Strategic Defence Review Debate - House of Lords
Note: I post below my speech of 18 July in the House of Lords on Britain’s Strategic Defence Review. (The section in brackets was left out due to pressure of time. Backbenchers were allowed 5 minutes each). I was the only one of 39 speakers to have any substantial criticisms of the Review. The near unanimous tone was one of approbation for the Review’s ‘call to arms’.
Lord Robertson, one of the three authors of the Review, set the scene in his opening speech:
‘The brutal, full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Putin’s Russia three years ago was a savage wake-up call for all of us………..Putin is now a threat not just to Ukraine but to the whole of western Europe’.
Lord Soames, warned of the dangers facing the UK in language suitable for the grandson of Winston Churchill: :’our communications networks are being hacked; our social media is flooded with disinformation; our free elections are targeted; our undersea cables are cut; our military bases are buzzed by drones; our infrastructure has been sabotaged; assassinations have been carried out on British soil; financial and media companies are regularly blacked out; and bombs have been placed on cargo flights’. Civil defence must train millions in how to respond to such attacks.
This is my speech:
I have a long-standing respect for Lord Robertson. In the early 2000s, we were both engaged in trying to build better relations with Putin’s Russia—he as chair of the NATO-Russia Council and myself as founder of the UK-Russia round table, whose efforts were then openly encouraged by the Prime Minister, Tony Blair. Since then, our paths have diverged. I have huge reservations about the report that Lord Robertson so ably presented earlier—mainly because I believe that it greatly exaggerates the threats that we actually face.
I am perhaps the only person in the House who takes this view, but I am happy that complete unanimity is not a requirement of membership of our august assembly. On one thing we can all agree—that we should spend more on our own defence, if only because the United States is no longer a reliable guarantee of our security. However, this salutary prudential note is overwhelmed by the report’s concentration on the need to guard against a supposedly imminent and potentially lethal Russian danger. The SDR states:
“Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 … irrefutably demonstrated … the threat, with state-on-state war returning to Europe”.
It goes on to say that the UK and its allies are “under daily attack” from Russia—note that word “daily”—
“with aggressive acts—from espionage to cyber-attack and information manipulation”.
We are told that Russia has demonstrated
“its willingness to use military force, inflict harm on civilians, and threaten the use of nuclear weapons to achieve its goals”.
The conclusion from all this is that Britain must rearm to deter and, if necessary, “fight and win” a war against Russia. As Mark Rutte, NATO’s Secretary-General, put it, the British had better rearm or “learn to speak Russian”.
This view of the matter is wildly overwrought.
The report then argues that, since Russia has intentionally blurred
“the lines between nuclear, conventional” and sub-state warfare, an integrated British response should combine both conventional and hybrid forms of war preparation.
So great stress is placed on the need for a resilient home defence to guard against “espionage, political interference, sabotage, assassination and poisoning, electoral interference, disinformation, propaganda, and Intellectual Property theft”—
all those weapons daily used by our adversaries!
To my mind, the tone is dangerously over the top. Let me point to two specific defects. First, the SDR wants to prepare the UK for “high-intensity, protracted war”, but it says nothing about its possible duration. The Cold War ended with détente, but there is no peaceful endgame in these pages, only a continuous state of armed alertness. As the the Bishop of Bristol asked: where is the peace strategy?
Secondly, to keep the UK in a constant state of war alertness requires, as Prime Minister Keir Starmer has frankly admitted, a radical “shift in mindset”, a transformation of culture and the eradication of unacceptable behaviour—in short, acceptance of defence and security as the “organising principle of government”. Have the authors of the SDR stopped to consider the Orwellian implications of gearing up the nation for permanent war preparation?
[None of this is to deny that we have to take precautions against the possibility of a pullout and Russian dirty tricks. But this is a fast cry fro proposing, as the SDR does, a national mobilisation in face of an existential Russian threat]
The SDR rightly draws attention to the increased, and often subterranean, threats of harm opened up by rapidly accelerating technological innovation. But I draw the opposite conclusion: the multiplication of technological threats provides a compelling argument, not for a nuclear or an AI arms race, but for global co-operation to limit the malign use of technology. It is the joint responsibility of leaders of all the great powers to act as adults and not as children playing around with their lethal toys. It is the duty of those with the greatest power—for good or ill—to behave in such a way as to maximise the chance of a peaceful future for us all.
An excellent speech, whose brevity merely adds to its force.
The nonsense about Russia is unfathomably foolish, and makes me deeply ashamed of being British. Having to learn Russian, for example. Even if Germany had conquered Britain (see, for example, Len Deighton's novel "SS-GB") there would have been no attempt to make British people speak German. There are advantages to an occupying power in speaking a language that the locals do not understand.
Whereas Russia has never attacked either Britain or the USA - on the contrary, fighting alongside them in several major wars - Britain and the USA have attacked Russia several times, invaded it, and killed hundreds of thousands of Russians in the Crimean War and after WW1. In the 1950s the US government had detailed plans for a preemptive nuclear attack on the USSR and China, which - mercifully - President Eisenhower vetoed. And since 2014 at the latest, both the UK and the USA have conducted active military operations against Russia in and around Ukraine, including drone strikes against civilian and military targets deep inside Russia. By all usual criteria, the UK and the USA have been at war against Russia since 2022, if not before.
The main reason for dismissing all talk of a Russian threat is that neither ordinary Russians nor their government believe that the UK matters. It is like an annoying buzzing insect that is best avoided. The only conceivable reason that Russia might have for attacking the UK is the latter's possession of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. (Unlike Russia, neither the UK nor the USA has disposed of its chemical weapons, and both are actively working on biological weapons. In Ukraine, for instance). If nuclear weapons are launched against Russia by the UK, Russia would have to retaliate. And half a dozen Sarmats (for instance) would suffice to render the UK largely unihabitable. It would take less than an hour.
'...our communications networks are being hacked; our social media is flooded with disinformation; our free elections are targeted; our undersea cables are cut; our military bases are buzzed by drones; our infrastructure has been sabotaged; assassinations have been carried out on British soil; financial and media companies are regularly blacked out; and bombs have been placed on cargo flights’.
And that's just what the Americans have been doing.