Armed Forces Act (Continuation) Order 2017

Lord Touhig Excerpts

Tuesday 21st March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Touhig (Lab)]

My Lords, the House will note that I am not my noble friend Lord Rosser. I apologise at the outset for my part in any confusion caused to the very excellent staff who drew up the speakers list. The House will not be denied my noble friend’s comments; he will speak at the end of the debate.

Seventy years ago last month, on 24 February 1947, the British ambassador to Washington was instructed by Labour Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin to deliver a memorandum to George Marshall, the American Secretary of State. The memorandum made it clear that Britain’s economic position would no longer allow her to continue as the reservoir of financial military support to Greece and Turkey. The shockwaves it produced throughout the Truman Administration were just what Bevin wanted. He believed that, following the end of the Second World War, the United States was in Europe but not yet of it in defence terms. His memorandum forced the US Government to take a decision that they had been unwilling to make up to that time. It led to the creation of NATO, and it was a Labour Foreign Secretary who was the midwife at that birth.

Moreover, it was also Bevin who conspired with Prime Minister Clem Attlee to create Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent, against opposition from some hard-left members of the Labour Party—alas, so far as our nuclear deterrent is concerned, some things never change. The decision was taken in secret by a small Cabinet committee. Arguing that Britain should have the atomic bomb, Bevin told the committee:

“We’ve got to have this thing over here, whatever it costs. We’ve got to have the bloody Union Jack on top of it”.


Labour has always had a proud record on defence when in government. Indeed, the Defence Secretary, Michael Fallon, told The House magazine last year:

“It was the Labour Party that gave us the two most important pieces of our defence architecture today—NATO and our independent nuclear deterrent. It was the Labour Government who committed to the 2% and the Labour Government who was the founding member of NATO—every time Labour has been in Government they have taken a responsible view of defence”.


Labour in government has committed resources to the defence of Britain, which this Government have failed to do. In particular, we spent on average 2.3% of GDP when we were in office. The present Government have failed to match this, preferring instead to use creative accounting to massage the figures by including some £1 billion of pensions in the 2%. Will the Minister’s Government match my Government in this? As we urge other NATO states to spend 2%, we would have more credibility if we were genuinely spending that amount ourselves.

The SDSR 2010 was the most misnamed of government publications. In the foreword, David Cameron and Nick Clegg wrote about bringing the defence budget into balance. They meant cuts. They offered a sop by saying that defence and security would contribute to the deficit reduction on a lower scale than other departments. That document was not about our strategic defence and security; it was about cutting back on defence spending. It was a document promoted not by the Ministry of Defence but by the Treasury. It talked of reconfiguring our Armed Forces. Having worked for some time as Gordon Brown’s PPS, I know that is Treasury-speak for cuts.

Today our Army is smaller than the one we put in the field against Napoleon. The latest figures show an Army of just 75,840 personnel. The Royal Navy is reduced to 19 ships, of which six have propulsion problems and two are laid up in Portsmouth because they are short of crew as a result of spending cuts. On top of this, we have no aircraft carriers. I look forward to the Government’s response to the National Audit Office report published last week on the carriers. We have no marine patrol aircraft and there are currently only seven RAF fighter squadrons. Two of these exist only because the life of the Typhoon has been extended until 2040.

There is an overdependence on recruiting reservists. Despite millions of pounds spent on recruitment, targets for all three services have been missed. Morale is poor. Some 54% of service personnel are dissatisfied with service life. The most valuable asset that Britain’s Armed Forces have are the men and women who serve. They have had their pay frozen and their pensions reduced, and their accommodation is in need of major investment. According to the 2016 continuous attitude survey, almost half believe that the quality of their accommodation has fallen. The Armed Forces’ Pay Review Body has revealed that almost every group spoken to believed that their pay increases were unreasonable. The 2016 survey revealed that only one in three of our Armed Forces personnel believed they were valued and just one in three planned to stay as long as they possibly could.

The failings I have identified are not the responsibility of our Armed Forces, but the consequence of government policy of cuts, mismanagement and poor forecasting. Concern at the state of our Armed Forces is not the exclusive interest of this side of the House. In recent debates, Conservative, Liberal Democrat and Cross-Bench Peers have expressed their concerns.

While continuing my criticism of the Government, I want to say that the whole House values the work of the noble Earl who has constantly demonstrated his commitment to the well-being of our Armed Forces. He comes to the Dispatch Box time and again, often to defend the indefensible, which he does with such great style that he is almost convincing. Those of us who are the Government’s critics in this House have nothing but admiration for him personally and value the fact that he listens and responds. For this, we are all grateful.

The SDSR 2015 was a missed opportunity. It failed to give a vision of the future which could have given us confidence that the Government were tackling the problems that they had created in 2010. There is a strong case for revisiting SDSR 2015. A revised SDSR would afford the opportunity to look afresh at Britain’s position in the world. We, on this side, happen to believe that defence and foreign policy are two sides of the same coin. The SDSR 2015 should have been based on our key foreign policy objectives. It was not. These are bound to be revised now, as a result of Brexit, and this will impact on defence. If the Government shared that view, we would not have the Foreign Secretary going around the Middle East proclaiming:

“Britain is back East of Suez”,


and even announcing a military spend of £3 billion over the next 10 years—all before the Ministry of Defence has published its Gulf strategy.

We cannot have major foreign and defence policy decisions made on the wing. Of course we have a role to play in the Middle East, but we have interests in the Far East and around the globe. We are a maritime trading nation. Keeping open the world’s shipping lanes and being able to protect and defend our global interests are essential. We are—and remain—a world power, one with a nuclear capability available to deter and protect. If we have clear foreign policy objectives, linked to defence, we can answer the question: what do we want our Armed Forces to be capable of doing? It is not rocket science. It is about asking the basic, obvious questions about what we want from our Armed Forces.

My noble friend Lord Robertson of Port Ellen most skilfully set out how such tasks could be approached. In a speech in 2015 about the NATO objective of spending 2% on defence, he said that,

“the 2% only makes sense if it is spent on the right things—deployable troops, precision weapons, logistics and specialist people”.

This simple and basic approach sums up what needs to be done. The SDSR 2015 could have set out those objectives clearly, made provision for the resourcing and funding and included the defence-industrial strategy. Perhaps I may commend this booklet, A Benefit, Not a Burden, which clearly sets out the case for the strategic value of Britain having a defence-industrial strategy. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Sterling, for drawing my attention to it. In this debate, I look forward to listening to and learning from the noble Lord, Lord Levene, whom I suspect might have a different view.

We face challenges not known by previous generations. Challenges posed by cyber have the capacity to change warfare into something we have never known or imagined. The Government are right to invest in cyber, but we must be willing to use it in an offensive, as well as defensive, mode if we are determined to deter. The other threat is from terrorist groups such as ISIL, which would turn high streets anywhere into a war zone. Some of the most evil and barbaric acts witnessed by humanity have been carried out by religious extremists who are in fact betraying the beauty of their faith.

We face a resurgent Russia, which has spent billions modernising its forces. We face an economically ambitious China, making dubious territorial claims in the South China Sea and increasing defence spending, and we face the evil regime in North Korea, which enslaves its people and threatens the peace of the region. We face the crisis of failed states such as Libya and Syria and the awful consequences of civil war, which has forced millions to flee and try to get to Europe.

NATO remains the bedrock of our defence, and I hope that at the May summit, Britain will make it clear to President Trump that, while we agree with him that all states should spend 2% of GDP on defence, NATO is not obsolete, irrelevant or out of date, as he said during his election campaign.

The first duty of the British Government is the care and welfare of our people, and at the heart of that is our defence. For that reason, we have no hesitation today in supporting the Armed Forces Act (Continuation) Order, to which the noble Earl referred in opening the debate.

Coming full circle, I return to Ernest Bevin. His shock tactics led to the creation of NATO, but it also led directly to the Truman doctrine of 12 March 1947. For me, the most powerful part of the President’s statement remains true today. He said that,

“totalitarian regimes imposed on free peoples, by direct or indirect aggression, undermine the foundation of international peace”.

The world is no safer today than it was in 1947, and we must therefore be ever vigilant.