NATO Summit 2018

Lord Judd Excerpts

Tuesday 26th June 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Judd (Lab)]

My Lords, I must put on record my appreciation of the two opening speeches. They were very helpful for the debate and gave much ground for consideration on our side of the House as well as on theirs. The committee is extremely fortunate to have at its helm someone with all the commitment and experience of the noble Lord, Lord Howell.

In 1947, I was 12. My parents were at a conference in Prague. I shall never forget their coming home full of grim foreboding about what might be about to happen. My father knew Jan Masaryk and was a great admirer of him. When subsequently he was found dead at the foot of the building, it did not to them matter whether it was suicide or a deliberate act by those who opposed him. What it marked was a serious, inescapable and grave challenge to us all about the threat from Russia and totalitarian communism. I will never forget the funereal atmosphere in my family home when that death occurred.

We also had at a more personal level for me at that age a social democratic family in Czechoslovakia with whom we were great friends. We have to this day remained as a family full of consternation, because we simply lost contact with them and what happened to them in the years that followed the communist takeover.

The point that I want to make is that what happened in the formation of NATO and of the United Nations was that we were living in an age where there was real conviction about the imperative of collective security and the importance of co-operation as the means of serving the well-being of people across the world, not least our own people. There was, therefore, a very strong underlying philosophy.

I am very glad that, in the debate in the other place on 23 June, the Secretary of State Gavin Williamson paid fulsome tribute to Ernie Bevin and the crucial part he played in getting NATO off the ground and persuading our American friends to become involved. He also put on record his appreciation and admiration of the Attlee Government and all they did to make NATO a possibility. We face a major challenge, because I do not think we can run away from the difficulties and complexities caused for us all by the unpredictability and crude chauvinism of American leadership at the moment. It is not about NATO; it runs totally counter to NATO’s purpose of defending freedom, liberty, democracy and the rule of law.

Some 20 years ago—I am sorry if I reminisce, but we are coming up to the 70th anniversary and it is perhaps quite useful to draw on experiences—I spent a week at a country house hotel in Limerick in the west of Ireland, at a cross-Atlantic seminar at which there were players from the United States and the United Kingdom. One of the players at this seminar was somebody called John Bolton. I simply could not believe that John Bolton spent the best part of that week lecturing us on how the United States had brought about the defeat of Russia, how NATO was irrelevant and how the only thing that could possibly matter to a self-respecting American was the supremacy in all things of America and what American citizenship meant. There could be no truck with this interdependent, international nonsense. I do not mind saying that a good deal of the week was spent in quite active conversation between John Bolton and myself.

More recently, of course, the Warsaw summit issued its communiqué. In a very telling and strong speech in the other place, Nia Griffith drew attention to the communiqué’s insistence that,

“deterrence has to be complemented by meaningful dialogue and engagement with Russia, to seek reciprocal transparency and risk reduction”.

Of course, Salisbury has made that infinitely more difficult, but it is an objective to which we must remain committed.

There has been lots of talk and debate about the percentage of gross national product being spent by members of NATO on NATO and defence matters. Of course this matters, but what is even more important is that we have a shared vision of the threat: what is it that we are preparing to defend ourselves against? What are the new challenges? Of course, they have become infinitely more complex—we have heard about cyber, space and electronic warfare. But I believe—this is a point I would like to emphasise—that in the end the defence of our society depends on the strength of society itself and the social fabric of that society. There is a very great conundrum for the Government in deciding what we want to spend on defence, but we must not do that at the expense of social infrastructure. The security services, the police and community policing are all crucial in defence, but so too are health, education, housing and employment. These matter as social priorities but they are part of our defence, because we have to have a confident attitude that we are defending a society worth having.

I will make one other point before I conclude. I have never been a unilateralist. I have followed the arguments for Trident and the rest. But, given the very high, perhaps disturbing, proportion of the defence budget that goes on Trident and through-deck cruisers, we have to be vigilant that this does not make us muscle-bound. If it is at the expense of having the highly flexible, dynamic forces we need to meet the real and immediate threats that arise in our society, it would be a tragedy. We have to make sure that we examine those things—which I suppose, if one wants to be a bit intellectually aggressive on the issue, one might call defence totem-poles—against the realities of overstretched personnel, overstretched equipment and the rest.

There are huge challenges ahead and I thank the two noble Lords opposite who introduced the debate. But let them understand that there are considerable numbers of us on this side of the House who, although we are, I hope, constructively critical in the best sense, remain determined to work with them to ensure the future strength and well-being of NATO as a vital contribution to the well-being of our people.