NATO Summit 2018 — House of Lords, 2018-06-26
Topic: International Affairs
William John Lawrence Wallace (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, I remember many years ago reading in the business pages of some newspaper that when a company or an organisation begins to build a grand, new headquarters, it is time to sell your shares. The noble Lord, Lord Jopling, is suggesting that, although I have to say to him that the record of the British Parliament in taking clear decisions on the renovation of the Palace of Westminster does not suggest that our political system is in terribly good form by comparison We still need NATO, in very different circumstances and indeed in rapidly changing circumstances now, as new threats of one sort of another emerge. As we see at this NATO summit, we face threats both from Putin’s Russian and, to our surprise and horror, from Trump’s Administration. We are not quite sure what will happen, and probably neither is he, but it may well be that there is a Trump-Putin meeting and we will have to deal with that. For the United Kingdom, for which NATO has been a core element of its place in the world since 1947-48, and for which it has operated as the cornerstone of our claim to a special position as superior to those continental countries, France and Germany, because we have this relationship across the Atlantic with the United States, NATO matters a great deal. If we come out of the NATO summit with a weaker relationship with the United States we will have to consider how we strengthen our security and political relationship with our European partners. That then feeds back into some pretty fundamental issues about Britain’s place in the world and our relationship with our European partners as we move towards leaving the European Union Our relationship with Russia is even more complicated because we are the European country which has the largest Russian footprint—in our boarding schools, in the owning of football clubs and British companies, in donating large sums to our universities and in Russians having second homes—often because their owners do not feel secure in Moscow—in London. We could make more of that and the Government should think about it. We are trying to maintain a dialogue with the Russian elite and the next generation, and perhaps some of them are here The downside is that Russian money of all kinds flows into different aspects of British life. I read the Foreign Secretary’s astonishing remarks that the CBI is EU-funded and, therefore, because it receives 1% of its funding from the EU, it is structurally biased in favour of the European Union. If you applied that test to a number of other British bodies it would raise awkward questions. I have read of occasions when Russians resident in Britain turn up at Conservative Party fundraisers and pay large prices to play tennis with David Cameron, or whatever it may be. That may not account for 1% of Conservative funding but it raises interesting questions. I will not mention what might have been contributed towards Vote Leave. I shall follow the noble Lord, Lord Dannatt, and talk about one of the other threats we have to face, which is called in the preparations for the NATO summit the insecurity in the south. We neglect that at our peril. The debate about migration in this country has been overwhelmingly about migration from Europe, where the population is going down, and not sufficiently about migration from the south, where the population continues to rise rapidly. In every year over the past 20 years, immigration into Britain from the south has been greater than immigration from the rest of the European continent I looked up the figures for the Nigerian population yesterday. Nigeria had a population of 100 million 20 years ago; it is approaching 200 million today; and it is estimated it will be approaching 300 million in 20 years’ time. We have to ask: where are those people going to go? There is not the water in northern Nigeria for them, nor the infrastructure. We all know that when a population rises rapidly you have frustrated young men, particularly half-educated young men, who are easily radicalised. They move into the cities and often foment revolution, fanatical radical movements and whatever These are huge problems which threaten our security. We will have to face them together with our European partners because these people will all want to come across the Mediterranean to Europe. As the noble Lord, Lord Dannatt, suggested, three helicopters are peanuts for what is needed. We already have some useful co-operation with the French across the Sahel in west Africa but we will need a great deal more. This issue is being debated across the whole of Europe and will pose large and ethical problems with which we will have to deal The British response is complicated by the deep confusion about what we think our role in the world is. We talk about a global Britain—the Foreign Secretary disappears off to parts of Asia almost every week—and we are left with deep confusion as to how we manage our defence and security and how closely we collaborate with others. Practically, we have co-operated more and more closely with other European forces: for 30 or 40 years with the Dutch and increasingly closely with the French since 1998. I am very happy to see the announcement that the British have now joined the French-led joint force separately from the European Union, which is intended to bring together the limited forces we have to make them more effective. That is clearly a necessary part of our way forward. I rather wish that the Ministry of Defence for many years had had France as a comparator against which we measured ourselves, rather than the United States, which meant that we wished to have quality equipment of the sort the Americans were buying: the F-35, larger aircraft carriers and so on—indeed, recreating aircraft carriers that were built so that French aircraft could not land on them. I remember Liam Fox trying to reverse that decision when the Conservatives came into power in the coalition in 2010 and discovering that the Ministry of Defence had not thought about the desirability of sharing with the French the ability to land on each other’s aircraft carriers.