United States: Foreign Policy

Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield Excerpts

Thursday 18th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield (CB)]

My Lords, I am truly honoured to follow the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Houghton of Richmond, who is such a welcome recruit to your Lordships’ House—on what one might call the warriors’ Bench.

I was honoured to serve as a member of his strategic advisory panel when he was Chief of the Defence Staff. I always associate the words “strategy” and “strategic” with the noble and gallant Lord. He has, in the language of quantum physics, a real gift for discerning both the waves and the particles that go into our nation’s defence posture, and the foreign policy and influence in the world that our Armed Forces support. He is, too, as we have heard, a son of Yorkshire, so we can expect an enduring and welcome injection of directness and common sense in our future deliberations. I congratulate the noble and gallant Lord on a very fine maiden speech.

I will concentrate this afternoon on what one might call the hidden dimension in diplomacy, foreign policy and international affairs, by which I mean intelligence, particularly the intelligence-sharing arrangements that have served the UK so well for more than 70 years. I refer especially to the so-called “Five Eyes” network, embracing the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, which the most recent report of the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament rightly calls “the closest intelligence partnership in the world”. It is also the most enduring, because in essence the “Five Eyes” is the World War II intelligence alliance, which has run on right through the 40 years of the Cold War and into the age of multiple threats that has followed. The UK-USA element within it, privately but not officially called the “two eyes”, is what gives our country its genuine global intelligence reach. Only two other nations possess that: the United States and Russia, with China coming up fast.

This intelligence reach is of critical value to the UK in a fragile, volatile and often scarcely readable world. For all the skills of our intelligence agencies and Defence Intelligence inside the Ministry of Defence, without the “two eyes” and the “Five Eyes” we would slip instantly into the second rank of intelligence powers.

This most special of special relationships rests on an array of agreements and one treaty—the so-called UK-USA treaty of the late 1940s. Participating nations are, however, not obliged to pass on or share intelligence that they garner. Anything that happened, on either side of the Atlantic, to staunch the flow would be a blow of considerable proportions on many levels, because we are an intelligence-trading nation as much as a diplomatic trading nation—to borrow a phrase used by my former Times colleague, Geoffrey Smith. What is of some immediate concern to the secret world is whether Brexit could impact on the skein of valuable bilateral intelligence and security arrangements we have with our European partners, to which other noble Lords have alluded.

The ISC caught this anxiety well in its report, published just before Christmas. I should point out that I have an air of regret about the ISC because we have got out of the habit of debating its annual reports in this Chamber. That is a great pity and we should restore that debate. The ISC said just before Christmas:

“Whilst none are as deep as the Five Eyes, the Agencies nonetheless have significant relationships with other countries. In particular, several areas of obvious shared intelligence interest exist with our European allies—primarily on International CounterTerrorism but also on other Hostile State Activity and Serious and Organised Crime”.


In that context, Parliament and Her Majesty’s Government should take the ISC’s concluding recommendations deeply seriously. It said:

“European mechanisms play an essential role in the UK’s national security, particularly at a time when the Agencies have all emphasised the importance of enhancing their cooperation with European counterparts. We urge the Government to be more forthcoming with its assessment of the associated risks of the UK’s impending departure from the European Union, and the mitigations it is putting in place to protect this vital capability”.


It went on to say:

“Once the UK has left the EU, intelligence cooperation is an area where it can continue to be a leader amongst its European allies”.


I say amen to that.

Such matters come perhaps into what one might call the hidden wiring capacity of our international relationships, but the value we can bring as a top-flight intelligence power, not just to ourselves but to our allies, must not go unheard amid the fractious cacophony that Brexit has brought to our politics and our national conversation. Good, carefully assessed intelligence is where hard power, soft power and so-called sharp power meet. As a country, we need it to shape our actions, our precautions and our strategy-making as much as we ever have in peacetime before.