Middle East: Deployment of British Armed Forces

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Wednesday 17th April 2024 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Minto (Con)]

My Lords, that is something for the parliamentary scheduling people. A major debate at this point would be very useful but may take up far too much parliamentary time.

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, will my noble friend the Minister take this opportunity to thank and congratulate the RAF pilots who prevented needless loss of life in Israel over the weekend? Will he take the opportunity to reaffirm our country’s long-standing relationship with the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan—a relationship that goes back more than 100 years —which was brave and correct in defending its own territorial integrity over the weekend? That is exactly the kind of relationship that should in general be assumed, without needing to come back to Parliament for preauthorisation every time we stand by our old allies.

[The Earl of Minto (Con)]

My Lords, I entirely agree with my noble friend. I also place on the record my admiration, and that of the Government, for all our Armed Forces in what must be an extremely difficult situation. Operation Shader, which has been in place since 2014, has been a remarkable success, and very active. I did not realise that since it was put in place, the RAF has flown 8,700 sorties and released 4,300 precision weapons.

Iran: Military Power

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Tuesday 20th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Minto (Con)]

My Lords, this is an extremely good point. We can go only so far with sanctions, due to all the reasons that your Lordships are fully aware of and the fact that Iran has its allies, which are not remotely interested in stopping—and in fact are encouraging—its proliferation. We sanctioned the IRGC in its entirety. We have sanctioned more than 400 Iranian individuals and organisations to do with weapons proliferation, regional conflicts, human rights violations, and terrorism. Since October 2022, we have sanctioned a further 56 IRGC-related organisations and officials. So we are taking as much action as we can.

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, the point of the question of the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, is that sanctions may not be working. Iran has been subject, on and off, to quite stringent sanctions for some 40 years—yet it has developed state-of-the-art drones that are now being used in Ukraine. What would my noble friend the Minister see as turning up a notch beyond economic sanctions and looking at ways of effectively deterring the ayatollahs?

[The Earl of Minto (Con)]

I thank my noble friend for that question. The key is to keep diplomatic channels open—it has to be. That is the only way this will be resolved in the long term. On drone technology, we introduced a new set of sanctions in December, and last month all components and everything to do with drone technology were included in these stringent sanctions.

King’s Speech

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Wednesday 15th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, speeches that follow maidens can sometimes have a formulaic quality. We say that it is a privilege, honour and pleasure, and the words issue from our vocal chords without our really stopping to ponder what they mean. Let me say with feeling that I feel very lucky and happy to be able to follow one of the most foremost historians of our generation, my noble friend Lord Roberts of Belgravia, the author of 20 books and perhaps best known for his magisterial and monumental biography of Winston Churchill. There have been 1,012 such biographies and his was the 1,010th, but I think it is at or close to the top of almost every critic’s list, above even, dare I say, The Churchill Factor by Boris Johnson, in which the great war leader is—oddly enough, who would have thought it?—reimagined as a witty after-dinner speaker and right-wing journalist who is cruelly excluded by the Tory leadership until the crisis hits, at which point, in desperation, they send for him.

However, as young people sometimes say of pop groups, I prefer some of my noble friend’s earlier work. Given the conversation we have just been having in this debate about the recent reshuffle, it is worth noting that he has written stonking biographies of two previous Tory Foreign Secretaries who spoke from these red Benches; namely, Lord Salisbury and Lord Halifax. Sometimes, my noble friend is portrayed as a TV historian or as not completely academic, and that is monstrously unfair. His books have been translated into 28 languages. They have won 13 literary prizes. Every one of them involves original research from primary sources, including the Churchill book. He was the first historian to get the late Queen to open the royal archives so that we know what her late father, in his dutiful, dim and decent way, thought about the events of that time.

My noble friend did, however, write one slightly more frivolous book. He authored a thriller in 1994 called The Aachen Memorandum. I mention it because I have a feeling that the fictional hero is modelled on someone currently on these Benches—I will leave noble Lords opposite to try to work out which of us. I mention this book because there is something oddly prophetic in it. It is set in the future, looking back to a Brexit referendum—and this is the uncanny thing. My noble friend imagines the in/out referendum having taken place in 2015—let us remember that this book was written in 1994—and records the vote to leave as 51.86%. In reality, it was 51.83%, so he was out by only one year and 0.03%.

I will say one other thing about my noble friend. Remarkably, he is already in Hansard, although this was his maiden speech. He is in Hansard, albeit unnamed, from a debate on the Australia trade deal that took place on 9 January. The noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, was making a speech in her usual, consistently anti-trade way about how terrible the Australia trade deal was. I quote her:

“Let us imagine that we export cheese to Australia all that distance away, and Australia exports cheese to us. What would be the point of that?”


Then it says, “Noble Lords: Better cheese!”. Then she says:

“I hear calls from the other side of the House saying, ‘Better cheese’”.—[Official Report, 9/1/23; col. 1258.]


Is it not an extraordinary thought that if, in any way, my noble friend had been incapacitated between January and now, he would have gone down as the Member whose sole contribution to the counsels of your Lordships’ Chamber were the two words “Better cheese”? I suggested to him that he should leave it at that and not make a maiden speech. I know that he is a very modest man and was tempted, but he overcame that because he has a great deal to contribute. He is, as Henry Kissinger described him,

“a great historian who is always relevant to contemporary thinking”.

I cannot imagine a better recommendation for a place in your Lordships’ counsels than that. I welcome my noble friend.

I turn to the substance and to another great historian. I think it was Samuel Huntington who said that, although we tend to forget it in the West, the rest of the world does not forget that our values were spread by force of arms rather than force of argument. We can very easily fall into the delusion of thinking that the rest of the world came to liberal democracy because of its obvious and intrinsic superiority—but, as a matter of historical record, that is not how it happened. It turns out that these values of ours—liberty under the law, open societies—have a much shallower hold on large swathes of our planet than we would have thought possible until very recently. We saw it first in the line-up over the Russia-Ukraine conflict. To us, it may have seemed perfectly obvious that a country had been attacked without provocation by a neighbour that had promised to defend it and that a democracy, however imperfect, was invaded by an autocracy. That is not how it looked in a number of other places.

We see that same division, perhaps even more starkly, in the reaction to the crisis in Israel and Gaza. Indeed, in a lot of the global South, people put the two things together and accuse us—by which I mean the West at its widest—of stunning double standards. Your Lordships will have heard this from colleagues in other countries. I certainly have. They will say things such as, “How would you feel if Putin had ordered Ukrainian civilians to clear out of half of Ukraine?”, “How would you feel if Russia had bombed two Polish airports in the way that Israel pre-emptively bombed two Syrian ones?”, or “How would you react if Russia cut off Ukrainian energy?”. Actually, they say, “We know how you reacted to that; you called it a war crime and called for trials”.

We may have what we think are good answers to those things. We might point out that in both cases a fundamentally open and law-based society is at war with a fundamentally terrorist state, a state that has no rule of law and is actuated only by force. We might point out that there is a huge difference between the unprovoked attack on Ukraine and Israel responding to the abominations of 7 October. But from the perspective of the rest of the world, that all looks like western realpolitik dressed up in the language of moralising.

I am afraid that we have been brutally reminded of how short the reach of our values is. We talk about universal rights. The noble Lord, Lord Coaker, spoke very movingly of his uncle and his belief that by fighting in 1944 he was making the world safer for democracy. For the next 70 or so years it would have seemed reasonable to assume that had happened. We saw the rule of law and open society spreading, roughly until what the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, described as the significant year of 2011, when that process stalled and began to go into reverse.

We are reminded of Samuel Huntington’s truth that what we call “universal values” in reality became universal values because of a series of military victories by the English-speaking peoples and their allies. Imagine that the Second World War had ended differently. Imagine that the Cold War had ended differently. There would have been nothing universal about them then. That is why it matters that we are still prepared to defend our values with proportionate force—above all, in Ukraine. There is a road to victory in Ukraine. You can imagine the Ukrainians breaking through to the Sea of Azov, kettling the Russian garrison in Crimea and having peace. But if Russia succeeds and can wait this out and maybe get a friendlier regime in Washington DC, the West collectively will have suffered a loss of prestige that makes Suez look like a picnic. In every other continent and archipelago people will recalibrate whom they need to listen to. That noise that noble Lords hear is the melancholy long withdrawing roar of western liberty.

Ukraine

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Thursday 9th February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, it is an immense privilege to follow the noble Lord, Lord Browne of Ladyton. I always learn a great deal from him in the field of geostrategy and defence. In fact, I am acutely aware of speaking after so many noble Lords, on all sides, who have direct ministerial experience, as well as noble and gallant Lords who have held senior office as servicemen.

In common, I suspect, with a number of noble Lords, I have had the privilege of visiting Ukraine a few times since the invasion. I never fail to be impressed by the cheerful and uncomplaining courage of local people. My last visit was to Odessa and Mykolaiv in September. Mykolaiv at that point was the front line. It was the time, as your Lordships will recall, when there was a lot of talk of the Kherson offensive, but it was a deception—what the Russians would call a maskirovka. In fact, the offensive at that time was in Kharkiv.

This was and is a very Russophone and historically Russophile part of Ukraine. We can see it in the toponymy. Why are so many of the places there called “pol”, rather than “grad”—Melitopol, Mariupol, Sevastopol or whatever? The answer goes back to Catherine the Great’s Greek plan, which energetic emperors had: to try to restore the Romanov claim to the Byzantine throne. She had a grandson who was conveniently called Constantine, and this idea of filling that part of the coastline with Russian settlers as a prelude to taking Constantinople. So, this has always been a Russian-speaking territory and, sure enough, the people there had historically voted for the pro-Russian parties. They were for Yanukovych’s Party of Regions and its various successors—up until the offensive.

I had this conversation over and over again with local people in that part of Russia, saying, “When did you change? Here we are still with a big statue of Catherine the Great and all these Soviet war memorials, and a Russian-speaking population”. Odessa had its own Maidan in 2014 and could easily have gone the same way as Donetsk and Luhansk. It was only the merest chance that it did not. The answer would come: “We had an idea of the kind of Russia we thought we had a kinship with. We did not want to be absorbed by it, but we thought we had a special relationship with the other east Slav peoples. But there came a moment for all of us when it became impossible to sustain that view. For some it was the annexation of Crimea; for some it was when Putin started lobbing ordnance at Russian-speaking populations in southern Ukraine; for some it was when he started firing missiles at our own city. But we have all got to the point where we have been jolted out of our dreams. We have to accept that the real Russia, the Russian we are dealing with, is not the one with which we aspired to have some sort of kinship or special relationship.” That is what makes it so hard to imagine a negotiated settlement from here. There is not a landing zone between the minimal positions of the two sides.

As recently as April, Zelensky was talking about referendums in Donbass, and so on. That is now utterly impossible, given what people have suffered, especially, in his case, the very personal reaction he had to seeing the abominations at Bucha. When you have seen something like that, it becomes very difficult to compromise. How did Yeats put it?

But who can talk of give and take,

What should be and what not

While those dead men are loitering there

To stir the boiling pot?

Just as Ukraine now has minimum terms for settlement, so does Russia. I cannot see any situation where Putin would accept a return to the status quo ante of between 2014 and last year, because that would leave him having to explain why more than 100,000 Russians have died while the economy has been set back a decade and NATO has reached the frontiers of Russia—for nothing. It is all very well people talking of realpolitik. The grand old man of realpolitik, Henry Kissinger, says, “Effectively, Ukraine is now in NATO, so let’s acknowledge that and let’s have referendums in the disputed territories.” Fine, but there is literally no scenario where either side could countenance such a thing.

We in this House might have various takes and modifications. We could say that we could have a demilitarised Ukraine, international observers or a demilitarised Crimea, but it is for the birds; it makes no difference in the world where these things are being determined. So, we are back, I am afraid, to the rather grisly proposition that one side or the other has to win—that the quickest way out of this situation is that one side is defeated and the other can settle from a position of strength. When we put it in those terms, it seems pretty clear who we should want to win. Anything short of a Ukrainian victory is a victory for Putin. If the front lines freeze where they are, Putin wins. If Russia gets to absorb its new oblasts administratively, Putin wins. If the West gets tired, bored or distracted and stops sending ordnance, tanks and planes, Putin wins. If China picks this moment to invade Taiwan, Putin wins. We are in a world of suboptimal alternatives—we have been since 24 February last year—but surely the worst option is for Russian aggression to be rewarded.

Let me answer those who ask why this is our business—not many, I am glad to say, in this Chamber, but there are voices beyond. I am not a great believer in the horseshoe theory of politics, but I notice that these are particularly voices on the far left and far right. “Why is this our fight? It is nothing to do with us; it is all stirred up by NATO,” and so on. I make just two points. First, we may want to be indifferent, but Putin has never been indifferent to us. He has been targeting this country in various ways for more than a decade, and arguably on two occasions carried out what were technically acts of war against us: the attacks that accompanied the Litvinenko and Skripal murder attempts. If you deploy state force in anger in an attempt to kill somebody who is living under the Queen’s peace, that is technically an act of war, so it is not as though Russia was peacefully minding its business and not crossing our radar.

The more direct answer is this. In December 1994, Ukraine was persuaded to give up all the nuclear arsenal it had inherited from the USSR in exchange for an absolute commitment that it would have its territorial integrity defended within its existing frontiers—a commitment guaranteed by the United States, the United Kingdom and Russia. For Russia then to turn around, after Ukraine denuclearised, and invade it must rank as one of the most grotesque betrayals in history. So, as a country with honour, we have no option but to see this as our fight. I do not think we have the option of sitting back and pretending that it is a far-away country of which we know little.

My noble friend Lady Meyer said that if any of the participants in the First World War had known how it was going to end, they would not have joined in. I am sure that is true. None the less, it is worth dwelling on the fact that the two most terrible wars we entered into in the 20th century were provoked not because our sovereignty was threatened or because we had been directly attacked, but because we took seriously our commitment to defend the independence of a friendly country. If we are not prepared to stand for the international order, for the rule of law among nations and for the right to sovereignty of a friendly people, then we are not the kind of country I thought we were.

Ajax Vehicles

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Monday 12th December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

When the problem emerged during trials, immediate action was taken: support was given, medical help was provided and monitoring continues. I do not have up-to-date information, but I will make inquiries and write to the noble and gallant Lord about that. Recently, it was made clear during the user-validation trials that no one was to feel under obligation to continue if they had concerns about health and safety, and they were free to speak up. As far as I am aware, the trials were able to proceed without interruption.

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, the sunk-cost fallacy is a powerful distorter of human behaviour in institutions as well as among individuals. When we look back at, say, the procurement history of the Eurofighter, we see that there was never a moment when it would not have been better to cancel it, every time it came up for review. Now, with Ajax, we are looking at a vehicle that is too heavy, that cannot fire while moving, and that, as we have heard, impacts on human health because of the motion and the noise. Will my noble friend the Minister look at tweaking procurement so that we can stop throwing good money after bad—perhaps, as the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, suggests, in the coming legislation?

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

As I indicated, Ajax is a very important development. It is a highly protected and versatile platform. It is able to move, fight, command and be repaired anywhere on the battlefield. It is future-proofed, with an advanced sensor suite and open digital technology to face evolving threats. That is taking us into a technological age for the Army that we do not currently have with any of our equipment. That is why we are very keen to procure this vehicle. But as I said earlier, we will not take anything that is not fit for purpose.

Ukraine: Lethal Weapons

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Tuesday 5th April 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

The noble Lord will be aware of the mixture of anti-tank missiles that we have previously supplied. We have also taken the decision to supply Starstreak high-velocity man-portable anti-air missiles. This will allow the Ukrainian forces to better defend their skies.

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, many Ukrainians attribute their successful defence to the lethal effectiveness of British weaponry. Who cannot be stirred by reports of Ukrainian soldiers shouting “God save the Queen” as they fire their missiles? But will my noble friend the Minister comment on recent remarks by the Russian ambassador that British arms will be treated as a target and that convoys will be subject to Russian military attack?

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

I respond to my noble friend by saying that the United Kingdom is a friend of Ukraine and Ukraine is a friend of the United Kingdom. We stand by our friends. We have a clear mission diplomatically, politically, economically and militarily as we continue our enduring bilateral partnership with Ukraine. As I said earlier, this hideous, barbaric venture of Vladimir Putin’s must end in failure.