Queen’s Speech

Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield Excerpts

Thursday 28th May 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my membership of the Chief of the Defence Staff’s Strategic Advisory Panel but I speak in an entirely personal capacity this evening.

Whenever I contemplate the task faced by the framers of the forthcoming national security strategy and strategic defence and security review—whether they be Ministers, officials or the chiefs of staff—I experience two things: first, a genuine pang of sympathy; secondly, an echo of some words of Winston Churchill’s to a group of Conservative politicians with an interest in foreign affairs in 1936. This is what he said, and I promise not to slip into an impersonation as the sentences roll:

“For four hundred years, the foreign policy of England has been to oppose the strongest, most aggressive, most dominating Power on the Continent … Thus we preserved the liberties of Europe, protected the growth of its vivacious and varied society, and emerged … with an ever-growing fame and widening Empire … Here is the wonderful unconscious tradition of British foreign policy”.

Why the sympathy? If the drafters of the NSS and the SDSR 2015 suggested opening their documents with resolute paragraphs like that, they would be offered either gardening leave or counselling at the very least.

More seriously, the implication of the Churchillian insight is that while we like to think of ourselves as being guided by the drumbeats of our past which make us natural strategists, I have come to the reluctant conclusion that it takes a Kaiser, Hitler or Stalin to give us a malign threat against which we can organise and plan, shaped by Churchill’s “unconscious tradition”. Without that external mind-concentrator, we are prone to drift, laced with a tendency to preach above our weight in the world, which on occasion can so irritate other nations.

I am among those who still wish our country to punch heavier than our weight in the world where and when we sensibly can, with our allies—and so are the majority of the public, if an Ipsos MORI poll of last autumn is a guide. When asked whether the UK should still try to punch above its weight in the world, 52% of respondents said yes while 36% said no. Why am I with the 52%? It is not because I am suffering from an atavistic post-imperial spasm or from an itch after the amputation, as a friend of mine in the secret world likes to put it, but for practical reasons, based on a belief that most of the time our special blend of hard and soft power can be of benefit to the world, as well as reflecting how we see ourselves as a people sculpted by a singular past, with special and valuable contributions still to come.

What might a swift audit of our assets look like? An array of superb Armed Forces—tributes have been paid to them from across the House today, quite rightly—seriously stretched, but studded with some world-class specialities. We have a top-of-the-range nuclear deterrent based on a very special set of deals with the United States. We have a considerable overseas aid programme; a top-flight Diplomatic Service; a position as one of only three powers with global intelligence reach; and a P5 seat on the United Nations Security Council—all this plus a rich barcode of cultural and soft power. There is the BBC World Service and the British Council and a goodly number of world-class universities, as well as a scientific research output out of all proportion to our size and wealth. That is still a very formidable list. Yet we may be drifting without prior thought towards a rim beyond which the world, and our allies especially, will realise that we are no longer the deployer of the influence that we like to imagine ourselves to be.

There was hardly a whiff of foreign policy or defence debate in the recent election campaign, as many noble Lords have pointed out; there was a howling silence. The great 19th-century historian, JR Seeley, noticed that we had acquired the imperial version of our great power as if in a fit of absence of mind; we could be about to lose what remains of our post-imperial influence with an equal absence of mind. Certainly, if we start to spend less than 2% of our GDP on defence, we will experience what my friend Professor Paul Cornish of the RAND Corporation calls “mission uncreep”.

I finish with a few thoughts about a very real threat to our country that will appear in neither the national security strategy nor the strategic defence and security review, because it is simply too difficult. It is the possibility that by 2025, in just two general elections’ time, we will be out of Europe, shorn of Scotland and a very different country strategically, economically and psychologically. I fear that an exit from the EU would trigger another Scottish referendum that would result in a vote to separate. Were that to happen, we would have shredded ourselves. That could be the kingdom to come, but we must not sleepwalk into it. The first people whom we have to defend ourselves against are ourselves.