Defence Spending

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Thursday 25th April 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, in introducing the Statement, the Defence Secretary said:

“we will remove 72,000 civil servants from the system, not because we do not think they are good people—fortunately, with low unemployment we know they will be gainfully employed elsewhere”.—[Official Report, Commons, 24/4/24; col. 944.]

Can the Minister tell me whether there were any negotiations with the trade unions? Are we to believe that there are 72,000 civil servants doing nothing? If that is not the case, can the Minister tell us what services will be reduced, curtailed or ended altogether? I would like an assurance that there will be negotiations with the trade unions in the implementation of this policy. I do not oppose the policy, but I wonder about that bit of it.

[The Earl of Minto (Con)]

My Lords, the 72,000 figure comes from the Chancellor’s desire to move the size of the Civil Service back to the situation in 2019, before the Covid virus struck. The Civil Service was required to grow quite considerably to cope with that situation, which has now passed. It seems logical that we start to move, through a period of natural attrition—there is no suggestion of mass requirements—back to a position where the Civil Service is fit for service, lean and nimble.

Ukraine

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Thursday 21st September 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, we seem to have hit the realistic point here. I start by agreeing completely with the previous speaker that there will be a reckoning. I made several visits to Ukraine between 2000 and 2016, the time at which it basically started to fall to pieces.

We forget; we talk about Ukraine as though it were an historic country, but the borders have changed three times in the past 100 years. They changed after Versailles, when part of Ukraine which was in the Austro-Hungarian Empire came out of it when Poland was created and the borders were set. They changed again in 1945 when, as a result of the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, the Russians took part of Poland into Russian territory. At the end of the war, Churchill did a deal with Stalin not to give it back, so the western borders of Ukraine embraced what was part of Poland. To compensate, Churchill agreed that Poland would get some of Germany. The eastern part of Germany was therefore taken into Poland, and the dispute over what we call the Oder-Neisse line carried on until the days of Willy Brandt. Even today, within the AfD—the extreme right-wing party—there is still talk about the lost territories.

Let us not pretend that the boundaries have been very stable, because of course finally Crimea became part of Ukraine only when Khrushchev, the ex-secretary-general of the Ukrainian Communist Party before he became leader of the USSR, gave Crimea to Ukraine as a present. All this was done because no one could see that there would ever be an end to the USSR: Stalin did not and Khrushchev did not. This is what we are up against.

When I first went to Ukraine, someone I christened “Authoritarian Grandpa” was in charge, Leonid Kuchma. He had a pretty good idea about how to run Ukraine: it was to keep it on a pretty short lead, restrict the freedoms overall, and give just enough play for the west and the east to live together. That carried on through the first 10 or 12 years of this century but then, after 2004 and the so-called revolution, the United States in particular and the EU spent years destabilising Ukraine. There is no doubt about it whatever, and if the papers are ever released it will be seen that that was what was going on. By 2014, Putin lost his temper. He also lost his sense of judgment, incidentally, because the way he took Crimea was absolutely illegal and wrong, but none the less he did it.

Between then and the outbreak of the war, there was constant tension between Russia and Ukraine and, frankly, we did little to help. We had the Minsk accords; we had France and Germany supposedly trying to broker a deal, but it was never adhered to and there was never much attempt to make it happen. Part of the reason for the whole problem in Ukraine was, first, the way we reacted. The end of Ukraine really came when Viktor Yanukovych was chased out after the second revolution. From then on, there was really no hope, because Yanukovych represented the east. He was based in Donetsk. I met his party members in Donetsk: they thought that he was their great god. He was not. But in the west, he had no support whatever. There, it was Tymoshenko and the rest of the elite who were in charge, so the country was really breaking up before one’s eyes. Indeed, I decided not to go back after witnessing a local election in Dnipro that was so badly run that I thought, “This country is beyond help”.

Anyway, that is where we are and that is how we ended up in the position today. There is no doubt whatever that Putin committed an illegal act; there is no doubt that he should not have invaded Ukraine; there is also no doubt that he felt at his wits’ end, but he made an amazing misjudgment. God knows what his secret service told him, but it is quite clear that he totally misjudged the strength of Ukraine.

We are now, let us remind ourselves, in a proxy war. The noble Lord, Lord Robertson, reminded us of how the Russians left Afghanistan. He could have reminded us of how the Americans left Afghanistan. It might be worth remembering that we are fighting a proxy war in Ukraine. The United States is contributing probably 80%, certainly 70%, of all the help being given; meanwhile, Europe squabbles. We have given some assistance—Britain has given more than anyone else in Europe—but I heard this morning on my Brussels newscast that Warsaw has decided to end military aid to Ukraine because of the dispute over grain. Hungary is very chary of doing anything useful, because there is still a Hungarian minority there. When Ukraine had a Government, they spent the years between 2017 and 2020 trying to eliminate the teaching of Hungarian in the school system of Ukraine’s Hungarian region. That does not endear you to the country you are living in. There has been a lot of tension ever since.

Where do we go from here? The noble Earl, Lord Oxford and Asquith, made the very good point that we must look beyond where we are. Our priority should be the defence of those countries that are in NATO. To do that, we have an end to the war in Ukraine, because we have to get the Russians back to the table and a Helsinki-type agreement on how far they can go. If we do not and end up in a stalemate, they will next start threatening the Baltics, which are NATO countries. I would not have gone quite as far with the expansion of NATO or the EU, but we have done it, and that is where we owe our first responsibility. We should be looking at and talking to those countries—looking at how we strengthen the NATO presence in Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia, give support along the long Finnish border and make them feel that they are a secure part of our family.

The last thing we should be thinking of is bringing Ukraine, Georgia or anyone else into NATO. We should be thinking about how we get a ceasefire, how we get the Russians to the table and how we defend the NATO countries that we are already committed to.

Armed Forces

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Thursday 7th September 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I too begin by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Soames, for initiating this debate. It is a pleasure to have him among us, and we are very lucky that he has come from the other place to join us. I am sure that his contribution will be widely appreciated over the years to come.

Two themes have come through very clearly: that we are not spending enough and that the Army and the military forces, including the Navy, are just not big enough for what we are trying to do. Those points have been made by several people. I want to concentrate on what I call the need for realism, because our attitude in defence is often pretty unreal. On its own, the UK cannot really do very much at all; we have to work in an alliance and in alliances with other like-minded countries. That is point one.

The second point is that we are a most important part of NATO, but we are not important enough to get the General Secretaryship, it seems. We have to realise that, even within NATO, we are beginning to be overshadowed by Germany. Within NATO, we need to concentrate more on interoperability. I was the first leader of the European Parliament delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly in around 1989. At that time, we were talking about the need for interoperability. The fact of the matter was that you could not send a tank through Denmark without the permission of the Danish parliament—and the fact of the matter is that interoperability is still a challenge for NATO and one that we need to look at.

The other challenge is that we need to be more realistic about Article 5. We are fond of saying, “Oh, it’s an Article 5 commitment”, but all that Article 5 says is that an attack on one is an attack on all. It does not say what we should do if Russia decided to intervene in Estonia. It does not give Lisbon any guidance as to what it should do, apart from saying, “Oh dear, Russia has intervened in Estonia. What shall we do?” As far as I can tell, we are not obliged under Article 5 to do anything at all, other than to note that an attack is an attack on us all. That needs looking at.

The point has been made on more than one occasion that the United States is yet again blowing hot and cold on its commitment in Europe. This has been the pattern for many years now. We must bear in mind that, in the end, Europe will have to defend itself. We cannot outsource defence for ever. In fact, we cannot outsource it for very much longer.

We hear lots of strong words about Ukraine, but we also need some realism. One day the fighting will stop—we do not know when, but it will. When it stops, Russia will still be in the same place geographically, it will be the same size and it will present the same challenges, and we have to come to terms with those challenges. We go on about Russian money rebuilding Ukraine, but the truth of the matter is that it is not going to happen. It has never happened—one country has never rebuilt another. It might be said that we rebuilt parts of Germany after the Second World War, but Germany did not rebuild anyone outside its borders for many years until it was rich again. We have got to be realistic: when the fighting stops, Ukraine will need a lot of help from the countries of the West that are now behind it.

As Ben Wallace said, the world is now more unstable and insecure, but I am not sure that that is not a predictable thing. What I would say is that we need to be tolerant and we need to look at building a new Helsinki and coming to terms with the reality of being a small but important nation contributing to the defence of our common home.

Estonia: UK Troop Levels

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Monday 31st October 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

The noble Lord will be aware that the attitude of NATO, and of the United Kingdom and our allies, is to invite Russia to de-escalate this rhetoric. Frankly, it will be destabilising and unhelpful if it continues to be intensified. The noble Lord will also be aware that, in connection with our overall commitments to NATO and the contribution we make not just to the enhanced forward presence but to equipment and personnel support, we will ensure that our troops are equipped appropriately for whatever task might confront them.

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, the United Kingdom has a long-standing relationship in defence in that region, particularly with Norway. Will we co-operate with our Nordic and Baltic partners to make it quite clear to Russia that any incursion in any of the Baltic states is unacceptable, and that part of that must be to keep a substantial military presence in the Baltic states, which of course include Estonia, where we have a particular interest?

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

I reassure my noble friend that we work closely with our friends in the Baltics, not least in Norway and Sweden and with our other presence in that area. He will be aware that, with our NATO commitments, we are very much committed to having a mobile and enhanced lethality in the area. As I said to the noble Lord on the Liberal Democrat Benches, that is designed to ensure that, whatever threat confronts us, we are able to play our part in seeing it off.

Ukraine: UK and NATO Military Commitment

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Tuesday 21st June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

With the greatest respect to the noble Lord, who, as he knows, I admire hugely, I disagree with his analysis. With the biggest investment since the end of the Cold War, the Army will reorganise; it will re-equip to become more integrated, active and lethal as a high-tech force fit for the threats of the future, not the battles of the past. As people increasingly recognise, what we do with the Army and how we do it in the future is not based simply on boots on the ground, but on a much wider understanding of how we are smarter and cleverer—finding better equipment and using technology. In that respect, we can operate in a much more agile and resilient fashion.

I say to the noble Lord that the nature of the conflict in Ukraine is certainly arduous and worrying; I think everyone accepts that it will be of long duration. But I would also say to him that the UK has been a singular contributor in leading the charge to help Ukraine defend itself, and we welcome those within and outwith NATO supporting that endeavour. The NATO summit on 28 June will be an important occasion because NATO will agree the new strategic concept and set the direction of the alliance for the next decade. Much of that will be informed by what has happened with this barbarous and illegal invasion of Ukraine by Russia.

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I shall use three quotes from yesterday’s debate. First, Tobias Ellwood, who put down the Question, said:

“But Russia is not losing and Ukraine is not winning”. ––[Official Report, Commons, 20/6/22; col. 556.]


Secondly, the new head of the Armed Forces said that we must be

“fighting alongside our allies and defeating Russia in battle”.

Thirdly, the Secretary-General of NATO said that this could take years. I should like to ask the Minister: where are we actually going? Last week in the Duma, there was discussion about the Suwałki Gap, the strip of land running between Lithuania and Poland that links Kaliningrad to Belarus. What happens if the Russians decide to force the Suwałki Gap? They would not be fighting Ukraine, but the Lithuanians are very anxious to implement all the sanctions and Kaliningrad is becoming more or less isolated. I should like to think that our forward planning stretches beyond Boris Johnson and the end of next week, and that we are looking seriously at ways in which this conflict could be gradually edged-up in a way that it would be very difficult for NATO to respond to with unity.

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

I do not agree with my noble friend’s somewhat dismissive commentary on how the UK has responded to this. I think, by universal assent, the UK has played a pivotal role in coming to the aid of and supporting Ukraine, which knows that it has in us a solid and reliable friend. I say to my noble friend that within the whole Baltic area there has been a bolstering of the enhanced forward presence, to which the UK has been an important contributor. That has been a necessary response. As I said to the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Pittenweem, what we are witnessing is quite simply an illegal and barbarous invasion by President Putin of an innocent sovereign state.

It is interesting that, within the Baltic area, Sweden and Finland now seek to join NATO. I assume they are motivated by the sense of comfort and reassurance that the alliance will bring them if they are able to become members. That is a matter for hope and optimism.

Ukraine

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Friday 25th February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I extend my congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord Sedwill, who I am sure will read this in Hansard.

I had a letter last week from Mishcon de Reya. I thought that anyone who could afford that level of lawyer did not need me, so I deleted it unread.

I would like to correct or clarify one point. A number of people have referred to Nord Stream 2. The Germans have not cancelled it; they have interrupted its approval procedure, which is quite different. If they cancelled it they would be liable for a very large sum of money, so at the moment it is just paused.

Many of us were dismayed by what happened yesterday, particularly as in endless meetings I and others have been assured that Russia had no intention of invading Ukraine. The Russian ambassador said that to me in very clear words. As I said yesterday, either his Government did not trust him enough to tell him what they were doing or he did not know what they were doing anyway. That is not a very good start for an ambassador, is it?

We should not underestimate Putin. He was very careful: he made sure from Macron, Scholz and Biden that there would be no military intervention in support of Ukraine. He is not a fool, although sometimes we think he is; on a good day he is quite shrewd. He knew that if he invaded Ukraine we would do nothing—and we have not let him down, have we? All we are doing is having debates.

There are two countries next to Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, that are very different daughters; they remind me of “King Lear”. Belarus is the dutiful daughter that represses its population, denies democracy and is the subject of much angst; it is not even a member of the Council of Europe. However, I am sorry to say that Ukraine has constantly pinpricked Russia by trying to cancel the base in Crimea, trying to mandate that only Ukrainian can be spoken—which is pretty daft if you consider the number of Russian speakers there—and all sorts of other annoyances. There has been a constant pattern of difficulty between Ukraine and Russia. I saw it playing out every time I went to the Council of Europe: the Russians sat there, pretty dumb and not doing much, while Ukraine never lost an opportunity to have a go at them. I am not surprised that Russia got pretty fed up with it.

We now move on to the field of sanctions. I do not wish to rain on the parade, but sanctions do not have a very good record. If we are going to make them work then we have to study quite hard what we want to do. The only sanctions that I know of that worked were the CoCom sanctions, and that is because the US held a very close grip on the export of technologies beyond trusted friends. So I say to the Minister that we need to look carefully at how we perform the sanctions regime, because clearly the sanctions that we appear to have announced so far will not bring anyone down in a month of Sundays. They are tokenism. Until we get to grips with Russian influence and money in London, we will not get very far. It is worth remembering that there is also quite a lot of Ukrainian billionaire money in London.

I say to the Minister that we need to start from the point where we are now. The most important thing for us to do is to get a common position on the NATO members in the east, because they are different. We have to defend them. We have to assure the Baltics, Poland, Bulgaria and Romania that they are part of the family, and we defend the family. That is what our priority should be now, not only chasing the Russians but making sure that we can reassure our other friends.

Ukraine: Military Equipment

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Monday 29th November 2021 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Balfe]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what plans they have to sell missiles to the government of Ukraine; what discussions they had with the governments of (1) Germany, (2) France, and (3) the United States of America, prior to opening negotiations on the supply of military equipment to Ukraine; and what assessment they have made of the impact of any such sales on peace in the region.

[The Minister of State, Ministry of Defence (Baroness Goldie) (Con)]

My Lords, we have signed a number of agreements with the Government of Ukraine to work together and with industry to boost Ukraine’s defence capabilities. This is part of the UK’s ongoing commitment to the Ukrainian defence capabilities and the support announced during President Zelensky’s visit to the UK in October. The UK maintains close dialogue with key allies, including Germany, France and the US, regarding Ukrainian military development. These agreements reflect and underline the UK’s commitment to Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty.

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, in eastern Europe, we seem to be drifting towards a war that we will inevitably lose, since we are outnumbered by about four to one. Would the Minister like to take back to the department the need for a comprehensive conference to deal with the frozen conflicts of eastern Europe, most of which date back 20 years? We need to review the Minsk II agreement and possibly look at an Austrian state treaty solution to the problems of Ukraine. Can we have a new initiative please, and not just a drift to war?

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

I thank my noble friend for the question, but I do not share his analysis. No one is disputing that there is a serious situation within Ukraine and on the Crimea peninsula. That is precisely why, over the last 20 years, and particularly in the past six years, the UK, along with allies and partners, has been supporting Ukraine with training, in capacity-building missions and maritime and other training initiatives. That is what the recent agreement was predicated on when we signed the treaty with Ukraine on official credit support for UK Export Finance. It is all about supporting that country and helping it to build its military capabilities.

Armed Forces Bill

Lord Balfe Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 7th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I join in welcoming the Bill and paying tribute to the Armed Forces, but I do reflect that, while we make a tribute to the Armed Forces, during the time of Covid the Government made tremendous efforts to get people off the streets. I claim no great role in that, but I did notice the huge number of ex-military personnel who are homeless, who felt left out of society, who were sleeping on the streets and who were part of that homelessness.

I must also say that, as someone who has had a fair amount of dealings with the United States and its legislative assemblies, we pay far less attention to our military than they do in the United States. To be an ex-soldier in the United States is an honourable situation. To be an ex-military person in Britain is something that is referred to from time to time with warm words but seldom followed up very effectively. So one thing I hope can come out of the Bill, the covenant and what follows, is a more humane look at the need to deal with post-service life as well as service life, and to face up to the problems that one gets.

If we are running a military operation, we should be clear what we are doing. We are operating a killing machine. The main purpose of an army is to go and kill people, and, if you bring people into that sort of situation, you get throwback in the sense of not only post-traumatic stress disorder but enormous pressure on people and the way in which they see the world. We have to face up to that. I spent a long time, as some noble Lords know, in the European Parliament and I was for some years vice-chair of its Security and Disarmament Committee. We used to go to NATO and, when it existed, the Western European Union and talk to people from all over Europe. It was very clear, talking to some of our Nordic friends, that they did not want to get their soldiers anywhere near military action that would involve killing the opposition—and they did not want it for quite good psychological reasons. I make this point because I think we sometimes romanticise this, saying “Oh, yes, Tommy soldier, great person”. I cannot remember the quote, but Kipling made it and we all know it: sometimes we love them, sometimes we don’t, but mainly we forget them. I think we need to remember that.

We also need to come to terms with the fact that the whole nature of warfare is changing. While 100 years ago the idea of mass killing was accepted—“Over the top you go” at Ypres or the Somme—that would never now be acceptable. Time has moved on. I predict that we are coming to the end of military operations as we have known them up to now. Afghanistan may well turn out to be the last big operation of its kind, and maybe we are moving forward to operations where drones and targeted killings are much more the case. Let us be honest: it is much easier to sit in a bunker in Lincolnshire and destroy someone on the ground in the Middle East than it is to face them across 300 yards or 300 metres of desert.

So I put it to the Minister, not as part of this Bill but as a consequence of this Bill, that we need to come to terms with how we deal with ex-service personnel, many of whom have severe mental problems partly caused by the situation in which, you can say, they have put themselves, but actually in which we have put them. We owe a duty of aftercare, and if there is one thing that Covid taught me, it is the huge number of people in society, on the streets, who come from a military background. I was actually shocked to learn how many, as a percentage, there were. I notice my good friend opposite—I am not sure whether I am allowed to call her a friend—the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, who lives in Cambridge, the same city as I do. Much of my evidence came from there, where the Government gave Cambridge City Council money to get people housed and people were still on the streets. I spoke to some of them and went round with some of the welfare workers, and I discovered a shocking level of mental incapacity that we also need to tackle.

Armed Forces: Covid-19 Deployment

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Thursday 12th November 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Goldie (Con) [V]]

I would like to reassure the noble and gallant Lord that it is. He will understand, from his own knowledge, both the level and extent to which the MoD has provided advice to the highest levels of government. Much of that advice has been welcomed by government precisely because of the attributes that the noble and gallant Lord identified in relation to the MoD and Armed Forces’ experience of command and delivery.

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

As someone who has done a considerable amount of research into, and study of, eastern and central Europe, can I counsel the Minister to avoid using the Armed Forces for anything that resembles coercive control?

[Baroness Goldie (Con) [V]]

I am not quite sure what my noble friend means by that phrase. If he is alluding to the possibility that the military will be asked to step in to enforce law and order, there is absolutely no intention for that to happen.

Covid-19: Security Risks

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Tuesday 19th May 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Goldie]

I reassure the noble Lord that the United Kingdom Government have been a core component of NATO, working closely with the organisation. We support efforts against disinformation, and we deploy our defence experts into NATO to support this central effort and put our expertise at its disposal.

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, the United States has not exactly distinguished itself by its international attitudes during this crisis, yet it is the leading player in NATO. I wonder if the Minister can tell us what part it has played in this response, and to what extent the Russians are using their tenuous position within the NATO structure to take part in NATO operations.

[Baroness Goldie]

I am unable to comment specifically on the role of the United States; I am here to answer questions on behalf of the United Kingdom Government. I reassure your Lordships that the United Kingdom Government have been engaged closely with NATO. I refer to some of the tasks that we have undertaken, and we are currently reviewing additional requests for support from the EADRCC for Albania, North Macedonia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina.