Defence Policy (International Relations and Defence Committee Report)

Lord Boateng Excerpts

Friday 30th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Boateng (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a particular privilege to follow the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, with whom I had the honour of serving on the committee. As I commend this report to the House, I pay tribute to our distinguished former chairman, the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay. She was an exemplary chairman: she was firm, she had a sense of humour—which always helps in a chairman—and she led us with marked distinction, so I give heartfelt thanks to her on behalf of the committee.

In commending the report to the House, I draw attention in particular to recommendation 162, which acknowledges and praises the deployment of military soft power and makes specific recommendations in relation to it. The integrated review of 2021 sets out the UK’s position and strength with regard to soft power:

“The source of much of the UK’s soft power lies beyond the ownership of government—an independence from state direction that is essential to its influence. The Government can use its own assets, such as the diplomatic network, aid spending and the armed forces, to help create goodwill towards the UK”.


The Defence Committee in the other place had cause recently to draw attention in a report to the deployment of soft power and made this observation:

“Whilst soft power does not instinctively fall within the remit of the Ministry of Defence, it plays a part in ‘defence engagement’, which is the military contribution to soft power. ‘Defence engagement’ itself is defined as ‘the means by which we use our Defence assets and activities, short of combat operations, to achieve influence’”.


I will draw attention to two specific areas of this in relation to the integrated review: implementation and that definition of engagement. Its implementation was reinforced by the mention made of it in the integrated review refresh as recently as March of this year, when the Government pledged to promote the soft and cultural power that the UK possesses and do more to bring soft power into their broader foreign policy approach. That is all well and good, and much needed on the ground when you look at the activities of our “strategic competitors”. That is one phrase the Government have used on occasion; they could also be described in a number of instances as our opponents and, in Ukraine, as our direct enemies, because that is what Russia and its surrogates—the Wagner Group—are. They are the enemies of this country and of the wider world.

Only today, we learned that, despite the events earlier this month, it is business as usual as far as Wagner is concerned. As we speak, Wagner is recruiting in Moscow and St Petersburg. Whether those recruits will be deployed in Ukraine or not remains to be seen, because it may well be that Wagner’s forces are integrated with Russian forces in Ukraine, but we know that they continue to be deployed in Africa. Africa is at the centre of Wagner and Russia’s policy—a policy of enrichment and aggrandisement. It is about both those things: the aggrandisement of Russia and the enrichment of Wagner and the plutocrats that lie behind it.

As we speak, Wagner’s forces are deployed in Sudan, Mali, Burkina Faso and the DRC. In all those places, they are seeking to destabilise and, wherever possible, defenestrate the natural resources of those countries, both metaphorically and literally, because the impact on the environment is as grave as the impact on peace, security and development.

We need a response to that, and it must build on our soft power and, importantly, our military engagement and our military defence diplomatic network—the network of military attachés and peacekeepers who do such good on the ground but who, all too often, are forgotten when it comes to deployment and resource. We seek assurances from the Minister on this. I speak from the experience of my time in South Africa here; they are a critical part of what happens in any mission. They are at the heart of our diplomacy and of development. They should not be forgotten, and we seek a clear and categorical assurance that in Africa, at least—but not just in Africa, and I shall come to that in a moment—that network is being enhanced and strengthened. If it is not, we will pay a price.

We are already paying a price and we see that in the deployment of Russian and Chinese naval assets off Simon’s Town. That ought to give us cause for concern. We ought to be concerned that the People’s Liberation Army is the fastest-growing military presence in Africa, as we speak. We ought to be concerned that our impact on the Caribbean is diminished by our failure adequately to provide scholarships at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and the Britannia Royal Naval College in Dartmouth, where Caribbean forces have traditionally been trained. I urge the Minister to assure us that those scholarships will once again be available to Caribbean Governments and that we will use the soft power we possess to the benefit of this nation and the wider world.

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[Lord Boateng (Lab)]

Can I press the Minister a bit on that? Wagner is in Burkina Faso and it threatens Ghana. It threatens the whole of that region. Have we increased our military attaché presence in west Africa in order to counter it? Frankly, if we have not, then we are whistling in the wind in terms of any hope of addressing the threat that it represents.

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

I do not have an answer to the specific question about the number of defence attachés we have there, but I will make the inquiry and undertake to write to the noble Lord.