Armed Forces Act (Continuation) Order 2017

Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield Excerpts

Tuesday 21st March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my membership of the Chief of the Defence Staff’s strategic advisory panel and of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s diplomatic excellence external panel, and that I shall shortly become, at an advanced age, an honorary captain in the Royal Naval Reserve.

In the life of a nation, it falls to certain generations to undertake a rethink of their country’s place in the world, its means of defence, its instruments for projecting international influence, the limits as well as the possibilities of what it can sensibly seek to do and the states of mind needed to reconcile aspiration and reality. The outcome of last June’s referendum on our membership of the European Union requires us to be just such a generation —a generation that truly rises to the level of events.

The multiple resetting of our national and international dials, the plethora of overlapping uncertainties, is, I think, creating a growing and unsettling realisation that, for probably a decade to come, we will be a destabiliser nation in the world. It is a condition we can scarce forbear to recognise in ourselves, for it cuts deeply against the grain of how we have imagined ourselves in the past, as a nation that strives to bring stability to others and tries to turn down the heat and to lower the noise in international affairs. But cut against that comforting grain it does.

In view of this, I should like to make the case this afternoon for taking a long, hard look at ourselves in a way that goes beyond the scope of our five-yearly cycles of strategic defence and security reviews. The model I have in mind is the Future Policy Study, part of a series of post-Suez rethinks that Harold Macmillan commissioned. He established the Future Policy Study in 1959 and tasked it to take a searching forward look at where the United Kingdom would be by 1970 on current policies. It was conducted in secret, reporting in 1960, but saw the light of day only 30 years later, as it was a Cabinet document. But, at the time, it undoubtedly added its weight to the tilt away from Empire and towards Europe which led the Macmillan Cabinet to undertake the first application for British membership of the European Economic Community in the summer of 1961, which began the long years of “Brentry” negotiations that eventually concluded in 1972.

In the cold light of “Brexit”, may I suggest that we wait neither for the conclusion of the Article 50 process in 2019 nor for the next SDSR in 2020, but instead encourage the Government to create a royal commission, or equivalent, on Britain’s place in the world, peopled by a widely drawn and knowledgeable membership recruited to do in public what Macmillan’s study group did nearly 60 years ago? It could, if so commissioned, divide its work into two parts. The first would be an audit of our assets as a nation, motivated by an appetite, which I share, to play a careful but substantial role in the world. The second would be to draw up the options and possibilities that our new, post-Brexit geopolitical position will present.

General de Gaulle famously opened his memoirs by declaring, “I always had a certain idea of France”. Each of us carries in our heads a certain idea of Britain, of our country’s gifts, accomplishments and what it can bring to the international table. Here, briefly, is my own certain idea, and the ingredients of our debate today are naturally central to that idea—to that audit of our assets that I mentioned earlier on.

We live on top of the world’s sixth-largest economy.

Thanks to our history, we are a member of more international organisations than any other country, with, in addition, our permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, though of course we are about to leave a mega-international organisation thanks to Brexit.

As others in this debate have mentioned, we possess a range of top-flight Armed Forces, albeit in my judgment not enough of them, including some stunning specialities—special forces, submarines and many more—plus a substantial nuclear deterrent. We have a cluster of top-of-the-range security and intelligence services, as well as a position as one of only three nations with genuine global intelligence reach, thanks to our so-called “Two Eyes” relationship with the United States and our “Five Eyes” relationship when you add Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The other two powers with global reach are, of course, Russia and the United States, with China coming up fast.

We are served by a top-flight Diplomatic Service, and a meritocratic and uncorrupt Civil Service.

We undoubtedly think above our weight in the world. Just linger for a moment on the most stunning of our trade statistics: we have around 1.5% of the world’s population with 5% of the world’s scientific papers and 15% of its most cited ones.

We deploy a formidable array of soft-power instruments —what the noble Lord, Lord Bragg, has called our “cultural world service”, which goes far wider than the BBC World Service and the British Council.

This is but a sketch. The list could go on. It amounts to a remarkable national portfolio. We must strive to sustain, cherish and burnish it. In seeking so to do, we must not think about those assets as a hubristic, wider-still-and-wider nation, but as a temporarily anxious and perplexed people who, if the national conversation rises to the level of events, can find good, sensible and sustainable ways through into a new and valuable geopolitical place in the world, to the relief of our friends and the disappointment of our adversaries.

But, first, we need that royal commission, fuelled by a high sense of purpose and shaped by a stretching and wide-ranging set of terms of reference. The sooner that we cease to be a destabiliser nation, the better. The first step to that is working out what we think our global position should be and how best to conduct ourselves in a vexing, testing world.