Brexit: Armed Forces and Diplomatic Service

Lord Spicer Excerpts

Thursday 8th December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Spicer (Con)]

My Lords, it has become almost a cliché to say there are tremendous similarities between the period leading up to the Second World War and the present time: economic instability; a dictator wanting to distract his own countrymen by foreign adventure, practising his tactics, strategy and his new arms in somebody else’s civil war; talk of minorities of his country, which is a potential aggressor, living in countries surrounding it; even a British tennis champion striding the world on both occasions. As with all clichés, this is not the only part of the story. As I understand it, there is no massed army on the borders of Russia waiting not only to invade but to occupy and subjugate surrounding countries. What there is is a great deal of mutual fear and of lack of confidence in oneself on both sides. As my noble friend Lord Sterling mentioned, this can itself be dangerous and lead to war by default. The analogy might well be with the First World War, perhaps, rather than the Second World War.

I will give two simple anecdotes as to what I am trying to get at. The first concerns a BBC film of a British warplane intercepting a Russian plane in British airspace—an event that, as I have just learned from a letter from my noble friend the Minister of 24 November, occurs regularly. This particular film not only showed the images, but you heard the voice of the British pilot, which went something like, “Good evening, gentlemen. I represent Her Majesty’s Government and on behalf of Her Majesty’s Government I have to tell you that if you don’t turn around in half a minute, I’m going to shoot you down”. Apparently even at the height of the Cold War we said something slightly different—something like, “Good evening. We represent Her Majesty’s Government. It looks as if you’re a bit off piste, and it would give us great honour to escort you back to your normal course”. In this particular anecdote, the temperature has undoubtedly increased enormously.

The second anecdote I wanted to refer to concerns an admiral I met recently, who was very taxed by the fact that four Russian warships got out of “their sea”, as he called it, the Black Sea, came into “our sea”, the Mediterranean Sea, and pointed their guns at our ships. He had to point his guns at their ships. This was a nasty moment all round. The point he was making was that it is not just the Royal Air Force that is constantly having to intercept Russian planes. We come very close to some nasty occurrence. Turkey did shoot down a Russian plane, just before the British anecdote I referred to.

There is a real danger of mutual fear and a mutual sense of not being up to the job. The Russians are fearful of their economy being the problem; on our side is the fear that we cannot keep up with Russian armament. That is serious. There is a very clear antidote to it. In our case in the West, we have to rearm. What my noble friend Lord Hamilton said about NATO is absolutely right and what has been said before was wrong: we have to have a strong NATO and to rely on the Americans. If one really looks between the lines, the new President-elect is really saying that Europe is not playing its part. My noble friend is absolutely right when he said that if we argue for a muddled chain of command, with the European Union being muddled with NATO, we really are in for a mess.

We have to look strong in the West. We would then be in a position, for instance, to take away the embargo on the Russian economy. The other side of the coin is that we should allow it to have back its self-esteem. When we come to a point where the two sides are looking each other in the eye from a position of self-confidence, we will then have some hope of continued peace.