Action Against Houthi Maritime Attacks

Lord West of Spithead Excerpts

Wednesday 24th January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Craig of Radley (CB)]

My Lords—

[Lord West of Spithead (Lab)]

My Lords—

[Viscount Stansgate (Lab)]

My Lords—

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, the noble and gallant Lord is quite right that the strikes were launched in that way by, in this case, four Royal Air Force Typhoons, supported by a pair of Voyager tankers. I repeat what I said: the Ministry of Defence has very much in mind the safeguarding of our assets and British nationals and British forces right across the region, and that is under constant review.

[Lord West of Spithead (Lab)]

My Lords, the large-scale attack we made first of all was never going to stop the Houthis making their attacks, as the Minister said; it was going to degrade only. Indeed, post then, the Americans have made a number of strikes in retaliation when weapons have been fired at them. The attack we are talking about now will hopefully degrade the capabilities of the Houthis to attack innocent shipping even more. I fear that the shipping companies seem to be showing a huge reluctance to think about getting back in the Red Sea, even though the Houthis have been degraded, and I can understand that. Therefore, this is likely to be quite a long, ongoing operation. It is quite right that we are enacting the rules of self-defence, and it is very good if you can do that immediately. In other words, when someone fires something from the shore at you, you hit where they fired at you from. That is why the Americans have been making these responses. One of our problems is that our aircraft are attacking from Cyprus, as the noble and gallant Lord said, several thousand miles away from this operation. Is the Minister surprised that we have not put an aircraft carrier there, because one could then respond immediately to these things and put that much more pressure on their ability to fire weapons at us? Having said all that, it is absolutely right what we are doing: freedom of navigation is so crucial to our nation.

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, I agree with much that the noble Lord said. We are working in a coalition here. The Prosperity Guardian operation involves 21 nations plus ourselves. The strikes, the response, the action that was taken which we are talking to, took place with the support of Bahrain, Canada, the Netherlands and Australia. This is an international response to unlawful action at sea. We always review deployment of our assets, but, for the moment, the British Government believe that the forces that the coalition has available are sufficient to deal with the threat that is currently presented.