Ukraine (International Relations and Defence Committee Report)

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Thursday 6th March 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, your Lordships can always tell when they are getting to the end of a debate, because the noble Lords, Lord Skidelsky and Lord Balfe, will be speaking. Like the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, I disagree with much of the report, but I thank the noble Lord, Lord De Mauley, and his colleagues for giving it to us, because this is exactly the time to discuss how we are going to handle the new situation.

Fifty-five years ago, Ted Heath, our then Prime Minister, outlined quite clearly why we should move away from the United States and start to look at the interests of Europe when we are defending Europe. In that, he was surprisingly supported by Enoch Powell. They both fell back on the doctrine that states do not do favours for other states. They have foreign policies to maximise their impact. That was always confirmed to me when I was in the European Parliament. For some years, I was on an outfit called the Transatlantic Policy Network and, through that, got to know the late Senator John McCain quite well. He was quite clear with me that there is no special relationship. He once said, probably very accurately, “There is only a special relationship in that we rely on you to keep the sergeants’ mess in control while we look after the officers”. He was right.

To an extent, I welcome President Trump and his disruption because it is long overdue. The invasion of Ukraine was clearly illegal, but it was not unprovoked. There were years of provocation preceding it, which ended by chasing Viktor Yanukovych out of office. From then on, there was little hope that Ukraine would settle down as a NATO ally in the West because Putin, who is in charge of his country and has to do his best for it, is of the view that the borders need redrawing. I have been in Crimea and all over the Donbass region. It is Russian. Let us face that: it is not Ukrainian; it is Russian and that is why there is little objection to a Russian presence there. Your Lordships are not meant to like these facts, but they are the truth.

What we now have to do, in my view, is adjust our policies in Europe so that we can break Russia away from China. We seem to be settling back and saying, “Oh yeah, Russia and China are going to get together”. China is far more of a threat to western values, because it does not rely on a western philosophy in the way that it looks at the world and, if it is allied to Russia, that means it is on the borders of Europe—it will have bases in the Arctic before long. My view is that we need to come to terms with Trump.

One challenge for the Ministry of Defence is that we need to make sure that our nuclear deterrent will actually work. I was assured by John McCain that the Americans held the key to certain aspects of launching the missiles that made them completely under American control. Could we launch an independent missile? France can, and that is why France will be the leader of the new European security dimension.

The people we need to look to are Merz in Germany—the new chancellor—and Giorgia Meloni, who has a very good vision of how Europe should turn out, and we must hope that Macron can be succeeded by someone who has European interests at heart and is not a nationalist. I see that as being our big challenge: we have to get back into Europe as a country and get as close to the Europeans as we possibly can. We will not be able to lead the European defence initiative, for the bad reason that we decided to leave the European Union. We will not get in there, because France will claim the initiative—and, frankly, if I were France, I would claim the initiative—but we do need to get more closely aligned.

My final point is that we have had some mention of the Scandinavian version of security. That is based on a form of national service and on defending the home space. We need to indulge in that. There is no market in Britain for body bags, and there is no market in Britain for foreign adventure beyond that necessary to defend our own country and our close allies in Europe.

[Lord Skidelsky (CB)]

Hear, hear!

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

See, I said I would get no cheer.