Strategic Defence Review

Lord Kerr of Kinlochard Excerpts

Wednesday 9th October 2024 Grand Committee

[Lord Kerr of Kinlochard (CB)]

It is a great reassurance to the House that the noble Lord, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, is associated with this review. I thank him for securing this debate and for the skill with which he introduced it. I hope that his review will tell it like it is.

We need to invest more and to invest better. The world is much more dangerous than when Labour last took office and the noble Lord set up his defence review. In the Middle East, the South China Sea and the Sahel and the sub-Sahara, we see higher tension and terror. In Ukraine, we see an existential threat to Europe’s liberties. There is nothing new in that—from the Moscow embassy, I watched the sack of Dubček’s Prague—but what is new is a NATO too long disarmed by a naive faith in the peace dividend and a US whose NATO commitment can no longer be taken for granted. The most chilling moment for me in the Trump-Harris Philadelphia debate was when Trump could not bring himself to say that he would support Ukraine. Putin would not stop at Kyiv—we face a 1938 moment. Ukraine’s war is our war, and keeping the alliance shield requires investment to deter and to insure against American retreat.

As the terms of reference for the defence review say, the first task of the state is to protect the citizen. That means that defence expenditure is not discretionary expenditure. When I worked in defence for Secretary of State Carington and Chancellors Healey and Howe, we had a commitment to maintain 55,000 troops on the mainland of Europe, and we always honoured it. We were spending 5% of GDP on defence, and the nation was not balking at that. When the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, ran his review, we were spending 2.5% or 2.3%—although the task has clearly grown. Russia spends 6% and is planning a 25% increase next year.

Of course it is misleading to think in terms of GDP comparisons and proportions, but it is absolutely clear that we need greater capability because the threat has got greater. We are not investing enough. I believe that if it was explained to the country why we were not investing enough and if the threat was spelled out, the country would not balk at it. I hope the defence review will tell it like it is.

We certainly need to invest much better. We must get recruitment right. Too many honourable Ministers have stood at the Dispatch Box admitting that there have been shortfalls but asserting that the corner has been turned. I am unconvinced. Outsourcing was always a mistake and it should now be corrected, but the much bigger problem is procurement, where the flaws are systemic. I recognise most of them from the 5% days when I knew a bit about defence, but they are still much more damaging now, with resources so much more constrained.

These flaws are not unique to us. In Washington, a bipartisan congressional commission reported this summer that:

“Fundamental shifts in threats and technology require fundamental change”


in how the Department of Defense functions, that the country must

“spend more effectively and more efficiently to build the future force, not perpetuate the existing one”,

and that the Defense Secretary and central staff

“should be more empowered to cancel programs, determine needs for the future, and invest accordingly”,

particularly in cyber, space and software. It said that the R&D paradigm needs to shift to adopting technological innovations from outside the department, and that 11 of the 14 technologies deemed critical for national security are “primarily non-defense specific”. That is what Congress is saying in Washington. Of course the US-UK analogy is not exact, but I believe all the elements I have mentioned are advice that we too should heed.

Investing better means a major update of the MoD’s procurement systems. The compact with the taxpayer has to be that, although we have to take more of his money, we will promise to spend it better. There must be no more sacred cows, interservice “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” deals, or continually changing specifications to add gold plate. We need longer production runs and more emphasis on simplicity, serviceability—the secret of, for example, the Hawk aircraft programme’s success—and specialisation. We do not need, and we certainly cannot afford, industrial capabilities across the board. We need to invest where we lead in Europe, and where others lead we need to go for the reciprocal procurement deals that generate the export sales and hence longer production runs, which drive down costs. This means having the self-discipline to stop tinkering with specifications and avoid the delusions of autarky—no more Nimrods or Sting Rays. In-house solutions and UK-only programmes are very rarely best.

Two great Defence Secretaries, Denis Healey and Peter Carington, had no doubt that economies of scale and the foreign sales that would generate the jobs meant collaboration with the Germans to build tanks and with the Dutch to build frigates. Their German and Dutch colleagues agreed. Memoranda of understanding were signed, but the tanks and frigates were never built. Both programmes were sabotaged by folie de grandeur in Whitehall. The Germans went off and built their Leopard tanks and the Dutch built their frigates—also, as it happens, called Leopards—both of which cost much less than ours and so greatly outsold ours.

Can the new Healey Defence Secretary do better? I hope so, with support from the noble Lord, Lord Robertson. It is a bit presumptuous to offer the noble Lord advice because he knows the issues so much better than most of us, and it is probably unnecessary to urge him to tell it like it is because he usually does, but I hope he will press for the systemic procurement reform that the Ministry of Defence, like Washington’s Department of Defense, so badly needs. We need to invest much more, but we need to invest it much better.

King’s Speech

Lord Kerr of Kinlochard Excerpts

Thursday 25th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kerr of Kinlochard (CB)]

I thank the Minister for a thoughtful introduction to the debate and I warmly welcome that the response will come from the noble Lord, Lord Coaker—the hero of our Rwanda debates. The House is well aware that Portobello Road in London is so called to celebrate Admiral Vernon’s great victory in 1739. I expect Rwanda Road to follow soon.

It was an Anglophile Dutch statesman who once said that there are only two kinds of European countries—those that are medium-sized powers and those that have not yet realised that they are medium-sized powers. I like the Labour manifesto’s call for a “progressive but realistic” foreign policy. I think we may be turning the page. After the bombast and bluster, there was a mature modesty—welcomed abroad—in the manifesto promise that we will be

“a reliable partner, a dependable ally, and a good neighbour”.

The Prime Minister has made an excellent start, and the speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Goldie, suggests that there will be a responsible, helpful Opposition.

But, to be honest, there was not much realism about Ukraine in the election—about how much we will have to spend helping Ukraine and remedying our hollowed-out Armed Forces. The fact is that the war in Ukraine is not being won and, if it were lost, President Putin would not stop there. We are in a 1938 situation. It is not just Ukraine’s security at stake; it is ours. I believe that, if told the truth about what is at stake and what we must do, the country would not baulk at the bill. I warmly welcome the noble Lord, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, to his new role. He is well known here and at NATO for telling hard truths, and I hope that he will do so.

Looking further afield, and here I pick up the point of the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, I hope that Labour realises how much the world has changed since the party was last in office and how much we have lost the global South. In 1990, when Kuwait was invaded, the UN resolution to condemn Saddam Hussein carried unanimously. In 2022, when Ukraine was invaded, while only four countries supported President Putin, 35 chose not to condemn him. I have to tell the noble Lord, Lord Howell, that the 35 included representatives of over half the population of the Commonwealth. Since then, the arithmetic has worsened with our refusing to condemn what is seen as genocide in Gaza and our ignoring what is happening in the Horn of Africa, where more are dying than in Ukraine and Gaza put together. We are seen as being hypocritical. The diplomatic disaster of March 2022 should have been a wake-up call.

What lessons should the Labour Government draw? First, it was unwise to hollow out our diplomatic posts in the global South; the Chinese did not. Secondly, cutting the BBC World Service was a false economy; RT in Moscow and CGTN in Beijing are expanding—no more cuts to the World Service, please. But there is a bigger underlying cause for the West’s declining influence in what is seen as our hypocrisy. The manifesto asserts that we will

“work with allies to build, strengthen and reform”

the global multilateral institutions. Quite—that is the point. The UN Security Council composition reflects the realities of half a century ago. The IMF director is still always a European. The World Bank president is still always an American. America rejects the ICC and paralyses the WTO court. The dollar’s exorbitant privilege is evermore resented. The bill for fighting global warming is seen as unfairly skewed, and western diplomatic aid is shrinking and comes with too many patronising strings and costly consultants.

There are some—the disrupters—who reject the whole idea of international law, but most of the global South follow the Chinese and want reform. They want rules that are modernised, and so should we. If the Labour Government are up to that challenge, progressive realism will mean something very important.