Strategic Defence Review 2025

Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield Excerpts

Friday 18th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield (CB)]

My Lords, I thank my friend, the noble Lord, Lord, Lord Soames, for his kind words. It is a delight to be back, even as a kind of sandwich filling between him and another friend, the noble Lord, Lord Howell of Guildford. It is very good to see everybody.

At the heart of the story of British governance since VE Day lies a pair of holy grails. The two are linked, and their pursuit has brought us much frustration and disappointment. The first is successive industrial strategies—about a dozen of them—each designed to pep up our productivity growth and the bounty we crave in the form of greater GDP per head. The second is a long line of defence and overseas policy reviews—again, about a dozen of them—each one intended to extract every fluid ounce of military and diplomatic juice from our struggling body economic to retain for ourselves significant clout in the influence markets of the world.

Ernest Bevin, our greatest ever Foreign Secretary, understood this symbiosis instinctively. In 1947, the year in which coal was nationalised and I was born, Bevin told the miners, “Give me an extra million tons of coal a year and I’ll give you a new foreign policy”. If Ernie’s very substantial ghost were to flit across the Chamber today, he would appreciate in a flash the significance of what we are debating and what was in the report of the noble Lord, Lord Robertson. My much-admired friend, the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, is but the latest in a long line of reviewers who have applied their grey matter and rich experience to breaking through the crust of these hard-baked problems. I congratulate him and his fellow reviewers, Dr Hill and General Barrons, on the penetration of their analysis and the candour of their risk assessment, the thrust of which I share, as I do the Prime Minister’s conviction that a sustained sense of collective national endeavour is required if the multiple dangers facing our land, our people, our values and our continent are to be reduced.

We really do need a sense of urgency of the kind that Bevin brought to the creation of NATO in 1948-49. We also require something that is missing in this document: a dash of poetry to enliven the plumbing. By this I mean the need to call up the English language to the colours to convey the moral arguments and to make them sing in the defence of our cherished open society and liberal democracy. There must, for example, be no short cuts taken with the rule of law at home or with the decencies of our constitutional conventions. The same applies to the conduct of military operations abroad. Defence reviews should say that firmly and without equivocation, for there is a moral front line that we must hold.

Our weapons are not just so much metal and ordnance. They carry the values of our society as well as explosives in their nose cones. The noble Lord, Lord Robertson, and his colleagues have sharpened our sense of what is needed for defence all around, against the multiple threats that the electronic revolution has placed in the hands of those who would do us harm, and of the fusing of civil and home defence with military defence if national resilience is to be secured. I add my support for the suggestion by the noble Lord, Lord Harris, about a new resilience approach.

I end with a final thought. Might this be the moment to revive something along the lines of the old central policy review staff created for Edward Heath in 1970-71 by, among others, my much-admired friend, the noble Lord, Lord Howell of Guildford? I think I can see the noble Lord, Lord Waldegrave of North Hill—who at some amazingly young age was a founder member of the CPRS—smiling, I hope in appreciation. It could be part of the Cabinet Office, as it was previously, working alongside the National Security Secretariat and the Joint Intelligence Organisation. About 30 people would do, half insiders, half outsiders, all possessing a great fertility of mind, tasked to roam free across Whitehall to horizon-scan and, where possible, to forecast, and to speak truth unto power when necessary. Such a review staff should publish as much of its product as it can for the benefit of the public, of Parliament and its Select Committees. Its cost would be so modest as to barely disturb even the most sceptical of Treasury minds.

As for the other elusive grail—the industrial strategy—that is for another day. Before I sit down, I ask noble Lords to cast their minds’ eyes upwards with mine into the Gallery. Look closely—can you see him? Ernie Bevin, his huge face cracking into a smile of sympathetic and rueful appreciation of the noble Lord’s report. It is time, once again, to stand on the shoulders of giants.