NATO

Debate between Bernard Jenkin and Lord Spellar

Thursday 4th July 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

If I may say so, it is a privilege to follow such a powerful speech about the spread of weapons. The whole House respects my hon. Friend’s extraordinary devotion to his work on arms control for the Quadripartite Committee. He approaches his subject with a passion and knowledge that is probably unrivalled in either House of Parliament.

If I may, however, I would like to respond, perhaps impertinently, to my hon. Friend’s implied rebuke to the Government for their helping to persuade the European Union to lift the arms embargo on the supply of weapons to the Syrian National Council—the least unrespectable part, if I may put it that way, of the Syrian opposition, which we would want to be properly represented in the peace negotiation or peace settlement that we are all striving to achieve. I support the Government in seeking to redress the extraordinary imbalance affecting the more reasonable forces involved in this extraordinarily bloody and complex conflict.

NATO should be agonising over this whole issue because it will have to pick up the pieces of a spreading war and conflagration that almost inevitably will occur unless the United States, Russia and the other major powers in the region—including, perhaps, even Iran—start to sit around a table and work out how to contain the conflict.

We were right to question whether there might be a case for sending arms into Syria to try to redress the imbalance, because the regime is already using a massive stockpile of weapons. Russian-trained pilots are flying Russian aircraft, dropping Russian munitions and firing Russian shells out of Russian guns at civilians all over Syria. I find it very difficult to tolerate the idea that the Russians should be able to do whatever they want in their bloody way in that country, while the west sits idly by doing nothing. It is not just the Russians, as extremist Sunni factions, too, are being armed by Qatari and Saudi interests, which are pouring weapons into the Syrian conflagration.

The danger is not that our sitting back and doing nothing will mean that nothing happens or that the pre-2010 stasis will reassert itself as Assad reasserts his power. The danger is that this conflagration will grow and grow and grow. I therefore think the Government are right to try to redress the political balance and to tempt the Americans into entering this crisis—otherwise, NATO will finish up having to pick up the pieces in a very much more active and perhaps unfortunate way than we would wish.

That brings us back to our subject, Madam Deputy Speaker—I hear you heaving a sigh of relief—which is the question, “What is NATO in our modern age?” I thought that my right hon. Friend the Member for North East Hampshire (Mr Arbuthnot), the Chairman of the Defence Select Committee, was right when he said that NATO has become a coalition of the willing—an organisation or a military alliance from which a coalition of the willing can be drawn. I do not rebuke the Minister for representing the Government at this debate because NATO is a political alliance that represents the foreign policy of this country, albeit backed by national military capability, pledged in co-operation to support the objectives of that political alliance.

Why is NATO still needed? I hope that I have just exposed one possible reason—to prevent war and to contain conflict. The reason NATO seems to be redundant and out of date to so many of our citizens today is that it has been so successful—the most successful military alliance in modern history—at containing, deterring and preventing conflict so that our continent feels perhaps deceptively safe from foreign conflict. NATO not only won the cold war, but keeps the peace. People should not forget the adage “If you want peace, prepare for war”, as that is what NATO is about.

Deterrence is the watchword—preventing wars rather than fighting them. That is why we spend money on defence—not to use the military capability in hot conflict, but so that we do not have to use the capability at all. Its use is pacific. That is one of the reasons the nuclear deterrent lies at the heart of NATO military doctrine. It is the relationship between the future of NATO and the continuation of our own nuclear deterrent that I shall explore briefly this afternoon.

There are three NATO nuclear powers: France, Britain and the United States. What threatens the future of NATO today is not just apathy or the parsimony of its member Governments’ defence budgets, and neither is it ignorance about its vital role. NATO is not going to be abolished suddenly. Nobody is going to make a decision at some NATO summit that NATO has had its day and will be wound up. The great danger is that NATO withers. I put it to the House that, with the war fatigue following Iraq and Afghanistan and the lack of appetite for NATO to play its deterrent peacekeeping and stabilisation role across the world, NATO is already withering. The collapse of key components of NATO is another danger, as is the uncertainty and the question mark that still exists over the continuation of our own nuclear deterrent. In fact, that is a threat to the continuation of NATO.

With the greatest respect to those who advocate European Union alternatives or supplements to NATO, I say that without NATO European defence is sunk. NATO has been doing European defence and security and it is doing European defence and security: there is no substitute or alternative to NATO.

We have left a question mark about the vital part of NATO’s capability. Our nuclear deterrent is pledged to the defence of NATO and our NATO allies. The Government have conducted a study into possible alternatives to the Trident nuclear deterrent. Now is not the time to go into great detail about that, except to say that we understand that it has exposed the truth: that there is no viable or cheaper alternative to our nuclear deterrent. Trident is the only viable nuclear deterrent on offer to the United Kingdom.

[Mr Spellar]

Can the hon. Gentleman—who is probably better informed than Opposition Front Benchers on this—give us any idea of when he expects the outcome of the study to be published so that we can have that informed debate?

European Union Bill

Debate between Bernard Jenkin and Lord Spellar

Monday 24th January 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Jenkin]

I am most grateful to be speaking under your chairmanship, Mr Brady. I will endeavour to be briefer than some hon. Members have been this afternoon.

We are discussing the trigger for a referendum in the Bill. It is worth pointing out the undercurrent in this debate: some people are speaking because they do not think that there have been enough referendums and others are speaking because they do not want referendums. The official Opposition have got into a bit of trouble with their amendment. My right hon. Friend the Member for Charnwood (Mr Dorrell) had some fun at their expense, because they tried to present a set of amendments as pro-referendum when their record on referendums is rather lamentable—perhaps as lamentable as ours when we have been in government.

[Mr Spellar]

rose—

[Mr Jenkin]

I will not give way, because my point was not designed to provoke the Opposition and I want to press on. The Opposition’s inability to answer the question of how the proposals would help to get a referendum meant that they fell into the trap that was set for them by my right hon. Friend the Member for Charnwood.

European Union Bill

Debate between Bernard Jenkin and Lord Spellar

Tuesday 11th January 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Jenkin]

I will revert to that later. The great danger of the European constitution was that it was explicitly and legally autochthonous. It derived its authority from itself and its own roots. At least the Lisbon treaty reverted to the principle that authority comes from the member states, but it contains the important and dangerous declaration about not only the primacy of EU law, but the EU’s constitutional supremacy over the constitutions of member states. That means our Parliament. I therefore fail to understand how anyone can say that there is no threat from the EU to the sovereignty of this House. That lot over there signed a treaty, without a referendum, that created such a threat. That has given rise to a demand for clarification about the sovereignty of Parliament in some form.

Many of my colleagues—I have talked to them in the Lobbies as well as hearing one or two speaking today—think that clause 18 is not the fight to have. If I may paraphrase my hon. Friend the Member for Daventry (Chris Heaton-Harris), he said that other clauses were much more important. It is not an either/or. It is suggested that somehow a referendum would be a panacea. People seem to think that as soon as we have a referendum—preferably an in or out referendum—we will be able to settle the issue.

The truth is that we may one day quite soon have a referendum on the European Union. It might be on the question of an additional treaty or power, and it might turn into a referendum on in or out. But the actual fact of a referendum will not solve anything. Instead, it will throw into flux the question of our membership of the EU, and the Government of the day will have to decide how to use that referendum to negotiate a new relationship with the EU. We will not stop the trains running through the tunnels and cancel all the flights and the trading. We will still have to have a relationship with the European Union.

Suppose that we wanted to take back control over our trade and to exit the customs union. We would need to have a renegotiation, sector by sector, of every part of the British economy’s trading relationship with the EU. The point about a customs union is that there are no barriers—it is a single trading area. If we were to elect to have a separate trading area—to leave the single market—but we wanted to continue to trade with that market, we would need a trade agreement, so we would need to negotiate one. Immediately, we would need renegotiation.

We constantly hear it said, “Oh, if you Eurosceptics want to leave the European Union, why not be completely honest about it?” The pro-Euros—the people who are dedicated to the annihilation of the sovereignty and independence of this country—always put the issue as a binary question and, to an extent, they are right. It would be a self-fulfilling prophecy—a referendum would become a matter of leave or stay. If we are not sovereign in this Parliament while this country is a member of the EU, the only option is to jettison all the treaties and Acts, so we have very little flexibility.

What we as a Parliament need, in those circumstances, is the ability to negotiate partially, to pick and choose from a menu of options. But that would require Ministers to be able to legislate to suspend this EU instrument or that EU instrument. For example, they would need to be able to suspend EU City regulation so that we can get our competitiveness back. The Prime Minister’s remarks on Monday, about his pro-jobs agenda and a flexible labour market, are another example. The coalition also says that it wants to renegotiate the working time directive to recreate the competitiveness of the British labour market. So Ministers would need the option of passing an Act of Parliament to suspend the application of certain EU instruments, but the question is whether that option will be available to them.

A little earlier, the beef ban was mentioned. I was a humble Parliamentary Private Secretary in the Scottish Office at the time, and we had a lot of discussion about how it could possibly be legal for the EU not just to ban the import of beef into other member states, but to ban the export of British beef from the UK to third-party countries. We were banned from exporting to anywhere, and there was some discussion about whether we could suspend the effect of that legal instrument to stop the EU preventing us from exporting our beef to other countries. The advice was, “Oh no, Minister. You can’t do that because it would put us in breach of the European treaties, infraction proceedings will be taken against us in the European Court of Justice and we will be found to have broken the law. Minister, I must advise you not to break the law, as otherwise you will be personally liable.” Do Members get the point? Ministers have to obey the law and accept legal advice. Unless we sort out the sovereignty of Parliament and make it explicit that Parliament can suspend European Community law in selected circumstances, Ministers will not be in a position to exercise the freedom that Parliament has given them.

[Mr John Spellar (Warley) (Lab)]

Did the hon. Gentleman seek alternative legal advice, which is often the sensible thing when getting that sort of advice in government, as I know from experience?

[Mr Jenkin]

We sought alternative legal advice and were assured that, in all probability, the domestic British courts would uphold Parliament’s sovereignty and ability to suspend those legal enactments. But that is the point. We might have it now, but will we have it in the future?