Civil Preparedness for War

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Monday 20th April 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, gave me a copy of his Salisbury speech last week. I want to quote the final sentence because, in some ways, that speech was a cry of despair that nobody has yet taken seriously the strategic defence review. He said:

“Eighteen months ago, a national conversation about defence was promised by the new government. It is about time to get it started”.


I was very struck when I read the SDR by what a radical set of ideas it presents. It proposes the remobilisation of people throughout the United Kingdom. It also proposes a home defence programme and a new home defence force. A lot of it has to be done at the local level. A joined-up Government would not at the same time have been pushing through a complete restructuring of local government to remove local government to a further distance away from ordinary people, in which there will be lower-level councils representing half a million people, which is slightly larger than the population of Iceland. That is not local mobilisation; it is not even really local government.

What we now need, clearly, is political leadership and money. What I am hearing from those who have already spoken is that we have a political culture that encourages all political parties to attack each other and not to co-operate with each other. We have to change that. It is also a political culture in which anyone who says that we ought to raise spending rather, and that we should perhaps under the current emergency raise taxes, will bring down the wrath of the Daily Mail, the Telegraph and everyone else upon them. Political leadership requires you to change the political agenda and to call for the sort of money which is going to have to be spent on home defence as much as on reviving our ability to operate outside the home territory and home waters. So, there is a huge amount to be done, and it is extraordinarily ambitious.

If I may end, I will quote what the Prime Minister said to Parliament last February, that we should

“use this to renew the social contract of our nation—the rights and responsibilities that we owe one another”.—[Official Report, Commons, 25/2/25; col. 634.]

I agree with him. I only wish he had done more to make people aware that this is what we need, and to try to create the sort of atmosphere in which we co-operate more with each other.