UK-US Co-operation on Using Atomic Energy for Mutual Defence

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd October 2024 Grand Committee

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Howell of Guildford. I agree very much with his introductory remarks about the huge democratic deficit represented by the CRaG process—remarks echoed by most noble Lords taking part in this debate. Democracy? It would be a good idea; I hope most people would agree. I also agree very much with his concluding remarks that we are in a new world and we need new approaches. What we have before us looks very much like something out of the 20th century, rather than being fit for the 21st.

I thank the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, and the International Agreements Committee, for their hard and rapid work in preparing the report, securing this debate and introducing it so clearly.

I note that the scrutiny period for the MDA ends on 23 October, which is today, and, for the AUKUS agreement, on 29 October. I might use a hashtag that I use frequently on social media: #NoWayToRunACountry. It would be nice to have more space and time for discussion and thought.

As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, set out, this debate occurs as the UK prepares to spend, and is spending, an enormous amount of money on new nuclear weapons. I must put on the record the Green Party’s opposition to the huge expense and risks of the Trident replacement programme in a geopolitical environment in which the majority of the world’s countries have backed the UN treaty for a global ban on nuclear weapons. I also note the related context in which the cost of the nuclear clean-up at Sellafield has spiralled to £136 billion, about which the National Audit Office has today expressed great concern. This is on a site where there have been very serious cybersecurity concerns and on which we have yet to find any kind of long-term solution for the storage of nuclear waste.

However, I will focus in particular on the AUKUS agreement, in part because the perspective of the Green Party of England and Wales lines up very much with that of the Australian Greens. We bring a different and widely supported voice to the debate in both our nations. Both our parties are opposed to the agreement, and that gives me the opportunity to draw the Committee’s attention to some important points that should, I respectfully suggest, give the Government and all parties pause.

I note by way of background that, in 2022, the Australian Greens had by far their best ever federal election result, labelled a “greenslide” by the leader, Adam Bandt. It saw the election of the first three Green MPs in Brisbane and a significant increase in Senate numbers, and state-elected representation has continued to grow since then. We are in a time of considerable political change in the UK, the US and around the world.

I also note, as I have previously noted to this committee, that two former Australian Prime Ministers and one former Australian Foreign Minister, who are not Greens, have all opposed the AUKUS deal.

I will begin with a longue-durée view and look over more than a century of Australian and UK military co-operation, which has been marked often by strong, even slavish, support for UK and US actions from the top of the Australian Government, although that has not always been backed by, or first checked with, the Australian public.

My speech might be taken as a balance and contrast to that of the noble Lord, Lord Hannan, not for the first time. First, I refer to the First World War. ANZAC Day on 25 April now marks the contribution of all those who have served militarily in Australia, but was initially founded very much around trying to get more people to sign up to the war, as historian Martin Crotty said, between 1916 and 1918, after the British-led military disaster of Gallipoli that claimed so many young lives, The Prime Minister of Australia, Billy Hughes, tried twice to extend service for conscripts outside Australian shores to feed more lives into the horrors of the trenches. When the flow of volunteers dried up, twice, the Australian public said no, and I note in passing that the Australian Labor Party subsequently split.

On 3 September 1939, Prime Minister Robert Menzies told the Australian people that they were at war with Nazi Germany. That came just an hour after Britain had declared war. While there is no doubt that the Australian public was, and remained, behind the Government, there was considerable concern and doubt, as there had been in the then dominions of Canada and South Africa, about the Australian Prime Minister’s assumption of automaticity. The slavish abandonment of any idea of Australian sovereignty has echoes which I will come back to.

Without doing a detailed trawl through Australian history, I will just stop briefly at the Vietnam war moratorium protests, the first of which took place on the 8 May 1970. These were then the largest public demonstrations in Australia’s history and represented growing resistance from a significant number of Australians to the Government’s commitment to the Vietnam War in general and conscription in particular. On 16 February 2003, more than half a million people took part in protests across Australia against the US-led invasion of Iraq, the largest anti-war protests in Australia’s history. The Committee can see the pattern that I am drawing out here and should perhaps reflect that Australia is, however imperfectly, a democracy and there is a strong chance that public views may eventually influence political choices.

Australian officials believe, and it has been widely acknowledged, although it is extremely hard to estimate the cost of the AUKUS programme over its life, that the long-term cost of the submarine plan is likely to be about 0.15% of Australia’s entire gross domestic product per year, on average. For context, in 2023, that was put as a comparable cost to boosting the resourcing of schools across the entire nation to what was seen to be an essential minimum standard. But the objections are not just about costs. I draw noble Lords’ attention to the Australian Greens’ dissenting report to the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade’s report on the Defence Legislation Amendment (Naval Nuclear Propulsion) Bill 2023. The dissenting report is readily available, so I will not discuss it at length but pick out a couple of key points. First, it states:

“There are environmental, health, security and social risks associated with every facet of the nuclear industry. These risks disproportionately impact First Nations peoples and their lands.”


I note that the very much unfinished business of the treatment of First Nations in Australia has recently been strongly highlighted. The report then states,

“that the two major parties have worked together to ensure a short time frame on the reporting of this inquiry and not enabled time for public hearings … the Australian public has not been properly consulted on the AUKUS proposal”.

We can see the clear echo here at the complaints that we have heard across this Committee. The report concludes that the deal undermines Australian sovereignty and violates international nuclear safety principles, and notes that Australia’s Defence Strategic Review rejected advice from the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Australian Government’s own nuclear safety advisory council, which recommended that an independent regulator have oversight of the programme.

Finally, the report notes:

“The Australian public has rejected … nuclearisation … for nearly a century”.


It might be of particular interest to the Government that the Electrical Trades Union and the Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union, two prominent Australian unions, strongly oppose the development of a nuclear industry in Australia or any end to the moratorium on nuclear power. That is the political context of the AUKUS deal. Noble Lords might think that that presents considerable political risks: they would be right.

I also note that that reflects the conclusion of a report published in the last week by the US Congressional Research Service, which says of the military context that

“the costs … of Pillar 1 could reduce, perhaps significantly, funding … for other Australian military capabilities”.

Crucially, it says that no alternatives were ever considered by any of the AUKUS partners. We come back to democratic scrutiny and consideration. To repeat, this report was from the US Congressional Research Service.

Finally, the timing of this debate all too acutely highlights the geopolitical context, of which our relationship with Australia is a small if significant part. There is the approaching US election, in which there is at least an even-money chance that we will see a second Donald Trump presidency and a risk that, even if that is not the result, we will see that candidate seeking to claim the presidency. I will not get into the details of today’s row, but this is not a politically stable time in US history to be making deals such as either of these. At the CHOGM meeting in Samoa, for which our Prime Minister may just about have landed after 26 hours, he will not be joined by the leaders of India or South Africa, because they are at the BRICS meeting hosted by the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, in Kazan, where the Chinese President, Xi Jinping, is also in attendance. Canada too is sending neither its Prime Minister nor Foreign Minister to CHOGM.

As I said in our debate on the defence review, the UK needs to consider far more than defence in isolation. It needs to consider its place and relationships in a world of multiple security threats—not just the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the threats that China presents with its denial of the joint declaration in Hong Kong and the threats to the democratic entity of Taiwan, but the multiple security threats of the climate emergency, the nature crisis and multiple health threats. I draw attention to an extremely disturbing report in Vanity Fair about the H5N1 virus in US dairy herds and that country’s wholly inadequate public health response.

The agreements we are debating today already look like 20th-century relics, and in future will likely look even more so, sitting dangerously, expensively and unstably in the 21st-century world. The security of our country and the world cannot afford such outdated approaches.