Lord Robertson of Port Ellen (Lab)

My Lords, I am looking forward to listening later in the debate to my colleague and noble friend Lord McCabe make his maiden speech. Unusually, I will start my speech today with my conclusion. After a full year examining, consulting, challenging, inspecting and intently looking at every aspect of the defence of this country, and bearing in mind the difficult world that we live in and have to survive in, this is what I firmly believe: we are underinsured; we are underprepared; we are not safe. This country and its people are not safe. The British people are faced with a world in turmoil, with great-power competition now spilling over into conflict, with constant grey-zone attacks on our mainland, and with Russia—often with the co-operation of Iran, China and North Korea—challenging the existing world order. We in this country are simply not safe. This review outlines graphically the threats that we face and describes our weaknesses and vulnerabilities, but it also—I emphasise that this is crucial—charts the way in which we can recreate the war readiness which alone will guarantee deterrence and safety for the future. The 62 time-specified recommendations in the report are the very minimum that we need to ensure that the country and our people will be properly safe in the future. That is why, in the report, we call for a national conversation in the country about defence and security, and the Prime Minister has endorsed that view. It has to be led from the top, and there must be no restraint on military and other people articulating the case to the country. I acknowledge, as a long-time politician, that defence is still not sufficiently high in the people’s priorities. They rightly worry about the cost of living—a lot of which has to do with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine—welfare, education and the National Health Service. Denis Healey, who I used to work with, said in 1969: “Once we cut defence expenditure to the extent where our security is imperilled, we have no houses, we have no hospitals, we have no schools. We have a heap of cinders”.—[Official Report, Commons, 5/3/1969; col. 551.] All of us have an obligation now to change public opinion. I preface what more I have to say about the review with some words of thanks. First, I thank the Prime Minister and the Defence Secretary for entrusting my excellent colleagues, General Richard Barrons and Dr Fiona Hill, and me to do an external review of the nation’s defence. It was a pretty bold move of theirs. This is my second strategic defence review, but the access we had to the Ministry of Defence, its people and its information allowed us to be both radical and profound in our 62 recommendations, and then to have the endorsement of the Prime Minister, the Defence Secretary, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the whole Government in accepting it. Secondly, I put on record my thanks to the many experts who assisted us in this historic endeavour. Working with the three reviewers was the defence review team, six non-partisan experts with us the whole way: Robin Marshall, Ed Dinsmore, Grace Cassy, Jean-Christophe Gray, Angus Lapsley and finally, and importantly, Sir Jeremy Quin, who was one of the best Defence Procurement Ministers in the last Conservative Government. In addition to them, over 150 experts were involved in the review and challenge process, which was a crucial way of capturing and interrogating external views. We are grateful to all of them. I pay fulsome credit to the talented team who worked with us on this review, led by Ayaaz Nawab, Group Captain Matthew Radnall and our chief drafter, Ashlee Godwin. We had a staff of truly remarkable and dedicated people assisting us in this mission. They made a pivotal contribution to a review which, I am confident, will intimidate our enemies, inspire our friends, invigorate our defence industry and make our country safer. They can be proud of what they have done, and we are proud of them. This is a truly transformational review. It does not tinker with the issues, gloss over deficiencies, or just marginally improve on business as usual. Our adversaries have given up business as usual, and we must do so as well. Over the years, we have allowed our forces and defences to become hollowed out. When we say in the report that we are unprepared, it is an understatement. We do not have the ammunition, the training, the people, the spare parts or the logistics, and we do not have the medical capacity to deal with the mass casualties that we would face if we were involved in high-intensity warfare. Over the years—I suppose I must plead guilty to this as well—we took a substantial peace dividend, because we all believed that the world had changed for the better; that the values of liberal democracy had been cemented into our societies; that war between nations was outmoded; and that our military forces would be needed only for short-term, distant interventions. Sadly, we were not alone in that. It may have been overoptimism, or at worst wishful thinking, but the brutal, full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Putin’s Russia three years ago was a savage wake-up call for all of us. This world we now live in has changed out of all recognition, and we have got to change as well. This review, comprehensive and detailed as it is, is therefore designed to bolster deterrence, both conventional and nuclear, by rebuilding war-fighting readiness. With a combination of homeland resilience, a new integrated force and new command structure, and by putting NATO first, we will, we believe, be safer at home and more influential abroad. We ruthlessly examined every aspect of defence, and the review challenges preconceived notions and habits for the very different world that we now live in. We have concluded that we need a strong digital foundation and an effective digital targeting web, which underpins the lethality and agility of our forces across all five domains. We propose a new, reinvigorated partnership with the defence industry, capturing innovation at wartime pace. With a powerful new national armaments director shaking up our procurement process we will ensure, therefore, that our fighting forces have the modern equipment that they need, on time and on budget. The review proposes a major boost to the reserves and the cadets. It reinvigorates and modernises training, it tackles the chronic troop accommodation problems that we have, and it deals with the recruitment shortfalls with innovative new ideas. It confronts—this is important—peacetime cultures of risk aversion, lack of trust and bureaucracy. Importantly, it will capture the innovations that we all see emerging from the experience of Ukraine. Indeed, the lessons of Ukraine do not just lie in the impressive ingenuity and tenacity of the Ukrainian people and their leaders. Britain has been in the forefront of helping Ukraine defend itself against the Russian invaders. We should make no mistake at all that if Putin prevails in subjugating his neighbour, we will all pay a heavy price. I dealt with Vladimir Putin on a number of occasions when I was in NATO. He once stood beside me and said: “Ukraine is a sovereign independent nation which will make its own decisions about peace and security”. He is now a threat not just to Ukraine but to the whole of western Europe. We have already supported Ukraine substantially, and it remains at the very heart of this review. One of the most important recommendations that we make in the review is that defence has to be a whole-of-society matter. In a world where the homeland is already under attack, with our critical national infrastructure on a knife-edge, where over 95% of our international data comes from threatened undersea cables and 77% of our gas supplies come in one single pipeline, we cannot simply contract out our defences to the people in uniform. We need to learn the lessons of Finland, Sweden and Norway in obliging all of us to know our individual and collective roles in protecting our nation. Let me address the question which I am pretty confident is going to be at the core of the speeches that come later in the debate. Is there the money for what we propose? I believe that there is and that there has to be, and the Prime Minister knows that as well. In the national security strategy, which was published only a few days ago, the Prime Minister says under his own name: “That is why, as part of this strategy, we make a historic commitment to spend 5% of our GDP on national security by 2035”. There are no qualifications or caveats involved in that statement. In the Commons, on 2 June, the Defence Secretary, John Healey, said, “take it from the Prime Minister when he said that we will spend what is needed to deliver this review”. He added: “The vision of this strategic defence review now becomes the mission of this Government to deliver”.—[Official Report, Commons, 2/6/25; col. 62.] There is no messing in what either of them said, and there will be no messing in what the reviewers hold them to account on. Finally, I say to Members of this House, who will all travel home after this debate in peace and safety, that three and a half years ago the European citizens of Bucha, Mariupol and Zaporizhzhia in eastern Ukraine also walked their European streets in peace and safety. Then came the sudden, unprovoked invasion by Putin’s Russia and with it the depraved violence of the Russian occupiers. In an instant they were not safe, at peace or free. Ordinary European people in ordinary European streets were doing ordinary things, until they were not. That is a warning for us all. The British people need, more than ever in my lifetime, the renewed defence insurance that this review promises. Those of us, including in this House, who know the dangers and the answer must make the case with the people and decisively win that argument. I beg to move.