Strategic Defence Review 2025

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Friday 18th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I will focus on two themes in the SDR: the commitment to “NATO first”, and the concept of “whole-of-society” defence and security. NATO first now means sharing European leadership within NATO to keep the US committed, not standing half-in and half-out of Europe through our beloved special relationship with the United States. The UK’s security ties with the USA are vital, but we face an increasingly transactional, and not particularly friendly, US Administration.

I spent nearly four years in the USA in the 1960s, studying government, international politics and defence. I was taught partly by professors who had been born in central Europe. In Washington, I met politicians and policymakers who had spent the war in what I now realise was Bletchley Park, or fighting in the allied armies across France or through Italy. They had deep affection for Britain and for European security. But that generation, most of whom had grown up on America’s eastern seaboard, died long ago. Policymakers we meet now more often come from America’s west coast, or Texas, Arizona or Florida—they look across the Pacific or south to Latin America. There is no special bond with Britain: they want to know how we can be useful and how much we are contributing to Europe’s defence.

NATO’s future rests on European leadership, which has to come from the closest possible co-operation between the UK, France and Germany. I welcome the latest UK-German treaty, building on growing UK-France co-operation, but we cannot achieve all we want through what is inelegantly called in the SDR “minilateralism”. We must integrate back into European multilateralism—the EU as well as NATO.

Putting NATO first also means putting second the dreams of again becoming the United States’ military partner in the Indian Ocean and South China Sea. The SDR bluntly states in chapter 5:

“Finite resources mean the UK cannot be everything to everyone”.


A previous Labour Government withdrew from east of Suez 59 years ago. Boris Johnson dreamed that we could leave Europe and be a global power again; and I have observed in the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, a certain nostalgia for naval deployments in the South China Sea, as well as for the affectionate special relationship of the past.

The SDR clearly states:

“A renewed focus on home defence and resilience is vital to modern deterrence”.


Its first priority defence role is indeed to defend, protect and enhance the resilience of the UK, including reviving civil defence and improving the resilience of our critical national infrastructure. The concept of a “whole-of-society response” to the multiple threats we now face—from transnational crime and terrorism, pandemics and climate change, as well as state threats—requires engaging with the wider British public, local government, voluntary groups and newly trained reserve bodies.

I looked at the UK Government Resilience Action Plan to learn how well this has been integrated with the SDR, and I found it very disappointing. A whole-of-society response has to grow from the ground up, rather than being imposed from the top down. The resilience action plan is thin on how to mobilise civil society and says almost nothing about the value and role of local government. Meanwhile, the Government have just published their English devolution Bill, which takes power from local government and gives it to elected mayors remote from Britain’s towns, villages and local communities.

As to mobilising civil society to respond to our insecure environment, we are promised only a “national conversation”. In terms of mobilising the more public spirited and patriotic, the review cautiously suggests that

“it will become necessary to increase the UK’s Active Reserve forces by at least 20%”—

I think that is about 10,000 soldiers—

“when funding allows, most likely in the 2030s”.

There is a great deal more work to be done here to engage the public in improving our national security and resilience. So far, it looks to me much more like the traditional Labour assumption that things are best left to the experts to organise a passive society, rather than the liberal view that democracy and security are guaranteed best by encouraging all citizens to play an active part in the common endeavour in communities throughout the country.