European Council

Lord West of Spithead Excerpts

Monday 2nd July 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

I can certainly reassure my noble friend that we are extremely mindful, and the Prime Minister is absolutely mindful, of the importance of this issue. We are committed to avoiding a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic, as we are to maintaining the integrity of the United Kingdom. We believe that these commitments can be fulfilled through our overall future partnership, but we have also set out that there may need to be a backstop solution for the border which ensures that we do not have a hard border and protects our constitutional integrity. We have set out our proposals for that, the EU has set out its proposals, which are not acceptable, and we will continue to discuss these over the coming weeks.

[Lord West of Spithead (Lab)]

My Lords, the Statement shows breath-taking complacency about our military capability. The last Secretary of State and this one both made it very clear that there is insufficient money to meet the demands of Force 2030. The £179 billion that the Minister referred to is being achieved through efficiency savings—but it is quite clear, as people have stated, that it cannot be achieved. The letter from General Mattis, which I have seen, makes it very clear that we will no longer be the ally of choice of the United States, because of where we are going. The military is in quite a parlous state, so my question is, bearing that in mind, are we really going to be able to be part of the European Intervention Initiative and still meet our commitments to NATO?

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

We are entirely committed to NATO. Indeed, as the noble Lord will know, we have a £36 billion defence budget, which is the biggest in Europe and the second biggest in NATO. We support the European Intervention Initiative and we believe that it complements existing structures and NATO. We believe that it also supports our argument that Europe is able to co-operate in new ways on defence outside existing EU structures. We were very pleased to sign the letter of intent, with France, Germany, Spain and four other countries, around this.