Strategic Defence and Security Review

Lord Bates Excerpts

Friday 12th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bates]

I welcome the review and congratulate my noble friend the Minister on the persuasive way in which he made the case for it in his opening speech. Some have questioned the five-month period given for the review and have said that it was too short. They are perhaps forgetting that the coalition Government are quick about making decisions and show decisive leadership. They managed to come up with a five-year programme for government in five days, so five months for a strategic defence review may be seen as rather generous in that setting. After all, it is not that people have not known what needed to be done; they have just lacked the courage and decisiveness to do it. We now have that leadership, the strategy is very clear and I welcome it.

Much has been made of where cost savings will be required; little has been made of where investment is being made. The noble Lord, Lord Boateng, referred to the area of conflict prevention and I shall focus my remarks on that. The SDSR set out that the direct funding of conflict prevention through the conflict pool will rise from £229 million to £300 million and that the overseas aid budget, which is critical to our defence and security, will rise by £3.1 billion by 2014. This is not only honouring our commitment to the poorest on the planet and the victims of wars and disease but is a crucial way of protecting our security. As the saying goes, if you do not visit your problem neighbourhoods then your problem neighbourhoods have a habit of visiting you.

Currently, approximately £1.9 billion of the official overseas aid budget supports fragile and conflict-affected states. The strategic defence review, at page 46, envisages that this may double by 2014-15. The investment will make us safer at home and abroad. This point was made by right honourable friend the Prime Minister, who said in another place that,

“we must get better at treating the causes of instability, not just dealing with the consequences. When we fail to prevent conflict and have to resort to military intervention, the costs are always far higher”.—[Official Report, Commons, 19/10/10; col. 798.]

He goes on to give the example of the awkward framework agreement in the conflict between the Albanian National Liberation Army and the Macedonian security forces under the previous Government, when NATO deployed a short 30-day mission to help embed the peace by monitoring the disarmament of the ANLA and destroying its weapons. It has been estimated that the international community’s early intervention cost £3,000 million but that it would have saved a potential £15 billion had the conflict escalated.

Of course, the savings of good conflict prevention work are even more significant when one considers the human consequences. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Birmingham, in his excellent maiden speech, referred to the work of Selly Oak Hospital and Headley Court in the rehabilitation of members of our Armed Forces who have been injured and wounded in action. This reminds us that in the Afghanistan campaign alone there have been 341 deaths, but for every one death five are wounded in action, sometimes horrifically. These courageous men and women deserve to be cared for. They are receiving that care at those institutions and we should recognise that.

On 14 June, my right honourable friend the Prime Minister said in relation to Afghanistan that insurgencies usually end with political settlements, not military victories: that we need a political process to bring the insurgency to an end. I cannot understand how efforts at peacemaking and conflict resolution are sometimes dismissed as the preserve of woolly-minded idealists. More often than not, it requires more courage, and is more odious, to make peace than to make war. We know that from the situation in Northern Ireland. I am delighted that this Government have rejected that outdated thinking and are reorientating our thinking on strategic defence towards conflict resolution.

When Sir Winston Churchill, as Prime Minister, said that jaw-jaw is better than war-war, it was significant because it was in the context of a revered wartime leader making those comments in 1954 at the age of 80. He was commenting on the Cold War and reflecting on the chaos and carnage that had already cost 100 million lives so far that century.

As I walked in this morning to take part in this debate, I walked through line upon line of poppies and small wooden crosses in Westminster Abbey Gardens, each with the names of brave men and women who gave the ultimate sacrifice in the service of their country. War is a scourge on all sides. There are no victors and no vanquished; we all lose because each life lost diminishes us as a human civilisation and poses a threat to our survival. We should remember, though, that when the guns start, it is because the politicians have failed. Our Armed Forces serve a political leadership. We are responsible for them, and it behoves us to do everything in our power to minimise the risks of their sacrifice being required of them in future.