Queen’s Speech

Lord Houghton of Richmond Excerpts

Tuesday 7th January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Houghton of Richmond (CB)]

My Lords, it is already well-covered ground, but I want to offer a few words on the interconnected issues of defence and security. During the election campaign the Prime Minister pledged the most profound review of Britain’s defence and security needs since the Cold War, and I welcome such an undertaking. As vice-chief in 2010 and as Chief of the Defence Staff in 2015, I experienced both of the last two reviews at close quarters. Both were very much creations of their time.The former was a response to the strategic shock of austerity. The latter was a far more hubristic affair, linking security to prosperity but, in respect of military capability, without ever closing the gap between ambition and resource reality.My honest view of both reviews is that they were exercises in prioritising the affordability of military platforms, garnished with a veneer of strategic insight. They were not that strong on intellectual analysis of a changing strategic context, nor on a redefinition of the UK’s place in the world. I sense most contributors thus far agree.

Permit me a few relevant observations. Contrary to the view currently peddled by some, we do not live in the most dangerous of times. Indeed, there is much evidence to suggest that there has never been a better time to be alive; that societies have become more peaceful; and that we are experiencing historic and sustained low levels of personal and interstate violence.

However, the raw statistics do not necessarily translate into how we perceive our own sense of security. This is partly because we now enjoy a media that is addicted to the sensationalisation of human anxiety but, more significantly, it is because the traditional format of war has been replaced by more insidious forms of interstate rivalry. New vectors of attack, as they are called, have supplanted formal warfare: such things as proxy terrorism, cyberwar, political assassination, disinformation and hybrid warfare, to name the most obvious. When combined with some of the mega-trends of our dynamic planet—climate change, urbanisation, increasing maldistribution of wealth and opportunity, the pace of technical change, the change in demography —we are left feeling very vulnerable at a personal and even at a collective, national level.

I am not so sure about whether this strategic shift from interstate warfare to interstate security malevolence is permanent. What I fear is that we may have started to forget that the relative peace we have enjoyed for the last 70 years or so is not naturally occurring. It is brought about only by the willingness of nations collectively to secure that peace.

The starting point for any profound review of the UK’s defence and security posture is to answer two questions. First, if we want to retain, by and large, the rules by which the world is currently organised, we need to decide how big a role we intend to play in the collective defence of those rules. Secondly, having recognised that, in the new security context, even a relatively peaceful world remains a dangerous one, how much national resource should we devote to ameliorating the new security threats to our people to an acceptable level of risk or societal tolerance?

The first question undoubtedly offers us some strategic choices, which will go a long way towards defining “global Britain” and may offer the opportunity to resolve some of the most serious incoherences of our current defence capability. The second question offers us far less discretion for inaction, and we are already well behind where we need to be in terms of organisation and capability.

Either way, I hope that this House does more to inform the debate than simply deploying nostalgia in support of military interest or supporting the view that some form of procurement alchemy will suddenly make all things affordable. I say this because the Armed Forces consist of sensible people. Institutionalised underfunding is not good for recruiting, retention or morale.