Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy

Lord Ricketts Excerpts

Thursday 22nd April 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ricketts (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a strategic adviser to Lockheed Martin UK. I know how hard it is to conduct a review such as this, having co-ordinated the equivalent document in 2010. I pay tribute to Professor John Bew and to all the officials who produced it. I agree with the Minister that it is the most comprehensive survey yet of the UK’s national security challenges. It also gives a convincing analysis of a world that is fracturing into blocs and heading towards systemic competition. I welcome the confirmation that European security, NATO and Britain’s partnership with the US will, as the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, said, be at the heart of our foreign policy.

The Indo-Pacific passage turned out to be more measured than the advance hype suggested. Some increase in diplomatic activity, economic engagement and military presence makes sense, but we have to be realistic: Britain will only ever be a secondary player in Asian security. The passage on China recognises that we must treat the country both as a strategic competitor and a necessary partner on trade and climate change. I agree that that is the difficult balancing act we need to perform.

I want to underline three areas that I see as main weaknesses in the review. First, it is an impressively wide-ranging document, but it is not a strategy. The US historian John Lewis Gaddis defines strategy as

“the alignment of potentially unlimited aspirations with necessarily limited capabilities.”

This review suggests British leadership in a whole series of areas but, as the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, observed, it makes no effort to set priorities. In the 2010 and 2015 reviews, we published a prioritised list of the risks facing Britain, which at least offered some guide to resource allocation. This review is, in effect, a long laundry list of worthy goals, leaving the real choices to be made by Ministers later.

Secondly, it is not truly integrated. There is a large gap between the words of the review and the Government’s actions. This is clearest in the ambition for the UK to be a “soft power superpower”. That is a noble aim, but the problem is that the Government’s actions are undercutting it. Take development policy: DfID was a great soft power ambassador for Britain; it showed that we were practising the values we preached. Reducing the aid programme to 0.5% of a smaller GDP means making more than £4 billion of cuts from one financial year to the next. It is the speed as well as the scale of those cuts that is going to have such a disruptive impact. Since the UK already has some long-term commitments to multilateral organisations such as the World Bank, the burden will fall heaviest on the bilateral programmes in countries in desperate need, such as Yemen, Sudan, Somalia and Syria. I felt that the Foreign Secretary’s Statement yesterday disguised the extent of those cuts, but they are inevitable. They will mean stopping projects for humanitarian support, clean water, education and nutrition. Once staff are sacked it will be very difficult to get them restarted.

At the same time, the British Army is to create new Ranger battalions to train and mentor the armed forces of less advanced partners. I fear we risk cutting development spending and increasing military presence in the same regions, if not the same countries. The Minister might wish to explain how that is an integrated approach.

Thirdly and finally, in two sentences, we are proposing to work with European partners but not the EU. How can we credibly aspire to be a superpower in soft power, science and technology, reshaping the world order, if we do not have a functional relationship with the EU? We will not have a real national strategy until we can overcome this taboo.