Strategic Defence Review
Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts(1 year, 9 months ago)
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Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)
My Lords, it is a first-class idea that we should have this opportunity for import from your Lordships, with all the enormous experience here, into the review before it happens, rather than waiting until it has happened and then moaning that they left out this or that bit that they should have put in. We may still moan at the end, because some of us moan all the time, but this is a very good way of approaching it and I congratulate the Government on doing it this way. I congratulate them on choosing the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, to chair it; he has assembled an extremely impressive team around him. This is a very good set of minds applying to a very difficult, disorganised and expanding concept of what on earth “defence” is and what we are trying to defend in a constantly changing world.
As the noble Lord said, it is the fifth strategic defence review this century if you include the 1998 review, which was modified in 2002. If you add in the integrated reviews we have had in recent years—there was one in 2021 and then the refresh review, and I have no doubt that another refresh review is being prepared now—we get the picture that there is a continuously changing platform. Technology is racing ahead at such an intense speed in the matter of defence and the conduct of war and battle, so we need to be almost constantly on the train. I have no doubt at all that, in a year or two, we will need to come back to this again—and then again—to keep up with the enormous technological advances taking place. We read about one almost every week. Last week it was explosives in pagers and exploding telephones; next week it will be something else in that region.
I take this as an opportunity for us all not so much to go over the obvious, central points—which the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, quite rightly touched on, with NATO as a bedrock—but to put in our own thoughts and hopes about particular issues that we would like to focus on and that might just be overlooked if we did not give them a little nudge. That is all I will do in my few minutes.
First, I will talk about China’s and Russia’s vast intrusion in the developing world, which is taking place almost behind the scenes while our eyes are on Ukraine, the Middle East, Afghanistan, Syria and the Pacific dangers around Taiwan. That is the front line but, behind it, the autocratic powers are moving very fast in a variety of ways—China mostly with bribes, insidious involvements, the belt and road initiative and so on; Russia in a more crude and violent way with the Wagner Group, which is still very active throughout Africa and Asia, although its leader came to a rather abrupt end after he was unwise enough to try to invade Moscow. That is what is happening before our eyes, and I hope that the review will concentrate on all that is going on there. As one expert put it, China is hoovering up the Commonwealth and the developing world, and we need to watch that, because we may find that it is too late if we do not act.
Then there are the neo-non-aligned countries—which, after all, are most countries—that are watching very carefully. I am glad to say that many are members of the Commonwealth, and I think they are all saying, “Look, we believe in independence. We are watching. We want support and advice from and a good relationship with the United Kingdom, but we don’t want to see Britain become too much a puppet of Washington. We don’t want to be under the hegemony of the Chinese either; we are trying to avoid being sucked into their nexus and network. But nor do we want to be necessarily lined up with a Manichaean view of the world, which comes particularly from the United States, that the world is just divided between good and evil, or the West and the East, and that that is the way it must be fought out”. Therefore, I hope that, in addition to the China and Russia scene, we use this review to get our own relationship straight with a changing United States. It is not 1945—it is not the heroic days of the Second World War or the Cold War. It is an entirely different situation. That is my first point.
Secondly, I hope we recognise that the fight is now on to kill civilians—to demoralise, undermine, frighten and terrorise civilians—and every kind of AI and other technology will be used by our opponents to do that. I saw that the director of MI5 said yesterday that we are now at the greatest level of threat in decades and that Russia and Iran, to take two, are determined to generate “sustained … mayhem” in this country. I hope that will be a matter of focus.
Thirdly, the whole industry and defence relationship has changed. A Ukraine expert was here yesterday and talked about battlefield co-ordination and management in Ukraine. That has been largely organised by private enterprise or by enterprises that are semi-private—some in uniform, some not. That expert pointed out that on the Ukraine side there is the question of managing 1 million drones, either in production—maybe in remote garages that no one knows about, or in unofficial factories—or being deployed and sent in various directions. No single military authority, no single Government, can co-ordinate all the movements of that sort of thing. His firm is called Aerorozvidka and he is deeply involved, as a civilian, in battlefield deployment and in new ways of industry co-ordinating with the military not only in supply chains—we know about all that—but in the organisation and deployment of strategy on the battlefield.
Finally, we have signed the NATO industrial capacity expansion pledge, which brings industry and technology even closer to the military. We are signing up to AUKUS, which is another opportunity, and to the Tempest programme with Japan and Italy. All these will involve huge new types of involvement between industry and the military, and that will require a considerable amount of time from the review team. Beyond its cellular internet of things, the Chinese Communist Party seem to have taken a dominant role there. We have Russia’s dark fleet sailing around the world undermining all the traditional areas of marine control. These are the frightening technologies of next month, probably, or certainly of the next year or two. These are the things that I hope will be concentrated on.
That is a start from me, but I am sure there will be many other better-informed, deeper and more important views to be uttered by your Lordships. That is my contribution.
King’s Speech
Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts(2 years ago)
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Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)
My Lords, the world is indeed, if not actually on fire, in a very dangerous state, as we have been reminded. Here, we have been told recently by those in authority that we must prepare for war in a few years’ time. Preparing for war is of course a vastly expensive business; it involves not more wages, higher pensions and all the rest but hardship and cutting back to finance the dreadful demands and dreadful expense of war.
We are going to have our strategic review. I say straightaway that I am a strong fan of the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, who I see is sitting here. I am also a fan of Fiona Hill. I just wonder, though, whether we are right to air in public all the problems and weaknesses, if we have them, in our defence structure against modern technology, which is changing by the hour. I am obviously a supporter, increasingly over the years, of parliamentary accountability, publicity and so on, yet the nature of war is full of surprises and secrets. Those secrets themselves are weapons, and if we go too far in discussing everything in public and debating it in our splendid Parliament, we tell our enemies a lot about how they should react. Let us go with caution into this review and realise that a basic message is all that is necessary: that if any nation stings us, we will sting back with 10 times the ferocity. That is the basic stance that we want to prevail.
Let me spend my last three minutes on outlining some themes that, in opposition, we can usefully and constructively help with in creating the kind of national unity and togetherness of society that the most reverend Primate has just spoken about. I make the following points.
First, does our capitalism really work for everybody? It is asserted that it does, but the vast majority of young people think that it does not. It is not a sufficient system, in its modern digital form, to deliver what billions of people throughout the planet really want. The younger generation is deeply disappointed and critical of it. We need much wider capital ownership—as well as strong incomes and wages, obviously—to give households and families the dignity and security that capital gives in a very dangerous age. People may say: what about levelling up? That is one of the aspects of levelling up that we should promote much more strongly, whatever party is in power. A wider capital-owning democracy has certainly been a theme in my party for 50 or 60 years. That is one theme that we on our side must work on to support the Labour Government and, I hope, carry them with us.
Secondly, we must take back control of our foreign policy. This is an age of looser alliances and of networks, which I do not think every policymaker, certainly in America, fully understands. In this country, we are crazy not to bring our own network—the biggest in the world, the Commonwealth network of 56 countries—far closer to the centre of our strategy and linkages. There may not always be a pattern of Governments agreeing with each other, but the point about the Commonwealth that makes it a 21st-century organisation is that it links at every level: from primary school and university to every profession, every level of training and every kind of friendship. We are very lucky to have that kind of linkage and should work much more on it.
Thirdly, we need to work with Japan, our great friend in Asia. If there is any question of revising some of these big defence contracts, I hope it will be done not by rumour and hint but in an open, friendly way.
Finally, our energy policy is a mess and remains far from achieving the objectives of the net zero that we want. We have vast expenditure ahead, and delusions that somehow renewables are carrying us along. They are not at all. We will have to multiply our renewables by at least four times, we have to multiply our nuclear by five or six times, and we need an entirely new national transmission grid, with a thousand miles of pylons. On carbon capture and storage, we have barely begun.
Where the Government are moving on all these issues, I hope we will help, and constructively. But where they are failing to move or simply do not understand what is happening, we will step in and put all our brainpower and effort into preparing for the day when what goes down comes up. Perhaps the Conservatives will step back into government again. Either way, both parties should work together.
Tempest Global Combat Air Programme
Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts(2 years ago)
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Lord Coaker (Lab)
I thank the noble and gallant Lord for his question and thank him in anticipation of the sorts of thoughtful comments that he will make and the help that he will give to me and others as we seek to defend our country in the best possible way. He makes a really important point on the GCAP. It is an important alliance between Japan, Italy and ourselves that gives us the opportunity to work with Japan and others—but in particular Japan—to develop that technological progress and partnership, which will be so important as we take this programme forward.
Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)
I declare my interests as in the register. Would the Minister agree that, recently, Japanese industry and its economy and the British economy have been getting on extremely well, with increased co-operation—much better than way back before the Brexit interruption? Would he agree that the sources of our biggest productivity increases of the past 50 years were when we were getting massive Japanese investment in the 1970s and 1980s? In the light of both those thoughts, does he accept that we must be very careful in continuing this progress and doing nothing impetuous that undermines the close co-operation that the Japanese want to have with us and are seeking in many other areas as well?
Lord Coaker (Lab)
As I said in answer to the question from the noble and gallant Lord—and the noble Lord makes the point for himself—the relationship between ourselves and Japan is extremely important. The technological advantage that both the UK and Japan get from our close partnership is extremely important. As I said in answer to the original Question, progress continues on the GCAP with the other partner, Italy. A strategic defence review will look at all the various programmes, but progress continues.