Queen’s Speech

Lord Owen Excerpts

Wednesday 18th May 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Owen (Ind SD)]

My Lords, there is a very clear need throughout the allied world for unity, and I shall therefore deal very quickly with the Irish protocol. I believe that there is no way that this country will accept abandoning a treaty by an Act of law without first a serious attempt at arbitration. That is why we have the Vienna conventions, and it is in my view inconceivable that this legislation should be presented to this House without a very serious attempt at achieving international arbitration.

Now to the main issue, which is the Falklands—sorry, not the Falklands, but that is perhaps in a way rather an interesting lapse. It is rather nice in this country to come back to a situation where you can say that the British Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for Defence have acted throughout intelligently and with courage, and we should be grateful for that. The issue of Ukraine has not been at all easy. We can all praise the President of Ukraine, who has shown remarkable courage and intense skill. I still believe that his biggest moment is yet to come, when he decides to open negotiations with the Russians for a peace settlement.

A peace settlement will have to end this but, frankly, it will not come from suggestions in this House or anywhere else, and nor should it. It should come from that country that was very nearly, on the second invasion, eradicated. It has the right to be supported by us, and we have quite correctly supported it within the limitations of NATO being a defensive alliance. We have not crossed that border, and we should not cross it. As for this loose talk about nuclear weapons and tactical use of weapons, of course that hangs and lurks as an ever-present danger. But that issue is primarily between two people: the President of the United States and the President of the Russian Federation. If President Putin feels that he wants to cross that threshold, he will endanger his whole country—but it is not an issue for NATO; nor, frankly, one that is helped by being discussed in this House either.

What we have to do now, as a number of noble Lords have made clear, is to strengthen our contribution. That means strengthening our contribution in weaponry, as we are entitled to do as a defensive organisation, and strengthening our economic sanctions, which are all the time being reduced. The good things that have come out of this dreadful war are few and far between. However, one fact is that we have seen the strength of NATO and the wisdom of Truman when he insisted that the boys could not come home in 1945 as he had promised them; in 1946 they were to stay.

We have heard a lot of trash and nonsense talked about European Union defence. A defence organisation has to have an inbuilt authority—a command structure. We have in NATO a proven command structure. We have the capacity to use the strength of the greatest military power still in the world, the United States, and to do so with discussion, democratic debate and, finally, military decision-making. I hope that President Macron has learned that it is not brain-dead and I hope that France stops trying to eradicate or even undermine NATO. That is the fundamental issue and we have seen it in this example.

For the future, it is extremely important that the Russian people believe that we are not antagonistic to them and that we do not want to humiliate them. They have a lot of economic and deep-seated military problems. Some of us—myself included—thought that their defence capacities and their armed forces were a lot stronger than they have proven to be. We must achieve a negotiated settlement that must come from Ukraine, but in the process of getting that settlement we must understand the Russian people and not permanently alienate them. That is a hard task but it is the task in front of us.