Speech in Lords on war and peace

There is no more important topic; the world would be a much better place if there could be peace in places today torn by war, with the damage, destruction, and the violence that brings. I agree with a lot of what the noble Lord said about the opportunities for the United Kingdom with our great diplomatic skills, the reach of our diplomatic service, the experience we have gained over many decades and centuries of intervening around the world and, where we could, trying to find resolution of conflict, and with our own experiences bringing peace out of the very difficult situation in Northern Ireland. But, as the noble Lord referred to at the end, one of the reasons the United Kingdom does have a role in the world and is taken seriously is that we have serious and important defence forces. It is most important that they are used with a view to promoting peace where we are intervening, or to right wrongs that can be righted relatively easily by the judicious use of force. That has not always been true in the interventions that we and our NATO allies have made in recent decades in different parts of the world.

I hope the Government, as they go through a rather long defence review and discussion about how best to spend the money that is clearly needed, will have at the forefront of their mind how those forces can be used to deter violence and the outbreak of new conflicts, and how they can be used for expeditionary forces that can make timely interventions where necessary, particularly where those interventions can help create a peace, or where they are needed to police a peace which has been brought about by diplomatic process.

I am sure all of us agree that talking and diplomatic compromise are usually better than conflict extending into aggressive war, and that we would all agree that you only get a war when diplomacy and politics have failed. We all here believe that politics, particularly democratic politics, should be a benign force channelling the conflicts and disagreements into words and arguments and resolving them by compromise or votes. But that will not always be possible in different parts of the world, and that is why we need to choose to spend our money on defence wisely, and to see how we can best help the world through those places where we have power: through the United Nations, through our senior membership of NATO and through the Commonwealth and all the associations that brings.

Looking at defence priorities, it is most important that the Government do not forget that the main priority is to be able to defend these islands and to show that these islands are so well defended that they would be a very hostile environment should any external force wish to intervene. That must mean strengthening our sea forces and our ability to respond to drone and missile attack, and to know how to police our waters when we see possible hostile powers looking enviously at our cables and pipes that are such an important part of our economic progress. So, will the Government please make sure that that is all beefed up and the best modern technology adopted?

When it comes to expeditionary force, we have in the past shown that we have that expeditionary capability, and at times it has been very successful. The Falklands are only free today, and the people of the Falklands are only safe in their wish to be British, because we had enough expeditionary force on our own to drive out the Argentinian invader and restore order. It is most important that we now keep enough force available in case anybody has changed their minds in Argentina about what they might wish to do to try to gain control of islands that are clearly British. British forces were also very successful alongside the American allies leading the operation when Kuwait was liberated, which was a very good example of a sharp use of overwhelming force to right a very obvious wrong where a country had been badly invaded.

Today we have two very big conflicts, which are damaging in themselves—particularly damaging for those involved with them, with too many deaths and too much destruction of property—but also very damaging to the rest of us economically, and because we are morally offended by how they originated. Those are the conflicts in Ukraine and in the Middle East.

We need to hear from the Government a bit more about how they wish to proceed. If we take the case of Ukraine, the war has dragged on for so long and we keep Prime Ministers for such little time that there have now been five United Kingdom Prime Ministers who have had to respond to the difficult situation in Ukraine. They have shown complete unity of understanding and purpose, they have all condemned the Russian invasion and the atrocities that have resulted and they have all wished to offer sensible support to the very brave Ukrainians defending their country. But they have all been very clear that we are not going to declare war on Russia, commit British forces or drag NATO into a conflict with Russia. That would greatly worsen the position and is much against everybody’s interests, including those of the Ukrainians, because it would intensify the exchange of barbarity with all the extra firepower it would bring to the conflict.

That means that we in the West have a dilemma: we are not going to offer a military coalition to beat the Russians, and the Ukrainians, fighting very bravely, have not yet been able to evict the Russians from their territory. I would be interested to know what the latest government thinking is about when and if there is going to be any chance for talking to replace war-fighting and for the two belligerents to be brought to the table in a way that might produce some kind of diplomatic answer. It is not obvious how you do it. President Trump has been much criticised for trying to do it; people thought he was being too kind to Russia, which is not something that people want. It would be interesting to know what the United Kingdom and the European Union position on all this is, and whether there is any way through. I think we all feel that five years of war is excessive and that the awful problems it is creating for the Ukrainian people are unacceptable, difficult though it is to see a way out.

In the case of the Middle East, the United Kingdom does not have a big role to play because it appears that we do not really have serious forces to offer to try to police the sea-lanes and to deal with some of the attacks on our allies in the Gulf. America has the near monopoly of power that can be committed to that, and in that sense it is America’s war. We all rest upon what happens in the exchanges between the President of the United States of America and those now leading Iran.

I would be interested to know whether the Government feel there is anything we can do by way of helping our allies in the Gulf, and whether they can see any way forward, which is more likely to be led by local interests there, as the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, very sensibly said. We too are friends of the UAE, Qatar and so forth—the places most likely to be able to help. It would be good if we could get our defence forces into a shape where we could play a more significant role in trying to help the restoration of normal shipping in the Gulf and Red Sea area. Clearly, energy prices, interest rates and other things globally have been driven up by the extent of that conflict and by the interruptions to trade. In a world that should have plenty of oil and is in transition to using less of it, we find ourselves short of it because of a very nasty war.

I would hope that the defence review would come up with good answers on that combination of defending the home base, which needs more defence, and the appropriate expeditionary force for policing commerce and sea-lanes and going to the aid of allies. It would be very useful to know from the Minister how the Government can extend the skills and the experiences we have had diplomatically and in governing places that are subject to these conflicts. The world desperately needs peace, particularly in those two centres of warfare at the moment, and we would all be better off if that could be brought about.