King’s Speech

Lord Houghton of Richmond Excerpts

Wednesday 15th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Houghton of Richmond (CB)]

I am pleased to have this opportunity to contribute to the debate on the gracious Speech. In doing so, the only interest I wish to declare is my national presidency of the Reserve Forces’ and Cadets’ Association.

The great military theorist Carl von Clausewitz wrote his classic work On War partly as a reflection on his observations on Napoleonic warfare. He formulated the concept of a trilogy: the harmonious combination of society, government and the armed forces, which, when working in unison, brought the art of warfare to its ultimate conditionality. This conditionality is best defined as national integrity, bound to a common purpose. In different ways, both Ukraine and Israel are experiencing such conditionality now.

In recent years, perhaps the closest the UK has come to such an experience was during Covid. Certainly, British society demonstrated a remarkable willingness to volunteer, at scale, to support the national response to a genuine crisis. In my last decade of service, I was very aware that the trinity in Britain was somewhat fractured. We were involved in two highly unpopular campaigns: Iraq and Afghanistan. British society undoubtedly respected its Armed Forces but was deeply concerned about the purposes to which we were being put. The Armed Forces enjoyed public sympathy rather than public support. As a result, government strategy, perhaps understandably, eventually came to focus more on damage limitation than any form of objective success in those campaigns.

In the time since our extraction from those unpopular wars, the state of the trinity in our country has taken another turn—a rather disturbing one, I believe. Simply put, and as the gracious Speech rather bears witness to, the trinity has gone missing. Why do I say this? In part, it is the absence of a compelling strategic narrative that binds the country together in a common purpose: a national conversation about the true state of a dangerous world, society’s views on and aspirations for our place in that world, and the abilities of the Armed Forces and wider society to play their roles in securing it.

As a society, we appear to live in an age increasingly defined by an obsessive fascination with completely pointless things; an age when many have defaulted to cynicism about what is truly meaningful. I credit the Government with some very good strategic thinking about the world. They know that it has become a much more actively malign and dangerous place, and they understand the need to reimagine warfare as a consistent and persistent condition between competing nations and interests, existing across a spectrum of malevolent activity, much of it below the threshold of what we have previously considered to be formalised warfare. The Government have a far better understanding of the differing vectors of warfare that embrace non-military activity—vectors that harness artificial intelligence to erode the integrity of societies, to undermine democratic process and to create alternate truth.

Government understands the need to build a more resilient society but it does not seem to want to engage with society about how to bring this about. Perhaps the most important lesson from both Ukraine and Israel is the requirement for a nation to have resilience. Fundamental to this resilience is a society that understands the realities of a dangerous world and a Government who have effective methods of mobilising national energy and human capacity to deal with it.

In the military sphere, there is a compelling need for a vibrant set of Reserve Forces, a supportive employer base, a practical volunteer offer and a practised methodology for training and mobilisation. The defence reviews of both 2010 and 2015 took cuts in the size of regular manpower. These were predicated on the growth of the Reserve Forces. In the 2015 review, a reduction in the size of the Army to 82,000 was predicated on a volunteer reserve of 30,000. In the Library material produced to support this debate, every single statistic on Armed Forces personnel levels, regular and reserve, shows a decreasing trend, bar one: the sole increase is in the number of people leaving.

The custodianship of the nation’s military capability is one of any Government’s most critical responsibilities. A healthy reserve is a vital national strategic capability. It is critical to resilience and national integrity. Therefore, can the Minister confirm to the House and the country what the future levels of Armed Forces personnel need to be? Can he confirm that they take into account the imminent revisions to NATO’s deterrent posture and the emerging concept of a UK national defence plan? Perhaps the Minister can also confirm that the Government will lose no more time in defining the specific demands they want their Reserve Forces to meet. I fear that they currently feel uncertain and in a state of neglect.