIP would really like the UK to leave the EU completely to pursue closer and separate relationships with China, Russia and other Asian powers and to have an enhanced partnership with China and India separate from European relations with China and India. I suggest that that is not the way to get the attention of senior Chinese or even, these days, Indian leaders. There are, of course, issues of national identity behind all this. I note that the campaign for Britain now has a subgroup entitled “Historians for Britain”, some of whom will be familiar to noble Lords. They want to promote the Michael Gove version of national history. I once saw a Conservative memo that said, “We must at all costs avoid any indication that World War 1 or World War 2 has any relevance in terms of pursing European co-operation”. That is the part of the argument about national identity and national history.
None of these alternatives offers us a coherent foreign policy let alone a credible or hard-headed approach to what our role in the world should be, to quote the noble Earl. It is a foreign policy with a hole at its centre where we have left out those countries with which we most closely share democratic values: our neighbours in the rest of Europe. If we have no European policy, we have no foreign policy, so how can we set out a strategic review of defence and security before we have concluded what future relationship we wish to have with our nearest neighbours? The SDSR will list the major threats facing the UK over the next 10 years and more. None of them is a threat to Britain alone. They are all, to one extent or another, shared with our neighbours: migration, cross-border crime, Russian subversion, pandemics and international terrorism. Our natural partners in facing them are our neighbours. If we do not recognise that, we end up sending HMS “Bulwark” into the Mediterranean when it is unclear what it is there to do, what rules it is operating under or what it does with the migrants it rescues. We have a determination to renew our continuous at-sea nuclear deterrent, but we are not entirely clear why. If we aspire to a Danish role in the world, Denmark does not need a nuclear deterrent, and neither does Switzerland. Our nuclear deterrent was a contribution to the defence of western Europe against the Soviet threat. We have to put it in its European context for it to make sense.
When she winds up, will the noble Baroness say whether in making the SDSR proposal we will follow the example of the last French White Paper and invite French participation as they invited British participation—Sir Peter Ricketts—in the process of developing their defence review or whether we think that is not something we should reciprocate? Do we intend to deepen European defence co-operation, in particular with France, or do we think now is the time to step back? If we intend to deepen it, do the Government intend to inform Parliament and the British public about how far that has got?
I am told that over the past five years the National Security Council spent more time discussing Gulf strategy than European strategy. Some of us have some doubts about the preferred Gulf strategy of the current Government and their predecessor. We have a close relationship with Sunni monarchies, looking for investment in Britain, pursuing arms sales—above all, aircraft sales—and have set in train an investigation into the Muslim Brotherhood because the Saudis and Emiratis pressed us to do so, without thinking through the implications for British foreign policy or British domestic politics. Thus we are in danger of ending up on the Sunni/Salafist side of a Sunni-Shia divide.
I note a number of comments about “increasing our footprint in the Gulf” as we withdraw from Afghanistan, in particular about expanding our base in Bahrain, which is close to the American Fifth Fleet. Will the Minister tell us who is paying for the expansion of the Bahrain base? I have heard some suggestions that the Bahrainis are paying for it, not the British Government. If that is the case, what conditions have the Bahrainis put on paying for that expansion, and what conditions in return have we put on the Bahrainis for the future development of that rather authoritarian monarchy?
Over the next year we will have to discuss Britain’s role in the world and what that requires as regards responding to future threats. The noble Earl promised a “hard-headed appraisal” of the role we want to play. In a discussion a few months ago on the context of the SDSR I heard a rather senior Conservative MP say, bluntly, “Well, we don’t know who we are as a nation, and we don’t know where we are in the world”. That is close to the bone as regards the confusion within the Conservative Party. Liberal Democrats understand that the British identity is compatible with the European identity, that Britain shares values and interests with our European neighbours, and that any coherent British foreign and security strategy has to be founded on a European strategy.