Strategic Defence and Security Review

Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom Excerpts

Thursday 3rd December 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom (Con) (Maiden Speech)]

My Lords, it is easy to say that it is a great honour to join your Lordships’ House, but it is hard to convey quite how much it means to me. I thank my supporters, my noble friends Lady Stowell and Lady Bottomley, and my mentor, my noble friend Lady Browning, for their unstinting encouragement and help. I am afraid I shall continue to need it, having already sat on the wrong Benches, stood when I should have been sitting, and no doubt sat when I should have been standing. I also thank and congratulate the staff of this House. I do not know how they recognise us all, but I take my hat off to them.

In my time in another place as a Back-Bencher, Minister, Chief Whip and chairman of the Defence Select Committee, I came to appreciate with admiration the depth of the wisdom and expertise that is available on a daily basis in this House. An obvious example of that is the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, whom it is a privilege to follow, but then I have been benefiting from his experience on issues of nuclear proliferation for many years now, so no change there. He told me a fortnight or so ago that he was an optimist; I am not. I have been described by the Times as making Eeyore look like a happy-clappy type, and your Lordships are just about to find out why. And how daunting it is to be speaking in a defence debate surrounded by noble and gallant Lords and former and current Defence Ministers, and how thankful I am that I have only four minutes, which has to limit the number of mistakes I can make—but time will tell.

I declare my interests in that I advise Thales UK; Pure Storage, the computer storage company; and the strategic company SC Strategy Ltd. I am also an unpaid adviser for the Electric Infrastructure Security Council of the United States.

I welcome the Government’s commitment to spending 2% of GDP on defence. I suspect that most of us would like to see more, but in a time of austerity this is a real achievement. There is one aspect of the review on which I shall concentrate. Since the Industrial Revolution, the developed world has begun to rely on technology to an extent which has been increasing as the pace of change picks up. The developed world is now completely dependent on, for example, computers and electricity. This was the subject of an excellent speech in a debate in this House about a month ago by the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey. Without computers, we could not function efficiently. If we lost our electricity, we could barely function at all. We would have no money, no communication, no chain of command, no water and no fuel. It would, as they say, be a really bad day. So our reliance on electricity creates for us an existential risk—a potential single point of failure that leaves us vulnerable as never before.

Therefore, I particularly welcome the concentration given in this review to the extra money provided to GCHQ, and to the recognition by the Prime Minister of the need for exercises to protect our energy infrastructure. I welcome the fact that when Oliver Letwin set out these vulnerabilities to the Chancellor of the Exchequer and asked for resources to deal with them, the Chancellor told him that he was being insufficiently ambitious and gave him more. I believe that that reflects well on both of them because, throughout the developed world, modern warfare will be fought not only on the beaches, in the fields and on the streets; it will be fought inside our infrastructure in ways we will not be able see, with no warning and with devastating consequences. I believe that the Government understand this, but there is much still to be done.