Strategic Defence and Security Review

Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts Excerpts

Friday 12th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts]

My Lords, during the previous Parliament, I had an opportunity to go to Camp Bastion in Helmand and on to Kandahar. The experience left me alternatively proud and humble. I felt humble because of the easy life that I live in your Lordships’ House compared to the daily challenges faced by our men and women in Camp Bastion and, in particular, the forward operating bases. I felt proud because they were such a professional group of men and women ready to do their best for their country.

Even flying in across that huge and rugged terrain showed the danger of willing the ends without willing the means. As we held discussions at Bastion, two things became very clear: that we had, and I think still have, a persistent shortage of helicopter lift capacity; and that has there been a slow—some out there would say an unconscionably slow—development of adequately armoured vehicles for transporting personnel. Particularly this weekend, we need to recognise that a heavy price is being paid for those failures. I have my views on how such failures have occurred, but this is not the time to introduce a partisan note. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Dean, I will leave history to be the judge.

As many other noble Lords have said, we are now a medium-size power and we have to keep this at the forefront of our mind if we are to avoid again confusing means and ends. We are a medium-size power with a population of 60 million and a power with a period of extreme financial stringency ahead that must necessarily inform and guide our actions. I welcome the document that we are debating today because it provides a reality check and some common sense.

I welcome the document in particular for two reasons, the first of which is its emphasis on cyberoperations. Last year, I had the privilege of serving under my noble friend Lord Jopling on a European Union Committee inquiry into cyberwarfare that resulted in the report Protecting Europe against large-scale cyber-attacks. The scale of cybercrime, cybersnooping and cyberintelligence was an eye-opener to me. The use of botnets, Trojan malwares and other extraordinarily named devices provides a cheap and easily disguised way of causing maximum damage. Therefore, I welcome the fact that we are putting increased emphasis on cybersecurity. However, by its very nature, that is not a national but an international problem. The European Network and Information Security Agency is inconveniently—and, in my view, unhappily—based in Heraklion in Crete, but, be that as it may, it is an international and a European response. I was disappointed that the review gives a higher priority to linking with the United States than to linking with ENISA.

Secondly, I welcome the renewed attention being paid to the Armed Forces covenant, to which the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham and the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Walker, have referred. I should declare an interest as chairman of the Armed Forces Charities Advisory Committee. Inter alia, the covenant provides for reasonable periods at home between unaccompanied overseas tours. I regret to say that in recent years, the line between those periods has become increasingly blurred. Putting that right is not just a matter of honour—although it is a matter of honour—but a matter of practicality. I am not a military man, but I believe that, if the practice continues unchecked, it will have an increasingly serious impact on the manning of our Armed Forces. That will not be seen at the junior recruit level because young men and women are footloose and fancy free—as they should be—but the middle ranks of officers and NCOs, who represent the backbone of our forces, have wives, husbands and children. There is a danger that they will vote with their feet.

In that connection, as the noble Lord, Lord Hutton, said, we need to get to the root of today’s article in the Times. It cannot be that a corporal who loses both legs in a bomb blast will miss out on £500,000 in pension and benefit-related payments. We must discover what the truth of that is—I have no idea whether it is true—and get to the bottom of it if we are to keep faith with our men and women in the Armed Forces.

For the rest of my remarks, I should like to turn to the second half of the strategy, which is described on page 9 as follows:

“to shape a stable world, by acting to reduce the likelihood of risks affecting the UK or our interests overseas, and applying our instruments of power and influence to shape the global environment”.

We have done less well on this part of the review than on the military side. I fear that we live in a world of increasing intolerance and, above all, of an unwillingness to compromise. We live in a world in which to compromise is to be seen to be weak and is portrayed as such, yet the readiness to compromise is the essential oil that keeps a pluralistic democracy functioning.

The challenges of Muslim fundamentalism are well documented, but we are starting to see the emergence of movements with similar certainties in Western countries, most recently with the rise of the Tea Party movement in the United States. It has been written that, for fundamentalists,

“their people are a chosen people who have a special covenant with the Creator, everything should be good in their lives and land as long as they hold to His law. Things are going wrong; therefore the covenant needs to be renewed and those that have strayed from the path must be brought back into the fold, or cast out”.

For the Tea Party,

“The constitution is the new 10 commandments for God’s chosen people. It is not negotiable. The problem with this fundamentalism—as with Islamic, Jewish, Hindu ... is that there is no dialogue to be had, no pragmatic give and take with those outside the movement of the true believers … The process of democratic politics risks breaking down”.

That will have an impact on foreign affairs, too. In an interesting article in the Financial Times, Mr Gideon Rachman wrote:

“The Tea Party … are liable to interpret setbacks and frustrations, at home and abroad, not as a consequence of the inevitable and growing constraints on American power—but as a result of some sort of ‘stab in the back’, whether by ‘liberal elites’ in Washington, or conniving foreigners overseas. That, in turn, risks leading to an unstable foreign policy that is aggressive, self-righteous and self-pitying in equal measures.”

So what does a medium-size power such as the UK do to encourage the millions of non-fundamentalists to continue to believe that a pluralistic, liberal system can help maintain a more stable world for us all to live in? We should not, I regret to say, send an aircraft carrier—with or without aircraft—as such an approach will tend to reinforce mindsets rather than change them. We need now to focus on what has become known as our “soft power” assets. For various reasons, the United Kingdom is particularly well placed in this field: the English language has become the world’s lingua franca; we have world class universities and what Chatham House has described as world-class knowledge assets, including the Ditchley Foundation, the Defence Academy, Wilton Park and so on; we have the British Council; and we have the BBC overseas service. In the short time remaining to me, I shall focus on the latter.

As I understand it, the funding of the overseas service will pass from the Foreign Office to the BBC. Some argue that this is a welcome development that gives further evidence of the service’s editorial independence from the Government—the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, did so in yesterday’s debate—but the decision raises real concerns. First, the BBC is operationally hard-wired to provide news for the United Kingdom. Indeed, its charter requires that and I am not sure whether the present charter agreement even permits the BBC to fund the overseas service. My noble friend may care to look at the detail of the agreement—on page 39, paragraph 75—where the issue is laid out. Secondly, and no less important, the BBC is structurally oriented towards its domestic audience. The trust, the ultimate protector, has representatives from England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, but where is the champion for the overseas service?

That is not to say that the overseas service is perfect—it is not—but the ability to project impartial news to people who cannot get it elsewhere, and often to do so in their own language, is a vital contribution to the soft power of this country. We need to ensure that, in an age of financial stringency, there are adequate protections against a slash-and-burn approach to what may become an orphan service.

As I said at the outset, I support the review—but there is more to do to weld all these soft power assets into a coherent approach to the benefit of this country and the world.