King’s Speech

Lord Walney Excerpts

Wednesday 15th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Walney (CB)]

My Lords, in adding my welcome to the Minister to his post and congratulating the noble Lords, Lord Young and Lord Roberts, on their maiden speeches, I particularly praise the latter for the moral clarity that he showed in his contribution at the end in making what to my mind is an irrefutable case about calling on Israel to simply lay down its weapons and agree to a ceasefire in the face of the genocidal attack that was perpetrated on it. Like many Members of this House, I saw for the first time the unfiltered footage that was shown by all-party groups here, with the support of the Israeli embassy. It is an unspeakable evil.

We have heard a number of important contributions about the need for the UK to retain its capacity to be a force for good, as the noble Lord, Lord Mountevans, put it. Often, those contributions focus on the need for continued investment in our defensive capability. I absolutely endorse that; 2.5% of spending may well not be close to sufficient for the scale of the challenge faced by the UK and its allies.

Equally important is the need for moral clarity and resolve in the face of the clear evil that we saw. I thought the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, was powerful in her contribution when she talked about the need for Israel to follow international law, but there is a huge danger for the UK and the West to be myopic in their focus when they talk about the need to follow international law and blame Israel for the situation, when it is of course Hamas that has embedded itself in hospitals, deliberately targets civilians, deprives its citizens of fuel so that it can fuel its rockets and tries to manipulate the international media, with the help of Iran, through disinformation on a scale that all too often gets through. Too often our focus is on Israel alone. If we allowed ourselves to go down that route as a country—which, to their great, both the Government and Keir Starmer, the Leader of the Opposition, have ensured that the Government and the Opposition have not—we would become part of the problem.

I was in the other place with the soon-to-be Lord Cameron in 2013, at the time of the disastrous failure to support limited military action in Syria as a response to Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons— I was one of only four Labour MPs who refused to follow my then leader, who pulled support from the Government at the last minute. That was a reprehensible act by Ed Miliband, but the Government bore a significant amount of responsibility for failing to make the case for action in Parliament and to the public.

So, in welcoming the future Lord Cameron to this place and his role as Foreign Secretary, I say that it is of paramount importance that he has learned from that failure, because the world is getting more and more challenged, and the need for continued investment will remain, as will the need to stay the course in Ukraine and other conflicts. That ultimately requires public support and, as a country, as a Government and in this place, we have not taken that argument out to the public to the level we need to now and in the period ahead. So I hope that he will be part of doing that as Foreign Secretary in the future.