NATO and International Security

Wayne David Excerpts

Thursday 19th May 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mr Wallace]

Yes, maybe it was. But let us not forget that NATO is a nuclear alliance. There is a danger that the people of Scotland will pick up the slight contradiction that the SNP, which campaigned to rid Scotland of the deterrent that has kept the whole United Kingdom safe for more than 50 years, is campaigning to join a nuclear alliance. In that nuclear alliance, it is Britain’s deterrent that is effectively allocated to NATO. If the SNP got its way, it would be ironic if its wholehearted support for NATO meant that it was reliant on an English nuclear deterrent.

[Wayne David (Caerphilly) (Lab)]

And Welsh!

[Mr Wallace]

And Welsh.

I welcome the close working and clear support from the Labour party on Ukraine and NATO over the past few months. I noticed the article in The Times today by the shadow Defence Secretary, the right hon. Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey), arguing for the Opposition to have a greater involvement in the process of refining the strategic concept for the next 10 years.

You know as well as anyone, Mr Deputy Speaker, that I am always keen to be inclusive and above partisan politics. I am happy to discuss with Opposition Front Benchers the strategic concept as it develops over the next few weeks and months. I will, however, add that NATO has mechanisms to contribute to such decisions, not least the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, on which a number of hon. Members serve—there are six Labour Members on it. In both the Opposition and the Government, we do not pay enough attention to our Members who serve on committees abroad. The assembly is often an afterthought, when in fact it should be embraced wholly. It can work both ways, and we can learn what people are thinking in NATO—for example, when it comes to solving the Turkish issue, we should be using the members of the assembly as much as ministerial contacts.

It is not always the case that Opposition parties are so supportive of NATO. Only a few years ago, the previous leader of the Opposition was a man whose aim was to disband NATO. There is also an individual on the Labour Front Bench who recently said that he hoped Russia would successfully hack the nuclear deterrent in the United Kingdom. I know that the right hon. Member for Wentworth and Dearne does not share those motives or views, but we should remind ourselves that not everybody, all of the time, agrees with our positions. Every party is free to change its position on alliances such as NATO, as have the SNP and others, although a certain Member for Islington is, I think, still on a different track.

NATO’s upcoming summit in Madrid, from 28 to 30 June, is an opportunity to address the new strategic reality and agree abiding changes to our deterrence and defence posture in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Ours aims at the meeting will be straightforward: to maintain NATO’s momentum; to ensure its forces are credible and combat capable in the east; to expand the alliance’s forward presence from a trip-wire approach to a more effective model based on well-equipped, in-place forces supported by persistent, rapidly scalable forces from elsewhere; and to strengthen neighbouring countries and the global partnerships that underpin freedom and democracy. Critically, NATO nations will be looking to agree our new strategic concept, which will set the direction of the alliance for the next decade.

For more than seven decades NATO has protected our way of life and the democracy, justice and freedom that go to the heart of who we are. But peace must be defended in every generation, and as we confront a dangerous new reality in which those values and the international system that underpins them come under sustained assault, it is vital that the alliance is stronger and more united than ever before. I know that that desire is shared by Members on both sides of the House, and they should rest assured that Britain will do all in its power to make sure that NATO keeps delivering by upgrading its defence and deterrence, and will help it adapt to face the 21st-century threat, making sure it remains, as it has for nearly three quarters of a century, the greatest bastion of our security and the greatest guarantor of our peace.

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[John Healey]

I am not sure whether the right hon. Gentleman means to catch your eye, Mr Deputy Speaker, but he makes several important points. His last point, on low tech, is right. In many ways, high tech can sometimes become low-tech weaponry. It is easy to conceive that, in the wrong hands, an unmanned aerial vehicle or drone could almost be a flying car bomb.

It is important that we continue to invest in and develop high-tech systems, which give us the edge and some of the deterrent effect we require. Like the right hon. Gentleman, one of the lessons I take from Ukraine is that, in the reality of battle, conflict and confrontation, we need “now tech” and not just high tech. That is one of the flaws in the procurement system, as the hon. Member for Basildon and Billericay (Mr Baron) said in his intervention.

[Wayne David]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that we all have to deal with the difficulty of the Russians’ apparent willingness, in certain circumstances, to use theatre nuclear weapons?

[John Healey]

Indeed, there is certainly a willingness to threaten to use such weapons. The escalation of President Putin’s rhetoric at times in this conflict has been reckless. That requires responsible leaders in the western alliance to be careful, measured and consistent about the rhetoric we use. That has not always been what we have seen from some of our Ministers. It also requires us to be implacably clear that any use of such weaponry would be met with a strong, special response and that the universal opprobrium that would befall Russia must make a contemplation of this, even by those in the Kremlin, even in circumstances in which they may feel they are losing ground and losing the conflict, unthinkable.

I am going to press on, because many other Members much more expert than I want to contribute to this debate. Whatever the points the Secretary of State has made and I have made so far, NATO’s new strategic concept has to be a major diplomatic agreement on geostrategic goals first and a plan for force generation, doctrine deployment and procurement second. The NATO 2030 plan must spell out how we are going to contain Putin, what forces we will generate, what new technologies we will accelerate and how we will strengthen our homeland societies. It must set out also a strategy for our open democratic societies to deal with China, which the 2030 reflection group now rightly described as

“a full-spectrum systemic rival, rather than a purely economic player or an only Asia-focused security actor.”

As the reflection group prepared NATO for these decisions, it said:

“The line between civilians and combatants is being blurred”.

So we want the alliance to set democratic resilience as a new core task for NATO when its member nations meet in Madrid next month.

We cannot go far online without finding someone to tell us that western democracies are just as bad or even worse than Moscow or Beijing. Putin spends billions a year trying to divide and degrade our democracies. We have seen that in things ranging from meddling in elections to misinformation about covid and to criminal corruption. The waning belief in our own values has perhaps become the west’s Achilles heel. Just as we defend against attacks from beyond our borders, so we must respond to attacks within them, too. The NATO Parliamentary Assembly’s recommendations for this new strategic concept stress also the central importance of resilience in our democracies and our societies. It is the way in which we can both counter hybrid warfare and shore up support for our defence commitments.

Within days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Chancellor Scholz declared it

“a watershed in the history of our continent.”

He overturned decades-long German defence policy and boosted defence spending by €100 billion. This is now day 85 and the Government have taken no action to reboot our own UK defence plans. Instead, we are told by Defence Ministers that

“the invasion of Ukraine has proved the integrated review right.”—[Official Report, 11 May 2022; Vol. 714, c. 136.]

Well, the integrated review was billed as a “threats-led” strategy. It has a prominent section on the Indo-Pacific, yet no section on Europe. It confirms that threats to Britain are increasing, yet it cuts the Army by a further 10,000 troops. It makes no mention of a Taliban takeover in Afghanistan or a Russian invasion of Ukraine. I say to the Defence Secretary that all democracies must respond to the newly realised threats to national and European security. That is why we are arguing that he and the Government must rewrite the flaws in the integrated review, review defence spending, reform defence procurement, rethink those Army cuts and reinvigorate UK leadership in NATO.

In the run-up to Madrid, 30 or—I hope—32 democracies and their civil societies will rightly demand a say in the priorities that are set for NATO for the next decade. As the Opposition party that intends to govern Britain in the near future, so do we—yet it is a closed process, confined to Governments. It is closed to the public and closed to non-governing parties, despite the fact that national elections are due within two years in 19 out of the 30 NATO countries. That is why I ask the Government to open up the UK process to create a common British vision for NATO. I welcome the Secretary of State’s offer, in response, to discuss the strategic concept with us as it develops, but I urge him to go further and to lay out for the public, in this House, the UK’s view of NATO’s strategic goals and military priorities, as well as the contribution that Britain will make to our collective defence. I want the UK to drive the debates as NATO gives a greater focus to defence, alongside deterrence and diplomacy. I want UK leadership in NATO to anticipate areas of future Russian aggression, to respond as the Arctic opens up, to settle the alliance’s relationship with the EU and to challenge and compete with China.

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[Wayne David (Caerphilly) (Lab)]

Yesterday afternoon, I had the privilege to chair a fascinating discussion with Members of both Houses through the auspices of the British group of the Inter-Parliamentary Union. We also had with us the British ambassadors to Poland and Ukraine. A number of things came across very clearly in that discussion.

First, it was pretty clear to the participants that the war in Ukraine will not be over quickly. That has already been said by my right hon. Friend the Member for North Durham (Mr Jones). The fundamental challenge from Vladimir Putin is not just to Ukraine, but to the entire rules-based international order and its significance cannot be underestimated. People are unclear what Putin’s objectives may be, but it seems highly likely that his objective really is to defeat Ukraine and to occupy, by hook or by crook, in whatever timescale is necessary, the entire country. The implications of that are very serious and they are implications for us all.

Of immediate concern is what may be happening in the south of Ukraine, with Russia’s slow but steady advance towards Odesa and then a possible link up with Transnistria, which has made a kind of unilateral declaration of independence at the behest of the Russians. Destabilisation would follow for Moldova as a whole, with implications for NATO and the European Union. These are big issues that we have to consider carefully and soberly, and—let us be honest—over a significant period of time.

It is also very clear that it is not too early for us to learn some lessons about what has happened and what is happening as we speak. The lessons have already been learned in Finland and Sweden. They have put forward their applications for membership of NATO. I am sure, despite the reservations expressed by Turkey, that they will be accepted—something we all must welcome.

A number of countries are rebooting their financial commitments to defence. In particular, Germany, as we have heard, is reorientating the whole scope of its economic development away from dependence on Russian energy to more self-sufficiency and a greater inclination towards the west rather than the east. Significantly—this is a pretty profound change for Germany—it has committed to a €100 billion increase to its defence budget, in the current financial situation in Germany. It has also committed itself to increasing its defence budget from 2022 to 2% of GDP. What is also significant is not just those pretty bold and emphatic statements, but the fact that there is in Germany cross-party consensus to a large extent about the need to do that. That underlines that we, too, accept that a fundamental realignment of foreign policy is taking place, which we must engage in, and we must be fully aware of its implications.

For the United Kingdom, too, there are very important issues that we must get to grips with very soon. One of the most important is that the cuts to our armed forces, in particular the Army, have to be reversed. Quite frankly, it is indefensible that the Government are still entertaining the idea of reducing the size of the British Army by 10,000; in the present context, such a reduction is ridiculous. As the Defence Committee has been saying consistently for some time, there also needs to be a consistent, strategic increase in the moneys we allocate to defence, and I believe that 3% should be the absolute minimum for our future commitments.

We also need to set in train a fundamental sorting out of our defence procurement process. Okay, it has been a problem for a long time, and fingers can be pointed in a whole host of directions, but given the importance of defence procurement it really does need to be sorted out once and for all. A cornerstone of any new strategy must be the development of sovereign capability; we must have a proper, well-thought-out, well-structured and strategic industrial strategy for developing the defence capability of this country, and that must be based on our indigenous entrepreneurship, workforce and talents.

A number of Members have referred to the integrated review, and it is clearly important. The tilt to the east, which has been referred to by many Members, is all well and good, and I understand that we must not turn a blind eye to what is happening with China—of course we should not; that is a long-term, possibly real threat. However, we must recognise that the priority here and now is what is being imposed by Russia, and our alliance with our allies in Europe must be reinforced and deepened. That requires going beyond the debates about Brexit and so on; let us put that on one side, because it has happened—we all accept that. We really need to co-operate with our European partners, who take a like-minded view on defence matters and foreign affairs generally, so that we speak and act with our allies in the United States with one concerted, determined voice.

We need to do something else as well, although my list is by no means exhaustive. It is of critical importance long term that we make a real effort to engage with the population of this country. All too often it has been easy for people to see defence as being in one place and the population’s priorities as being somewhere else. We must find a way to ensure consistently and over a long period—as they have in the Scandinavian countries and in Sweden in particular—that everybody understands that the country as a whole has a stake in its own defence. We need to have a discussion on that—cross-party if necessary—to make sure that that begins to happen in the United Kingdom. In other words, we need to develop national unity of purpose and the events in Ukraine make that an absolute necessity.

To conclude, it is well worth going back to what Ernie Bevin, the United Kingdom’s Labour Foreign Secretary, said in May 1949. He said that we support NATO and that

“we shall act as custodians of peace and as determined opponents of aggression”—[Official Report, 12 May 1949; Vol. 464, c. 2022.]

That was absolutely true in 1949, but it must be true also in 2022.