National Security Situation

Lord Ricketts Excerpts

Thursday 19th April 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ricketts (CB)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as set out in the register. I have discovered that there are a lot of informal clubs and groups around your Lordships’ House; one of the smallest is that of former National Security Advisers, since it has only one member. I hope noble Lords will not feel that that disqualifies me from contributing to the debate. I welcome the fact that the debate looks at national security as a whole. One of the intentions behind setting up the National Security Council, as I did for David Cameron in 2010, was that it should co-ordinate across the whole of government all the different arms—security, defence and foreign policy—and assemble around the Prime Minister and senior Ministers all the key advisers, including, for the first time in a structured way, the intelligence community heads, to have systematic discussion across this whole range with plenty of challenge, and a forum to really take decisions. That is just as well since, as many noble Lords have said, we have more simultaneous threats to the security of this country now than at any time since the Cold War.

If we look at the immediate situation, as others have said, the Islamist terrorist threat is clearly high. It is not an existential threat to this country but it needs continued vigilance. The international security system put in place by our predecessors in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War is under real stress, particularly from countries that do not accept the rules that were laid down there. One of the most interesting recent comments on national security was from US Defense Secretary Mattis in presenting the US defence strategy a couple of months ago. He said that,

“great power competition, not terrorism, is now the primary focus of US national security”.

That is a phrase that we too should ponder in this House.

Russia has been at the heart of this debate, quite rightly. I can say from my own experience that we have taken a tougher approach to Russia in the UK since the Litvinenko poisoning than any other European country. We understood from that time that the Russia of President Putin regards the West as an adversary; that he is playing a zero-sum game; that he will push wherever he senses weakness; that he is creating a sphere of influence, in the classic sense, around Russia; and that he is actively trying to sow discord and division among his adversaries. Russia is deliberately developing tools to blur the lines between war and covert manipulation. The record on that is pretty clear, from the Russian intervention in Georgia in 2008, the annexation of Crimea, the interference in Donbass, the pressure on the Baltic states, the increasingly blatant manipulation of our media and our electoral processes in the West, the intervention in Syria in support of President Assad—all of that points in the same direction.

And then there was the poisoning of the Skripals. Whoever in Moscow authorised that—I agree that there is no plausible alternative to it being authorised and conducted from Moscow—miscalculated very badly. I assume they thought it would be like the Litvinenko case: a few Russian spies would be thrown out, the world would move on and a chilling message would have been sent to Russian traitors around the world. I think they miscalculated the growing sense of unease that the previous recklessness of Russian behaviour has generated in many countries. People saw it as another confirmation of a pattern of behaviour and therefore there has been a very strong and supportive international reaction. I applaud the way the Government have handled that very difficult case with determination, firmness and effective rallying of a large international consensus—much larger, in my view, than the Russians expected. They have been wrong-footed, and they have reacted with a classic combination of sarcasm and dismissal, coupled with menace and obfuscation. We now need to go through what has been announced in terms of implementing financial measures to show that this was not simply a one-off expulsions effort, but that there are real consequences for Russian money in London and other capitals.

At a most inconvenient moment for Russia, their Syrian allies chose to use chemical weapons in Douma. I agree with other noble Lords who have said that it is incomprehensible why Assad should have felt it was necessary to use chemical weapons against his own citizens at that very moment. Again, I entirely applaud the Government’s handling of that. It was absolutely right that Britain joined the US and France in the military response. It was an error in 2013 that the other place voted against joining air strikes. They too were limited with a specific target, and fitted well into the strategy. That sent a signal of British disengagement around the world. What signal would it have sent if Britain had stood aside a second time from western action? Of course, that one-off military operation will not fundamentally change the Syrian civil war. I agree with others in the debate that it needs to form part of a wider strategy and that we need to get back to a political process. I am sure that the Minister can put the Government’s position more clearly than I can, but in my memory it has long been the position of the Government that the Syrian regime would have to be part of any such negotiation. The problem has been getting the Syrian parties together; that needs to be re-energised now.

The Russian reaction to the Syrian use of CW has been very odd. It is as if they thought we were blaming Russia for using CW and that we would attack Russian forces. They had some problem keeping a single coherent line; on the same day that the Russian defence ministry in Moscow was saying, “It was the British wot did it”, the Russian representative in New York was saying that there had not been any chemical attack at all. We had a great deal of scaremongering that any western military action could be the prelude to World War III, and that things were now worse than the Cold War. Worse than the Cuban missile crisis, the Soviet invasion of Hungary, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia? I do not think so, although some of our media picked up the Russian propaganda and worried people a great deal.

It is essential for a Prime Minister to have discretion to authorise military action in an emergency, and to be accountable to Parliament afterwards for the exercise of that discretion. I am clear that any British Government with any sense of survival will take care to consult Parliament and have parliamentary backing before launching any significant large-scale military activity putting British lives at risk—certainly any ground-force military operation—but a limited, contained military strike of the kind that we saw at the weekend, co-ordinated with allies and therefore with decisions required urgently, seems within the discretion that a Prime Minister should have. It should be an issue for political discretion and accountability, not for definition in legislation.

In addition to the immediate and the urgent there are some very long-term issues, as other noble Lords have indicated. Since before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the twin pillars of our grand strategy have been to be the closest of allies with Washington, and to be anchored in Europe despite a degree of turbulence there. Bits of masonry are falling off each pillar. Leaving the European Union clearly changes one element of that strategy, and the inevitable US move in the focus of its national security towards Asia alters the relationship with Washington. That is no surprise, as the defining national security issue of the next 50 years will be US competition with China; the surprise has been President Trump’s retreat from multilateralism and the hesitations about endorsing NATO Article 5, which produced the other interesting comment of the last year, which was Chancellor Merkel at the G7 saying, “We Europeans truly have to take our fate in our own hands”. For a Federal German Chancellor to show that degree of concern about NATO is worrying.

I profoundly hope that a review of Britain’s role in the world will conclude that we should remain an activist, engaged international power, living up to our responsibilities as a permanent member. However, that argument has to be remade and re-won with the British people after all the problems that we have had with Iraq and Afghanistan, as others have said. That argument needs to begin now. It is one of the most important tasks for our National Security Council, alongside all the immediate and urgent matters that it has to deal with.

[Lord West of Spithead]

In the context of the noble Lord’s work as National Security Adviser, what level of discussion was there about the scale of defence forces required for our nation?

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Ricketts]

I had the privilege of being the National Security Adviser at the time of what the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, referred to as the worst security and defence review of all time, in 2010. It ran alongside a comprehensive spending review. It is an inevitable law of government that strategic decisions have to be taken in light of the resources available, otherwise you make a strategy and totally fail to fund it, which does not help you either. I would defend that 2010 review. As noble Lords will remember, it inherited a large gap in the programme for the Ministry of Defence, and tried to bring the programme and the defence budget back together. One of the legacies of that most awful defence review ever will be our two aircraft carriers and the F35s on them, which will restore a degree of clout to British defence policy.