EU and Russia (EUC Report)

Lord Elton Excerpts

Tuesday 24th March 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Elton (Con)]

My Lords, I must begin by congratulating the noble Earl, Lord Oxford and Asquith, on what I can only describe as an impeccable maiden speech. I hope to hear him very often in future. I also thank my noble friend Lord Tugendhat and his team for an outstanding report from which I have learnt a very great deal—and I have learnt a great deal more from the debate that has followed.

I have one regret about it, and it comes pretty early. In paragraph 5 we read:

“The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the cornerstone of defence for its EU Members, is outside the scope of this report”.

I understand the reasons for that, and it would have been an unmanageable task to have written that into this report, particularly in the time available, and I dare say that it would have been pretty difficult to assimilate, but it has to be said that in Putin’s mind NATO stands as a very important shadow behind everything that is going on in Europe.

This brings me on to sadly familiar ground. I speak really out of a sense of duty because I realise that although here they are more numerous, in the country as a whole the proportion of people who have lived through history since before the Second World War is small. I was fortunate enough to have a highly intelligent historian as my father and guide who had fought through the First World War, and I have read a bit of history myself, and I find what I am hearing and seeing now extraordinarily, sickeningly similar to what happened when I was a child under tuition.

I was born in 1930, and at that time, a nation that felt itself to have been humiliated by recent history threw up a dictator who achieved astronomic popularity by playing on that card and annexing neighbouring territory on the grounds of ethnic appropriateness. He did so with the freedom afforded by neighbouring states being ridiculously underequipped to resist him. The fate of the gallant, brave but tiny British Expeditionary Force underlines what I am saying. What have we now? We have a great European country that considers itself to have been recently humiliated by history, led and dominated by a tyrant who has no respect whatever for human rights—which is another echo—and who is annexing neighbouring countries on the grounds of ethnic similarity. We also have a British Government, as we had in 1937 to 1939, who seek to restrain the policies of that dictator, backed by wholly insufficient military force to give credibility to any threat that might be made.

Clausewitz said, if I remember correctly, that war was diplomacy carried on by other means. If I say that, I suppose people will begin to dismiss what I have to say, thinking that old men who recount the past are trapped in the definitions of the past. However, the Putin era has redefined not diplomacy but war, as we have heard from my noble friend Lord Howell. The equivalent English word is “masquerade”. The word I want is “maskirovka”—my noble friend nods—which is very different until it shades into warfare. The definition is important because NATO, in Article 5—hence my regret that it could not be in this report—has a very clear definition of the infringement of the rights of a country, which is based entirely on the old-fashioned concept of tanks rumbling across the frontier. However, in Ukraine we have what has been—and, I do not doubt, will continue to be—the infiltration of personnel and light equipment across the border. Therefore I see a repetition and I just pray that it does not go the full course, as it did in 1939.

How long does it take to prepare and to be sufficiently credible in one’s armaments? Noble Lords will recall that the turning point in the downward spiral of our fortunes in the 1939 to 1945 conflict was the building of the Supermarine Spitfire. The Air Ministry gave the contract to develop the prototype on 3 January 1935, and 14 months later, on 5 March, the first flight of the prototype took place. The Air Ministry ordered the first 310 Mk1 aeroplanes on 3 June 1936, and 23 months later the first production Spitfire flew for the first time. It was not until August 1939 that No. 19 Squadron became the first to receive the Spitfire in bulk. Much less glamorous, in the background, and differently constructed, the Hurricane was statistically far more important in the Battle of Britain. The Spitfire was built of stressed skin, which was the up-to-date method; the Hurricane was built of steel tubing with fabric over it, with a Merlin engine inside, and had four machine-guns.

Despite that time lag, of 1935 to 1939, we are still wondering whether we should stick to 2%. We have to, and there may be costs to that which are not very acceptable. But I, for one, do not want my children to have their children in the middle of another world war. It has to be fought if we are to protect all the values of our society, and world health.

If the right reverend Prelate, who has gone back to his flock, were here, he would perhaps be muttering, “Blessed are the peacemakers”, and saying that we should be beating our swords into ploughshares. But it is beating your swords into ploughshares that precipitates war if the other chap has not done it as well. When the Americans say, “You are not strong enough—you can only be a small unit within our army”, that says to the Russians, “Come on, have a try”. We have to be strong and make the sacrifices necessary to do that now. They will be hugely greater if we do not.