Strategic Defence Review 2025

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Friday 18th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, if we were holding this debate in normal times, I suspect that it would be something of a lap of honour for its three authors, led so ably by that veteran of defence reviews, the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, who introduced this debate in such a masterly manner. It clearly marks a major shift from the excessive complacency of what was called the post-Cold War era and spells out convincingly why we need a new, hard-headed approach to defence and security—one that not only requires a major intellectual shift but that will change the resources we devote to these matters, not just in words but in deeds, if our own national security is not to be put at increasing risk.

However, the times are not normal. They are volatile in the extreme. Wars are being waged in Ukraine and across the Middle East—and could be waged in the Far East—which have brushed aside with apparent impunity much of the rules-based international order that was so laboriously and necessarily put together after the two world wars of the 20th century, not least the UN charter itself. The speed of change is being accelerated by the policies of Russia, the United States and China, and by a chaotic clash of long-term foes in the Middle East, whose hostilities are expanding rather than diminishing. So my remarks are in no sense a criticism of the adequacy of the review, merely a recognition that we are being swept along at speed by a tide of affairs that bears an uncanny resemblance to that which first engulfed the world in the period leading up to the outbreak of the First World War.

First, for a number of years after the Cold War ended in the 1980s, we fell into the trap of treating soft power as somehow a substitute for hard power. It is not. Now we risk swinging back in the reverse direction, shrinking the elements of our soft power in order to finance the resources for our hard power. In that category I place the decision to finance most of Britain’s necessarily reinforced hard power by shrinking an essential part of our soft power: our overseas aid budget.

It surely makes no sense to load the cost of the BBC World Service—a unique contribution to countering the tidal waves of misinformation and disinformation in today’s world—on to a regressive tax on the licence fee holder rather than onto the taxpayer. It is surely time to reverse that lamentable decision.

The world-leading role of our higher education institutions risks being hamstrung by misleading fears linking overseas students with illegal immigration. It is long past time that we stopped treating overseas students as immigrants and scaring ourselves stiff with the resultant net migration figures. We really do need to take another look at the balance of hard and soft power, recognising that we need them both.

My second point is that we risk failing to understand—and several noble Lords have mentioned this—how close we are to the collapse of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and to the consequences of such a disaster. I am not talking about our own decision to join other European members of NATO in returning to a tactical air role, which has no proliferation risks and could play a valuable role in strengthening deterrence against a resurgent imperialist Russia.

If Iran were to follow North Korea in obtaining nuclear weapons, the consequences of that disastrous development would very possibly be not only regional, but global—hence the need for the E3 to resume their efforts with perseverance to avoid that outcome by peaceful, negotiated means. I do agree with those who have mentioned the P5: at some point, the dialogue on strategic stability between the recognised nuclear powers—broken off quite correctly at the time of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine—will need to be resumed.

We do need to proceed with determination on the initiative to strengthen the European pillar of NATO on which the Government have so laudably embarked. This is not just a matter of responding to legitimate pressure from successive US Presidents, but a simple recognition of the need to react to Russian aggression via strengthened deterrence so that hostilities can be avoided as they were throughout the Cold War. That is why the review—quite rightly—chose “NATO first” as its motto.

All three of the points I have raised require that essential tool of soft-power diplomacy. We need to ensure that our diplomacy is properly resourced and does not fall short, as it is at some risk of doing.