Armed Forces

Lord Judd Excerpts

Monday 5th November 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Judd]

My Lords, it is always a real joy to follow the noble Lord. He brings a very interesting and important perspective to our deliberations. Like others, I warmly welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Garden of Frognal, to our debates. She has more than proved herself as a very effective member of the opposition Front Bench and now of the Government. There is also a personal reason for welcoming her, which I am sure she will not mind my mentioning. I was fortunate to get to know well, as a friend, her late husband. I had great affection and admiration for him. He brought tremendous professional experience, as well as a great deal of wisdom and perspective. It is good to see that tradition being followed, even if I might wish that it were being followed from another position.

The noble Lord, Lord Astor, started his characteristically businesslike speech with a very human dimension when he paid a warm tribute to those who had fallen or suffered grievous wounds, and to their families and the bereaved. He was echoed, in what I am sure those of us who heard her will believe was a particularly powerful and moving speech, by my noble friend Lady Dean—speaking again with all her experience of consistent work with the people of the services. It is right that this debate should have that context set out clearly at its beginning. This is indeed remembrance week. All those to whom I referred are the responsibility of every one of us, whether we are in the House of Lords or the House of Commons. We are all responsible, and we must never forget that.

We also have a responsibility to the countless civilians who die in conflict. It must never become acceptable to say—as one American general foolishly did—that we do not do body counts. Every innocent individual who died in conflict is a person who matters every bit as much as the members of our own society. Furthermore, we would be misguided not to realise that that kind of attitude plays inevitably into the hands of the agitator and the extremist. We have to demonstrate consistently our concern for humanity.

War must always be a last resort. We must not slide into a new philosophy in which war becomes an alternative management option. The slide could be accelerated by the development of remote, high-technology warfare techniques. It is easy to talk about collateral damage, but it means individual men, women and children and their relatives. We have to remember all the time that peace and stability cannot be imposed if they are to endure. They have to be built by the people of the regions. Our role is to support those people in finding the right solutions. There is a fatal flaw in the concept that somehow the world can be managed by the powerful. It cannot. The powerful are utterly dependent on solutions rooted in the people of the world who are building their own future.

In all this, hearts and minds—although it is an easy phrase to use—desperately matter. We must be vigilant about the dangers of counterproductivity. I will spell out one issue that increasingly preoccupies me. We talk about how we are defending the rule of law. That should be demonstrable all the time. What is the significance of that in the trend—I hope that I do not oversimplify—of rendition, of Guantanamo Bay, and now of drones? Are they not a means of circumnavigating the rule of law? Are they not a means in the end, if we are not careful, of not only accepting but utilising the technique of extrajudicial killing?

If we are about the rule of law, we are about the operation of systems that can be seen to be totally in line with that principle. Of course, the same can be said about torture and the mistreatment of prisoners. They are wrong and obscene—but also counterproductive because they play into the hands of the extremists who are orchestrating those on the other side. It is another easy thing to say in this House, but we have to be consistent, in the midst of all the acute human pressures on our service men and women, and on those in the security services, in demonstrating that they are upholding something different, and that we are about something different.

I hope that noble Lords will allow me to indulge in personal memories. One of the privileges of my political life—I really enjoyed the experience—was that in my first full ministerial post I was one of the last Ministers to be responsible on a dedicated basis for the Navy. We had service Ministers in those days. I am not sure what I was able to contribute, but I learnt one hell of a lot and I came to admire the services greatly.

In those days, a group that fascinated me was called “the future shape of the fleet group”. I am not sure whether it still exists in one form or another. I used to tease them in conversation and say, “You guys should go off to a country house somewhere with a blank sheet of paper. Forget about all the involvements in which we find ourselves, all the equipment and arrangements that we have inherited. Analyse what the real threats are and then say what we need in the United Kingdom to meet those threats and counter them”. Then, of course, as realists we come back to what we have inherited. We see how we can make the best and most constructive compromise between that and what we should ideally have, and we see how we can move forward in the most effective way. I am sure that that is as true as ever.

If we are making predictions about the future, two things are fairly obvious. First, that as we shall always operate within an international context we should constantly ask ourselves how far our personnel are being prepared for international operations in their training and education. How important a part does language play in training and education? The quintessence of the high-flying officers should be an ability to make a contribution at the centre and to be at a premium when they get back to their own service with that experience of the centre. Do we have that culture? I hope the Minister can reassure me. It is a struggle constantly to achieve it, but it is vital.

Secondly, we can predict that intelligence and security operations of a different kind will always be indispensable. We must always realise the importance of good intelligence and analysis in making the work of our services effective. Of course, those services themselves must all the time demonstrate in the way that they operate a commitment to something that is different from the evil forces that we are combating.

I finish with a couple of more immediate observations. One is that as a former Minister responsible for the Navy, I can see that in the future we will need flexibility and the ability to deploy rapidly. We will need independent, freestanding bases from which to conduct operations of that kind. Therefore, carriers are absolutely indispensable in the future. We can argue about how sophisticated they need to be and we can certainly all agree that they are useless unless we have the appropriate aircraft to operate from them. But the carriers are indispensable to our future if we are serious about international co-operation in security and the rest.

I hope that I can be forgiven for being a bit of a Greek chorus here. I have never been able to reconcile our analysis that they would be absolutely indispensable in 10 years’ time and our present security situation that meant for 10 years we did not have that capability. That is absolutely inexplicable. I do not hold the present Government solely responsible: it is a collective responsibility that we should face in that context.

I have never been a unilateralist: I have always been a multilateralist. In the imperfect world in which we live, I accept and endorse that there has had to be a nuclear deterrent. But I also recognise that one of the most important elements in a sound defence strategy is the cause of disarmament. The less armed the world is, the less likely severe conflict will be as long as one’s arms are concentrated on the real security task. We do not want lots of surplus arms circulating around the world and we do not want to encourage proliferation in any form of arms.

We need to remember that when the non-proliferation treaty was achieved, a solemn pledge was given by the existing nuclear powers that they would embark on a programme of consistent and demonstrable nuclear disarmament. As we move into the next generation of deterrent, how do we reconcile that commitment with what we are doing? If in an imperfect world we take the approach that we have to have a nuclear capability for the time being, why are we talking about perfecting and increasing our nuclear capability? There are all sorts of ways of maintaining a nuclear capability—God forbid that we should ever have to contemplate using it—that would not be as costly and extravagant as the one on which we are embarked.

I know that there will be honestly held different views and I can see my noble friend Lord Robertson, for whom I have unlimited regard, dissenting from my analysis very strongly. Of course he brings a great deal of personal experience in the very directions in which I have been arguing in my remarks tonight, so I take his objections seriously. But we must beware of drifting into an inevitability of a self-generating expense when there are so many other pressures on our defence system that desperately need proper financing. There is nothing worse than putting people in defence in situations in which they are not properly sustained and supported. That therefore means that we must look very sharply all the time at the disproportion and immense cost involved in this form of next-generation nuclear weapon.