Health

Liam Fox Excerpts

Monday 9th June 2014 Commons Chamber

[Dr Liam Fox (North Somerset) (Con)]

Perhaps I may allow the House a slightly more bipartisan interlude by concentrating for the moment on a different part of the Gracious Speech, which is the part relating to our country’s national security. I was delighted to see in the Gracious Speech the Government’s commitment to the NATO alliance, which is underpinned by the hosting in Wales of the NATO summit later this year.

From 4 April 1949, when it came into being, NATO has become the major instrument of stability and security in Europe. It has taken in newly emerging democracies, such as Greece and Spain. It has been extended to countries formerly in the Warsaw pact, creating a far more safe and stable continent. It has embraced countries such as Norway in the far north and Turkey, giving us security in places where we perhaps have greatest strategic vulnerability.

However, as we approach the summit in Wales, we need to accept that there are big weaknesses inside our major military alliance. To an extent, the political and military roles that we clearly understood during the cold war have dissolved away, and western countries existing in peace and freedom have become fat on the prosperity and security that they have come to take for granted. Only four members of the NATO alliance currently meet the 2% of GDP floor of spending that they undertook to meet when they joined and, as a consequence, the European continent gives a lower priority to defence and is ever more addicted to welfare. As the Prime Minister and Chancellor Merkel have regularly pointed out, we have now reached a situation in which the European Union represents 7% of the global population, 25% of global GDP and 50% of global social spending. That picture is utterly unsustainable. It is a situation in which the pressures of defence have become great.

Of course, NATO has had recent success in the way it took charge of operations in Afghanistan, what it did in response to the invasion of Kuwait and, perhaps more successfully, what happened in the Balkans. However, not long ago the Libyan conflict showed us how many weaknesses the alliance has. We did not have enough of some key assets—such as intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, or air-to-air refuelling—to the extent that we would not have been able to carry out the Libyan campaign without the United States being on board. Such is the current weakness of European NATO.

We are confronted with a growing threat in the shape of Putin’s Russia, and we have stood by and watched serial bad behaviour from the Putin Government. They cut off gas to Ukraine, in breach of the NATO-Russia treaty, and we did nothing. We saw a cyber-attack on Estonia, and we did nothing. Russia invaded Georgia, parts of which it still occupies, and we did far too little. I am afraid that the signal the House sent after the debate on Syria only gave Putin the understanding that further aggression would not be rewarded with real resistance by the west, and I am afraid that the events we have seen in Ukraine are, at least partly, a result of how such decisions have been interpreted. We must be careful to ensure that our behaviour does not further reinforce that position.

We have allowed wishful thinking on Russia to replace critical analysis. We have all wanted to see Russia develop as an open, democratic, pluralistic system, but that is not going to happen, at least not under the current regime. The quicker we understand that, the better for the wider security picture. It is a bullying and thuggish regime that is not likely to change. Its modus operandi is clear: it pumps money into regimes or city states—wherever it can—to try to encourage them to be more Russia-friendly. It issues huge numbers of Russian passports to citizens in those places and then claims that it has to defend them.

The whole debate about the Ukrainian crisis misses one essential point: it is not to do with strategic or even tactical interests; it is a direct challenge to international law. Putin has said that the protection of ethnic Russians—not even Russian citizens—lies not with the states in which they live, or with the laws, constitutions or forms of government of such states, but with an external state, Russia, which can intervene to protect ethnic Russians wherever they may be. If we allow that to stand, there will be no international law, because it will sweep away every norm of international behaviour that has been accepted since world war two.

[Geraint Davies]

President Obama has made it clear that he is against Britain leaving the European Union or Scotland leaving the UK. What does the right hon. Gentleman think President Putin’s position would be on those issues?

[Dr Fox]

With all due respect to anybody outside our own borders, what the United Kingdom decides to do is a matter entirely for the United Kingdom, and what Scotland decides to do is a matter for Scotland. Nevertheless, since the hon. Gentleman asked me what I think about President Putin’s view on those issues, I will tell him what I think about Scotland. Any fragmentation would be not only a fragmentation of our country’s defences but a potential weakness inside NATO, and that is unlikely to help or give comfort to anyone other than those who are a potential threat to our national security. The hon. Gentleman raises an important point, in that events that take place inside the United Kingdom may well have resonances that are not naturally considered when decisions are being taken.

I want briefly to mention another area of national security of which the House must be very cognisant: the changing nature of the threats we face. We have gone from state threats in the cold war to the domestic terror threat we faced from the IRA, and we now face a transnational terrorist threat. That threat has come at a time when we have seen a huge growth in the internet, which allows a lot of the enemies of this country to hide. Back in 1995, when President Clinton was President of the United States, there were 130 websites in the world; at the end of 2012, there were 654 million. That is a lot of places for our enemies to hide.

Our security services need to be able to operate in the same environment as our enemies, and that to me was the essence of the great betrayal of Snowden. We depend on a moral and legal relationship between our employees and the Governments of our allied states to maintain our security, and there were three elements to what Snowden did. The first was his disclosure about the extent of National Security Agency surveillance. Had he done that inside the law it would have been a legitimate debate in a democracy, but to go further and set out the means by which our security forces carry out their business, or even potentially to set out the names of particular operatives, goes well beyond what is acceptable. In my view it goes from legitimate debate into the business of treason.

We do not have massively overwhelming security apparatus in this country. We spend 0.3% of Government spending on all our agencies put together, which is what we spend on the NHS every six days. We have good, strong oversight of our security services in this country that we should be proud of, but we must be clear when it comes to national security that peace and security are not the natural state of the world. Those things have to be fought for with every generation, and we have a responsibility to fund that appropriately. We can have neither such restricted freedom that we start to become what we claim to oppose, nor go off on a libertarian rant that takes us to a place that leaves us far less secure than we ought to be. If we get that balance right, we will be doing our duty in this House.