That an humble Address be presented to His Majesty as follows:

“Most Gracious Sovereign—We, Your Majesty’s most dutiful and loyal subjects, the Lords Spiritual and Temporal in Parliament assembled, beg leave to thank Your Majesty for the most gracious Speech which Your Majesty addressed to both Houses of Parliament”.

My Lords, on behalf of your Lordships’ House, I thank His Majesty the King for delivering the gracious Speech. I am grateful for the privilege of opening today’s debate on the Motion for an humble Address. As this is a King’s Speech debate, I begin by uniting us all in praise of Their Majesties’ incredibly successful state visit to the United States just a few weeks ago. The visit saw the words of His Majesty the King bring members of the House of Representatives to their feet again and again, where his wise words, sharp humour and powerful messages resonated across political divides.

I will use this occasion to set out how the Government will continue to drive forward the UK’s national interests, tackling pressing global challenges to make Britain safer and more prosperous. The only way to do that is by bringing all the tools at our disposal to bear. We have to be truly integrated: from diplomacy, development and defence to soft power and economic strength. The crisis in the Middle East is just the latest example of why the Government are taking this approach. Families and businesses across the UK, and countries across the world, are grappling with the fallout from the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz. We are working tirelessly across all fronts, leading efforts for a lasting diplomatic breakthrough to restore freedom of navigation without tolls and to get the global economy moving again.

We have urged Iran to allow shipping to flow freely through the strait and to progress a diplomatic pathway. As my friend the Foreign Secretary did in a call with Iranian Foreign Minister Araghchi on 8 May, we have used our convening power to bring together more than 40 countries to channel collective pressure to reopen the strait, engaging intensively with the US, our partners in the Gulf and European capitals. We have bolstered our defensive capabilities in the region as part of co-ordinated regional defensive operations in line with international law, and we are working internationally to respond to the impacts of the crisis on the world’s poorest. That includes at the Global Partnerships Conference that we co-hosted this week, where we gathered developing countries around a new approach to international partnerships and discussed how to alleviate the impacts of the crisis on food, fertiliser and fuel. That is because our efforts must be integrated and the effects of these crises around the world are connected to what we are doing at home.

Sadly, this approach is essential, given that we face a world more riven by conflicts than at any time since the Second World War, where tools of economic integration are being used as weapons of geopolitical conflict and where competition between the US and China shapes our world. We see this with the threat posed by Russia to the UK and wider European security: an aggressive, expansionist Russia that deploys hybrid threats and information warfare against us and our allies, and exports interference and instability. Just as in the previous Parliament, this Government have taken every opportunity to stand with Ukraine and apply pressure on the Kremlin’s war machine. The UK’s total military, economic and humanitarian support for Ukraine amounts to £21.8 billion, and the UK has sanctioned over 3,000 individuals and entities since Russia’s full-scale invasion.

In this Parliament, we will remain stronger than ever in our support to Ukraine, confident in the cross-party commitment that Ukraine’s fight is our fight, and steadfast in putting pressure on Russia. That involves sustaining our international leadership that has brought together partners and unlocked practical commitments through the coalition of the willing, including for the future deployment of the multinational force in Ukraine. Faced with Russia’s aggression and growing global security threats, last year the Government committed to the largest sustained increase in defence spending since the Cold War. To do that, we took the decision to reduce the development budget to 0.3% of GNI by 2027, but we remain just as committed to tackling global challenges in a new and modernised way, which I will return to shortly.

Turning to other pressing conflicts, Palestinians and Israelis desperately need peace. We need to deliver phase 2 of the 20-point plan, prevent Gaza getting stuck between peace and war, and stop Israeli settlement expansion and settler violence, which is at an all-time high and in flagrant breach of international law. Last year, this Government took the historic step of recognising the State of Palestine, to help keep the two-state solution alive, and we will continue to ensure that our international work is consistent with Israel’s lasting security, with Palestinian self-determination and with achieving peace in Lebanon.

These are messages we delivered through the UK’s presidency of the UN Security Council in February, a presidency we also used to put the spotlight on Sudan, as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, including the women and girls who have endured unimaginable ordeals of sexual violence. We will sustain our focus on Sudan, building on the Berlin communiqué that followed the international conference we co-hosted in April, which brought together 55 states, secured £1.3 billion of funding to save lives, and renewed the diplomatic push for a ceasefire and political resolution of the conflict.

Sadly, Sudan is not the only example of a conflict overlooked. In March, I visited the Democratic Republic of the Congo and saw the consequences of years of conflict, including on survivors of sexual violence, the desperate need for clean water, emergency healthcare, and food and nutrition assistance. But I also saw the courage of those delivering front-line services, the expertise of local health professionals and the ingenuity of Congolese entrepreneurs. To break the cycle of conflict, the world must get behind those people. That means providing humanitarian and peacebuilding support. The UK is delivering life-saving care: from trauma surgery and support for survivors of sexual and gender-based violence, to clean water and emergency food. This means calling for those responsible for the violence to stop and supporting multilateral efforts towards sustainable peace.

Crucially, it means supporting long-term opportunity for people in the DRC through strengthening business links and supporting investments, whether that is setting up a new UK-DRC Chamber of Commerce, which I launched in March, or expanding access to finance for SMEs through British International Investment’s $55 million commitments to the DRC’s banking sector. As we discussed in a Question earlier, Ebola in the eastern DRC is a major threat, and we are working with the World Health Organization and Africa CDC. So far, we have allocated up to £21 million to the region, and I will be going to the Congo next week.

This Government are putting into practice a new, modernised approach to international development, one that reflects the scale of the global challenges that we face today and the very different geopolitics compared to two or three decades ago. International systems are threatened and humanitarian responses, already strained, are being stretched to their limit. While some are turning away, the UK with our partners is doing things differently. The countries that we work with want modern, respectful partnerships rooted in shared interests.

As my noble friend Lord Collins’s consultation on Africa last year set out so clearly, all of this means that we need to forge new alliances and work with developing countries in a different way. We have a new approach, one that channels aid to a more focused set of priorities over the next three years and moves us beyond being a donor to focus on spurring new investment, providing the expertise that enables countries to build up their own capacities and that helps countries and communities thrive without aid. It is essential that we streamline an inefficient, insufficiently co-ordinated system that places an unnecessary burden on partner countries.

This was at the heart of this week’s global partnerships conference, which brought together Governments, international organisations, civil society, businesses, technology and philanthropy. We must draw on the strengths that everyone has to offer: the richness of innovation that diverse coalitions bring to even the toughest problems. Working together collectively, respectfully and through mutually reinforcing partnerships is the only way that we will tackle the global challenges of today. Together, we agreed a new compact: not a typical negotiated text, but a synthesis of what partners have told us across its themes of finance, technology, and shifting the power: a shared commitment to working faster, more openly and in true partnership in the decades ahead. That will provide the framework for us to deliver a new way of working, a more responsive international system and improved financing. This will better meet the priorities and aspirations of partner countries and tackle the shared challenges of a new era, to forge new ties with growing economies and trading partners of the future.

Irregular migration is one such challenge, exacerbated by conflict, poverty and climate change. We have secured the return to France of over 600 migrants under the UK-France returns treaty; we have reached agreement with six African partners on improved processes to return those with no right to be in the UK; and we have deployed our new sanctions regime to target 55 individuals and entities to help break the business model of criminal gangs. But we need to go further, together with others, to raise our collective ambition on migration, supporting the security of our borders, the fabric of our democracies and the protection of those who need it.

Across all the priorities I have set out, there is one constant: we cannot meet any of these challenges alone. Our partnerships and alliances remain crucial to global growth and security and to our own growth and security. We will work through groups such as the G7 and the G20 to build and strengthen these alliances, collaborating to address issues of global importance that impact every household in the UK—whether that is working through the G7 to support Ukraine, keep the pressure on Russia and respond to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, or promoting policies to support growth, jobs and productivity through the G20. As His Majesty the King outlined in his Speech to Parliament, our G20 presidency in 2027 will place the UK at the forefront of driving global growth and stability, which is essential for the prosperity of working people across this country.

The world today is more fragile, contested and interconnected than ever. The breadth and complexity of the challenges we face underline why we must bring to bear all the tools at our disposal, integrating our diplomacy work with our efforts on development, defence, soft power and economic resilience. Only through this approach will we make progress. So, over our new parliamentary Session, the Government will seize every opportunity to advance our interests and uphold our values, using all the levers we have across government to strengthen our alliances, build new coalitions and shape solutions to the shared challenges we face. There is much for us to discuss, so I look forward to hearing your Lordships’ contributions and working with noble Lords to make the UK a stronger, safer and more prosperous place.

My Lords, I start by expressing total agreement with the Minister on the fantastic success of His Majesty’s visit to the United States. We saw an increasingly rare moment of bipartisan support for his remarks in Congress; it was a tremendous visit that did the country great credit.

We have had four long days of debate on the shortcomings of the Government’s legislative agenda, so I would like to begin with one point of support for the King’s Speech. There was no Chagos Bill. The Chagos deal should be dead. That would be the right decision, and I know I speak for many noble Lords when I say that the decision should stand for the rest of this Parliament. The concerted efforts of noble Lords across the House showed just how effective our scrutiny role can be. Sadly, while that deal should be dead, we know that the Government’s policy is still to transfer sovereign British territory to Mauritius. That should change. That is the policy of the current Government, but we eagerly await the views of the “King of the North” on Chagos. Perhaps electors in Makerfield should ask him in some of the increasingly rare debates that might happen in that by-election. We wonder what the “King of the North” will have to say about Chagos in the south—although Makerfield was not part of Chagos last time I looked.

Could the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, in winding, reassure the House that the Government will go back to the drawing board and consider all their options afresh on this matter? Can he confirm that the proposal to resettle the Chagos Islands, previously considered by both Conservative and Labour Governments in the past, would cost a great deal less than the £35 billion current Chagos surrender deal? When we debated this before Prorogation, I asked the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, to update the House on the status of the Chagossians who had returned to their homeland on Peros Banhos. I wonder whether he could give us further updates.

We were grateful to receive his letter of clarification correcting the record on the right of settlement for Chagossians in the current treaty. However, when we asked him about the provision of humanitarian supplies, he used a very peculiar form of wording. He kept saying that he had been “assured by officials”. I wonder whether, since that debate, he has had the chance to check for himself the statements about whether the commissioner is withholding vital humanitarian supplies from those people. When we have asked questions about this, we keep getting an answer from the Foreign Office that it is a decision for the commissioner—yet, when we write to the commissioner, we do not get much clarification either. It is unusual that Ministers seem to be a bit reticent in clarifying this matter, so I wonder whether he could clear things up at the end of this debate.

I should also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Weir of Ballyholme, who is sadly not in his place, on his success in the Private Member’s Bill ballot. We have not yet seen the final text of his Bill, but the British sovereignty protection (Chagos Islands) Bill will be interesting to read and will enable us to show the Government once again just how strongly we feel about protecting our interests in that region.

The Chagos Islands are just one part of the world where British sovereignty needs defending. We are also facing pressure in Gibraltar and in the Falkland Islands. The British people expect their Government to stand up for their interests both at home and abroad. Gibraltarians and Falkland Islanders expect the British Government to stand up for them too. Could the noble Lord, when he winds up, reassure the House that His Majesty’s Government will continue to defend British sovereign territory and support our overseas territories whenever they are threatened?

Indeed, the Government made a manifesto commitment to this principle. I do not know whether it still applies to Mr Burnham, but they said in their manifesto:

“Defending our security also means protecting the British Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies, including the Falklands and Gibraltar”.

The manifesto went on to say:

“Labour will always defend their sovereignty and right to self-determination”—

a point sadly lacking on Chagos. Nevertheless, that was the commitment that they made to the British people, and that is a promise that we expect them to keep.

On Gibraltar specifically, we are grateful to Ministers for making the draft EU-UK agreement in respect of Gibraltar available. It is right that Parliament has the time to scrutinise a treaty as complex as this in full detail. At the end of the debate, could the noble Lord confirm whether the final approved treaty will be laid before the House in June or July of this year? If it is laid in late July, there is a risk that we will not be able to satisfy the requirements of the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010 before the Summer Recess. What is the Government’s timetable for ratification of the treaty? Can the Minister also confirm whether the Government believe that additional enabling legislation will be required in this case, or is CRaG approval sufficient?

Turning to the Falkland Islands, I think we were all concerned by Argentina’s calls for talks on the future of the Falkland Islands some weeks ago, and the very concerning corresponding reports about the United States reviewing its position on the islands. I am pleased that the US Secretary of State has since downplayed these reports. I know that the Foreign Secretary has recently met the US Secretary of State, so could the noble Lord say what discussions Ministers have had with our American partners and what reassurances they have been given? The Falkland Islands are British. The Falkland Islanders overwhelmingly wish to remain British. Our allies and our Government should respect that. I hope that the Government and the Official Opposition are united on that matter. If that is the case, we will of course support the Government in its work to defend British sovereignty, both overseas and at home.

On international threats to our security, the conflict in Ukraine, which we have just discussed, remains fundamental. An expansionist Russia is a threat to our European security. I am proud of our record of support for Ukraine, and, notwithstanding their latest decisions, we have thus far been pleased to support the Government in their policy of support for Ukraine. Britain has, rightly, backed Ukraine throughout Putin’s war, and we must continue that support until Russia’s illegal invasion has been turned back—there have been some encouraging signs recently. Britain also has an important role to play in helping Ukraine’s recovery and the response to atrocities committed in that conflict.

I do not wish to return to the previous debate, but I was saddened that our excellent record on tough sanctions was blemished this week by the decision, which we discussed, to weaken restrictions on oil products originating in Russia. On the radio this morning, I heard the Chief Secretary to the Treasury saying, as did the noble Baroness, Lady Lloyd, that these temporary licences will be short lived. The noble Baroness used the expression that it could be only “a number of months”. I wonder if, at the end, the Minister could confirm whether the Government have a timescale for those licences to be revoked. It flies in the face of the Minister’s Statement on support.

On Iran, of course we cannot discuss the energy crisis without addressing that terrible conflict, which has had a major destabilising effect on economies all over the world. I suspect that we have not yet seen the full effects of that in the UK, and that we will see them in the months to come. As a result of our failure to secure domestic oil and gas supplies, we know that we are particularly exposed, but the impacts of this conflict go far beyond energy. It is essential that the Foreign Office works at pace, and in concert with other departments, to secure our supply of essential goods and particularly fertilisers—something that has not been remarked on nearly as much as energy but could be even more important.

We have also had questions all week about the risks of a super El Niño. Such a significant climatic event coinciding with oil and fertiliser supply issues, the Ebola outbreak and the conflict in Sudan is extremely concerning. I am sure that Ministers will want to take all necessary steps to put mitigations in place to protect British citizens from any potential impacts. The House would also benefit from a broader update on the Government’s approach to these issues.

On what is currently the world’s greatest humanitarian crisis, in Sudan, which the noble Baroness, the Minister, referenced, could we please have a further update from the noble Lord the Minister on what steps Ministers are taking to engage with our regional partners to help bring that terrible conflict to an end?

In the Middle East, the Israel-Gaza ceasefire, uneasy though it is, represents a significant step towards peace. While we have not been central to those negotiations, Britain still has an important role to play. His Majesty’s Government must be unequivocal on Israel’s right to self-defence while seeking a peaceful settlement in the region.

To that end, when the Minister winds up, will he take the opportunity to set out what difference the UK’s recognition of Palestine has made? It was seen by many as an inappropriate step that only continued to give legitimacy to Hamas, so what view do Ministers now have, a few months after that sad decision? It excluded us from the negotiations; Israel reacted very negatively, and any influence that we had with it was lost. I therefore do not see what difference it has made on the ground. Perhaps the Minister could update us at the end?

That conflict has, of course, had a profound impact on relationships between different groups in the UK, and we have seen a quite appalling rise in antisemitism in recent months. I am sure that the whole House will stand united against antisemitism. However, words are not enough. The rise in the hatred of Jews, which led to the violent and bloody assault of our neighbours in Golders Green and the murder of our fellow countrymen in Manchester, is appalling. It is targeted, it is driven and, sadly, it is on the rise in our country. With one voice and one accord, we must all act to eradicate this vile hatred in our land and reassert our true national values of tolerance and respect that have for so many years—indeed centuries now—made Britain a place where Jews feel safe and can prosper and thrive. I fully accept that domestic affairs are not the responsibility of the Foreign Office or the MoD, but we must never shy away from the relationship between that conflict and rising hatred in our own country.

I will end on China. The Chinese state has engaged in espionage in the UK—we have seen a number of cases recently, even here in Parliament—and Chinese state actors have been responsible for numerous cases of intellectual property theft and serious cyber attacks. Indeed, China has even sanctioned Members of your Lordships’ House, all the while it continues to persecute the Uyghur people in Xinjiang. I particularly want to pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Alton of Liverpool, for his tireless campaigning for justice and an end to the repression of the Uyghur people. I am sure that he will refer to it in his remarks later.

We have constantly raised concerns about the establishment of a new Chinese mega-embassy on the Royal Mint site in the heart of the City of London. We continue to oppose that decision, and we will continue to call for the release of Jimmy Lai, who has been so appallingly treated by China. Could the Minister provide us with an update on Jimmy Lai’s case when he responds to the debate? While China poses such a significant threat to the UK, represses its own people and wrongfully imprisons Jimmy Lai, the Prime Minister continues to call for a thawing in our relationship. I completely accept that Britain must engage with China; that is clear. However, in our view, the Government’s approach is the wrong one; we need to treat China as the threat that it is.

We are facing many global threats, and the world feels less stable than it has been for a very long time. We must give clear moral leadership, and we must help to mitigate those threats. I have spoken about the approach that Britain must take towards the global challenges that we are facing, but, at its core, we know that British foreign policy cannot succeed unless we have the tools to defend our interests. That is why defence spending is an essential priority for the Government. I know that, towards the end of the debate, my noble friend Lady Goldie will focus on defence in her remarks. We are at a time of great uncertainty, and Britain has a role to play in securing a more stable future. We need the right strategy and the right tools if we are to achieve that. Therefore, we on this side of the House will remain critical friends to His Majesty’s Government, willing Ministers on to increase our defence spending, to mitigate threats posed by foreign states and, ultimately, to stand up for Britain’s interests on the world stage.

My Lords, one week ago, the day after the King’s Speech, a Russian drone destroyed a nine-storey apartment block in south-east Kyiv. Some 24 people were killed, including three teenage girls aged between 12 and 15. Some 18 apartments were destroyed, and yet more lives were shattered. Last Friday, the Ukrainian flag was removed from outside Essex County Council’s offices by the newly elected Reform UK administration in Chelmsford. I was pleased to see this roundly condemned by all other parties locally, including the Conservatives. I believe it is vital to maintain the cross-party support, including in your Lordships’ House, against the war in Ukraine. We need to maintain maximum pressure on the Putin war regime through all means possible, including an effective and punitive sanctions regime. In that regard, as my noble friend Lord Purvis made so very clear, yesterday’s announcement on sanctions is to be greatly regretted.

Last week, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights reported that, in the first four months of this year, 80% of civilian deaths in Sudan were caused by drone attacks, which killed at least 880 people. Some 26 civilians were reportedly killed in the Kordofan region on 8 May alone. On Monday this week, Lebanon’s health ministry reported that the number of people killed in Lebanon has passed 3,020—400 of whom have been killed since the ceasefire came into effect last month. I had the privilege of working in both Kyiv in Ukraine and Khartoum in Sudan, and I have many friends and former colleagues in both countries. It is always important to remember that, behind every statistic, there is a human face.

As the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, said, we are having this debate against a backdrop of tremendous uncertainty and instability, with ongoing wars in Iran, Ukraine, Sudan and the Middle East. All of these are amplified by the profound challenges caused by climate change and rapid technological change. This week, we saw a greatly emboldened President Xi of China meeting President Putin in Beijing, declaring a strengthened alliance between the two countries. In Russia, President Putin continues to clamp down on any credible opposition and free media. He is perhaps at his most dangerous when feeling under threat, as he faces Ukrainian long-distance drone attacks and a very gradual reversal of his advances in Ukraine, at a horrendous and growing human cost. It is hard to know the exact figures for the number of young Russian men killed, but the Economist this week has estimated that it might be as many as half a million lives lost.

Meanwhile, we are nearly 18 months into the second presidency of President Trump, which means that there are another two and a half years of his volatility and unpredictability to go. I add at this point congratulations from these Benches on the very successful visit of His Majesty the King. In the light of continued uncertainty about America’s commitment to NATO’s collective defence, our military needs urgent investment and renewal. The current Government inherited an Army at its smallest since the Napoleonic Wars and a Navy at its smallest since the English Civil War, yet the Government have moved far too slowly and timidly to rectify this.

I was struck by the speech last Thursday by the noble Lord, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen. He made an incredibly powerful case for an all-society approach to rapidly rearming and reminded us that the UK is already “under attack”. As the current Prime Minister said at the Munich Security Conference earlier this year:

“Time and again, leaders have looked the other way, only re-arming when disaster is upon them”.

The Government must act now to commit to reaching 3% of GDP spending on defence by 2030. Liberal Democrats have called for cross-party talks to agree a consensus on how to reach that level of spending within that timeframe. I would be grateful if the Minister could respond to this suggestion in his closing remarks. Those of us who were privileged to hear the remarkable speech by President Zelensky to both Houses a couple of months ago could not help but be humbled by just how much we now have to learn from Ukraine about drone and robotics technology. In that regard, does the Minister agree that borrowing to invest in defence could support innovation and economic growth?

In my remaining time, I will touch on two other key areas: international development and our relations with the European Union. A couple of weeks ago, I was on a train from Calais to Boulogne-sur-Mer in France. As I was getting on the train, I realised that everyone around me was carrying a polythene bag with a large orange object in it. I eventually realised that these were in fact life jackets, and that my 50 or so fellow passengers were people who had failed to get on a small boat that day and so were returning to their camp near Boulogne-sur-Mer to try the dangerous crossing on another day.

I understand that this is an incredibly emotive and complicated issue. I live in Broadstairs on the Kent coast, and the reception camp for the migrants is incredibly near to where I live. I believe the Government are right to concentrate much of their efforts on stopping the appalling people smugglers and attempting to destroy their economic model. However, two things struck me looking at these dejected passengers on that train to Boulogne-sur-Mer.

The first was that they were desperate fellow human beings prepared to risk their lives. Sitting opposite me was a young man from Syria, with his baby strapped to his front. A boat ran aground and sank off the coast of Boulogne-sur-Mer that very morning, killing two women, I later learned on the BBC website. The second thing that struck me is that we rightly talk a lot about the pull factors to the UK and the people smugglers who benefit at the cost of human lives, but we talk rather less about the push factors that cause many to want to leave their countries in the first place: the drought, the famine, the desperation and the wars—wars that are sometimes proxy wars started by far-off countries.

Not long ago, we were proud global leaders in the world on development assistance, with all mainstream parties jostling to claim the credit for reaching the 0.7% target of GNI, including the Conservative Government at that time. Our global assistance is currently 0.3%, as the Minister said in her opening remarks, but there are rumours that it could fall much further. I would be grateful if the Minister could confirm in his closing remarks the projected percentage by the end of this year and into next year.

The removal of USAID is having a dramatic and awful impact on the prevention of diseases such as HIV, TB and, as has been said, currently Ebola, in sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere. The policies of President Trump have acted as a green light to other countries to follow in his slipstream. It is, I fear, short-term populism that will have long-term and disastrous consequences—consequences that will be felt by this country too. We can hope that a future US Government will change and that we will see a return to a revised world order based on a rules-based approach and a generous approach to international development. However, to refer to the much-quoted speech by Mark Carney at Davos this year,

“hope is not a plan and nostalgia is not a strategy”.

The UK needs to think again about our place in the world and our alliances. We need to prepare now for tomorrow’s uncertainties. Our economy, security and defence are inextricably linked to our European partners. As Mark Carney and others have said, we should also reach out to those middle powers that share our values, such as Canada and Ukraine.

That brings me to my final point, about the EU. It is my hope that, one day, we can reunite properly with our EU partners. Where I live, in Thanet in Kent, 68% voted to leave the EU in 2016. But that was then and this is now, and it is increasingly hard to find anybody who can find anything positive to say about the decision of 10 years ago. Some 10 years on since the Brexit referendum, I believe it should be less a question of whether we were wrong in 2016 and more a question of what is in the national self-interest 10 years from now, in 2036.

Today, I hope to become a great aunt for the first time—my niece is about to give birth as I speak. What will make this a better country for that little boy being born today? The European Union 10 years from now will be a very different place. Nobody wants to repeat the stale, old and tired arguments of the referendum 10 years ago, but I sincerely hope that a future EU, with Ukraine at its eastern edge, will include our country to its west.

My Lords, in his speech at the Munich Security Conference in February, the Prime Minister warned of the dangerous time in which we live. He went on to say:

“In the 1930s, leaders were too slow to level with the public about the fundamental shift in mindset that was required. So we must work harder today to build consent for the decisions we must take to keep us safe”.

Wise words—which makes the deafening silence that has followed all the more astonishing. Where is the national conversation that we were promised and that is crucial to convincing people, most particularly the younger generation—not to mention the Treasury—of the need to face squarely the perils ahead? At the moment, it is nowhere, and certainly not in the gracious Speech. So perhaps I can help the Minister who will wind up by suggesting some key elements that should underpin such a conversation.

The first is to remind people of what the Athenians taught the Melians during the Peloponnesian war: the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. If we allow ourselves to become weak, our good intentions will count for nothing. The only intentions that will have any meaning will be those of the powerful, and, if those intentions are malign, we will just have to suffer them. The second point is that our strength is directed towards and essential to the deterrence of major conflict. Weakness makes war more, not less, likely—either that or abject surrender to the demands of an aggressor. Effective deterrence is expensive, but a failure of deterrence far more so, and the horrendous costs are then paid in blood as well as in treasure.

Effective deterrence occurs in the mind of a potential adversary: they must be convinced that malign action on their part will result in consequences that will be unacceptable to them and that conflict will result in their defeat, no matter what measures they pursue. They must therefore be clear that we have the full range of capabilities and the political will to ensure such an outcome.

Strength is of course enhanced by acting in concert with others, which is why NATO remains crucial to our security, but membership of an alliance does not absolve us of the need to pull our weight. To our shame, we are slipping well down the weight scales within NATO. Moreover, it makes no sense for NATO to rely upon a single-source supplier for crucial strategic capabilities, as we do upon the United States. This is not just a matter of one unpredictable Administration: come the day they are needed, those capabilities may be unavailable or diminished for all sorts of reasons. NATO needs to be much more resilient to such uncertainties, and this means that European members must develop alternative sources of such strategic capability, most of which will be beyond the reach of any individual nation. European partnerships to fund, develop and operate those capabilities are urgently required, but the capabilities that are necessary for victory will not all be present at the start of any conflict, either in nature or in quantity.

It is notable that many of the systems and methods that the Ukrainians are now employing so successfully against the Russians did not exist four years ago. The lesson here is that we need in Europe an agile, innovative and rapidly scalable industrial base—not, I should note, just traditional defence companies—that can rapidly adapt to the circumstances of a conflict and produce at large scale the technologies crucial to success.

The final point is that properly resourced military forces of appropriate size are essential but not by themselves sufficient for effective deterrence. Our political system, social structure and domestic infrastructure need to be resilient to the attacks they are already suffering, which would increase manifold in the lead-up to and during any conflict. Weakness in this area undermines our deterrent posture. As the Government’s own defence review made clear, we currently have shortfalls in many of the requirements for effective deterrence. We must make good those deficiencies as a matter of urgency, not just articulate vague aspirations for the future. That means fiscal choices that may be hard politically but are obvious in logic. It is a choice between pain now and a likelihood of catastrophe in the future. This is the message our political leaders must take to the country. These are the measures on which they must deliver. Yes, it will be a challenge, but it is one to which they must rise. It is time, indeed beyond time, for them to lead.

My Lords, I endorse what the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, said about the vile harm of increasing antisemitism in our nation. I am glad that widespread condemnation is being matched by solidarity and community action. I also welcome what the Minister said about working for and recognising a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine, but ask that urgent attention be given to the threat posed by the E1 developments in the West Bank, which would imperil such a solution.

We on these Benches have lamented the retreat from the commitment to 0.7% equivalent of GDP on development aid to 0.5% and then further to 0.3% under successive Governments, and the very real impact this has had around the world in the serious deterioration in health, education and nutrition, not to mention the significant diminution of our global reach. I welcome the Minister’s clarification of the Government’s intentions in what was said in the gracious Speech about taking action to reduce humanitarian need and conflict around the world.

Many in this House will have read the report in the Times on Monday of 51 military veterans, including Field-Marshal Lord Richards—the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Richards—a former Chief of the Defence Staff, Major-General James Cowan, who commanded the British Army’s primary fighting division, and General Sir Nick Parker, former commander-in-chief of land forces, protesting this latest cut. They argue, with the considerable expertise and wisdom at their disposal, that to force a choice between development aid and defence spending, the increased need for which I do not doubt, is a false economy.

To live in a world where state and non-state actors are more aggressive, where one of our principal allies is ever more unpredictable, where water resources are contested, where climate change drives food insecurity and where other states begin to fail is to live in a world that is increasingly more threatened with incipient and real conflict. To cut aid contributes to instability and insecurity. It means a vast erosion of this country’s soft power in a new era when, having exited a foundational political partnership, we increasingly find ourselves acting alone. The inescapable logic of Brexit is that we need to compensate by spending more on defence, more on aid, more on diplomatic representation and more on the BBC to maintain our influence in the world. What we are doing is planning to increase the first while cutting all the rest. Surely the lesson of history is that there is a complex interplay between power and influence. Neither should be neglected. I hope that His Majesty’s Government will think again.

My Lords, it is a privilege to speak in this debate. This week, as the right reverend Prelate has just referenced, some of our most experienced former military chiefs wrote:

“When crises are left unaddressed, they do not stay distant for long”.

One of the most important lessons in foreign and security policy that I learned in my years as the EU foreign policy chief was the connection between what we call the three Ds: development, diplomacy and defence. When the leadership of Operation Atalanta to combat piracy off the coast of Somalia rested at NATO in Northwood under British command, I would hear time and again that solutions to piracy “lie not at sea but on the land”. Military leaders pushed for greater efforts to rebuild Somalia, to provide alternatives to teenage boys persuaded into piracy on the promise of $10,000 if they succeeded in capturing a vessel, and to engage in more effective diplomacy to get others to support our military and civilian missions. Their determined, highly effective military operations could ultimately succeed only if the range of foreign, security, development and defence capabilities worked together. I hope that my noble friends share the assessment, in their new modernised approach, that the three Ds are not interchangeable but part of the same comprehensive approach.

We cannot spend what we do not have, and streamlining, reviewing and modernising what we do is a vital part of good government. Massive effort is now needed to bring our defence capabilities to where they should be but, necessary as that is, it is insufficient in tackling the crisis we face. When crises are left unaddressed, they do not stay distant for long. If we seek an example, we need look no further than the Strait of Hormuz, a 104-mile stretch of water full of small coves, narrow in many places, and now the subject of one of the worst standoffs in my experience of foreign policy.

My experience of negotiating with Iran over four years to reach the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, as chair and lead negotiator, gave me useful lessons not just for Iran. The Iranians now engaged in negotiations are quite familiar figures, not least Abbas Araghchi, the Foreign Minister, though they are probably now more constrained by hardliners who stand beside them or behind them. They have some experience, but so do we. I often describe the Iran deal as a jigsaw puzzle. Put together, it creates a picture. In 2015 the picture showed that we could be confident that Iran was not building a bomb. It was not. The picture was made up of pieces covering different parts of the deal, including levels of enrichment, types of centrifuges, stockpiles and heavy water reactor capabilities, inspection and monitoring regimes and more. The deal began from knowing what our objectives were.

The challenge now is that the reasons for the war, and therefore the problems to be addressed, seem to fluctuate—getting rid of an oppressive leadership, freeing the people, continuing to degrade and dispose of any nuclear weapons capability, preventing support to proxies, or some version of all of these. The vital first jigsaw puzzle piece, the opening of the Strait of Hormuz, which requires detailed, hard negotiation, does not of itself settle any of these underlying issues.

I ask my noble friend to lay out what proposals we are making to the countries most concerned with the negotiations, from the United States and of course Israel to Pakistan, the Gulf countries, Turkey, India, China and others. I worked with six nations on behalf of the United Nations, but I engaged with 20 more in pursuit of the agreement. There is much we could offer, so perhaps he can tell your Lordships’ House what exactly we are doing.

Finally, as my noble friend the Minister said, there is nothing that we can deal with alone. Foreign policy is domestic, not remote. We cannot keep people safe, offer opportunities or grow our economy without collaboration. The closer the collaboration with the like-minded the better, and that means Europe. Going back to the past is not an option—the world has moved on—but having a plan to get to a much better place is a must.

I am not arguing here for rejoining the EU, but perhaps the Government could be a little more careful in talking about our red lines as though they somehow will prevent what I see as a tidal wave of anger and resentment at being let down in so many communities. People want to see better living standards; that is impossible without better economic growth. They want to see a better life. I hope that my noble friends will take these comments in the spirit of willing them on in the tough decisions that lie ahead. The Government need to be as clear as they can be why foreign policy is about domestic issues and why engaging and showing leadership in taking tough decisions is more vital than ever.

My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the noble Baroness, who speaks on these matters with great authority, and I agree with what she said about Iran.

I am not an expert on defence, and I have rarely troubled your Lordships with my views on defence. Indeed, I had hoped that all I needed to do today would be to get up to say how much I agree with everything that the noble Lord, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, said in the debate on the gracious Speech on Thursday, and promptly sit down again. I very much agree with what the noble Lord said, and indeed with what the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, told us just a few moments ago.

Last Thursday the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, said that

“we are underprepared, we are underinsured, we are under attack and we are not safe”.—[Official Report, 14/5/26; col. 86.]

I agree. Of course we must spend more money on defence, but the noble Lord, in his contribution on Thursday, concentrated his fire on the Treasury. I have some sympathy with the Chancellor, whose room for manoeuvre is very limited, so where is the extra money to come from? We are spending far too much on welfare, but the Government have demonstrated that they are incapable of reducing our welfare bill.

Here is something that can be done: the Prime Minister—and only the Prime Minister can do it—today could ask every department to reduce its spending by 1%, and in future years within the plan period by 1% off the current plans. That would not be easy; it would involve painful decisions. But I have been a departmental Minister, and I know it could be done. It would raise a substantial amount of money. If that reduction were to be applied to the relevant departmental expenditure limits, it would raise £6.7 billion in the current year, rising to £7.5 billion in 2030-31, a total of £35.6 billion over the plan period. It would give some meaning to the oft-repeated declarations by the Prime Minister and other Ministers that defence must be an overriding national priority. It would give meaning to the Prime Minister’s statement in his introduction to the strategic defence review that it was his

“first duty … to keep the British people safe”.

But that is only half the answer. What is the money to be spent on? Three months ago, I was in Ukraine with a number of colleagues from the other place. We learned of the extraordinary way in which Ukraine has transformed modern warfare. We were told about the robots that can travel 20 kilometres and blow up Russian command posts, we were told of the occasions when Russian troops have surrendered to these robots, and of course we were told about drones.

A few weeks ago, I was at a gathering when I had the temerity to suggest that I did not see a great deal of evidence that the British Army was learning the lessons of the war in Ukraine. A very senior officer was present, and he berated me for my ignorance and told me that I did not know what I was talking about. I am quite used to being berated for my ignorance, so I did not take offence. A few days later, I was in the company of a less senior officer but someone who was nevertheless in a position to answer two specific questions that I put to him. Does the British Army have any robots of this kind? His answer was no. Do you know when the British Army will have robots of this kind? His answer was no.

In my ignorance, it seems to me that these different reactions are not entirely consistent with each other. I hope the Minister will put me out of my ignorance when he comes to reply to the debate and will explain how these different reactions can be reconciled with each other. I look forward to his response with great interest.

My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow a fellow Petrean, the noble Lord, Lord Howard of Lympne, who I felt was in an almost emollient mood.

Nick Thomas-Symonds, the Minister for the Constitution and a fine academic historian—as it happens, he is an expert on Owain Glyndŵr, the last native Prince of Wales—told us last month that although the Government want to develop closer ties with the EU, any sort of deal that would lead to the UK and the EU entering even into the customs union was ruled out. Even a bespoke version, he said, such as the agreements the EU has with Turkey and Norway, would be “off the cards”. We might call that the Starmer line—a ticket for a day trip to Calais. Streeting wants to take us off on the grand tour on the Brussels express. Burnham, on the other hand, is seriously Augustinian in his approach: Lord, make me a pure European, but not just yet.

Where is the Labour Party going? In the other place the Foreign Affairs Committee, in an excoriating letter sent yesterday to Mr Thomas-Symonds, severely criticised the Government for their

“secretive, piecemeal and disjointed approach to negotiations with the EU”.

The letter said:

“The lack of a clear and comprehensive vision for the EU relationship will continue to hamstring the Government”.

That was a letter signed by Emily Thornberry.

In the notes to the European partnership Bill published last Wednesday, the Government say:

“Businesses across the UK tell us they are being held back by red tape when trading with Europe”.

It is not red tape that is holding back businesses; it is the Government’s red lines inscribed in that medieval manuscript that would appeal to the historical interests of Mr Thomas-Symonds, the cobwebbed Labour 2024 election manifesto.

Say it out loud: the Brexit experiment has failed. True, the Pied Piper has led us the way to gold, but it is gold bitcoins for the man playing the alluring pipes—it is Nigel’s gold. The Government tell us, in the notes to the Bill, that the loss to our gross domestic product could be as much as 8%. The trumpets last week sounded out fanfares for just a 0.6% increase in growth in the last quarter—the highest rate, they boasted, in the G7. That is only 2.4% in a year. It does not begin to make up the 8% we have lost already.

Next month, as my noble friend Lady Suttie reminded us, it will be 10 years since David Cameron’s referendum. At that time, we were safe behind the bulwark of NATO. International trade was based on the rule of law. Putin’s ambitions in Ukraine still seemed limited to its Russian-speaking borders and the Middle East was quietening down. Those who promoted Brexit relied on our special relationship with the USA for security and prosperous markets. We would, they promised, be free to cut unique special deals around the whole world. It has not happened. These assumptions have proved false.

The world today is a very different place. Trump has torn up the rules with his stupid tariffs. He is pursuing military glory for his own vanity. He has weakened the American commitment to NATO and destroyed the capacity of the USA to give moral leadership to the world. The Liberty Bell is well and truly cracked and rings with a jangled sound. Meanwhile, Putin and Xi have discovered eternal friendship in each other’s arms. I say to whoever sits in No. 10 in a month’s time: be bold. Go for the single market and the customs union and follow the road once again to full partnership with Europe, with full participation in decision-making and administration. Take the lead as we in Britain used to do. Owain Glyndŵr could have made a better case for it. It is back to the future time.

My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Gresford. As the gracious Address rightly notes, antisemitism, political fragmentation and alienation are challenges that demand we work far harder to renew our institutions and put the national interest first. Two issues that I want the Government to address are resilience and dependency.

The most pressing challenge is the deadly quartet—as the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, referred to them—of Russia, China, North Korea and Iran. I have some skin in the game as I have collected sanctions from each of them. Their lethal challenge to the liberal democratic order represents one of the most severe threats since World War II. Consider how that axis works. It utilises Hong Kong, for instance, for the shadow fleet of tankers selling oil to China and for companies producing tech parts found in Iran’s drones and ballistic missiles. The BBC reports that at least 11,000 North Korean soldiers have been sent to fight for Putin in Ukraine—some have been used as human minesweepers. Iran has provided Putin with weapons, ammunition and technology. In facing this axis, our national resilience undoubtedly needs to be bolstered by increased defence spending now, before it is too late, and by a coherent strategy to defend our citizens and values.

In travelling through many dictatorships, including the former Soviet Union, Burma, North Korea and China, I have seen at first hand an inspiring desire for the liberties we often take for granted. That desire is exhibited courageously in Ukraine and vibrantly in Taiwan. On Monday, I co-chaired a meeting in Parliament addressed by Thae Yong-ho. He was the deputy North Korean ambassador in the UK and defected in 2016, choosing democracy over dictatorship. We discussed a United Nations commission of inquiry report documenting North Korea as a state that

“does not have any parallel in the contemporary world”.

The report called for its crimes against humanity to be prosecuted by the International Criminal Court. It never has been. In its political prison camps, hundreds of thousands continue to perish. This is a country where a 22 year-old boy was publicly executed for listening to South Korean music.

In China, I visited persecuted Christians, witnessed the suppression of Buddhists in Tibet and met Uyghur Muslims enduring genocide, as referred to earlier by the noble Lord, Lord Callanan. In Hong Kong in 2019 as an international election monitor, I saw an unprecedented turnout, with pro-democracy candidates gaining a landslide victory in the city’s last fair and free elections. The CCP communist regime responded by destroying “one country, two systems”, disqualifying elected legislators, enacting the national security law and imprisoning up to 1,900 political prisoners in Hong Kong. They include people such as the young man Joshua Wong and the remarkable British citizen Jimmy Lai, who, unless released, will undoubtedly die in solitary confinement.

The Joint Committee on Human Rights, which I have the privilege to chair, identified China, in its report on transnational repression, as the greatest internal threat and called for it to be placed in the advanced tier of the foreign influence registration scheme. In our report on supply chains and slave labour, we called for radical change to the Modern Slavery Act to prevent slavery in global supply chains. Will those recommendations feature in forthcoming legislation?

For British industry to be able to provide jobs and to compete, there must be an end to unfair competition based on slave labour. Resilience demands that we address a trade deficit of £43.5 billion with China rather than adding to it. We must urgently wean ourselves away and trade instead with partners such as Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, India and other emerging democracies. Our ability to rebuild a resilient manufacturing base, to compete fairly and to protect jobs against rising unemployment will always be compromised by states such as China that use slave labour. As the JCHR report on supply chain transparency and my amendment to the Energy Act made clear, national energy resilience cannot be dependent on solar panels made by Uyghur slave labour.

The dangers of the moment, including prohibitive energy bills, also require us to open new gas and oil fields and responsibly utilise natural resources. As with the challenge from AI, currently being examined by the JCHR, we risk making the same mistake of the 1980s of too rapid deindustrialisation and using state handouts, which are no substitute for the dignity of work. No one should be better off on benefits than in doing a day’s work.

A resilient democracy must bolster its citizens and its international alliances, acting confidently in promoting the rule of law and democratic values. To that end, the Government should accept, for instance, the JCHR recommendation to extend universal jurisdiction against perpetrators of mass atrocity crimes, an issue to which I will return in the balloted debate which I have secured for 4 June and through my Private Member’s Bill on genocide determination. I hope that, when those measures come forward, the Government will demonstrate that they mean what they say when, in the words of the gracious Address, they will take measures which contribute to the UK’s

“strength on the world stage”.

My Lords, it is an honour to speak in this debate on the gracious Speech and to follow the noble Lord. I must congratulate him on his collection of sanctions.

We live in a fragile world in which democracies and rights are being threatened. Currently, there are 116 million displaced people in the world. That number will grow as a consequence of crises and climate change. It is a difficult, dangerous world in which the NATO summit in Ankara will be crucial. It comes at a time when America’s commitment is uncertain and their troops on our continent are decreasing. The other key conference is on the EU reset. I associate myself wholeheartedly with everything that my noble friend Lady Ashton of Upholland said on that.

Bilateral relationships are of the utmost importance. I am delighted to serve as co-chair of the British-Spanish Tertulias, which was established in the 1980s when Spain joined the European Union. This strengthens ties between our countries, bringing together people from the worlds of politics, business, academia and civil society. We share many challenges with Spain and often we find common solutions. Both our political systems are increasingly afflicted by populism.

There are also notable policy differences—for example, on immigration, on which there is a pressing need in this country for more coherent, joined-up thinking across government departments. I struggle to believe that the FCDO was fully aligned with the Home Office’s recent decision to ban visas for students from Afghanistan, Cameroon, Myanmar and Sudan, including those awarded Chevening scholarships. Will my noble friend the Minister say how this visa brake, which denies opportunity to individuals amid humanitarian crises, is consistent with the Government’s stated commitment to support fragile and conflict-affected states, and particularly their focus on women and girls? Scholarships are not only transformative for brilliant students but are a powerful instrument of British soft power.

The FCDO has embarked upon a major restructuring programme. I fully recognise the need for decisions to be grounded in robust evidence, for greater use of technologies and for efficiency to deliver value for money, but I am concerned that huge cuts risk inflicting long-term damage on our diplomatic service, which commands global respect. In an increasingly complex and unstable world, the skills of diplomacy are more important than ever; they must not be eroded. I would be grateful for reassurance from my noble friend that diplomacy remains a core priority.

Some of the reductions stem from concerning cuts to development aid. I too recognise the need for a new approach, but the figures are stark. The reduction to 0.3% of GNI by next year in reality means that only 0.24% will be spent internationally. It is imperative to increase defence spending to safeguard our national security, but international development and security are intrinsically linked. Aid is an essential tool of security and prevention, helping to stabilise fragile regions and to address the root causes of conflict and irregular migration before they impact directly on the United Kingdom. I thank my noble friend for her work in this area, including her efforts to secure increased UK funding for OCHA.

I am proud of the Prime Minister’s global leadership on Ukraine, including the initiative to establish the coalition of the willing, which is vital for not only Ukraine but the security of our country and our continent. I commend his leadership on Iran in resisting calls for engagement advanced by the Opposition, President Trump and his henchman in this country, Nigel Farage. Until recently, it would have been unthinkable for the United Kingdom to diverge so markedly from the United States, which is now at best an unreliable partner and at worst increasingly hostile to the international order it once helped to uphold—an order which, in Mark Carney’s words, is not coming back.

The special relationship is perhaps no longer so special and our most important strategic relationship must increasingly be with the EU. NATO remains at the cornerstone of our defence, but I would be grateful for an update from the Minister on progress on negotiations for the United Kingdom to participate in the EU’s €90 billion loan facility for Ukraine. Like everybody else, I support an increase in defence expenditure. I am rather dismayed that the national conversation proposed in the strategic defence review, which is essential, has not yet been forthcoming. It is urgent and it is one of the few defence initiatives that can be delivered at little or no cost. I am sure we would all want to contribute.

My Lords, I want to talk about the war in the Gulf. I do not often agree with Rachel Reeves but I had some sympathy with her when she told her opposite number in America that the war in Iran had made the world more dangerous. The Iranian regime is murderous, duplicitous and criminal. Regime change is something profoundly to be wished for, but this is not the way. It has to come from within.

The economic effects of the war could be far-reaching. It is not just fuel but, as my noble friend Lord Callanan pointed out, food. The Gulf is at the heart of the global fertiliser market, where many producers depend on gas. As we approach the planting season, if that is delayed then we could see something more serious than just shortages.

President Trump has started a war he does not know how to end. The war is justified on two dubious claims. First, there was no imminent threat to the US. Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, made that crystal clear in his resignation speech. Equally, Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence, in her evidence to Congress made clear that Iran had not restarted its nuclear weapons program. As the noble Baroness, Lady Ashton, said, this war had no clear objectives when it started, and now the objective is to get back to where we were before it started.

The President seems to see two options: escalation or economic attrition. It remains unclear whether the US blockade of Iran will force Iran to capitulate more quickly than Iran’s blockade of the rest of the Gulf will hurt its neighbours. For the American blockade to succeed, it has not just to cause hurt but to bring the regime in Iran to its knees—a higher threshold. On escalation, the US can reduce Iran to a pile of rubble, but the consequences could be as dangerous as they were in Iraq. The last thing that the Middle East needs is another failed state. The CIA apparently has warned that bombing again would probably lead to a wider conflict and, even worse, damage further the infrastructure of the neighbouring Gulf countries. It is a grim situation and it could all have been avoided.

The tragedy is that we had, in 2015, a nuclear agreement—for which I pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Ashton—which Iran observed, submitting to rigorous international inspection and confining enrichment to low levels. President Trump chose to tear up the deal. Why? For no reason, apparently, other than that it was President Obama’s deal. Unsurprisingly, the Iranians then reacted by enriching to much higher levels while emphasising that this policy was reversible if the West came back to the negotiating table.

Is a deal possible today? The JCPOA ought to provide the template. Both sides, according to reports, have dropped some red lines. According to some, America is now pressing not for a ban on enrichment but for a number of years without enrichment. The Iranians have sent proposals through Pakistan to negotiate in phases. A phased agreement is indeed a possibility, as it would give the opportunity to build some trust. Reports say that US intelligence agencies have been asked to analyse the effects of the President simply declaring victory and withdrawing from the conflict. No one wants to see America humiliated or Iran strengthened, but the alternative of restarting the war and the bombing is not the answer. It would be futile. In the end, after more fighting and more deaths, there would be negotiation—better to start now and let diplomacy have its day. Better jaw-jaw than war-war.

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Lamont, now a fellow traveller on the International Relations and Defence Committee. I draw the attention of the House to my relevant defence-related commercial interests, particularly my role as chairman of Defence Holdings PLC and as European defence adviser to Blackstone.

Unsurprisingly, I want to confine my comments on the gracious Speech to defence-related issues, and with due humility, because whenever I stand to speak and look around this Chamber I still feel young. I thought I might start by offering some thoughts on leadership. Among the many famous dictums on leadership sits Napoleon Bonaparte’s view that a leader when faced with a difficult or indeed potentially catastrophic situation had a duty to his army and his country to do two things. The first was to establish the truth and the second, in the context of that truth, was to offer hope. To explain this a little more fully, the truth I am talking about is not some sort of confected delusion or some exercise in self and public deception; rather, it is the ugly reality that only brutal honesty can lay bare.

Only in the context of unvarnished truth is it possible to offer practical hope. To explain, the hope that I am talking about is not some passive form of wishful thinking akin to optimism, nor some alchemy dreamed up by the authors of the defence strategy publications. Rather, the military idea of hope is a combination of desire, positive expectation and some action. Hope is a motivating force that provides both strength and resilience in uncertain times.

In the context of defence, the gracious Speech undoubtedly nodded in the direction of some truth. It talked of dangers and threats, but the narrative of peril was completely neutered, because it so obviously sat in the wider context of government inaction on funding the latest strategic defence review. We need to do much better.

I offer some selective views on both truth and hope. The first truth is that the dangers we face are more complex, active and potentially existential than we realise. I say this because the threats are not only military ones that can be identified and physically defeated; rather, they are also threats to the resilience of our critical infrastructure, the integrity of our society and the values we hold dear and want to live by.

The second truth is that our defence capability is in a mess. Not only are our Armed Forces woefully underresourced, but they have been procured for a different world, age and mindset. We remain the prisoners of our remarkable national story. We cling to the totemic symbols of global authority: our nuclear deterrent, aircraft carriers, fifth generation jet fighters and exotic platforms—the global projection of hard power. I am not saying that many of these things are not needed, but by the time such things are paid for, there is little left over for the conventional combat readiness which is the baseline requirement of credible deterrence on a localised basis.

This leads to the third hard truth: our pretensions to NATO leadership, a core aspiration of the last defence review, are frankly laughable. The same is true of some of our other pretensions; for example, to the status of a technological superpower. In short, the British public have been subject to 25 years of delusion and to quote my friend—he has been oft quoted today—the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, we now find ourselves

“underprepared, underinsured and under attack”,

and we are not safe—that is the truth.

In respect of hope, however, I can offer some more positive thoughts. In respect of the threat, I do not personally worry that Russian paratroopers are imminently going to land in Kent or roll tanks up to the gates of Paris. The wars in Ukraine and now Iran have demonstrated the inherent advantages of defence over attack. We can triage the threats of the moment and should prioritise our support to Ukraine and the desperate need to build national resilience and ameliorate the more critical risks to our societal integrity.

We need to spend more on warfighting readiness to contribute to more credible deterrence, to help build back some international respect and to better justify our leadership credentials. I do not accept this as being unaffordable. Affordability is a political choice. Moreover, if the future promises on defence funding are realised, our challenge is more one of timing than money. I am intimately aware that private equity recognises the need for, and mutual benefit of, investing in defence and the stability it helps ensure, and it is keen to make that investment quickly.

Finally, we should all continue to recognise that, in human terms, and despite the neglect we have subjected them to, we continue to have in our Armed Forces a most remarkable national asset. We owe it to them to tell the truth and to offer them some hope—the hope that their service deserves. So I am not downhearted and without hope, although I am mightily frustrated that the political elite of my nation seems to spend the majority of its time convulsed in wholly meaningless distractions. There is an urgent need to be honest with the nation about our predicament and to offer it hope through practical action. This should now be the Government’s cohering purpose.

My Lords, “know thyself” was the message of the oracle at Delphi, and it was good that the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Houghton, enabled us to puncture some of our national delusions, and I follow him in that. It was unusual and significant that the gracious Speech began with a sentence on the “dangerous and volatile world” in which we live. Indeed, the forward perspective is very bleak. Our hope for a peace dividend has gone and has been replaced by wars, rumours of wars and dangers to the global South, including the danger of famine.

It is no longer possible for international affairs to be considered self-contained. We saw, for example, in the local elections on May 7, the extent to which Gaza was a significant factor. The old attempts to isolate national and international affairs are no longer. It is also so sad to see the rise of antisemitism in this country. We should bless the contribution of our Jewish community to the position of this country over very many years.

The old certainties have gone, and the post-war settlement is being undermined massively. Fundamental to the post-war settlement is the warmth of our transatlantic relations. Yes, there will remain co-operation, intelligence and massive cultural exchanges, but the old warmth has indeed gone. The US has questioned our role in the Falklands—which is a neuralgic issue for us in the UK—has threatened armed force against a NATO ally, Denmark, in respect of Greenland, and has erected tariff wars against its allies.

Is it just President Trump? No—the likely successor, Vice-President JD Vance, campaigned for the strongman Orbán in Hungary, a country I know well, having served there for two years. Equally, JD Vance is quoted as saying of Ukraine:

“I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another”.

The US, alas, is no longer a beacon on the hill. If NATO is indeed, as President Trump has said, a paper tiger, we must question whether we can rely on the US in the way we did in the past.

It must be extremely difficult for US ambassadors to follow the volatility of US foreign policy. US policy in Iran underlines this problem. It is a war of choice. There was no consultation. Was there any consultation when the US, on Tuesday this week, was about to renew its war on Iran or was blind support needed in spite of the lack of consultation?

Against this background, what way forward is there for us? Surely, the pivot should not now be to the Indo-Pacific. In my judgment, it should be to Europe—perhaps to broader Europe rather than just the European Union. That is the challenge that faces us. We must find means of defending ourselves.

On defence, I will say only that, like a number of colleagues, I endorse and adopt what my noble friend Lord Robertson said about our lack of preparation. In my judgment, a safer haven beckons. We need a closer relationship with Europe—it is a much safer haven for us—and we need to reduce our dependence on the US, but that will have to be done incrementally and over time. However, we need to build our relationship with Europe so that we can face the world together. In terms of that relationship we should be bolder and put the Ming vase back in the cupboard where it belongs.

My Lords, in our increasingly dangerous and volatile world, there is one conflict which does not get much attention from the media. The brutal conflict in Sudan is moving relentlessly into its fourth year, with little prospect of resolution for the world’s worst humanitarian crisis this century.

In April, the UNHCR representative in Sudan stated that 14 million people are now displaced and at severe risk of violence and food shortages every day. The Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces, along with their respective coalitions, remain focused on a military victory. Control of Sudan remains divided between the SAF, holding the north and east of the country, and the RSF, which is largely in command of the west. The key battlefronts continue to shift, with fighting now concentrated in the country’s centre and south-east. There is no sign that either side can fully defeat the other.

Until the rains come in June to September, there is likely to be intensified fighting to make territorial advances. But when the rains come and fighters are bogged down, there will not be any respite for civilians, who will suffer indiscriminate attacks on civilian infrastructure from the air, by drones sourced from outside Sudan. The UN fact-finding mission into El Fasher recently described the events as having “the hallmarks of genocide”, including mass killings, ethnic targeting and systematic sexual violence against women, girls and children.

The noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, who opened the debate, has been generous with her time in briefing Peers, humanitarian organisations and members of the diaspora on the policies and actions of the UK Government in their efforts to ameliorate the humanitarian crisis. Her work is appreciated—but there is a “but”. So much more needs to be done to bring a period of recovery to the peoples of Sudan and security in that region; security there is crucial to us all.

When the Foreign Secretary attended the third International Sudan Conference in Berlin in April, she pledged to preserve £146 million of UK aid to support front-line aid workers providing life-saving support to Sudanese civilians. But it is telling that the conference was criticised by the Sudan’s SAF-aligned de facto Government and faced objections from the RSF’s Tasis coalition. The ministerial session at the conference failed to agree a joint communique and had to settle for a co-chair’s statement instead.

Regional interests in the Middle East, the Horn of Africa and the Red Sea continue to exert influence on Sudan’s fighting groups. What diplomatic progress have the Government been able to make in discussions with countries such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the UAE? The latter is often accused of providing military materiel to the RSF. Sudan has a troika, a quad and a quintet—groupings which lack co-ordination. What is the Government’s view about how to bring coherence to the discussions of those groupings?

When the Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, replied to one of the Questions for Written Answer from the noble Lord, Lord Alton, in April this year, she supported the quintet’s launch of an intra-Sudanese political dialogue on the basis that it could pave the way to a civilian-led transition in Sudan once a permanent ceasefire had been secured. Will the UK play any role in providing financial or diplomatic support for that process?

The UK has a very influential position as penholder on Sudan at the UN in New York and Geneva. So, can the Minister update the House today about the steps being taken diplomatically by the UK to support brave front-line responders such as the Emergency Response Rooms, prevent further casualties and secure a ceasefire and, ultimately, what appears at the moment to be an impossible-to-secure peace?

My Lords, next year, the UK will host the G20 as its president, and the gracious Speech refers to the Government’s aim to use it to “reinforce global stability”. Today, I will focus on the Middle East and the need to rein in the Israeli Government if we are to create that stability.

Along with the US, the Israeli Government have embarked on one of the most reckless, ill-thought-out wars in recent history, with dire consequences for the global economy, the environment and the security of the region, as the noble Lord, Lord Lamont, set out. The Prime Minister was right in refusing to allow the use of British bases in mounting the attack on Iran. The Netanyahu Government concomitantly started a war in Lebanon that has killed many civilians and has occupied the south of the country. The ceasefire there, which the US eventually demanded, has been broken almost daily as the Israeli Government act with impunity. The ceasefire in Gaza is also in name only. Since its announcement, more than 600 Palestinians, many women and children, have been killed.

As 90% of the infrastructure has been destroyed, most Gazans live in tents, denied sanitation, adequate food and water and medical supplies because there is still insufficient access for the convoys. Again, the Israeli Government act with impunity. It is horrifying that they have moved to deregister international NGOs from operating in Gaza so that Gazans are denied the humanitarian services they desperately need. While Gaza remains an uninhabitable wasteland, no progress is being made in its reconstruction. What action are the UK Government taking to try to get this started?

Turning to the 60-year occupation of the West Bank, the UK Government rightly accept that it is illegal, as was confirmed by the ICJ in 2024. Meanwhile, the Israeli Government are pursuing a policy of annexation there, having encouraged over 100 new settlements, with some 750,000 settlers, on land which was owned by or is designated for Palestinians. House demolitions and ethnic cleansing, the theft of water and other resources, and vicious and unpunished settler violence are all commonplace. Again, the Israeli Government act with impunity.

Last year, the UK recognised the State of Palestine as a first step towards its implementation. The Israeli Government have announced their opposition and take steps to prevent it, despite widespread international support for a two-state solution in which the rights of Palestinians to self-determination are recognised. It is surely hypocritical to back two states yet to stand by while this progress is blocked. Can the Minister say what actions the UK is taking? Condemnation alone is not enough while the Israeli security Cabinet registers Palestinian land as Israeli state property. Annexation is a flagrant breach of international law.

As the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Southwark touched on, the Israeli aim to bury the two-state solution by building the E1 settlement is unacceptable. Taking land designated for a future Palestinian state and making it unviable must be challenged. So will the Government warn that companies which bid for construction contracts there will put at risk their commercial interests in the UK? Will the Government also introduce a comprehensive ban on trade with illegal settlements, including services and investment as well as goods? Such trade prolongs unlawful occupation.

Finally, will the Government work with our EU partners in reconsidering the trade agreements with Israel? The EU and UK agreements have both been breached by the Israeli Government’s failure to respect human rights and democratic principles. It would also be helpful to hear the Government’s response to a letter in the Financial Times that was signed by 60 former UK ambassadors, which covered many of the issues that I have raised. Please will the Government demonstrate leadership on these issues in the run-up to the G20—in the interests of justice and peace in the Middle East?

My Lords, it will come as no surprise to people who have listened to me over the last few years that I, like my noble friend Lord Thomas of Gresford, would like to talk in this context about our relationship with the European Union.

I could have spoken last week on the economic affairs debate, but I am speaking today on foreign affairs because I believe that our relationship with the European Union is the biggest long-term issue facing the United Kingdom. It is not just an economic issue. Can we really believe, as the Brexiteers wanted, that we can cut ourselves off from Europe and rely on our special relationship with the United States? We have a President there who has threatened to invade Greenland, who has started a war in Iran without consulting his NATO allies, who threatened to kick Spain out of NATO when it objected to the Iran war, and who has said that the US should think again about UK sovereignty in the Falklands. Can we really rely on the special relationship any more?

It is now 10 years since the referendum and, as various speakers on these Benches have indicated, Brexit has clearly failed. The limited economic advantages arising from our recent trade deals are more than offset, as my noble friend Lord Thomas of Gresford indicated, by the recent calculation, admitted by the Government, of an 8% cost of Brexit to UK GDP. Even the trade deals that have been done outside the framework of our membership of the European Union, including the one announced yesterday with the Gulf states, are merely a pinprick in relation to the overall 8% cost of Brexit. In this context, the Government’s approach to Europe is too restrictive, as shown in the European legislation in the King’s Speech. A reset of our relationship, bound by the rigid red lines on free movement and the customs union, is inadequate when Brexit is failing and the US is unreliable as a strategic partner.

My noble friend Lady Suttie, in her opening remarks, echoed the call by the former leader of our party, Nick Clegg, for a 10-year programme ending in rejoining the European Union. His thesis is that first we should negotiate to join a bespoke customs union. Then we should move on to join the single market. Ultimately, in 10 years’ time, we should apply for full membership. The public, as we have seen recently, are on the side of this approach. A recent poll showed that 55% of the electorate now want to rejoin the European Union. To the surprise of many, 63% want to return to free movement. This is supported, as we know, by the noble Lord, Lord Kinnock, who unfortunately is not in his place.

The argument that the European Union will not want us needs to be taken with a pinch of salt, as indicated by my noble friend Lady Suttie. Over the next 10 years, the European Union will see fundamental changes, particularly with the admission of Ukraine, one of the world’s largest farming communities, which it is pressing for. We cannot yet foresee the impact that this will have on French and German farmers. However, following the admission of Ukraine, the EU will be a completely different entity from the one that we left. We will be not negotiating with the same institution.

Now is the time for the Government to be bold and not worry about the results of the Makerfield by-election.

My Lords, as a response to the humble Address, I remind noble Lords of 8 May 1945. My sister and I were around at the time. There was a massive noise outside our house. We lived in London. My sister and I had been given the opportunity of going away but wanted to stay with our parents. My parents came in with a glass of sherry and said, “The war is over. We’re safe”. I remember that so clearly. What I had not realised is that when my parents talked about being safe, we had thought that the Germans were going to take over the whole of Britain at a particular time. We then were told that we were particularly safe because, being Jewish, quite a number of our family finished up in Auschwitz.

What I really want to say is that everybody here realises that today’s discussion is possibly one of the most important we have ever had. It is worth going back a wee bit to the words that we all say every year, and when I went away to military service we all said it then. On 11 November, we all stand to attention and somebody always says, “We will remember them”. To my mind, it is important for us all to remember.

Of course, many people have been slaughtered in many wars. We use the words “just war”, but what is a just war? My personal view is that the war at the moment in Iran is a just war. There is a moment in life when you have to make a decision because, when you go to war, large numbers of people will get hurt, wounded for life or killed. What is happening in trying to get Trump out of this war is, to my mind, totally justified. Ukraine should be supported totally.

On the attack on Iran—some of your Lordships may have seen the news that came through just a few minutes ago—the Iranian regime has totally refused to accept that it cannot have control of their nuclear capability. I know that there is a lot of feeling against President Trump—sadly—and what he is doing, but he is a great believer in trying to save lives. He has said many times that nearly 2,000 young people—Russians and Ukrainians from 17 years of age—are being killed every day that goes by. Somehow or other, that has to stop. In practice, once again, our support on that front is totally important.

I finish by saying that our noble Ministers—the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, and the noble Lord, Lord Coaker—have heard many speeches today. It is not for me to talk about how they feel, but I would like to hope that they agree with the view that I have expressed: to save life in the ultimate is what we all try to achieve, but sometimes war is justified.

My Lords, when I read in the Times last week that the Prime Minister was going to announce an £18 billion increase in defence expenditure, I thought, “At last, the Government are going to put their money where their mouth is”. But, of course, I was disappointed. Once again, we are going to have to rely on words, which basically means that Britain’s reputation as a military power continues to go down the plughole. Not even the powerful and patriotic rhetoric of the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, can do anything about that.

The figures speak for themselves. NATO data shows that, on a proportional basis, the United Kingdom was the 12th biggest spender last year, having been the third biggest in 2021. At present, we are spending 2.4% of GDP on defence, which is way below the target that we have set ourselves. Given how much the nuclear element takes up, the proportion going on conventional forces is little over 1%.

This not only means—as the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, so forcefully put it—being unprepared for war and finding it difficult to deal with the cyber and other espionage threats that already assail us, but makes a mockery of the Government’s ambition to play a leading role in foreign policy and security deliberations with our European allies. It explains, too, our pitiful lack of resources in the Middle East when the US and Israel attacked Iran. Of course, it also explains President Trump’s contempt for what we have to offer.

I do not blame this Government alone for the predicament we are in. It is the culmination of a long retreat. In 1998, the former United States ambassador to London, Ray Seitz, whom I hope others as well as I remember with affection and admiration, warned that “the British miniaturisation of its own Armed Forces” would lead to a reduction in British influence in Washington. Not only in Washington: the same applies in Europe, the Middle East, Asia and all over the world. By miniaturising our military, we are throwing away an invaluable diplomatic card. This Government are not the only ones to blame for us being where we are, but they are to blame for not doing anything to reverse the process.

The Government’s failure to rebuild our defence preparedness is not the only way that they are failing to provide for this country’s security; the failure fully to exploit our North Sea oil and gas reserves is another. Many noble Lords have spoken about this during the course of the week-long debate on the gracious Speech, so I will not labour the point. However, I will say that, whatever the security benefits of green energy and renewables in the long run, we shall need fossil fuels for a long time to come and it is in the interests of our own security that as much as possible of those fuels should come from our own resources in the North Sea.

Wood Mackenzie has estimated that, by 2035, we will be importing 60% of our LNG needs from the United States, versus 10% in 2026. I hate to say it but, when one sees how casually President Trump interrupts or impedes trade flows or takes other actions when an ally displeases him for some reason, how can we regard that as secure, quite apart from all the other dangers that threaten the international trade in oil and gas?

My Lords, I wish to raise three issues: Israel, Ukraine and defence expenditure.

Since 2022, I have been challenging in this House the billions being spent on the war with Russia, which I have repeatedly opposed in over 30 interventions in debate. Contributing to this crisis are our failures to hold in check American policy on NATO expansion, thereby breaching the neutrality of east European barrier states’ status, which is so important to Russia; our support for Ukraine membership of NATO, only later qualified; our failure to press for early withdrawal of the other battalions following the Maidan revolution; and, in my view, a complete misreading of events in Donetsk and Luhansk. The consequences of these policies have been not only economic but have enabled a powerful UK defence lobby to mobilise and use the crisis to demand increases in defence expenditure. I view Russia’s brutal, aggressive, war-mongering response and regrettable turn to the East and China to be a direct consequence of western miscalculation—all avoidable. Unfortunately, my Government have found themselves locked into this strategy.

I move on to Israel, the war and the Palestinian question. The debate has, unfortunately, become submerged in discussion over antisemitism, thereby diverting us from the real debate. It is hard to know where to draw the line, thus the dispute over the London marches. As a great admirer of Israel, which I first visited as a schoolboy in 1959, like many of my friends I am torn. Trump’s position, as set out in Jared Kushner’s paper on the vision for peace, is at the heart of the problem. The plan proposes a Palestine without borders, landlocked inside a greater Israel, with Palestinian enclaves under Israeli control. The plan, which is opposed throughout the Middle East, is further deepening and aggravating the existing conflict. In my view, the Government are right to keep out, and the Prime Minister has stood firm.

I move on to defence expenditure. I understand that my noble friend Lord Robertson of Port Ellen has proposed a 5% target. My 10 years on the Public Accounts Committee in the Commons, followed by my reading of the brilliant exposé on waste in defence procurement by Lord Levene of Portsoken, leave me wary of any demands for substantially increased resources. Yes, some increase is needed, and we are delivering, but I say that we should cut the overcharging, waste, gold-plating and contract revisions, and find another Peter Levene—and then we can talk.

Before we accept the notion of an increased worldwide threat, which I reject, we need to reflect on whether we would be credibly arguing for substantial increases if we were to settle the conflict in Ukraine as per Trump and then sought to influence Trump over Israel, seeking a more considered approach without our being accused of undermining Israel’s need for security. I strongly believe that, with careful diplomacy, we can reduce world tension. The question is whether the brilliance in diplomacy that characterised Foreign Office thinking over generations is still there. In my view, our mistake has been to fail to support Trump over Ukraine. That failure by the western democracies, in particular in Europe, has cost us dearly.

Trump is now questioning and challenging not only our wider European policy agendas but the relationship between America and Europe. The little Englanders who keep us outside of Europe should keep that in mind. Their case is dying on the cross of American isolationism. We should have supported Trump’s Ukraine initiative. If we had done so, we could have influenced the events in his war with Iran and probably the future of trading relations with the United States. Furthermore, perhaps as a consequence, we could have curtailed the opportunist relationship Russia is now developing with China, for which we bear some responsibility. When Russia finally implodes, the truth will no doubt come out. I know my views are minority views, but I thank the House for its tolerance.

My Lords, I disagree with a great deal of what the previous speaker has just said, but I am extraordinarily glad to live in a country where he has the right to say it and I have the duty to listen.

I will talk a bit about defence, like most Members taking part our debate on the King’s Speech, starting with the powerful contribution from the noble Lord, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen. He started by endorsing the Prime Minister’s comment in his introduction to the King’s Speech that the Iran conflict demonstrates the need for the UK to be stronger and to move with greater urgency. However, he also pointed out that the bit of the speech that should have told us how much the Government intend to spend on hard power appeared to be missing. I hope the Government will say something shortly. I wish that, among the 37 pieces of legislation on other subjects, they had been able to give us more news than we have had so far. Nevertheless, I am going to continue to assume that the Government are serious about defence, even if they are dangerously slow in getting active.

There is, and I worry about this, a growing strand of opinion in the country that asserts that NATO is now a busted flush, that the US is no longer a reliable ally and that we should look for our security somewhere else. I think that is a line of argument that we should be extraordinarily wary of and should be countering strongly—it does not make sense. With an overbearing Russia on our doorstep, underpowered Europeans cannot afford a divorce. Actually, if truth be told, the Americans need the facilities and the rights of passage they have with their European allies. They do not have an interest in the end of NATO, and divorce would be quite painful for them. I do not think that, as things stand, NATO will collapse, but that relatively reassuring state of affairs is not unconditional. It depends on what we do next, and particularly on what Europeans do next.

The international landscape in which NATO was originally built has shifted materially since the start of the change that was visible with Obama. Mr Trump’s behaviour has undoubtedly made adjustments to the new situation harder on both sides of the Atlantic than it need be, but we cannot complain about his exposure of the inadequacy of our defence efforts and our lack of political pulling power that results from that, which other Lords have also remarked on. While NATO is not a busted flush, there is a mounting crisis of credibility, so, with some exasperation, I ask the Government how long they will go on without doing much, if anything. The situation, as the Prime Minister said, is urgent.

The Government tell us that national security is their primary duty. They have accepted the wide-ranging and very insightful defence review conducted by the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, but over a year later we still do not have the defence investment plan and the Government have not joined the EU’s defence, security and resilience bank. Serious spending on defence by the UK is backed up to the end of the cycle.

The important point is that our European neighbours are not waiting about; they are moving faster than we are. Each day news comes of agreements on kit that they will build and of the creation of bilateral corporate partnerships between them that will fulfil contracts. Many could turn out to be long term. The corporate structures could be set and the defence market opportunities could be cleaned out before the UK is ready to get going. Frankly, we risk being shut out.

This not only deprives us of the economic growth that the Government advertise that defence will bring to traditional defence-building regions of this country, which badly need the business; it is adversely affecting our claims to political influence and leadership inside the alliance. Our reputation took an embarrassing dent the other day with our pathetic performance in the Mediterranean. My plea to the Government is: we have the words; can we now have the deeds?

My Lords, the gracious Speech said that His Majesty’s Government

“will continue to pursue foreign policy based on a calm assessment of the national interest”.

I hope that the Minister, when he calmly sums up this debate, will confirm that our national interest includes giving support to the State of Israel, however strong our criticisms may be of some—perhaps many—of the policies of the Netanyahu Government, and that it is in our national interest to oppose all those who seek to destroy the State of Israel.

On Tuesday evening, I attended the opening of an exhibition in London which bears witness to the massacre of young people enjoying the Nova music festival in southern Israel on 7 October 2023. On that occasion, 6,000 young people came to dance but, at 6.19 am, the festival was overrun by pure hatred. Hamas supporters raped, tortured, murdered and mutilated hundreds of people. One of those murdered was a British citizen, 26 year-old Jake Marlowe from north London.

Anyone who thinks that it is progressive for so-called freedom fighters to rape and murder partygoers, and anyone who doubts the atrocities committed that day, should attend that exhibition in Shoreditch—I hope all Members of the House will do so—if only for five minutes. Almost as painful as the reminder of the appalling events which occurred that day is the fact that in London—I emphasise: in London—in 2026, a massive police presence is required to protect the exhibition and those attending from attack by antisemites.

I focus on the Nova festival because it is a symbol of the true values which Israel shares with this country, and of the fragile nature of those values. In Israel, people of all ages and backgrounds, and of any sexual orientation, attend and enjoy cultural events without discrimination. People in Israel read uncensored newspapers; they can freely discuss whatever they like, without state interference. They can vote for the politicians who govern them. Their disputes are determined by independent judges under the rule of law. They benefit, as do people around the world, from astonishing scientific and technological developments in cancer treatment, telecommunications, defence industries and so many other disciplines. These are values of liberty, diversity and scholarship which we find in very few other countries in this world, and in no other country in the neighbourhood where Israel exists.

Sadly, we have to acknowledge that Israel currently has leaders and policies with which we strongly disagree—I strongly disagree—such as the Netanyahu Government’s toleration, indeed encouragement, of violent conduct by settlers in the West Bank in their treatment of Palestinians, which is shameful; the reprehensible statements by some Ministers in the Netanyahu Government; and the failure of that Government to accept that, as the gracious Speech said, we must all work harder towards securing a two-state solution. But when we criticise those aspects of Israeli government policy, and we are right to do so, we should bear in mind that many Israelis share and express the same concerns.

Debate is necessary, but what is unacceptable is that there is a state, Iran, whose primary objective is to destroy Israel, which seeks to develop nuclear weapons to implement that objective and which funds organisations, including Hamas and Hezbollah, whose raison d’être is the pursuit of that goal. There are many misguided individuals who are prepared to carry out attacks in this and other countries against anyone they perceive to be a supporter of Israel, by which they mean Jews, and there are all too many others who shrug their shoulders or look the other way. So I ask this Government to recognise the values that we share with the State of Israel—whatever our criticisms, and rightly so, of some of its policies—and not to forget Jake Marlowe and all the other victims of the Nova festival massacre.

My Lords, the King’s Speech was right to emphasise that we face an increasingly dangerous and volatile world, but is what is laid out a match for what is required? We are a divided country. We can trace that back, at the very least, to the financial crisis of 2008, when billions were pumped into the banking system to stabilise it, with the City of London particularly exposed. When people see their living standards suffer, they can be beguiled by simple solutions. Into that played the Brexiteers and our economy was seriously further damaged, with a reduction in GDP of 8% to 11%. The UK became even less of a desired destination for investment. London as a leading financial centre was eroded. Now we see people reaching even further to the right and the left, and we know from history the risks of that.

We are in a divided world where the use of force is undermining any notion of the mutual benefit of a rules-based order, with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and Trump attacking Iran, theoretically to secure something better than the JCPOA—which took the noble Baroness, Lady Ashton, and others four years—without any line of sight on achieving that and seemingly without any assessment of what the consequences might be. That makes crystal-clear that we cannot simply sail on alone.

We are indeed part of the European continent and best defend our interests by being part of the EU grouping, as my noble friends Lady Suttie, Lord Thomas of Gresford and Lord Razzall have said. The Government’s plan to move closer to Europe is therefore welcome but far too limited. Like my noble friend Lord Thomas, I note that the Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee has described as “woefully inadequate” the Government’s response to their own paper on seeking such a closer relationship, hiding behind, as the committee put it, “generalities”, with a

“lack of a clear and comprehensive vision”.

I welcome the Government’s recognition of Palestine, to which the Minister referred; I had a Private Member’s Bill on this in the last Session. I hope we have not reached a point of no return in terms of a contiguous Palestinian state alongside Israel. Stability, security and prosperity in the region are desperately needed.

The economic challenges that the Government face pose problems for us all. I come here to the cuts in development assistance, theoretically to help fund defence. That is of course a false choice, as the noble Baroness, Lady Ashton, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Southwark have said. As we read in Monday’s Times, our military leaders have written to the Prime Minister emphasising that cutting foreign aid will compromise national security. They rightly argue that foreign aid helps to prevent the instability, extremism and displacement that military force otherwise later has to confront at greater cost. I ask the Minister: what is the Government’s response to that letter to the Prime Minister?

A reminder of how we can be directly affected by what happens elsewhere is encapsulated in the current Ebola outbreak. Back in 2014-15, we recognised the risks of the west African Ebola epidemic. The far-sighted Chris Whitty harnessed anthropologists to assist in finding acceptable ways to mourn the dead that did not then endanger the living. He set up field diagnostic clinics and hospitals in Sierra Leone, with the US working in Liberia and France in Guinea. An appalling disease—which could have had a terrible impact globally, including in the UK—was checked in its tracks. ODA money went into vaccine research in the Jenner Institute in Oxford and elsewhere. That paved the way for our stellar performance in vaccine development in the pandemic.

All that has gone by the wayside. The Americans now criticise the WHO for moving slowly when they themselves cut its budget, which affected the WHO’s disease surveillance abilities. We have slashed our aid budget. The Minister noted that we are committing £21 million to the Ebola outbreak. In 2014-15, we put in £420 million. Our contribution now is a mere 5% of that earlier effort. The Government need to be far more aware of when the left hand undermines the right. Cutting aid is one area, and now we have immigration restrictions that are throttling our universities. We are in danger of losing our leading edge here. The Government are right to aim for the UK’s economic security and growth, but the measures we see here leave unanswered many of the areas that must be tackled if such growth is to be achieved.

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Northover. I believe long ago we were in the same Government, but I cannot quite recall which Government it was. We have had some very fine speeches both today and throughout the six days we have been debating the King’s Speech. A couple stick in my mind. The noble Baroness, Lady Manningham-Buller, reminded us that we are all under attack by Russia, on all sides and in every way, at all times—and she should know. Then there was the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, who in his last Lords speech—sadly—warned against us sinking into a vortex of pessimism and despair. How right he was.

At the end of the last century, many of us used to visit Japan a lot on delegations and so on, and they always arranged for us to see the Prime Minister of the day. We used to smile a bit, quite politely and privately, that it was always a different person—a constant rotation of Prime Ministers. I suspect the Japanese are laughing at us a bit now, because we too are caught in this whirligig of instability, and instability at the political centre affects everything else: the confidence and attitudes of investment and business and future prosperity. Why are we caught in it? There are all sorts of explanations, but I will add three in my five minutes.

First, any Government now face a far more informed electorate—maybe for better, maybe for worse. I suspect mainly for worse, but in vastly greater quantities than ever before in history. Every grievance becomes turbocharged. Every minor, unfiltered and unedited view is promoted through a massive world system of electronic information. There are 37 million devices in the UK alone—not counting wired telephones—that can be tuned in to any ministerial statement. Everything can be and is challenged, and it becomes a permanent maelstrom of debate.

We have created an entirely new information network, and I am not sure that some in the media or those in political circles have quite adjusted to this huge revolution and its effect on everybody. That, incidentally, is why some of us fought 10 years ago to set up an International Affairs Committee. It did not exist and we had to fight very hard.

Secondly, in this digital, hyperconnected world, most of the root causes lie outside our national government reach. That is not a very popular view, but it is so. Whether it is security and safety, cost of living, funding shortages all round, trade, local government and those potholes of course, interest rates and the bond market, or energy independence, which is largely a chimera—these are all matters that are only partially under our home Government’s control. They are certainly not in control of the root causes of them.

Thirdly, in 1945, liberally minded visionaries built a new world order out of the rubble of the Second World War. All the institutions they created then served us well, but they are all in trouble. They are supposed to be the rule-makers and the fora where there are referees, without which chaos and a world without rules develops. We need a new Bretton Woods, new trade rules, a new International Maritime Organization, a new health organisation and, of course, a new, unblocked United Nations. Where are these visionaries today? They are certainly not in Washington. Where are the Trumans, the Marshalls, the Keyneses, the Dexter Whites and the other figures who built this world order almost 100 years ago?

Mentioning Keynes allows me just a few seconds to share sadness that we no longer have Robert Skidelsky with us, who was a great biographer of Keynes. Of course, not everyone agreed with him—certainly not on Ukraine, where the robots are winning and not losing.

All this is ignored or barely reported in the press. We need the spirit of 1945 all over again, but many times over and many times more ambitiously. Without that, we can all attack the nearest targets and have a bit of an inter-party battle and so on, but we will remain the plaything of past economic fantasy theories, being swept along in a rudderless craft—a world without rules—which is absolutely fatal to a country such as ours. I refuse to be a pessimist. We must listen to the warning of the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy. We ignore these facts of our totally altered world at our peril.

My Lords, I rise to speak as a nurse on the health aspects of the strategic defence review and some of the implications it holds for the National Health Service. I shall be brief, as the review is admirably concise in its analysis. As I was unable to speak in the health debate, I hope the Minister will indulge me and kindly pass on some key points to my noble friend Lady Merron.

The focus of my remarks is the need for close collaboration between the Defence Medical Services and the NHS. The gracious Speech sets out the ambition that the Government

“will support our gallant Armed Forces and their families who make considerable personal sacrifices for the collective security and freedom of everyone in the United Kingdom”.

Defence Medical Services play a crucial role in retaining service personnel and boosting morale, so it is vital that they are fit for the future. But they do not act alone. Renowned for the excellence of their rehabilitation services, they are nevertheless dependent on the NHS for secondary and tertiary care.

The Covid pandemic taught us all the crucial role that defence services played in logistics, setting up the Nightingale hospitals and rollout of the vaccination programme. The review, however, fires a warning shot in pointing to the fragmentation of services and the historic neglect and underfunding, arguing that the relationship with the NHS has been deprioritised in recent years. It is imperative that this relationship is repaired and boosted by securing close collaboration between the MoD and the DHSC to ensure that the Defence Medical Services and the NHS have the capacity to meet defence medical needs, including in the most extreme circumstances.

To achieve this, a sprint review was recommended to assess system-wide capacity and capability. This was scheduled for completion in March of this year. Can the Minister confirm that such a sprint is planned or under way, and whether its findings will be accessible in the public domain? The adoption of a “whole force” plan identifying workforce requirements as part of an enduring approach agreed with the NHS also presents an opportunity for articulation with the much-anticipated NHS workforce plan. In closing, can the Minister assure us that he will work closely with his noble friend the Minister for Health to ensure that these vital services are given the priority and attention they deserve?

My Lords, I am honoured to speak in this debate, and I welcome the Government’s strong commitment to defence and improving relations with European partners as a vital step towards strengthening European security and upholding our unbreakable commitment to NATO and our allies. I pay tribute to our diplomats, members of the Armed Forces and the intelligence agencies that keep us safe.

Healthy defence spending, partnerships and alliances are cornerstones of our security and ability to keep our citizens safe and our country secure. However, our defence and resilience cannot be measured solely in military or economic preparedness; there is also the question of moral clarity. While nations must have the capability to defend themselves, they must also seek to have the courage and consistency to defend fundamental values and the rule of law internationally. I fear that, across much of democratic world, what we might call our “moral resilience” is weakening, with serious consequences for our long-term security.

The scale of human suffering is immense. In Sudan, Gaza, Myanmar, Lebanon, the DRC and Ukraine, wars are being waged against the civilian population with impunity. In any of these conflicts, with perhaps the sole exception of Ukraine, it is difficult to claim that we uphold international law consistently or that we value all human rights equally. At the same time, global military spending has reached historic levels. There is logic in preparing for a more dangerous world, but arms alone will not make us or the world safer. Countries shape the world not only through the power they possess but through the example they set. When democracies apply their values selectively, they weaken themselves strategically and make it easier for authoritarian states to argue that our principles are merely instruments of convenience.

In modern conflict, there are very few clean hands, even among democracies. Some democracies commit atrocities and then deny what the world has seen them do. Some provide diplomatic cover, and often intelligence, for actions that they should condemn. Some remain silent because moral clarity has become politically inconvenient. After the Second World War, leaders built international institutions—from the United Nations and NATO to the International Criminal Court, to mention just a few—designed to prevent civilisation sliding back to barbarism. They had seen how quickly peace could turn to war; how economic fear, extremism, propaganda and scapegoating could poison public life from within.

While history does not repeat itself exactly, there are echoes today that should concern us: political fragmentation, distrust of institutions, antisemitism, ethnic nationalism, economic anxiety, contempt for democratic processes, and the normalisation of dehumanising language and acts. Old ideas are returning because too many people have forgotten that they were once rejected and disregarded.

I am not nostalgic for the post-Cold War era or for the post-World War II settlement. I know war. I think of Srebrenica. I think of the promises made by the international community and then disregarded, and of the price paid by innocent civilians who were told they were safe. My concern is not that we have fallen from the imagined perfection but that we are losing even the aspiration to uphold our own standards. This is why I believe that moral authority and moral consistency must remain central to British foreign policy. This means being as clear about our views of human rights with our friends as we are with our enemies.

Sir John Major recently warned of the “fortress” generation—a society made fearful, more divided and less hopeful about the future. He was reminding us that public life carries an obligation to hand on something worth inheriting. Many young people today are no longer certain that that will happen. They see wars streamed live. They hear politicians speak of law and humanity in one context, while avoiding those same principles in another. They are losing faith, not only in Governments but in the sincerity of politics itself. This is not a sentimental concern; democratic legitimacy depends upon it.

Of course, Britain must be ready to defend her citizens and her territory. When the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, called out the Prime Minister and the Chancellor over their failure to rearm the United Kingdom at speed in the face of growing threats, he spoke for many. But military strength without moral authority is ultimately a hollow form of power. Our influence rests not only on what we can do or how well we are armed but on what we stand for.

My Lords, the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Houghton, mentioned his due humility to those more senior than him in this House. I am but an infant in comparison, so I address your Lordships with that in mind. In the brief time I have, I will reflect on national resilience, on government progress—or lack thereof—following the recommendations in the SDR, and on the contribution that your Lordships’ House is making and can make in the immediate future.

The noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, spoke of deterrence, and resilience is part of deterrence—specifically, in doctrine, deterrence by denial. Colleagues who have visited Ukraine this spring have commented on the impact that the last horrific winter had on the Ukrainian will to defy Russia’s illegal invasion. They spoke of lives lived underground, under nets and under concrete. They talked of the worst winter ever, because of both the huge increase in Russian drone and missile strikes and the impact of attacks on energy infrastructure, combined with bitterly cold weather. Yet it seems that, if anything, that has hardened resolve and resilience—a sense that, “If we can survive that, we can survive anything”.

However, in the UK, I worry about what the public could survive. Already, we know that Russia is attacking us. I live in Salisbury and know well the impact that Russian murderous aggression has had on our soil. My fellow citizen, Dawn Sturgess, lost her life due to that attack, and the city of Salisbury suffered severe physical and economic consequences over not just months but years. The issue is not whether people have courage—of course they have. It is whether government and institutions have given them the information, tools, trust and support to be resilient.

We need a clear path to improve national resilience, to have that national conversation that we know we need to have. Resilience does feature in the King’s Speech, and prominently in the cyber security and resilience Bill, but as expected there was no defence readiness Bill, which was recommended in the SDR. That leaves us without a clear path to improving national resilience, and I hope my noble friend the Minister can explain to the House later how that national conversation will be stimulated by the Government in the coming months. The need is urgent—in fact, critical.

The noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, chair of the House of Lords National Resilience Committee, wrote in the House magazine this month of the Nordic countries’ approach to preparing their citizens for emergencies. As she put it, those Governments

“communicate candidly about risks. The result is not alarmism but assurance”.

The Nordic example shows us that honesty about risk can be reassuring, empowering and mature. Assurance and information are what people need and I know that this House cares about this topic: we recently debated civil preparedness for war in Grand Committee and the overwhelming conclusion was that we need to make more time for this subject in this House.

In conversation, I have become increasingly vocal in my opinion that this challenge cannot be answered by defence policy or strategy alone, just as the SDR said. A couple of weeks ago, I and some of my fellow Labour newbies, or new joiners, met to discuss defence issues, because it is a subject we all care about. It became very apparent to us that my fellow Peers, with expertise from local and national government to insurance, from the emergency services to law, and from housing to education—that is just a small sample of the experience of my intake—have deep understanding across hugely important, diverse areas in the national resilience conversation. The answer does not lie just with those who live and breathe defence and security, although the experience of noble and gallant Lords and other specialists in these areas is always needed.

Your Lordships’ House contains exactly the range of experience a serious resilience conversation requires. I look forward to the report from the National Resilience Committee in November and I hope my noble friend the Minister agrees that we all have our part to play now—today and tomorrow; not just in this House, but outside it; and not just talking but acting. To reiterate, resilience is not about frightening people, it is about trusting them with honest information and giving them the confidence and means to play their part.

My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the noble Baroness in this: I believe very much that it is a question of actions, not just talking. The gracious Speech promises:

“The United Kingdom will also take action to reduce humanitarian need and conflict around the world”.

The promise would carry immeasurably more weight were the Government not simultaneously imposing the deepest cuts ever seen in the UK aid budget—this from a Government who were elected on a manifesto to keep aid at 0.5%. We are now reducing it to 0.3%, with devastating effects. We all know why this policy changed: it is because the Government—and their loyal Opposition, I have to say—saw focus group polling that showed that cutting overseas aid budgets to fund defence at home might prove electorally popular. Well, that does not seem to have gone down too well, does it? But it is worse than that because, as the noble Baronesses, Lady Ashton and Lady Northover, pointed out, some of Britain’s most senior former military chiefs have now warned that cutting foreign aid to fund defence will compromise our national security. The Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, began this debate by reminding us that we live in a more fragile, contested and interconnected world. But the policy of aid cuts leaves us less safe at home and less effective abroad.

These cuts have real-world effects, nowhere more so than in Sudan. As my noble friend Lady Anelay set out very eloquently, 19.5 million people in Sudan today are in urgent need of humanitarian assistance. The World Food Programme can reach only 5 million, but because of aid cuts and the conflict in Iran, which is driving up costs of delivery, that has had to be reduced to 3 million, and individual rations are being cut by 50% in some areas. Despite the pledges made at last month’s Berlin conference, as of today, the UN’s Sudan humanitarian needs and response plan of $2.87 billion remains only 20% funded. What does it say, in a world of unprecedented wealth, where we are able to find $3 trillion for arms sales, that we cannot find $3 billion to save the lives of 20 million people?

The prime responsibility for the human suffering in Sudan lies squarely on the warring parties, which are perpetrating extraordinary acts of cruelty and sexual violence against their own people. The use of drones means that there is no safe space for civilians. Hospitals, markets and waterholes and wells are targeted. Civilians are overwhelmingly the victims of this war, and as such their voice needs to be heard too.

The peace negotiations are supposed to be led by a quad of nations—the United States, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates—but they have stalled, with three of the four who are supposed to be in charge of peace negotiations actually supplying arms to one side or the other. As the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, said, we need to invest diplomatic capital in calling that out and reminding our friends of their responsibility to get their sides to the negotiating table, to stop feeding the conflict and to start feeding the people. We need a humanitarian ceasefire now. If they are not prepared to step up to the responsibility, they should step aside and let others try.

The United Kingdom is still a diplomatic superpower that is widely respected around the world. We have some of the finest and most skilled diplomats on the planet. The UK and London have enormous convening power, as we have seen this week at the excellent Global Partnerships Conference in Woolwich. There is no military solution to this problem; the need of the hour is for a diplomatic surge. I believe that the UK is uniquely placed to do that. We are the penholder on Sudan at the UN. We need no further authority to act and to get involved.

The need of the hour is not just for words; it is for actions too. I began by quoting the gracious Speech, which said we should

“reduce humanitarian need and conflict around the world”.

That Speech goes on to say:

“Ministers will champion the rights of women and girls to live in a world free from violence”.

Fine words. But for the women and girls living alone in fear and hunger in Sudan today, they may respond in the immortal words of Eliza Doolittle:

“Words! Words! Words! I’m so sick of words! …

Sing me no song!

Read me no rhyme!

Don’t waste my time,

Show me!”

To say that we live in a volatile and disrupted world is to state a truism. Truisms can get tedious, especially if too often repeated, but one ignores them at one’s peril. For no country is that truer than for Britain, a middle power in the Canadian Prime Minister’s perceptive characterisation, which has sacrificed influence by deciding to leave the EU in 2016, and which, while still having worldwide interests, cannot hope to further them effectively on its own. Add to that the fact that our closest ally for the past 80-plus years, the United States, can no longer be regarded as dependable in all circumstances.

It is frequently said that we can no longer rely on the rules-based international order, to the development of which Britain contributed so much in the aftermath of two disastrous world wars, and that we must come to terms with the new systems which have succeeded that order. However, the hard fact is that there are no such systems emerging, merely the modern equivalent of the law of the jungle, where might is right. That certainly does not suit our interests or our values.

The capacity of the rules-based order has not lost its value to us, whether we are talking about the UN charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Geneva Convention on the Law of the Sea, the European Convention on Human Rights, the international trade rules of the World Trade Organization to secure freer and fairer world trade, or one of the many others. They are not outdated, nor would it be in our interest to allow them to wither on the bough.

Take nuclear weapons as an example. The nuclear non-proliferation treaty, which has recently held its periodic review conference, remains a cornerstone of international security. Without it, there would be many more nuclear weapon states than there are now, vying with each other in regional arms races. That treaty has ensured that only one of its signatories, North Korea, has flouted its obligations. In recent decades, Iran has come quite close to doing so too, but that point was not imminent when Israel and the US attacked it at the end of February. It is surely in our collective interest that Iran should never have a nuclear weapons capability.

That can be achieved only at the negotiating table and sustained only by a rigorous system of safeguards operated, without interference, by the International Atomic Energy Agency. That should surely be the aim, but little is being done to secure it since President Trump destroyed the best attempt to do so. Take too the dialogue on strategic stability between the recognised nuclear weapon states, which has been suspended since Russia launched its aggression against Ukraine. That too will need to be resumed at some future moment, together with agreements to limit the unlimited accumulation of those weapons.

The world needs a rules-based trading system, too, if we are not to slip back into the protectionist, tit-for-tat retaliation of the 1930s. Tariffs, unilaterally applied, are simply a synonym for taxes, which in the end negatively affect one’s own consumers and producers. There needs to be some international procedure for handling trade disputes, which is why the Government’s recent decision to join the interim procedure in Geneva was so welcome.

Later this year, an important decision will be taken in New York on the appointment of the next Secretary-General of the United Nations. The UN has taken some hard knocks in recent years, as it did in the 1970s and early 1980s, but Britain as a permanent member of its Security Council should surely be doing all it can to secure the appointment of an effective, reforming leader to take over its leadership. We should be working to consolidate and strengthen the procedures introduced when Secretary-General Guterres was first appointed to open up the choice to more transparency and to ensure that no trace of gender discrimination is allowed to interfere with that choice.

The disruption we have seen in recent years to our international relations has already wrought some real damage to our ability to shape our destiny. That destiny is as a European middle state, with most in common geographically, politically and economically with other European countries.

My Lords, I was born in 1936, so I had the privilege of entering national service at 18. I did two years, as we all had to do, because the Act passed by the Labour Attlee Government in April 1947, supported by the other political parties, decided that that was the ideal length, after considerable discussion about whether it should be one year, which the RAF said was hopeless, or 18 months, which I think the Navy said was hopeless. We ended up at two years.

Those two years were for me the experience of a lifetime. I had a place to go to at Cambridge, but that was put off. I joined a whole bunch of other young men from all walks of life. My goodness, what a joy it turned out to be. You learned to mix—I had been a boarder at school, but most of them had lived at home and never lived with anybody else. You had to learn to live with others.

Initially, we were at RAF Kirton in Lindsey. The first thing you got shown was how to make a bed. I still remember that, because the sergeant came around and ripped off most of the sheets because we had not done it properly. We had three months there, then I was privileged to be chosen to train in Canada with people from 10 different countries right the way through NATO that Canada was supporting—from the obvious ones such as us and Canada to the far less obvious ones such as Turkey. I got my wings. After that, I had hoped to carry on for the remaining six months, but that was not possible.

I believe we should seriously look at a modern national service for all our young people. Among the number of young people who are at the moment unemployed, either those who are unable to work altogether or those who choose not to work, there is a core sitting there doing nothing. That is not good for them or for the economy, so there is a huge opportunity.

I took the trouble to find out what the rest of NATO is doing. It is too complicated to cover in a five-minute speech today, but the UK and Belgium are the only two countries in NATO that have nothing. That is not good enough, in my judgment. The enemy, to put it that way, is ever increasing, which is hugely worrying. Against that background, we cannot just sit back and not do something.

I pay tribute to His Majesty’s Government on what they have done, or tried to do, to begin to build up the CCF and one or two of the youth movements et cetera. I respect and welcome what they have done. But there is now the need to be more positive.

Then, there is the issue of how we are going to pay for it. I remember, when I was a small boy in Pinner, Middlesex, outside the library was the Spitfire Fund. Every week, they would adjust by how much it had gone up. Maybe a spitfire is not the right aircraft to choose now, but why can we not have an ISA geared to defence matters? People would respond much more to that than many other issues. I say to your Lordships and to the Government in particular: can we please look hard at this opportunity? I am pleased to see the Minister in his place, and I know he will look hard at it. I have written a book about national service; it will save him a lot of work, because I have been through all the National Service Acts.

Finally, I have two other points which have nothing to do with national service. First, I hope we put real money behind the ELSA project, because the Tomahawk situation does not seem to be as good as it should be. Lastly, there was also an opening speech earlier on from somebody I know pretty well, the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, and there was a lot of wisdom in his speech.

My Lords, I draw attention to my entry in the register.

Who is to blame for the parlous state of our Armed Forces: politicians, the media or the public? I would suggest all three, but the prime responsibility surely lies with our political leaders—successive Prime Ministers and Chancellors of the Exchequer—for underfunding our forces to the benefit of welfare. Welfare now represents five times defence spend. If only the money we wasted on HS2 had been spent on defence, just imagine the difference.

Some in your Lordships’ House have argued and battled away for years for greater defence spend, such as former military chiefs and, on these Benches, the late lamented Lord Ming Campbell, and my noble friend on the Front Bench. When I was on the Front Bench in 2008, I argued for an increase in the Army from 103,000 to 120,000. Of course, the noble Lord, Lord West, was laughed at over the years for continuously pressing for an increase in the Navy. Well, no one is laughing today.

Defence spending is an insurance, not an indulgence. Our allies have woken up—Germany and Poland in particular, and others—but we are laggards. We live in an ever-dangerous world. Can we ignore the threat from Russia, with a leader willing to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of his people in a lunatic invasion of Ukraine? As General Sir Gwyn Jenkins, the first Royal Marine to head the Navy, said recently:

“The need to rearm and improve this country’s readiness for war has become an absolute necessity. Just maintaining the ‘capable status quo’ is simply not good enough. We are at an inflection point”.

So how are we responding to the dire situation? The Prime Minister talks the good talk when overseas or with NATO allies, but little happens. Where is the defence investment plan that has been promised for months?

Of course, the Treasury is being difficult—it always is—but the Prime Minister is First Lord of the Treasury. Where is his leadership? We do not need Trump to tell us that he is no Winston Churchill, but in his remaining weeks could he not do right by this country and increase defence spend and thus leave some legacy to be proud of? We now have Gordon Brown back as an adviser so—who knows?—we might be lucky and get a third aircraft carrier, provided that it is built in Scotland.

The MoD never admits to any problems or blackholes. There is always the optimistic line, “We can fulfil all our operational obligations”. The reality is that there is a huge blackhole, with near paralysis in procurement.

Where is the new money for defence to come from? I reject more borrowing. We must tackle the bloated welfare budget. No party has the guts to scrap the triple lock, which is viewed by virtually every commentator as totally unsustainable. I suggest that we raise funds through what I might term shock-and-awe tactics to shake the nation and wake it up to the threat and the need to rebuild our deterrent capability. Perhaps there should be an increase in the standard rate of income tax, an increase in value added tax or a consideration of some form of capital gains tax or sales tax on the sacred cow in this country of principal residences. Moneys so generated must be entirely hypothecated to defence. We must avoid the understandable temptation to spend new moneys solely within the United Kingdom. We must work with our allies to avoid duplication of spend. We will waste so much if everyone focuses on their sovereign capability.

I will say something about the United States-NATO relationship. Trump was right to insist on Europe raising its game on defence spend, but in the final analysis I do not believe that the United States will leave NATO. Trump likes real estate; no way will he just walk away from valuable, heavily invested bases such as Mildenhall and Lakenheath in the United Kingdom, Ramstein in Germany or Aviano in Italy. His military knows the benefits of these bases and our joint intelligence capabilities.

I conclude by asking the Minister four questions, and he may need to write to me. First, is any inroad being made into the bloated number of civilians employed by the MoD? There are around 60,000; our Army is only 70,000 people. Secondly, on recruitment, where are we with Regular and Reserve recruiting? Thirdly, how justifiable is the rumoured Japanese alarm over the United Kingdom dragging its feet over the Global Combat Air Programme, our JV with Japan and Italy? Lastly, what plans are there, if any, to provide a cost-effective deterrent to defend our vital infrastructure in this country from unmanned aerial vehicles—that is to say drones?

It is a very great pleasure to have a few moments to speak and comment on the gracious Speech. I have a matter of concern, which I put to the Ministers on the Front Bench, that quite rightly both His Majesty and our Government have declared that we are in an extremely volatile world, with an enormous number of challenges globally. My question to the Ministers is: why was there no mention of our closest and infinitely most powerful ally, the USA? Nowhere is this commented on at all. It is a very odd thing indeed. We are told that it is a pivotal moment, with the world more volatile and dangerous than ever before. Where is there mention of the USA? There is a comment on NATO, but it does not comment that NATO is largely financed by the United States of America, our closest, deepest and most important partner. Where are His Majesty’s Government standing on this?

I am not quite convinced that using His Majesty the King’s visit to cover the Government’s nakedness in this matter will quite suffice. As His Majesty pointed out in his speech to Congress, our real relationship with the USA goes back 400 years; the 1777 back to 1600 research that I and others have been carrying out shows that the bedrock of the special relationship is an enduring relationship that has been going on for over 400 years.

Of course, you may say that we disagree, and that, while the USA is indeed the most powerful nation on the globe today, we are bound to disagree, and maybe the Government disagree with some aspects of US policy. Yet noble Lords may recall the letter of George Washington to his son in, I think, about 1770, in which he says that true friendship cannot qualify as such if there has not been at least one very significant disagreement. So friendship incorporates disagreement. I do not ask that the Government necessarily agree with the USA Government, but that is excuse at all for apparently discarding and dismantling our most important relationship of all.

I do not believe that we can fulfil our defence of the nation, which we are demanded to do, unless, when we celebrate the 250th anniversary as perhaps the most important thing this year following the King’s visit, we recognise the USA and see that our enduring relationship goes back at least 400 years. I believe that the key to the enduring relationship is the trade and industry that we in the United Kingdom carried out for so many hundreds of years. Indeed, if you look at the 1776 Declaration of Independence, you will find that five Middle Temple Benchers actually signed it. So we are integral to this relationship. I leave it with the Government to tell me, and other colleagues in this Chamber, why they have somehow apparently forgotten that and discarded it.

Yesterday, I had the great honour of entertaining one of the tribal leaders of what is now a nation, the Chickasaw, and the week before the chief of the Muscogee tribe. Their relationship with us goes right back, and it is based on the enduring relationship of trade and business. That is really what it is all about.

I ask the Government to confirm that the US-UK relationship is the most important one for us.

My Lords, I am pleased to join your Lordships today to speak in this debate on the gracious Speech as we focus our attention on foreign affairs, international relations and defence. In particular, I welcome the attention given to the United Kingdom’s role on the world stage as secure, engaged, and collaborative with our allies in a period of global uncertainty and great disruption.

Today I will touch on six key issues: sexual violence in conflict, women in peacekeeping, our relationship with Europe, Northern Ireland, hostile state threats, and the immigration and asylum systems.

First, on sexual violence in conflict, this country has a proud record of leadership, and the Labour Party, through the work of the right honourable William Hague, helped to place this issue firmly on the international agenda and keep it there. We have consistently argued that this scourge should not be treated as an unfortunate yet inevitable by-product of war but instead taken seriously as a preventable, grave violation of human rights and a serious barrier to the creation of any lasting peace. I hope that the Government will continue to put prevention, survivor support and accountability at the heart of their work abroad. I would therefore welcome continued UK commitment to international co-ordination to prevent sexual violence in conflict, working with allies, multilateral institutions and local women-led organisations to stop this atrocious violation of human rights.

Secondly, and complementary to that, we must continue to push for greater inclusion of women in peacekeeping negotiations. Women at the peace table, actively engaged, must mean more than a token woman; it also means training, capacity building and proper safeguarding mechanisms. While it is not mentioned in the gracious Speech, I hope that the Government will nevertheless use their defence, diplomacy and international standing to be firm advocates of supporting women into peacekeeping roles for the sake of global stability.

Thirdly, I welcome the Government’s commitment to deeper partnership with Europe. In a more dangerous world, practical co-operation with our European neighbours is not a luxury; it is a necessity. Whether on defence, energy resilience, sanctions, trade, migration or diplomatic co-ordination, the United Kingdom is stronger when it works closely and respectfully with those who share our security and values.

I particularly welcome the direction of travel towards a more constructive UK-EU relationship. This is a progressive step forward in our relationship with our closest neighbour and allies. It is a practical arrangement that favours our nation’s interests. I hope that, when fiscal conditions allow, we can return to a model of greater foreign aid and development partnership, in the knowledge that development is the foundation of security. When people are educated and economically empowered and health systems and fragile states are supported, the world is a far safer place for everyone.

Fourthly, I will touch on Northern Ireland. I very much welcome the Northern Ireland Troubles Bill. It is essential in confronting the ongoing legacy of the Troubles. It performs a vital role of addressing unfinished business from the Good Friday Agreement. It corrects the flaws of the Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Act 2023. It reconstitutes and reforms the legacy commission. It ensures fair disclosure of information, including, jointly, the Irish Government and accountability. It provides delivery of a bilateral victim centre and a human rights-compliant approach to addressing the legacy of the past in Northern Ireland, with the aim of delivering truth and justice to victims and survivors of the Troubles, while introducing safeguards to protect Armed Forces veterans when it is reasonable to do so. We owe the Bill to the citizens of Northern Ireland and the UK service personnel who were killed, injured and bereaved during those dark days of the Troubles.

Fifthly, I turn to the hostile state activity in the world, where the boundary between war and peace is no longer neatly defined. The Government are right to take the changing nature of the threat seriously. Our response to cyber attacks, espionage and proxy groups’ pressure on disparate communities and other forms of hostile action must be firm and lawful. A country’s resilience is not just about security powers; it lies in the democratic confidence of the people and the state. People need to feel that they have a meaningful voice when they feel excluded or unheard. Hostile actors can come in and exploit grievances and divisions. So I hope that, alongside robust national security measures, the Government will continue to invest in trust, participation and civic education and protect our open democracy.

My Lords, for some variety of topic I will start by warmly welcoming the wider acceptance across government departments of the covenant duty of care in the forthcoming Armed Forces Bill. This was much pressed for by me and others in debates on the 2021 Bill.

Will the Government now tackle the dark scourge of lawfare? I have repeatedly raised concerns about growing legal pressures placed upon our Armed Forces which risk undermining operational effectiveness and fairness for those who serve. I first raised this when the Human Rights Bill was being debated in 1998. I argued that there were incompatibilities between that Bill and the then three single service disciplinary Acts. The sitting Lord Chancellor assured the House that it would always be possible in a combat situation to resile or derogate from the Human Rights legislation, as necessary. Practical experience since has shown that withdrawing from the Human Rights Act for combat reasons has never been considered possible, let alone attempted. However, numerous operational cases based on human rights legislation have made their way through the courts—even to the UK Supreme Court and the European Court of Human Rights.

A decade ago, in a debate on alleged war crimes and the interplay between international law and domestic legislation, I and others pressed the Government to reintroduce formal Crown immunity for overseas operations. The complex and expanding legal landscape risked burdening commanders and front-line troops with uncertainties at moments when clarity is essential. Later, during a debate on vexatious legal claims against British service personnel, I and others pressed for combat immunity or other legal protection to be arranged for those engaged in active operations. In the Queen’s Speech debate the following year, I urged Ministers to consider both combat immunity and a statute of limitations for historic allegations, arguing that our service men and women deserve clarity and protection when involved in testing combat operations.

Our Armed Forces must of course operate within the law, but they must also be protected from legal encroachment that threatens their ability to act decisively in combat. The highly respected US army general, General Petraeus, said that the UK must decide how its legal architecture supports rather than inadvertently constrains the effectiveness of those it asks to serve.

Recently, we have seen examples of apparent piracy on the high seas, when special operations forces boarded a vessel. Fortunately, no individual member of the crew was hurt or died as a result of the boarding. If they had been, and a claim was made, would the special operations member or the Minister who authorised the seizure be in the dock? Should it ever be a Minister? The position is unclear, and would be even more so were a Prime Minister to order the destruction of a terrorist civil airline, akin to the 9/11 attacks. These problems, sometimes summarised as lawfare, must be grasped.

With no sign of a new Bill of Rights, the quinquennial Armed Forces Bill would be an opportune legislative moment. Much detailed work has already been done, and I urge the Government to use the Armed Forces Bill to act on this subject.

My Lords, we meet today at a moment of profound consequence, as we have already heard, for the Middle East and, as events have shown subsequently, for our shared future. I draw attention to my registered interests and to my work with organisations focused on conflict resolution and with the Council of Arab Ambassadors.

I begin, as did the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Houghton, from a place of hope, optimism and principle. History shows, as did my tenure as a Foreign Minister, that when courage meets conviction even the most intractable conflicts can bend towards justice and lasting peace. I will set out three truths that must guide us on this pathway to peace.

The first truth is that every life has equal worth. The death of a child in Gaza, Israel, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen or Iran diminishes us all. Our politics and actions must never become so hardened that we forget the humanity at the heart of these conflicts and crises.

Secondly, security and dignity are two sides of the same coin. Israelis and Palestinians must be able to live in peace and security, but any framework that asks for one people to mortgage their dignity so that another may feel secure will fail. A durable peace will emerge only when both peoples can see their rights, safety and aspirations reflected in equal measure. I ask the Minister to detail what is being done to stop the shocking attacks by Israeli settlers and the expansion of illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank of Palestine. What are we doing through our long-standing support for Lebanon in helping its Government to disarm Hezbollah? The Government’s response must be more than references to past sanctions or statements of condemnation. When was the last Foreign Secretary or Defence Secretary visit to Israel and Palestine? When did we last meet President Aoun of Lebanon?

The third truth is that principles matter most when they are hardest to uphold. International humanitarian law is not a menu of optional extras; it is the baseline of our common morality. The protection of civilians standing with and for survivors of sexual violence, unfettered humanitarian access and accountability for abuses are human obligations.

From these truths flows a practical path: a ceasefire respected in deed as well as word, humanitarian aid moving at scale and infrastructure being rebuilt. These are not political concessions; they are lifesaving imperatives.

I met this week with the Egyptian Foreign Minister during his visit to the UK. What is the action planned and agreed with Egypt, and indeed other partners that the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, alluded to through the partnerships conference, in making progress in this respect?

On the security architecture, a ceasefire must be underpinned by credible security arrangements. This means co-ordinated efforts to ensure the disarmament of militant groups. It means robust border and maritime monitoring. It means the accountability of security institutions—to the law, not to the gun. What is the United Kingdom doing to deploy to the region training and defence assets?

On the political horizon, we must restore the pathway to a viable, sovereign Palestine, living in peace and security alongside Israel. It must be time-bound, with clear milestones of governance reform, economic stabilisation, security and, yes, steps that reopen Jerusalem as a shared city of faith, hope and heritage.

As we heard from the Minister, Iran has changed the dynamics. Neighbours have a stake, but we do as well. Normalisation anchored in de-escalation, reconstruction and investment can change the calculus of despair. I am sure all in this House will join me in commending the efforts of our Gulf partners—particularly Pakistan, which, as we speak today, is in Iran again through its Interior Minister to avert the restart of a war. Can the Minister share what assessments have been made on the new security and defence architecture in the Gulf, which includes Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Türkiye and Pakistan, and is supported by Qatar? What support have we extended to the UAE and Bahrain in the C-SIPA partnership? What is the current status of the Abraham accords?

To our international partners, we must align our efforts, not just our statements. The Government have hollowed out aid and development budgets to their bare bones, and we have lost leverage. I feel for and genuinely appreciate the efforts of the Development Minister in this regard, but, as the noble Baroness, Lady Ashton, reminded us, development, diplomacy and defence come together; it requires leadership in all three areas.

I close with a simple conviction. Leadership is the art of narrowing the gap between the world as it is and the world as it should be. The hardest day to make peace is always today; tomorrow offers the illusion of easier choices that never arrive. If the Middle East is, as we argue, the cradle of faiths that teach the sanctity of life, the dignity of the stranger, and indeed the possibility of redemption, and if those truths can take root again in policy and action, through ongoing action and investment, and through prayer, then peace becomes a reality.

My Lords, His Majesty’s gracious Speech was watched by millions of people at home and abroad with interest. His Majesty spoke at a time of turbulence, wars and uncertainty facing millions of people around the world.

In Gaza and Israel, the conduct of hostilities since October 2023 has generated credible allegations of serious violations of international human rights law, including crimes against humanity and genocide. The Security Council resolutions have called for ceasefires and humanitarian access. The problem remains compliance.

In Ukraine, Russia’s invasion violated the charter as affirmed by UNGA Resolution ES-11/1. The Security Council is blocked by Russian veto, but the legal position has not changed: borders cannot be redrawn by force.

In Sudan, the war between the SAF and the RSF has produced famine, mass displacement and documented atrocities against civilians. Resolution 2715 renewed the UN mission, but, without political pressure and accountability, the situation deteriorates. Resolutions without enforcement become empty gestures.

In recent months, the US and Israel have waged war on Iran without any reference to international law. Thanks to the efforts of the Government of Pakistan, a ceasefire has been agreed while the details of a peace agreement between the US and Iran are worked out. The United Nations has proved to be irrelevant once again.

That brings me to another international dispute that is almost forgotten by the international community: the Kashmir issue that has been on the Security Council’s agenda since 1948. Resolutions 47, 51 and 80 called for a free and impartial plebiscite under UN supervision once hostilities ceased. That plebiscite has never taken place. While waiting for the UN-promised plebiscite, the human rights situation has deteriorated in Kashmir. Over the years, international human rights organisations, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the UN Commission on Human Rights and others, have reported the Indian Army operating with complete impunity under the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act. It is alleged to be involved in the excessive use of force, arbitrary detentions, torture, murder, mass graves and rape, while journalists, political leaders, human rights defenders and activists are detained and held under preventive laws, such as the public safety Act, for months and years, often without charge or trial. This situation should not be allowed to continue. The international community, including Britain, must do everything it can to bring an end to these human rights abuses and hold those responsible to account.

India and Pakistan have fought three full-scale wars and many border clashes over Kashmir, and Kashmir remains one of the most militarised zones in the world. In May 2025, we saw another dangerous escalation, with cross-border strikes and civilian casualties. The ceasefire holds, but the dispute is unresolved. What makes this issue different is the nuclear dimension. A single miscalculation on the line of control could escalate beyond regional control, with consequences for global health, climate and the economy. I mentioned earlier four other areas of conflict, but let me tell noble Lords that the consequences of a war between two nuclear countries, India and Pakistan, could be far worse than those conflicts.

We can either invest in diplomacy now or wait for the next crisis to invest in damage control. I believe that Britain, with its historical relationship with both India and Pakistan as the head of Commonwealth and a permanent member of the UN Security Council, is best placed to use its unique position to bring these two friendly countries back to dialogue to help to find a peaceful solution to the long-standing issue of Kashmir, according to the will of the Kashmiri people, and to bring peace, stability and prosperity to the 1.7 billion people of the Indian subcontinent.

My Lords, following the most welcome reference in the gracious Speech to

“drive global growth and reinforce global stability”,

I want to raise the subject of international action against corruption. I should first declare an interest in that my daughter has been active in drafting the core crimes of an embryonic international treaty on the subject, but my acquaintance with it dates from far before that, from when I was a member of the council of Transparency International UK, sat on two Bribery Bill committees and observed at first hand the effects of corruption in sub-Saharan Africa.

Corruption is the foundation from which widespread and deep-rooted instability comes: the erosion of democracy and the rule of law; the exploitation of the many by the few; the simple misery of those without the means to obtain education, healthcare and the provision of utilities; the perversion of action against climate change; the destruction of level playing fields for ethical businesses; the deterrence of constructive investment; and, not least, the demoralisation of public support for international aid.

Corruption does not endure from lack of laws. One hundred and ninety-two states are party to the United Nations Convention Against Corruption. It criminalises corrupt conduct. Kleptocrats, however, continue to arrange impunity by controlling the administration of justice.

The United Kingdom now has a promising anti-corruption strategy, but this is not a problem that any country can address on its own. We can lead the development of multilateral solutions. The Government’s plans to host a summit on illicit finance next month are an encouraging part.

An international anti-corruption court is vital among the innovations that are needed. It would fill the enforcement gap in the international framework. It would go far to disrupt transnational grand corruption networks; it would prosecute the bribe payers, corrupt officials and money launderers who commit the universally agreed crimes of the UN convention when national Governments fail to do so. As well as its credible threat of criminal prosecution, which would deter corruption, most significantly, the court would have an assets division dedicated to returning illicit assets to serve the public good, even when the arrest and extradition of criminals is difficult, which has been a serious obstacle to proper redress so far.

An eminent global expert group, led by Justice Richard Goldstone of South Africa and Allan Rock, a former Canadian Minister of Justice, has shared a first draft of the international anti-corruption court treaty with interested officials in more than 35 Governments, as well as civil society organisations, for informal comments. I understand that we are committed to participate actively in this dialogue, along with Canada, Moldova, the Netherlands, Nigeria and Norway. Ukraine’s High Anti-Corruption Court judges have said that this would help their domestic effort. Widespread support comes from Africa and Latin America. The voice of the global South is crucial and demonstrates its pressing need for better governance.

Finally, the expert group has done the bulk of the laborious drafting work so that Governments such as ours can now provide input. Through 2026, the expert group will use the feedback from important stakeholders to finalise the draft for publication in early 2027. Will my noble friend the Minister renew the United Kingdom’s commitment to this viable solution to a deep-rooted and intractable barrier to justice and democracy, and keep your Lordships’ House in touch with developments? Can he say how His Majesty’s Government will contribute to the treaty discussions, at this formative stage of its development, and how they will play a leadership role in raising awareness about the proposal?

My Lords, we were once unquestionably a leading military and economic power. Today, our role is less clearly defined. We still have significant soft power through our institutions, global networks and cultural reach, and His Majesty the King embodies that soft power in a way that no one else can, but soft power cannot rest on individuals alone. It has to be reinforced by national confidence and a clear foreign and defence policy.

Britain has often been defined by its pragmatism, yet at times we have alienated and ostracised certain nations and peoples, to such an extent that meaningful dialogue and peaceful negotiation have become almost impossible. Trust can be earned only through openness, honest endeavour and a willingness to engage without prejudice. I fully endorse the Prime Minister’s decision not to join the United States in what most regard as an unlawful war in Iran. That restraint was right and showed judgment, for escalation is not the same as leadership. However, that in itself is not enough. We do not want to be drawn into conflict, but where is our diplomatic leadership? Where is the active effort to convene, influence and lead from the front in the pursuit of peace?

Britain’s soft power should be at its most effective in that gap between stepping back from military action and stepping forward with diplomatic influence. To remain a country of consequence, we must shape the conditions for peace, not merely react to them. But as someone who believes that every effort must be made in the pursuit of peace and in preventing the troubling proliferation of arms and ever-more destructive technologies across the globe, I also believe that soft power alone is not enough.

There must stand an unquestioned degree of hard power too, so that our words carry credibility and weight, as laid out in the strategic defence review. However, that strength must be grounded not in aggression but in defence and the protection of stability. Our laws should not just be ink on some document. I remind noble Lords that we are a signatory to the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, recognising that attacks on heritage are often attacks on people, history and humanity itself. That is why damage to historic sites and cultural assets in Isfahan in Iran is so deeply concerning. A city of immense historical and architectural significance, Isfahan represents centuries of artistic, cultural and intellectual achievement. Whatever the wider politics or military circumstances, the protection of civilians and of cultural heritage must remain a principle upheld by all sides because, once heritage is lost, it cannot truly be replaced.

We must use our diplomatic influence, including with our allies and partners, to help safeguard cultural heritage wherever it is under threat and to uphold the principles that we have committed ourselves to under international law. These treasures do not belong to one nation alone. They form part of the shared inheritance of humanity and reflect the very values of civilisation, respect and continuity that we seek to defend.

My Lords, the gracious Speech puts national security where it belongs, at the centre of government. I welcome that, but the question before us is not only what we spend—it is how we think and act; how we organise a whole-society defence; how we turn resilience from a slogan into collective preparedness; and how we convert defence investment into regional growth.

The strategic defence review is clear: the UK faces a more complex set of threats than at any time in recent decades. Cyber attacks on critical infrastructure and major employers, hostile activity against subsea cables and satellites, biological risks and pressure on food and energy security are not hypothetical scenarios; they are real and happening now. My noble friend Lord Robertson of Port Ellen warned recently that we are underinvesting and deciding too slowly in our defence expenditure. I fully share his analysis and concerns, but the answer is not only more and better Armed Forces—it is a more resilient country.

Whole-society resilience means three things. The first is services that function when systems fail, in particular public services that know what to do when the screens go blank and the phones go down. The second is infrastructure, particularly power, water and transport, that is designed to withstand disruption and keep on working. The third is citizens who know the basics of preparedness.

On the last point, we need to be frank and practical with the public. As my noble friend Lady Antrobus has said, our Nordic neighbours show how. Sweden’s If Crisis or War Comes booklet tells every household how to cope if the power fails or networks go down. The advice is simple: be able to look after your household for at least a week, plan to have enough water and food that does not need refrigeration, medicines, cash, a battery radio, warm clothing and a family contact plan. Finland goes further, teaching civil preparedness in schools. This is not alarmism—it is adult citizenship in a modern age. I am not suggesting for a moment that we face imminent invasion, but we must also recognise that we have grown used to systems—food, banking, power, fuel, water—that never fail. That confidence is in many ways a measure of our progress as a nation, but we have allowed our collective capacity for self-reliance to atrophy, and that has left us brittle.

Complacency is a weakness, and it diminishes our collective strength and resolve in the eyes of those who seek to do us harm. This, in turn, increases our vulnerability and the likelihood of such continued attacks. We must address this calmly and with clear public guidance, in a way that treats people as partners, not passive observers. Reform of local resilience forums is an opportunity to wire this in: local government, blue light services, businesses, universities and civic groups planning together, exercising together, communicating together. Resilience done well is not about fear but about confidence: the confidence that comes from preparation and practice.

Members of your Lordships’ House will know that I have spoken previously about the economic dividend of defence. Done smartly, defence spending can be a powerful engine of regional growth. Advanced manufacturing in the north-east, cyber and AI in the Midlands, and green maritime on our coasts are not add-ons to our defence strategy; they are its drivers of innovation. But the system must be fit for purpose. Today SMEs face procurement designed for primes. Universities sit on world-class research without clear routes to its practical adoption. Skills providers need the ability to plan and engage effectively for the long term. Economic growth and national security are not competing priorities; they are the same priority.

I recognise that in parts of my party there is some scepticism about this agenda, shaped by history, but the threats described in the SDR are not those of the 1980s or the early 1990s—they are the real and present threats of now. The threats are real and growing, and the price of inaction will far exceed the cost of preparedness. The gracious Speech sets a direction; now we must match it with pace by building resilience locally, unlocking defence investment for growth regionally, and acting nationally at the speed the world now demands.

I commend the noble Lord, Lord Forbes of Newcastle, on that amazing and practical analysis of where we are and what needs doing. I am somewhat nervous about following him. For the record, I declare that I have now rejoined the Conservative Party after four years as a non-aligned Peer coinciding with my tenure as chair of Ofcom, which I have now finished. I am therefore free to express some opinions again, which is a great relief, today on the Middle East specifically.

The UK has formally proscribed both Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist organisations. Both organisations are Iranian-backed proxy actors responsible for attacks on Israeli civilians, regional destabilisation and the deaths of British citizens. Does this not create a strategic inconsistency for British foreign policy? If the UK legally recognises Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist entities, should not British policy more clearly reflect support for democratic allies confronting those organisations directly?

The Middle East conflict is not solely a regional dispute: it intersects with core UK national security priorities identified in the SDR, including drone warfare, missile defence, cyber conflict, autonomous systems and hybrid warfare. Israel is already confronting these threats operationally and thereby represents a key strategic and defence partner for the United Kingdom and its allies. The humanitarian crisis from the war in Gaza cannot be separated from Hamas governance, militarisation of civilian infrastructure, aid exploitation and refusal to disarm. Palestinians themselves continue to suffer under extremism, corruption and institutional failure. Long-term Palestinian stability requires demilitarisation, anti-corruption reform, educational reform and the marginalisation of extreme actors.

Should the UK not therefore pursue a strategically coherent policy that: strengthens UK-Israel defence, intelligence and cyber co-operation; expands sanctions and international co-ordination against Iran and its proxy networks; supports post-Hamas technocratic governance and reconstruction in Gaza; promotes Palestinian education reform, anti-incitement measures and institutional transparency; and advances long-term regional stability, grounded in security, coexistence and, of course, democratic government?

Supporting Israel’s security and supporting a viable future for Palestinians are mutually dependent objectives, not contradictory ones. It is worth remembering that the Palestinians rejected coexistence in a state of their own on at least four occasions post-war. They do not want a two-state solution; they want a one-state solution which excludes Israel entirely from the Middle East map.

Following the UK’s recognition of a Palestinian state and the expansion of UK-Palestinian bilateral engagement, Britain now carries a greater responsibility to ensure that its political engagement and taxpayer funding support coexistence, transparency, educational reform and anti-extremism measures rather than incitement or radicalisation.

Recognition of a future Palestinian state should therefore be accompanied by clear expectations that Palestinian education systems promote coexistence, mutual recognition, tolerance and peace, while demonstrating meaningful reform, transparency and accountability consistent with international educational standards. Continued UK engagement should encourage bilateral Palestinian partners to implement measurable reforms in governance, education and anti-incitement frameworks.

Long-term Palestinian stability is impossible while extremism continues to dominate its political and educational structures. Following the 7 October attacks, Hezbollah’s deliberate escalation on Israel’s northern border forced approximately 60,000 Israeli citizens to evacuate their homes. Despite ceasefire arrangements and sustained international pressure, Hezbollah continues rebuilding military infrastructure and resisting disarmament.

The window for a structured disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration process, supported by regional actors including Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, modelled in part on the framework the UK helped to shape in Northern Ireland, may be narrowing. I hope the whole House would welcome some enlightenment from the Government on how they intend to capitalise on Iran’s and its proxies’ current state of weakness.

My Lords, I welcome the commitment in the King’s speech that the Government

“will champion the rights of women and girls to live in a world free from violence”.

I recently read a 2001 UNFPA report. The introduction said:

“The nature of armed conflicts changed dramatically during the latter half of the twentieth century, with casualties among civilians increasingly outnumbering those of military personnel”.

We know that women and girls are now the most vulnerable in all modern conflicts. I want to focus on the impact of conflict on women and girls, especially as preventing conflict seems to have taken a back seat in the intervening years.

This week, the Independent Commission for Aid Impact published the latest assessment of the global context for development co-operation. This watchdog warns that the UK’s “modernised approach” to development must address significant global pressures through clear, measurable commitments if it is to deliver lasting impact.

This is at a time when sexual violence as a weapon of war remains widespread. Conflict-related sexual violence surged by 25% in 2024, with millions of women still needing and reliant on humanitarian assistance. One-quarter of countries report a backlash against women’s rights. One in five children worldwide is growing up in a conflict-related area, being killed and injured. The bleak reality is that, at the current pace of progress, ending gender-based violence and achieving equality for women and girls will take another 100 years.

The need has never been greater. According to the UNFPA, the impact of recent cuts to its programmes has been that more than 11 million people lost access to essential sexual and reproductive health and protection services. The maternal health clinic may still be there, but the midwife has gone. There is no emergency obstetric equipment, no post-rape kits, and no contraceptives or menstrual supplies on the shelves.

In Afghanistan—which has already been mentioned very eloquently by others—according to Plan International, women and girls now face the severe crisis of malnutrition, alongside systematic human rights abuses. While this is happening, relations with the Taliban have become increasingly normalised globally. In Sudan, which was raised very eloquently by the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, and the noble Lord, Lord Bates, the humanitarian situation is worsening as the conflict continues, with 25 million now at risk of starvation.

According to the recent Amnesty International report:

“Women in Gaza are being denied the conditions needed to live and to give life safely. This … erosion of their rights to health, safety, dignity … is a deliberate act … targeting women and girls. It is also the … consequence of Israel’s calculated … practices of multiple mass displacement, deliberate restrictions on … essential items, as well as humanitarian relief, and … years of relentless bombardment that have devastated Gaza’s health system and decimated entire families”.

I would welcome an update on what the Government are doing about that.

According to Human Rights Watch, women’s agency and participation in peacebuilding, accountability and political leadership is the most important step countries can take to protect women’s rights during conflict and to uphold a right enshrined 25 years ago at the UN Security Council. Upholding women’s rights requires having women at every table, all the time. The United Kingdom is in the unique position of being the UN penholder for women, peace and security. With that comes an opportunity that the UK can use for global political clout and leverage, especially at a time when opportunities and the hard-won rights of women and girls are slipping back, with deepening inequality.

Will fulfilling the ambition in the King’s Speech to protect and prioritise the rights of women and girls globally include using the UK’s diplomacy, redoubling its soft powers to counter the global rollback of the rights of women and girls, providing flexible, long-term funding to women and girls-led organisations, and working across government to tackle violence against women and girls in the UK and globally, aligned with the commitment to halve violence against women by 2030? Will the UK Government ensure that life-saving sexual and reproductive health and gender-based violence services are central to humanitarian action? In 2026—25 years on from the report I mentioned in my introduction—millions of women and girls have none of the rights that we would wish them to have: safety, choice, opportunities and, most of all, a voice.

My Lords, while major defence programmes dominate the headlines, we risk overlooking more cost-effective ways to strengthen Britain’s resilience and warfighting readiness: investing in our Reserve Forces and logistics support services. Tanks, ships, aircraft and drones may capture the attention, but none of them can operate without trained people to sustain and support them. Credible deterrence depends not only on equipment but depth, readiness and resilience.

Ukraine’s ability to draw rapidly on trained reservists at the outset of the Russian invasion illustrates the need for the UK to rebuild military depth and widen participation across society. While the Armed Forces Bill seeks to expand the reserves pool, it focuses largely on the strategic reserves and fails to address deeper structural problems. Reservists remain only partially integrated into wider defence planning. I declare an interest that my daughter is a serving reservist officer.

Training opportunities are inconsistent, access to MoD facilities is limited and poor budget management leaves times of the year when reservists are unsure whether they will even be paid for their duties. Communication failures make it difficult to balance civilian careers with military commitments, forcing many eventually to choose one or the other.

This is particularly concerning given that, despite the SDR’s commitment to increase the active reserve by 20%, both numbers and service days continue to fall. Reviews have repeatedly identified the same shortcomings—including the work by my noble friend Lord Lancaster of Kimbolton—yet little meaningful action has followed. The Government still lack a clear delivery plan, dedicated funding and even a proper understanding of the skills currently available within the Reserve Forces.

If the Government are serious about strengthening the reserves, they must go beyond simply extending recall ages or service length. We should look to allies that integrate reservists far more effectively: KLM pilots who also fly Dutch F35s and the US Air National Guard, which operates front-line aircraft, as well as Scandinavian and Baltic nations, where reserves often outnumber regular forces. Many of us believe that the UK should aim to double the size of the reserves, but that requires clear cross-government understanding of the role that reservists are expected to play.

The same lack of attention affects the Royal Fleet Auxiliary. Like the reserves alongside the regulars, the RFA often plays second fiddle to the Royal Navy, despite being indispensable to it. Royal Navy operations rely on the RFA for fuel, ammunition, aviation support, medical assistance, supplies and amphibious capability. Without the RFA, the Royal Navy’s global reach would be severely restrained. The Minister himself has described the RFA as essential, yet the service continues to face mounting pressures. Its fleet is ageing, procurement delays persist, and several vessels require extensive modernisation and repair. At the same time, personnel shortages are worsening. For the second time in two years, RFA crews are staging strike action over pay and conditions. Temporary settlements have failed to resolve concerns about below-average pay awards, poor transparency and declining morale.

RFA personnel occupy an especially difficult position. Technically MoD civil servants, they are nevertheless expected to spend increasing amounts of time at sea, undergoing demanding operational tasks. They are, in effect, the Royal Navy’s blue light emergency service—but operating with ageing equipment and insufficient recognition. It even remains unclear whether the Armed Forces covenant extends to the RFA. This matters because the RFA is central to the future of naval operations. It is the RFA “Lyme Bay” that is being sent to the Middle East. Currently being readied in Gibraltar, the ship, once upgraded, will be able to deploy and recover autonomous systems, underwater drones and mine-hunting vessels, acting as a mother ship for uncrewed technology. As the First Sea Lord observed, this is a perfect example of the “hybrid” Royal Navy the UK hopes to build.

However, advanced technology alone cannot compensate for workforce instability and underinvestment. Settling industrial disputes, improving retention policies and creating clearer career progression incentives are all essential, and so too is properly aligning the RFA with the UK’s wider defence strategy. The Reserve Forces and the Royal Fleet Auxiliary are two indispensable pillars of Britain’s defence capability, yet both are undervalued and unloved. If we are serious about delivering the ambitions of the SDR and restoring genuine warfighting readiness, we must invest not only in platforms and hardware but in the people and support structures that make military power possible. It is time to give the reserves and the RFA the love they deserve.

My Lords, I am pleased to contribute to this debate on a subject that I believe sits at the very heart of everything else that we discuss in this Chamber: the security and safety of the UK and all of us. I declare an interest as a member of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly—PA—and as a chair of the sub-committee on defence and transatlantic economics.

I welcome the Government’s stated commitment to defence. In a dangerous and volatile world, these words of resolve matter. However, I have to say, with respect, that words alone are not enough, and on this occasion the words were not accompanied by the legislative framework that the scale of the threat requires. There had been real anticipation, widely reported, that the King’s Speech would include a defence readiness Bill. It did not. That absence should trouble every Member of this House who has read the strategic defence review, particularly those who have read and absorbed the extraordinary speech given last week by my noble friend Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, who led the review.

The strategic defence review called for warfighting readiness, new munitions factories, enhanced cyber and missile defence, and a revitalised industrial base. Ministers accepted all 62 of those recommendations, yet the promised 10-year defence investment plan remains undelivered. Accepting recommendations is one thing; funding them, legislating for them, and giving them the permanence and priority they deserve is quite another.

It is in this context that I draw the attention of the House to a report published earlier this month by the Center for European Policy Analysis—CEPA—entitled “Unleashing Defense Innovation”. It is a serious and timely piece of work, and its central argument deserves to be heard in this Chamber. The report makes clear:

“Europe’s surge in defense spending”—

and there is such a surge—

“represents a once-in-a-generation strategic opportunity … but without a modernized investment strategy, new funding risks entrenching outdated force structures rather than delivering real deterrence”.

Spending more on the wrong things is not a solution; it is just a more expensive version of the same thing. The CEPA report is particularly instructive on the question of financing. It argues compellingly that private capital, venture investment, private equity and sovereign wealth funds must be mobilised alongside public expenditure, if we are to transform our defence industrial base at the speed that the threat demands. Procurement cycles that outlast entire technology generations are, as the report rightly observes, both strategically reckless and economically wasteful.

The Government should read these words carefully. Legislation that removes the regulatory and other barriers currently preventing institutional capital flowing into defence would be a significant step forward, and that is precisely the kind of bold structural reform that a defence readiness Bill could provide. Our NATO alliance remains the bedrock of our collective security, and I am glad that the Government have reaffirmed it, but NATO is not a comfort blanket but a commitment—and commitment requires capability. As my noble friend Lord Robertson has himself warned, our reliance on the United States, predicated on the assumption that it will always be there, has led to a diminution in our capability. We cannot outsource our security and then be surprised when the terms change. The alliance is only as strong as its members and Britain must be a strong member, not in aspiration but in armour, munitions and readiness.

I want to say something that bears repeating in this Chamber. We talk a great deal about the conditions necessary for democracy to flourish: free and fair elections; the rule of law; an independent judiciary; and a free press. All these things matter enormously, but none can be sustained without the hard infrastructure of national security. A democracy that cannot defend itself is a democracy that will not long endure. Strong defence is not the enemy of liberal values; it is the guarantor.

The Government have the diagnosis: my noble friend Lord Robertson and his distinguished colleagues gave it to them. The Center for European Policy Analysis has shown the way forward on innovation and finance. What is missing is the courage to act on it with the urgency and legitimate seriousness it demands. I hope that Ministers will hear this message not as a political challenge but as a patriotic one, offered, as I believe it is by all sides of the House today, in the national interest.

My Lords, I was interested to note that in the first paragraph of the gracious Speech the King mentioned the Middle East conflict, and in the second paragraph he made the statement:

“My Government will take urgent action to tackle antisemitism”.

Clearly, the two are not unrelated. Like the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, I went to the Nova festival exhibition in east London on Monday with some other Members of this House, and it brought back the utter revulsion and shock of the events of October 7. I very much hope that the Minister, along with many if not most of the Members of this House, will also make a point of going to the Nova exhibition. The barbarity of October 7 was beyond description. Shortly afterwards, the Government seemed to be sympathetic to the horrific threat faced by Israel of repeat attacks, but, unfortunately, since then they have significantly diluted their conviction to ensure that this never happens again.

I very much welcome His Majesty’s Government’s previous statement that there has not been any genocide in Gaza. To suggest so is an insult to the true victims of genocides around the world and to ignore the extraordinary steps taken by the IDF to try to protect civilian life wherever possible, despite facing an enemy who uses its own compatriots as shields and pawns in hospitals and schools. Fair criticism of Israel is fine—I have made that, in particular of Mr Ben-Gvir and his like. Can the Minister today confirm the Government’s position that there was no genocide in Gaza?

We have seen unparalleled levels of antisemitism and hate in the UK. As recently as last Saturday, the Palestinian demonstration had to be redirected by the police to avoid it going past my synagogue. As I said on Times Radio later in the day, members of my congregation felt unable to attend because of the danger they felt simply being on the streets of London, going to and leaving the service. I was there; I saw it.

The Government have offered welcome money and warm words to the Jewish community, but they miss the very simple point that their constant demonisation of Israel opens the door to those who wish to indiscriminately attack both Israel and the Jewish community around the world. We have heard for ourselves in the marches the chant “Death to the IDF” and “From the river to the sea”. I am sure noble Lords realise what “from the river to the sea” means. It means that every Jewish person should be thrown out from the State of Israel.

I ask the Minister, who I know is unhappy with the level of antisemitism he sees in the UK, to urgently address the following issues which relate to the scale of institutional focus against Israel, which is without parallel. For example, agenda item 7 of the Human Rights Council exists solely to target Israel. The UK has changed its position on agenda item 7, which is completely unacceptable. For years, under previous Administrations and this one, the UK opposed it along with the E3 partners and now it has shamefully moved to abstention.

Likewise, we see that UNRWA is in a state of institutional dysfunction. It applies an inherited definition of refugee status exclusively to the Palestinians. Unlike any other refugee in any part of the world, it perpetuates the Palestinian refugee question rather than trying to resolve it. This Government are guilty of compliance. There has been proven Hamas infiltration of UNRWA, so why have HMG continued funding it? Why have this Government not made more protests over the appointment of Francesca Albanese as a special rapporteur, given her appalling statements? Some European allies have, so why cannot we?

I am pleased that the King’s Speech announced the tackling state threats Bill, which will, I hope, allow the Islamic—not the Iranian—Revolutionary Guards to be proscribed. I think I probably detect the Minister’s hand in making this happen, for which we are grateful. The threat to this country from Islamic radicalism is not just cyber attacks; it is not just violence on our streets, killing Jews randomly; it is also the institutionalised singling out of the world’s only Jewish state. We see more attacks on Israel in the House of Commons than support for the National Health Service.

These and other inherently discriminatory measures have created such a negative perception of Israel that some very misguided people believe they have an open door and support to take it out on Jewish people in this country. In Heaton Park in Manchester on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, the attacker shouted, “This is what you get for killing children”, pledged allegiance to the Islamic State and then killed two British Jews.

We need to understand the direct connection between demonising Israel unjustly and death threats to British Jews. This Government should have the backbone to be much more forthright in their support for Israel’s fight for the right to exist and take steps to calm the febrile, poisonous atmosphere which has arisen against Israel and our own Jewish community.

My Lords, my speech will be rather different.

Giovanni Spadolini was Italy’s Prime Minister in September 1982, when I joined the Foreign Office. In the following 10 years, Italy had seven different Prime Ministers. Italy was less effective on the international stage as a consequence. In the UK, 10 years ago our Prime Minister was the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton. It looks increasingly likely that, in the next few weeks, the UK will have its seventh Prime Minister in a decade. The UK is seen as less serious on the international stage when we are not serious at home. Across the board, our reputation is taking a knock in some areas that have traditionally defined the United Kingdom: political stability, policy consistency, strategic clarity and fair play. I will give one example on the last of those.

Late on 15 April, the Guardian splashed the story that Lord Mandelson had failed his security vetting before going as ambassador to Washington. Within 24 hours, in time for the evening news, the Prime Minister dismissed Sir Olly Robbins, Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office. In the UK, Prime Ministers do not dismiss Permanent Secretaries without process and without cause. This being without process is demonstrated by the very compressed timeline; it being without cause is becoming obvious through the continuing investigation of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, to which Sir Olly gave compelling evidence. Sir Olly was the victim of an injustice, which can and should be corrected.

It is not all bleak on the international stage for the United Kingdom. In some areas, the UK continues to be world leading or world beating. Our soft power is intact. Right now, exemplary work is being done in British courts, theatres, film studios, football clubs—I congratulate Aston Villa—and universities. I am the master of Christ’s College, Cambridge, which last year won its fifth Nobel prize. Right now at Christ’s, a post-doc is developing, with his brilliant professor, a blood test for the very early detection of multiple cancers. Their work is hampered by restrictions on foreign medical samples coming into British laboratories. They understand the need for regulation, but their contention is that it is unnecessarily restrictive. I appreciate that this is the first time this has been mentioned today and that this is a rather technical subject, but I will write to the Minister and urge His Majesty’s Government to help, please.

My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow—and more to the point, to listen to—the noble Lord, Lord McDonald of Salford. Here, I must declare an interest: Salford City, his namesake, is this Monday fighting for promotion from League Two to League One against the wonderful Notts County. Let us hope we win—and I declare an interest in that result.

Let me go back to something more to the point. I welcome the renewed commitments to defence spending and NATO, but we absolutely cannot ignore the recent observations of the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, of “corrosive complacency” in government on defence, and his warning that

“we cannot defend Britain with an ever-expanding welfare budget”.

Politics is about choice and government is about priorities.

The first duty of government is defence of the realm. Before every other programme stands the obligation to keep the nation safe. We are living in a very dangerous world; many Peers have already spoken to that point. The peace dividend that we saw in 1989 has been spent—it is gone. We face a belligerent Russia, an expanding China, instability in the Middle East, a contested Indo-Pacific, cyber attacks, economic coercion and hybrid threats that respect no borders—and we have not even talked about international criminality. In a world such as this, defence is not one departmental claim among many but the foundation on which every other claim rests.

Unfortunately, for too long, successive Governments have treated defence as a residual claimant on the public purse. I am sick and tired of hearing politicians from the other place, and potentially from here, blaming the Treasury. This is nonsense. “Blame yourselves. You are in charge, you have been elected. I am sick of this. You cannot blame the Treasury; that is enough.”

Britain is not a poor country. We are the fifth-largest economy in the world. We have science, innovation, the City, universities, the legal system, Lloyd’s of London, our leading AI practitioners, alliances and the history to be the great power that we are. We are a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, a founder of NATO, Five Eyes, AUKUS, the G7, the G20 and the Commonwealth, and we lead the Joint Expeditionary Force. We are a nuclear power. Please, let us just get a grip here.

Britain is in fact a great power, and we have obligations. But greatness is not an inheritance; it must be nurtured. We comfort ourselves with talk of soft power. Enough of this. Soft power without hard power is no power at all. We are not the Vatican, in case anybody has missed the point. We cannot simply will stability, deterrence, freedom of navigation and support for our allies while failing to train people and to provide the ships, aircraft, munitions, and the industrial capacity and resilience to fight and win.

This is a question of priorities. The state has the obligation to protect the vulnerable, undoubtedly, but we cannot become a transfer economy in which welfare drifts from a safety net—an important safety net—into a very unpleasant way of life. It is unfair to working people, it is corrosive to society and it is divisive. Everyone wants to blame every other party around here—“Look at these guys, look at those guys”—but the corrosion starts from within.

Let me give one illustration: the Motability scheme. For many, it is a vital and good scheme, but its scale and scope have ballooned beyond being a true safety net for the vulnerable. The latest figures show there are 875,000 vehicles on the road. At roughly £25,000 per vehicle, this is £21.9 billion of national resource deployed. Using Babcock numbers of £250 million to build a core Type 31 frigate, that sum is equivalent to over 87 frigates. So, when we ask, “Where are our frigates?”, we can see where they are—they are travelling around our roads.

This is a choice that we have made to expand entitlements at the expense of the safety of the nation. We need a new settlement and we need some backbone. The question is not whether Britain can afford to remain a great power—we can and we are; the question is whether we choose to be. With that, I end with my previous question: where are our frigates? They are in the priorities that we and prior Governments have chosen, and, frankly, it is time to choose again.

My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Hintze. His patriotism and clear-headedness are an inspiration.

“An increasingly dangerous and volatile world threatens the United Kingdom”.

Those were His Majesty’s first words—well, not quite his first words; I think his first words were:

“My Lords, pray be seated”.

He is a very polite monarch who always puts the immediate before the important, but his first important words were:

“An increasingly dangerous and volatile world threatens the United Kingdom”.

You would think, listening to this debate, that no one disagrees with that. On every side, we have heard listed, sometimes in abstract terms and sometimes in specific terms, the various forms of danger that threaten us: cyber attacks, energy shortages and direct kinetic threats.

I put it to your Lordships that we do not really believe that: if we did, we would be behaving very differently. To develop the theme of the noble Lord, Lord Hintze, we would be putting minesweepers before Motability. To adapt the old First World War catchphrase, we would be putting guns before butter. We would, in short, be prioritising actual security over social security, rather than spending more than five times as much on the latter as on the former. That is not the behaviour of a country that truly believes it is threatened by an increasingly dangerous and volatile world.

What is the single biggest threat to our security? We have heard all the abstract nouns listed on all sides in this debate. They have sometimes been more specifically identified as Russia, China, Islamic terrorism or whatever. But above and linking all those threats is the really serious threat, which is that we are not growing economically. As long as our GDP is flatlining, it does not matter whether we spend 2%, 4%, 5% or 10% of GDP on defence, because the number is not increasing.

We are bloated as an economy, morbidly obese and adipose. Like anyone in that situation, getting fit again will require some short-term pain. There was an opportunity for some of that short-term pain in the King’s Speech. We had been promised a Bill on welfare reform, and it was very ostentatiously dropped. What did we get instead? A whole series of Bills increasing the power of state regulators and growing the state at the expense of what is left of the private sector. There are Bills on regulating water, Bills on regulating ticket sales, Bills on regulating oil, Bills on regulating energy prices and Bills on regulating housebuilding. This, again, is not the behaviour of a country that thinks that it faces an immediate threat.

Behavioural psychologists tell us to infer motive from behaviour, rather than the other way around. If we infer motive from behaviour, the Government have decided to prioritise short-term popularity, particularly with certain groups of the electorate, over the long-term security of the nation.

The noble Lord, Lord Grade, said that he had rejoined the Conservative Party and therefore could regain his opinions. I recently moved in the opposite direction. My partisan glands were cauterised in a painful operation.

This problem has grown up under successive Governments, including that of my former party. There has been a repeated unwillingness to face short-term, bad headlines in pursuit of long-term security considerations. But the strength of this country was always its relative economic success. From the Nine Years’ War until the end of the Cold War, we were successful in war and victorious and powerful in the councils of the world, not because of some magical property in our soil, seas or skies and not even because of the fighting spirit of our people—excepting the present company of noble and gallant Lords—but because we had a technological edge over our adversaries based on greater economic advancement. We are making a choice, instead of pursuing that advantage, to spend it on short-term popularity and on making ourselves more comfortable.

The noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, quoted the Athenian ambassadors as quoted by Thucydides in his history: the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. We are making a decision to be relatively weak because we do not want to face any of the short-term pain, and that is how powerful countries become weak countries. They become bloated and overweight, and in the end they lose the capacity to defend themselves and collapse, as all powers collapse.

“Altogether elsewhere, vast

Herds of reindeer move across

Miles and miles of golden moss,

Silently and very fast”.

My Lords, it is a privilege to take part in this debate, and I have learned a great deal from many of the contributions that have been made—I hope I am a wiser person as a result. I want to talk about two topics: the movement of people throughout the world and the effect it will have on this country and on western Europe; and something about the Middle East, Palestine and Israel.

I cannot claim to speak about defence. I will just say in passing that about 20 or more years ago, I was invited as part of a delegation of Members of this House and of the Commons to visit Afghanistan, and we went to Camp Bastion and Kandahar. It was a very informative and interesting experience to see the British Army in action in very dangerous circumstances.

We must expect more movements of people, whether driven by climate change, poverty, or war and persecution, and we ought to be ready for that. The movements will increase; they are not going to be stopped, or not easily. We have to look at the tragedy in Lebanon. I grieve for that country and what it is going through—I have been there a few times, although not very recently. It is suffering enormously, and I have to say that there will come a time when many Lebanese will have to flee as their country is being bombed and attacked by the Israelis.

I am pleased that we did not succumb to Trump’s blandishments to join him in attacking Iran. It is America’s war, not our war. We have supported the Americans in Afghanistan and in other countries, but this was not an occasion for us to get involved. I think it will be a long time before the world recovers from the tragedy of what the Americans are doing there.

Then we have the tragedy in the Horn of Africa, not just in Sudan but in the DRC. Again, people are suffering there and many are on the move. There is the almost forgotten situation of a million Rohingyas who fled from Myanmar into Bangladesh. I visited Cox’s Bazar some years ago and there were about 100,000 people there, but now there are a million and Bangladesh is getting very little help. Some of the Rohingyas are fleeing to neighbouring countries, but nobody is giving them much help.

On Israel, I am as opposed to antisemitism as anybody, partly from my own personal history, but to suggest that criticism of Israel is somehow antisemitic is a departure from the truth. The noble Lord who said that is not here now, but I find it very upsetting when people suggest that. Some years ago I had a conversation with a previous Israeli ambassador to London, who said to me, “Of course you can criticise Israel—they do it in the Knesset all the time”. It is unhealthy to think that we are antisemitic because we say that what the Israeli Government are doing is unacceptable, which I believe it is.

Yes, there was a dreadful tragedy in Israel on 7 October. The Hamas attack was appalling, and we all send our sympathies to the Israelis, the people who were held hostage and the families of those who suffered. But that is not the only tragedy in the region, and it has been made much worse by the response of the Israelis. We recently saw on our television screens the people who came on the flotilla. That was a fairly peaceful exercise to bring aid to Gaza. But after an Israeli Minister delighted in seeing people handcuffed on their knees and humiliated, without having committed any criminal offence, and said, “This is to teach them”, even Prime Minister Netanyahu had to say that was not in the best traditions of Israel, and that Minister was rightly condemned by our Foreign Secretary.

I was delighted when this country recognised the State of Palestine—not because that recognition in itself solves anything but because it is a necessary stage on the way to having a two-state solution. I was very happy to be outside what became the Palestinian embassy when it celebrated becoming a Palestinian state. It is absolutely necessary for there to be a two-state solution.

The growth of settlements is damaging the chance of a two-state solution. There are 102 illegal settlements on the West Bank and the threat of more settlements through E1, which will divide Palestine into two separate parts and make a Palestinian state even more difficult to achieve. We have to take action against any British companies that want to have contracts to build E1 and to make sure they know that there will be sanctions against them if they go ahead. The Prime Minister has said that the 1967 occupation is unlawful, as advised by the ICJ. That should be fundamental to our approach. There should be consequences. There should be no UK trade in goods and services with settlements. We should suspend the bilateral trade partnership. This is all based on there being international co-operation.

I shudder at the thought that the Israeli Government are introducing a death penalty only for Palestinians. They have denied access to Palestinian prisons in Israel as NGOs have denied access to Gaza. What is happening is a tragedy. We have to say to the Israeli Government, “You’ve got to stop. The tragedy of 7 October does not justify what you are doing now”.

My Lords, I refer to my interests in the register. It is a great honour to be present for this debate.

I will ask the Minister three questions. First, when will we start supporting British companies that are developing innovative defence systems but find themselves having to go abroad to countries such as the USA to manufacture their British products, because they do not get the funding or support from the UK Government? We then end up buying those products back for the defence of our great nation. Given the importance of being self-reliant and resilient, perhaps it is time we start to look at bringing back manufacturing and backing those fantastic entrepreneurs who, if backed properly, would create thousands of jobs and put us back at the forefront of leading the world with world-class systems. It would also help the Government’s economic growth agenda. Will the Minister therefore commit to putting the interests of British entrepreneurs at the heart of their support by funding and helping them to invest in this country? This would include the manufacturing of PPE and other necessary uniforms. I was horrified to find that only 6% of all uniforms for the military are produced in this country. We need to put the economic growth of our country first. That does not stop us engaging in closer co-operation with our allies old and new.

Secondly, when will we work more closely with our friends and allies across the African continent? Like all nations, we have an economy that needs to grow into a more knowledge-rich, new technology-based and clean power-based country. We need critical minerals. While the Chinese, the Americans and many of our European allies have been engaging actively for many years, we seem to lack a coherent, joined-up strategy with the African continent—especially with countries with which we have long-standing relationships. This is important not just for British businesses but for our presence in the wider debate through soft diplomacy. We can do so much more that benefits not just us but our partners and allies across the continent. Will the Minister urge the Government to strengthen our embassies and high commissions, particularly in countries where it will generate opportunities for British businesses and our excellent, talented and skilled workforces that support us to export goods globally? Cutting the strength of embassies and high commissions is shooting ourselves in the foot. We need a strong presence across the world, and our embassies and high commissions are the first outward-facing connections that those countries have with our country.

In these uncertain times, will the Minister tell us what the Government’s strategy is to have strong access to virgin steel, because without it we will not be able to manufacture SMRs, defence capabilities and infrastructure? No discussions are taking place with UK businesses that are willing to work with the Government to help support the steel industry. Will the Minister therefore meet and speak to those businesses that wish to come in and support the infrastructure in this country to help build our defence mechanisms?

The security of this country is very unpredictable and we are living in a very unpredictable world. Although the noble Lord, Lord Forbes of Newcastle, is not in his place, I agreed with everything he was saying. It is time that we put the growth and security of our country first, working with old and new allies. We cannot dither; we need to make decisions. That is what is needed in this time of turmoil.

My last piece of advice to the Minister, who I know will listen carefully to his colleagues the noble Baroness, Lady Ashton, and the noble Lord, Lord Robertson—who have huge experience of the terrors and turmoil that goes on—is that it is perhaps time to bring them into the tent and take their advice on how to work and negotiate. Their experience is huge and they would greatly benefit the Government and the wider nation.

My Lords, before I start, I pay tribute to the RAF regiment with which I have strong connections, as is noted in my register of interests. Its role is not well known but it is essential, and it deserves public recognition from this House; so too does the RFA, spoken to so well by the noble Baroness, Lady Fraser of Craigmaddie.

I would like to have heard rather more about national security in the gracious Speech to help advance the short debate I initiated in Grand Committee on 20 April. Nevertheless, I am determined to continue that debate, which focused on our civil preparedness for war or major critical infrastructure disruption. I was delighted to hear the contribution from the noble Lord, Lord Forbes of Newcastle, who reiterated my remarks from that debate. Despite many assurances from the Minister, whom I greatly respect, when he responded to my short debate, my concerns remain.

The omission of the defence readiness Bill from the King’s Speech, kicking the can down the road until at least mid-2027, shows remarkable, even criminal, complacency by the Government, when we have kinetic war raging on the European continent, as well as hybrid warfare by Russia and China waged directly against the UK and its allies. This was wisely and vehemently expressed by the noble and gallant Lords, Lord Stirrup and Lord Houghton of Richmond, and others throughout this interesting and important debate.

In my town of Richmond, the community emergency plan appears to be driven by a community interest company—a CIC. It is a volunteer body, undoubtedly committed and well meaning, but our central and local government need to take the lead to give legal weight, authority and direction to what has to be done by our Civil Service, industry and citizens. No less than a whole-of-government approach is needed, putting in place the means to mobilise the whole nation if an existential crisis arises. Part 2 of our county emergency plan in North Yorkshire warns of the consequences of inaction:

“It can be chaotic if people do not know where reliable advice can be found; what is needed (and not needed) and to whom they should turn”.

In his critique of Understanding the UK’s Transition to Warfighting Readiness, former deputy police commissioner, David Gilbertson, relates how public order can quickly break down in crisis and the need to prepare for it. Chaos can easily be sown by our enemies. Hybrid warfare is destabilising Europe. Look at Russia’s shadow fleet activity, misinformation and disinformation and malign influence, cyber attacks, aggressive probing by drones in the sea and air, economic warfare and explicit threats—recall the Salisbury poisonings—and that is not to mention the existential threats we have of climate change and the looming energy crisis, now made incredibly more difficult since we seem to be letting Russia off the hook by reducing sanctions against buying its oil.

The Prime Minister’s national conversation on defence and security has yet to start, as noble Lords have already mentioned, and there has been little, if any, public engagement, and certainly no clear central direction on what that national conversation should look like. In his newspaper article of 16 March, the noble Lord, Lord Hague of Richmond, wrote:

“An act of national leadership is now required: to be frank with the country about the dangers and be clear that the funds for more tanks, ships, planes, drones, ammunition and recruits are vital”—

and, I would add, to be clear about how we, as civilians, should be preparing ourselves to ensure our survival in extremis.

As we presently lack a plan for homeland defence, notwithstanding the setting up of our own National Resilience Committee, chaired by the excellent noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, what action is being taken to strengthen our civil defence immediately? I do not believe we have the luxury of waiting until that report is produced at the end of November. What is being produced in the interim?

Being complacent about our country’s security is no longer tenable. Ukraine shows us that graphically. We do not have the luxury to implement plans in the casual way we have done in the past. It is time to get our act together to ensure our collective security and build the resilience of our nation.

My Lords, before turning to the main substance of today’s debate, I briefly say that I warmly welcome the inclusion in the gracious Speech of a promise to tackle so-called conversion practices. These have severely damaged and traumatised many LGBT people over decades, not least when performed in the name of religion. I welcome that promise just as warmly today as I welcomed it from this same Bench on the three or four occasions when it has previously been made. I hope that, this time round, we will actually get to the point of legislating. Indeed, the General Synod of the Church of England overwhelmingly voted to press the Government to do just that several years ago.

Turning to today’s main topics, I want to speak briefly about Britain’s soft power, covert foreign influence and defending liberal democracy. As international threats grow more complex and less overt, Britain’s foreign policy and influence abroad depends less on traditional hard power alone and increasingly on proactive British diplomacy. Noble Lords have already alluded to this but, alongside our formal diplomatic missions, key institutions such the British Council and the World Service extend our cultural influence. Many of our universities, along with our public schools, play a key role in shaping future global leaders. They must be sufficiently supported and resourced to do the job we need them to do.

Equally, bodies such as the Commonwealth, and, indeed, my own Church of England, contribute to an extensive international network: we connect local communities, education institutions and development organisations, all of which promote British values such as human dignity and justice on a global scale. The most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury, speaking in the House earlier this week, highlighted that the Church builds bridges and fosters relationships across lines of race, faith and class. This role in fostering unity is absolutely essential in the face of an increasingly divided world. More broadly, these institutions develop long-term diplomatic relationships, and grass-roots engagement with them embeds liberal democratic principles in cultures abroad and promotes best practice in other nations.

We cannot ignore the growing prevalence of covert operations by foreign powers on British soil. In recent years, there has been a marked increase in incidents of transnational repression in the UK, such as the targeting of Iran International in 2023 and the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury in 2018, as well as in foreign actors who seek to radicalise British citizens. In the light of these threats, I welcome the Government’s commitment to tackle foreign interference, especially the proposed national security Bill’s focus on criminalising those involved in instigating, or indeed planning, the most violent and egregious attacks.

While previous legislation has already placed some caps on foreign political donations, I am also concerned about how technology-enabled routes of access to the British public may enable undue ideological influence over our political system, including seeking to weaponise differences of religion or heritage within the UK. Strengthening the transparency of donations to political campaigns, to individuals either directly involved in or prominently seen as being engaged in politics and to parties more broadly is essential if we are to defend the democratic integrity of our electoral processes.

I welcome the Government’s renewed interest in defending against these threats, but at the same time I remain concerned about the impact of some proposals on our civil liberties. Recent years have seen a steady tightening of regulations around protests. This has major implications for the freedom of expression that underpins our liberal society. It is crucial that any new government powers are firmly rooted in a commitment to maintain personal liberty and freedom of expression. I believe we can do this at the same time as ensuring that our freedoms are not abused as a means of promoting hostility. Others have already alluded to the dramatic rise in antisemitism that killed two of my Jewish neighbours on Yom Kippur last year and frightened so many others of us who live in the city of Salford.

Liberal democracy stands under threat, not only from non-democratic standards, but from what Viktor Orbán, lately of Hungary, proudly referred to as “illiberal democracy”. From Hungary to the USA, we see jurisdictions where votes may still be largely free and fair, but the use of executive patronage and commercial pressure to force the judiciary, the civil service, the press, religious institutions and businesses to collude with the leaders’ whims and wishes make democracy a very thin defence. That must never happen here. This United Kingdom, which I am so proud to serve in your Lordships’ House, is far more than a blot of pink on an increasingly multicoloured map. Britain is a way of life, a way of life inevitably far from perfect, but which can yet be a beacon of hope across the globe. That is what is worth defending. That is what our foreign and defence policies must provide.

My Lords, it is always a challenge to follow a bishop, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester is no exception. The Prime Minister says that a central aim of the new legislative programme is to strengthen security, the economy, energy and defence. The country is to be put at the heart of Europe to remove the barriers to growth under a European partnership Bill. European alliances are to be rebuilt, the Armed Forces strengthened and the UK is, he says, to stand strong with NATO.

Noble Lords have referred today to the link between a strong economy and strong defence, to which I add a strong, tough diplomacy. The UK is a sovereign state, a member of the G7, historically a global trader and a staunch upholder of competitive markets and free trade, for which trade treaties remain, as the Minister reminded us this morning, a vital tool in the armoury of international relations. Sadly, this does not seem to have been followed up by this Government.

In rebuilding alliances, the very costly one in, one out deal with France last August has resulted in the removal, by the end of April, of 605 people who arrived illegally on small boats, with France sending 581 people. It seems there is a lot of money for the current deal: £500 million, plus the £162 million top-up for the deport and detain scheme. Can the Minister let us know how this deal will make more value and whether it can be toughened up for this country?

In respect of the wider EU, for this Government it seems there is no EU demand that is too much, no cost too high and no deal too punitive. Even Sir Keir Starmer’s three modest reset proposals—on mutual recognition of professional qualifications, an end to restrictions on UK touring artists, and a modest veterinary agreement—have all failed. The first two have got nowhere, so far, and instead of an agreement on the third we have a fully blown SPS deal, which is what the EU demanded, including long-term access to UK fisheries. There is also a negotiation in progress to open the borders of this country to tens of millions of the EU’s young people under 30. The EU has not shown the slightest flicker of willingness to consider the suggestion, proposed by David Lammy, of a financial services agreement based on mutual recognition of equivalent standards.

Worse, trade with Britain’s global partners will suffer, as they signed up to trade with the UK under its own laws. Each party, as in the CPTPP deal, is to trade on the basis of mutual recognition of standards, scientifically assessed and with conformity assessment bodies, and without the uncertainties produced by dynamic alignment with EU law. As Professor David Collins has explained, this could leave the UK open to legal challenge internationally from trade partners.

This week, the International Agreements Committee heard from a former chief trade negotiation adviser at the DBT. He said that the UK should look to the growing economies of Asia and the Middle East, including the GCC countries, and continue to work with the US on whatever opportunities presented themselves. Agreements are possible; the US remains our biggest single trade partner and, as the official added, the current Administration want to go where we want to go, for we share many similar aims in trade, but that cannot be expected from a future Democrat regime. Why should a country be held up by the slowest ship in the convoy rather than embrace its role as a global leader of free markets, competitive global trade and the rule of the common law, itself the most significant export?

My Lords, I thought long and hard about which debate on the humble Address I should participate in. My background in local government, regeneration and housing initially pushed me towards the debate yesterday; but since joining your Lordships’ House in January, the questions raised here, conversations with colleagues and the challenges of world events have brought me to a realisation that our nation’s defence is a topic that I cannot ignore. While I have no historic experience or expertise in defence, the challenges our nation faces means that defence should be everyone’s business.

For more than 30 years since the peace dividend of the 1990s, we have perhaps left defence as a subject largely for those with knowledge and experience of the military sector. However, I know they must now feel that it is imperative that more, if not all, of us should play a part in the debate about the fundamental duty of government—the security of our nation. Without a new debate and the building of a truly national consensus, we risk allowing our nation’s security to be sidelined again at a time when it should be top of every agenda. So I hope that my contribution today will be welcomed and my lack of experience forgiven—perhaps seen as a pre-emptive strike of the national conversation.

President Theodore Roosevelt popularised the proverb, “Speak softly and carry a big stick”, as an approach to the United States’ national defence policy in 1900. As one military expert observed to me recently, there is a risk that our approach to defence today becomes characterised as, “Shout loudly and carry a matchstick”. In fact, the British military remains a formidable force, with recent and relevant experience of supporting significant military engagements. Britain has military knowledge that continues to be envied and used around the globe.

We have a plan in the strategic defence review, but I can only add my voice to those calling for it to be implemented through the defence investment plan, for the reality is that, even if we meet our current and significantly increased target of 3.5% of GDP on defence spending by 2035, in nine years’ time, that will still be only half of what the then Government were spending on rearmament in 1938, having risen from similar levels of spending to today in 1932. I do not believe that we have the luxury of being able to wait another nine years to significantly increase our defence spending and capacity when the world today feels far more threatening and our alliances uncertain—and I know that many here would argue that the world today is more akin to 1938 than to 1932. We know that, in life, prevention is better than cure, and 3.5%, or even 6.9%, of GDP spent on defence now would still be dwarfed by the massive sums that it would actually cost to fight a war, as the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, pointed out, recalling that more than 50% of GDP was ultimately spent annually on defence during World War Two.

We need to show those who would challenge our way of life that we are serious about protecting our freedoms and begin to make the investment necessary to defend ourselves with the systems, weapons and people needed in 2026. As the noble Baroness, Lady Kingsmill, outlined, there are innovative and affordable ways in which we can fund that defence investment. Let us embrace that innovation and explore all options to build the systems we need now.

I welcome the Government’s moves to strengthen our relationship with our EU neighbours. That is an essential ingredient in building our defence capability. War and conflict are never an inevitability, but we make them more likely if we fail to demonstrate by words and deeds that we will act now to have the military capacity to defend ourselves.

My Lords, as the Chief of the General Staff has recently made starkly clear, Great Britain and NATO are very much in Putin’s crosshairs. We are on an inescapable collision course with a Russia that is on a determined war footing. Many aspects of this conflict have already been under way for quite some time. Deliberate, enhanced Russian escalation in a wider sphere is evidenced by its increasingly subversive and deliberately antagonistic activities in eastern Europe, yet the Labour Administration have been consistently weak in their responses to these ever-increasing dangers and shown a lacklustre regard to substantially beefing up defence of the realm.

Our European partners are not indulging in such dangerous and inescapable complacency. Some are already taking the gloves off in a way that should be a real spur to our own commitment and endeavours but could also, if not balanced, raise very significant concerns.

We need to talk about Germany again. Germany is launching an enormous rearmament programme and its officially declared, stated aim is now to build, in its words,

“the strongest conventional army in Europe”.

Chancellor Merz has secured a constitutional amendment to exempt defence spending from the stringent legal limits on government debt. Merz’s recent proclamation is that the scale of defence spending now has to be “whatever it takes”. It is now clear that, by the end of this decade, Germany’s conventional defence spend will significantly exceed that of the combined total of the UK and of France. Rheinmetall, Germany’s defence giant, is already responding at full bore to Chancellor Merz’s exhortations, with typical German efficiency, huge productivity and a focus on maximum quality. For understandable historical reasons, this is now ringing alarm bells in Paris and in Warsaw.

There are clearly much more disturbing forces also at work. But for us in Great Britain, that should be the spur to emulating Germany’s determined commitment to protect Europe’s freedoms and culture. Why are this present Labour Administration so timid and so indecisive? Why do this Labour Government not listen and respond with immediacy to the wise, experienced and much-respected counsel of their own distinguished noble friends in this House, such as the noble Lord, Lord Reid of Cardowan, and the noble Lord, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen?

“Action this day” surely has to be seized as the galvanising mantra. For a long time, we have been the USA’s major and most respected partner in NATO. We should welcome Germany’s even more heavyweight presence alongside us. Restoring President Trump’s confidence in NATO is of permanent importance. A NATO regalvanised under leadership determinedly funded by Great Britain—alongside a fully funded and committed Germany—will be very close to President Trump’s heart. He clearly values hugely his own British, Scottish and German familial ties; we must determinedly embrace Germany in this way. The depiction of Field Marshal Blücher in the Royal Gallery reminds us of an absolutely pivotal partnership of yesteryear. His Majesty the King’s hugely successful state visit to Germany demonstrated how warm this two-way relationship can be. We must not let Germany drift eastwards.

My Lords, I speak from a Sikh perspective on common concerns for peace and justice in our strife-torn world of today. The poet reminds us that rivers and mountains interpose to make one people implacable foes. It is not only geography that divides our one human family but human greed, prejudice and bigotry, including religious bigotry.

Seeing ourselves as superior and others as lesser beings has been a source of conflict throughout history. In 1937, in a speech justifying the proposed uprooting of Palestinians to create a Jewish state, Winston Churchill said:

“I do not admit … that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race … has come in and taken their place”.

Rivalry between the “higher-grade” races resulted in the horror of the First and Second World Wars, atrocities against the Jews and the incineration of hundreds of thousands in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The suffering and devastation of war shocked world leaders into a new realism and a common desire to work for a more peaceful world. Victor nations agreed that the only way forward to lasting peace would be a recognition of the equal rights of all members of our one human family—imperatives for peace and justice first put forward by the Sikh Gurus more than two centuries earlier.

Jesus Christ wisely warned that the sword should not be used automatically to resolve difference, but today politicians and retired generals constantly call on the need for bigger and better weapons to defend ourselves against those we call our enemies. We show righteous indignation when those who are not our friends abuse human rights, but we show less concern when a friendly country fires on innocent children and aid workers in Gaza, and at the threats by an eccentric friend and ally to obliterate all life in Iran. Powerful nations exploit smaller nations’ conflicts by selling arms to impoverished people in places such as the Middle East, or by direct involvement in conflict in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. India buys oil from Russia to help fund Russian aggression against Ukraine. Unbelievably, Russia sells arms to Pakistan for use against India.

In a speech in this House a year or so ago, the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, a former Defence Minister, made clear what politicians mean by defence. He spoke about countries such as China and Russia threatening the existing world order. He was right: they too are also trying to acquire crude political and economic power. However, the briefest glimpse at world history shows that the existing world order is built on racism, slavery and gross economic exploitation. Conflict is inevitable in a world built on such insecure foundations.

What do we need to do to make it a fairer world? Religious teachings were meant to provide the answer, but today rivalry between different religions and absurd claims of exclusive and favoured relationships with the one God of us all has made the distortion of true religion a major cause of conflict and suffering. Guru Nanak was a witness to such bigotry in India some 500 years ago. The Guru, like Jesus Christ in the parable of the good Samaritan, openly challenged this irreligious view of religion. He taught that the one God of us all is not the least bit interested in our different religious labels, but in what we do to create a fairer and more peaceful world.

At the same time, Guru Nanak recognised and highlighted the ethical commonalities between our different faiths. Our holy book contains writings of not only the Sikh gurus but parallel ethical perspectives from Hindu and Muslim saints. I believe that this approach of looking to the good in others and building on common values and interests is the only way to lasting peace and justice.

Today, we are in a smaller, interdependent world. Our destinies are inextricably entwined, and we face common environmental and other challenges. We have to realise now that there is no “us” and “them”; there is only “us”. We all have a common responsibility to change old-fashioned mindsets about exclusive and superior religions, and the belief that force is the only way to resolution.

My Lords, I pay tribute to the hereditary Peers, who gave time and expertise to this House with a true sense of public service and duty passed down over generations. They will be missed.

I begin by declaring my interests. I co-chair and run the APPG on Women, Peace and Security. I am on the steering board of the Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict Initiative. I set up and run the Afghan Women’s Support Forum, and I am the honorary colonel of Outreach Group.

The King’s Speech highlighted that an increasingly dangerous and volatile world threatens the UK. As well as the war in Ukraine and the terrible situation in the Middle East, the Red Cross reports that there are over 130 active conflicts in the world today—as the Minister said, that is more than at any other time since World War Two—with civilians bearing the brunt of attacks and sexual violence often being used as a weapon of war. There seems an inability to bring these conflicts to peace. The wars of the last 20 years flex from acute to chronic, and often back again. Wars are easy to start and, as we see, are so hard to finish. Today, there are over 120 million displaced people, many as a result of conflict. There will never be global peace while this situation continues. In our interconnected world, what happens in one place affects people all over the world.

I am concerned about aspects of the UK’s response to all this. We should be investing more into conflict resolution and prevention. For resolution, we must work with other countries to maintain international bodies, including the UN, and to reform them to be more effective. Conflict prevention, by averting war, not only saves lives but billions of pounds. Studies show that for every £1 invested, as much as £100 is saved. However, last year’s report by Mercy Corps and Saferworld revealed a sharp decline in the UK’s investment in peacebuilding, violence prevention and conflict resolution over recent years.

Empirical evidence shows that including women in peace processes makes peace more durable, legitimate and effective, and 35% more likely to last 15 years. In 2000, the UN Security Council Resolution 1325 recognised the disproportionate effect of conflict on women and girls. While the Foreign Secretary’s words of commitment to the women, peace and security agenda are most welcome, the International Development Select Committee’s report found that the UK Government failed to deliver on commitments relating to the inclusion of women and girls in meaningful participation and conflict prevention, that funding has been reduced, and that the Government’s commitment appears to be waning.

I welcome the statement in the King’s Speech about putting the rights of women and girls first, but there needs to be action, not just words. There remains enormous gender inequality in many countries, mostly because male leaders turn a blind eye to issues such as child marriage and FGM. Why has funding for sexual health and reproductive rights been cut? The Government argue that the reason for slashing aid is because we need money for defence, but this does not have to be financed at the cost of international development. It is a political choice that the Government are making. We need security for the UK, and this will not be achieved by defence alone. As we have heard from many noble Lords today, we need the combination of diplomacy, development and defence.

International development aid is not charity; it is an investment in a safer, healthier and more stable world. I have a number of concerns in this regard that I would be grateful if the Minister could address. The reduction of people at the FCDO is not only damaging morale but will destroy institutional memory and experience. The reduced aid needs to be used in the most cost-effective way: financing at grass roots, not mainly financing multilaterals. What percentage of aid will actually go to the purpose it is meant for, after hotels for migrants are paid for—16% of the budget last year—and top-slicing to fund the multilaterals? Why is funding to demining organisations such as HALO and MAG, where the UK is a world leader, being cut by about 66%? How can countries prosper where there is the danger of mines? It was accepted that education was the way out of poverty, yet the UK now seems to have abandoned this. What are we doing to tackle corruption? Many African countries are rich in resources, but the benefits end up in the pockets of a few.

The MoD tells us we should be war ready. At the moment, I understand that we import about 40% of our food, so why are this Government allowing solar panels to be put on good agricultural land, which we need to grow food? I understand if the Minister cannot answer all this today, but I hope that they will write to me.

My Lords, I declare an interest as sometime chair and vice-chair of the APPG for the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. I have raised the division of Cyprus many times in your Lordships’ House, and I put on record my gratitude for the immense effort made by the FCDO in trying to facilitate a long-term solution to the problem. Our colonial past on the island and our status as a guarantor power have meant real involvement, particularly in the run-up to the Crans-Montana negotiations, now nine years ago. It is a matter of huge regret that these negotiations failed at the very last moment, when the Greek Cypriot negotiators abandoned the process.

Cyprus has been divided for over 50 years, and in this half century there have been repeated attempts to reunite. All these attempts have failed, and in each case the Greek Cypriot south was the proximate cause of these failures. The current position is that the north of the island, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, is a de facto state, recognised only by Turkey and supported by Turkey both economically and militarily. Northern Cyprus is isolated and under embargo.

In 2017, after the last-minute failure of the Crans-Montana negotiations, the then-incoming TRNC President took the quite understandable view that more negotiation would be a waste of time unless there were to be formal recognition of the TRNC as a separate state. Unsurprisingly, this has resulted—or had resulted until recently—in no significant progress. But there has been no shortage of warnings that the situation was delicate and the tensions were increasing. This was before war broke out in the Middle East, and war has made these tensions on the island very much more intense. But despite, or possibly because of, these heightened tensions, there now appear to be faint signs of a restored appetite for negotiations to resume.

The Republic of Cyprus President has indicated that discussions between the UN Secretary-General and the Turkish President could lead to a new peace plan and has urged the resumption of negotiations. The UN Secretary-General has also indicated a desire for an effort to restart reunification talks. Clearly, the record of 50 years of failure to reach an agreed settlement carries some harsh lessons about good faith and the inevitability of serious and probably unpalatable compromises. The Minister will know that the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus has newly elected a leader, Tufan Erhürman. On 28 April last, Mr Erhürman said:

“The question that needs to be asked is this: is there anyone who truly believes that a solution on this island can be reached by ignoring the existence of the Turkish Cypriot people? … As to our position? Guided by the will of our people for a solution, we are here — resolute and determined — with patience, composure, and a serious sense of purpose”.

For many decades, the people of Northern Cyprus have lived unrecognised, disadvantaged and embargoed, deprived of access to international capital and now facing wars in the region and the likely consequences of those wars. The division of the island was not the fault of the people on the island; they are not to blame, but they have been isolated, as a consequence, for 50 years with the inevitable economic consequences. It may be that changes to the geopolitics of the region, the shifting of alliances and the arrival of newly elected politicians present an opportunity for progress.

This is what Ursula von der Leyen had to say about the situation, speaking on 7 January this year:

“For the European Union, a comprehensive, fair and lasting settlement for Cyprus remains an absolute priority”.

I ask the Minister if he will make the same commitment. As I am sure he knows, there is significant sympathy and relevant expertise in this House on the subject of Cyprus, and I ask him to meet me and other colleagues to discuss how we may contribute.

My Lords, it is a pleasure to take part in this adjourned debate on the gracious Speech. I would like to cover the area of dual-use technologies and, in doing so, I declare my technology interests as set out in the register as adviser variously to the Crown Estate, to Endava plc and to Simmons and Simmons LLP.

Dual-use technologies have become increasingly important and of interest, but it is AI that has put this on a completely different path, not least because of its omnipresence, if not as yet omnipotence, and certainly its omniapplicability. The sheer velocity and availability of AI means that dual-use technologies now need to be considered in a wholly different manner. Consider, in the past, nuclear: fortunately, still, a largely niche activity, highly technical, difficult and complex. AI, by contrast, is a very retail pursuit, available to all, bad actors as well as good. What should we consider when we look at the UK’s approach to dual-use technologies? First, we should consider the tech stack itself. How much of this should the UK develop? How much should it control? How much should it directly own? How much should it have a complete 100% grip upon?

Similarly, we should consider data. AI is nothing without data. Where is the sensitive data when it comes to dual-use technologies? Is it on-prem, in the cloud, in this country or somewhere else? Where are the people involved based? Where does their expertise come from? What are they doing, and how, when it comes to dual-use technologies? Turning to the capital, the sources of funding and indeed the whole question of investability around dual-use technologies, what is happening in terms of institutional investment and pension funds, both in terms of the possibilities for investment and the barriers and blockers to said investment?

When it comes to exports, it is easy to think that we should just reach for export bans around some of these technologies, but perhaps we should look at both sides of this and see the potential to export some of these technologies to like-minded nations, to build coalition and collectivity around such similar approaches. As for the energy used, where is it coming from? Who controls it? What level of risk is involved there?

Finally, it is well worth considering open source and the possibilities therein. I ask the Minister specifically: what have the Government learned from the Pentagon’s Project Maven? What are the lessons for the UK? Similarly, when it comes to reviewing the UK’s tech stack in AI and across all dual-use technologies, what process of decoupling, if any, are the Government currently considering? Allied to that, what premium are the Government prepared to pay when it comes to having true sovereign AI? Would it not be beneficial, around all these technologies, to have some legislation, some right-sized regulation, as set out in my AI regulation Private Member’s Bill?

To conclude, in many ways dual-use technologies shine the sharpest of spotlights on an uncomfortable truth wilfully ignored by Governments over decades, which is this: if you want peace, prepare for war—politically problematic, economically inconvenient, yet timelessly true, from Plato to NATO. Certainly, prepare for war on the battlefields, but much more than that, prepare in the boardrooms, in the data centres, in the servers and in the chips. Prepare in the cloud, prepare in the rare earth minerals and prepare under our oceans. Prepare, prepare, prepare to fight for the “we” in a sadly increasing world of “me”. Prepare if we want peace.

My Lords, the gracious Speech was notable for many things, not just the welcome list of Bills. I rather suspect that your Lordships’ House is going to be even busier in the next Session than it was in the last. There are many Bills that we can look forward to debating and considering in detail over the Session ahead. I also welcome it because—and here I disagree, but only slightly, with the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup—there was a narrative thread running through it, albeit a slightly thin narrative thread, about building better resilience for the country. Before I go any further, I refer to my registered interest as chair of the National Preparedness Commission.

For example, there are to be Bills to strengthen the resilience of critical infrastructure and to safeguard sovereign supplies, with Bills on energy independence, the steel industry, clean water and highways. Others will reinforce national security, looking at cyber and state threats. The Armed Forces Bill will take steps to expand the pool of reservists. All that is welcome, but the two decades of external shocks that have left our nation in a weakened state merit rather more. We cannot continue to apply, as is suggested, sticking plasters. What is needed is a bold strategy to deliver a stronger, more resilient society for everyone.

Alas, there is one striking omission in the gracious Speech—there is no defence readiness Bill. This was recommended last summer in the strategic defence review led by my noble friend Lord Robertson of Port Ellen. That recommendation was accepted by His Majesty’s Government, but apparently it is not ready. I know that work is progressing on this, and draft legislation to provide the powers needed to prioritise the supplies and support required in the event of a national defence emergency inevitably calls for substantial consultation across government. I understand that, but in an ideal world we would have had it before us this Session, particularly as the international situation has become even more threatening in the short period since the SDR reported.

Indeed, such legislation is a necessary part of the UK’s commitment to Article 3. NATO expects each member country to maintain its own resilience as part of collective defence, and that involves preparedness against all types of shock, including natural disasters, cyber attacks and military threats. That is needed because it is there to ensure the continuity of government and critical services at times of crisis.

I urge my noble friends on the Front Bench to use this unfortunate delay as an opportunity for the Bill to have a broader focus than perhaps is suggested in the strategic defence review. Let us be clear that the nation’s resources may need to be mobilised not just in the event of hostilities but in other civil emergencies, not necessarily arising from nation state action. We will need those mechanisms, and we would need those powers, in another pandemic or to deal with extreme weather events precipitated by climate change and, indeed, many of the other acute risks listed in the National Risk Register.

Something much broader is needed: a national resilience and defence readiness Bill to provide a framework to make the best use of the nation’s resources in the event of any emergency or in response to hostile action. Such a Bill could place a duty on government departments, public bodies, local authorities, large businesses and organisations to build their resilience and bolster their preparedness to respond to different sorts of threats and emergencies. It could set structures to facilitate this and underpin it as part of a concerted national effort to address the dangerous and volatile world that we now face as a nation. This must now be prioritised and brought forward as soon as it is ready—perhaps even before the next gracious Speech. It would be gross negligence for us not to do so.

My Lords, His Majesty’s gracious Speech addressed Britain’s security, prosperity and position within an increasingly fractured international order. Yet it made no mention of artificial intelligence, the technological force now profoundly reshaping it.

AI is not just a sectoral or domestic policy issue. It has become foundational to how nations project power, defend their citizens, secure critical infrastructure and maintain sovereignty. AI is not arriving in a stable world. A decade of algorithmic conditioning on social media has already separated people into parallel realities, eroding the shared reference points of international order and co-operation. Today, AI systems capable of matching human cognition are beginning to participate directly in human judgment itself.

The frontier AI systems on which much of the world will depend are being shaped by an extraordinarily narrow concentration of people, power and data. Most nations are not participating meaningfully in this process. They are inheriting it. I believe AI has the potential to usher in the greatest civilisational uplift in human history, but that outcome is not guaranteed. It depends on whether international communities can establish credible frameworks for stewardship before competitive pressures harden into permanent norms.

At present, the opposite is happening. Across the world, the centre of gravity has shifted away from shared safety frameworks towards acceleration, sectoral advantage and national competition. While principles have been written and summits convened, the trajectory of artificial intelligence is increasingly being decided by a handful of individuals—unelected, unaccountable and operating at a scale that democratic institutions were never designed to oversee.

I know from personal experience that many of those building AI systems care deeply about their responsibilities. But private capability, however well intentioned, is not the same as democratic legitimacy. The majority of the world’s nations, representing the majority of the world’s people, are not part of the equation. In the absence of governance, restraint becomes a competitive disadvantage. This is no longer a theoretical question of future risk. It is a present contest over power, incentives and control. A few weeks ago, one major frontier AI company refused to allow its systems to be used in autonomous weapons or mass surveillance of citizens. Its competitors agreed to the conditions of unrestricted use and secured the contract.

We are facing a new magnitude of technological power, and the window to shape what comes next is rapidly closing. Sir Demis Hassabis, Nobel laureate and founder of DeepMind, has described this moment as 10 times the Industrial Revolution at 10 times the speed. Other institutions are recognising the scale of this moment. On 25 May, the Holy See will publish Magnifica Humanitas, the first encyclical on artificial intelligence. It was signed on the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, the Church’s landmark response to the human and social consequences of the Industrial Revolution. The Holy See recognises that this technological transition will profoundly shape the moral conditions of human society—and that the time to act is now.

The United Kingdom has historically been the country that convened coalitions capable of shaping international order at moments of profound transition. This is such a moment. The question is no longer whether artificial intelligence will shape the future international order—it already is. The question is whether democratic nations will help shape that order together or whether they will gradually surrender agency to systems, norms and concentrations of power designed elsewhere. Britain has the credibility and alliances to convene that coalition. I urge His Majesty’s Government to place this transformation at the top of the agenda for the United Kingdom’s G20 presidency in 2027.

My Lords, yesterday, I had the privilege to visit an exercise being conducted this week deep underground, less than half a mile from your Lordships’ House. It was being conducted by the headquarters of the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps, a British-led NATO strategic reserve corps. This is the United Kingdom’s principal land fighting component dedicated to NATO. We have committed to make that corps available, with two fully rounded-out war-fighting divisions—that is a force of about 30,000—and the necessary combat support brigades. In the exercise, units of the corps were deployed forward in Estonia and connected to the exercise headquarters here in London. In the exercise scenario, the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps was facing two Russian combined arms armies in Estonia and was integrating military capabilities drawn from the land, air, space and cyber domains, all enabled by AI. It was an impressive demonstration of the best of the modern capabilities to which we aspire, drawing significantly on the Ukrainian experiences gained over five years on the battlefield.

I was very pleased to note the ambition, forward-thinking battlefield concepts and levels of innovation shared between the Army and industry, and especially that many are small and medium-sized enterprises and some using hedge fund money. The Army’s aim is to have this level of capability fully developed and deployed by 2030, the date by which it has assessed that Russia could mount a land attack in eastern Europe or the Baltic. If there was to be a ceasefire in Ukraine, this date could of course come forward, as Russia could reconstitute its forces more quickly. There was no doubting the commitment, enthusiasm and professional dedication demonstrated by all involved in that exercise, but the level of capability required to deter or defeat a Russian attack will not be met by 2030 at the current level of investment into our Armed Forces, and certainly not into our land forces.

There is talk of an additional £18 billion being spent on defence in the next four years, but that is not the £28 billion that the service chiefs have identified as necessary in the short term, nor will that take us to 3% of GDP by 2029, and certainly not to 3.5% by 2034. There may be a temptation, in trying to find this additional money, that His Majesty’s Government consider raiding the international development budget again. Already, we know that that has been reduced from 0.7% to 0.5% of GDP, and more recently to 0.3%. This dramatically weakens our soft power potential, which, when combined with our hard power capability, is what brings the UK influence on the international stage. More immediately, one has to wonder when, or if, the defence investment plan will ever be published. Without it, defence programmers cannot allocate money, contracts cannot be let to industry, production capabilities cannot be boosted and the security of our nation cannot be assured.

Yesterday morning, as I walked to the exercise location, the Household Division was rehearsing for the King’s birthday parade next month. We can all be very proud of the immaculate standards of the bands and the soldiers of the Household Division, and I am confident they will deliver a spectacular parade. But I would be even more proud if we were able to deliver a full war-fighting division into the field, let alone the two we have committed to NATO. Our enemies smile at our weakness and our friends shake their heads in disbelief at our lack of commitment to the security of Europe. I have said it before: we are drinking in the last chance saloon. The leadership of this country needs to wake up and take action before the dead hand of history calls time.

My Lords, I welcome the opportunity to contribute to the debate today. Before I start, I congratulate the Government on the announcements today on the Gulf free trade agreement. This agreement has been a long time coming and it has been an extremely difficult negotiation. It is absolutely fantastic that it has now been agreed with the six separate nations of the GCC. I declare my personal interests in this as set out in the register, in particular as co-chairman of the UAE-UK Business Council, which has among its members many billions of pounds of investments both ways. This agreement, if it has the clauses that we all hope it does on investor confidence and investor protection, will enable even bigger investments to flow, which will be exciting, particularly at these times. It will also make an enormous difference to the £25 billion of bilateral trade between the UK and the UAE.

I hope that this is just the beginning and that what will follow will be a bilateral agreement to pick up the other areas that are not covered in the free trade agreement that will be negotiated by some of the Gulf states with other nations. Those agreements will give us a lot more in the two key areas of professional qualifications and data.

I move on to talk about defence, the issue I particularly want to talk about. I fear that we are not moving at the pace and with the urgency required—this has been said by so many people today. I therefore welcome the Government’s stated ambition to increase defence spending, but I am afraid that the proposals are simply not enough. The strategic global challenges and real threats faced by the United Kingdom today require increasing our national defence and security spending, as has already been said, to somewhere in the region of 5% to 7% of GDP. Once upon a time, those figures would have sounded excessive, but not today. NATO, for example, has already moved towards a 5% framework.

I applaud the fact that, across Europe, we are now starting to see European nations take far greater responsibility for their own security. The American view that Europe must increase defence spending and become less reliant on America underpinning security will not disappear. This is now a structural fact of the American political psyche, which far transcends the current presidency. Yet we are far behind where we need to be. It is regrettable that our Armed Forces lack the equipment, industrial backing and procurement speed required for the changing nature and character of war today. We cannot meet the peacetime demands with our current innovation-blocking systems of defence procurement and regulations that are simply not fit for the industrial requirements of the 21st century.

That brings me to the situation in Ukraine, from which we must learn. Last Thursday’s missile attack on Kyiv, which killed 24 and injured many more, is a painful reminder of why our resolve towards Ukraine must not falter. We should be clear that, despite Russian disinformation, the economic pressure of sanctions placed on Russia by the United Kingdom and our allies is being felt. These sanctions, have constrained Russia’s access to capital, weakened its supply chains and supressed its ability to innovate. At the same time, Ukraine’s extraordinary innovation on the battlefield has shown the world how a determined nation, with the right support, can inflict damning blows on the war machine of a much larger aggressor.

Back home, with our stubbornly stagnant economic growth, does the Minister agree that there is a key opportunity to—

I remind the noble Lord that speakers in the gap should take a maximum of four minutes.

Oh!

The noble Lord is on the speakers’ list—huge apologies there.

Does the Minister agree that there is a key opportunity to reposition increased defence spending as an engine for domestic renewal and regional growth? If we anchor our sovereign defence supply chains in the towns and cities that have been too often left behind, I put it to the Government that we will soon find that we can strengthen our national security while transforming local economies. Through targeted increased defence spending, we have a real opportunity to upskill a generation, generate high-tech civilian spillovers and turn the urgent necessity of national security into a powerful instrument against domestic deprivation.

My Lords, it is often suggested that a week is a long time in politics, and I suspect that for the Prime Minister, it has been a very long week. It is now eight days since His Majesty the King came and gave the gracious Speech last Wednesday. We heard the Motion for an humble Address from the noble Baroness, Lady Crawley, which was one of the most exciting, lively and dynamic Motions for an humble Address I have heard. I am delighted that she is in her place today.

We are now moving to the very end of speeches on this year’s gracious Speech, at the end of a day that has been wide-ranging, well-informed and interesting. I hope the Minister responding will feel that he has been blessed, in that from his own Benches in particular there have been myriad calls for resilience and increased defence expenditure—surely things that any Minister in the MoD will want to hear—which will enable him to talk to the Secretary of State for Defence and urge him to press in Cabinet, to the Prime Minister, whoever he may be, and to the Chancellor of the Exchequer the importance of defence expenditure. One thing that has virtually united the House today has been the importance of defence expenditure. There are nuances in what noble Lords have said but, broadly speaking, there has been an acceptance that defence expenditure is crucial.

However, before I get into the details of defence, as I am winding from these Benches for the whole international and defence day, I want just to touch on some of the wider issues of foreign policy, the challenges, and particularly Europe, because noble Lords will have realised that from these Benches there is a very clear voice on Europe.

Among the very powerful speeches today, one that I thought was noteworthy was from the noble Lord, Lord Sterling of Plaistow. He told noble Lords that he remembers 8 May 1945 and his parents celebrating, as other people’s parents would have been doing, but in particular saying, “We are safe”, and described the importance, if you were Jewish, of being safe in this country and in Europe. We have heard many contributions today about concerns of antisemitism. If you are Jewish in this country today, you may no longer feel safe. But there is a wider concern. It is not only that if you are Jewish you may not feel safe; the message of the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, who has been mentioned more times than anybody else in the Chamber today, is that we are underprepared, underinsured, under attack, and not safe.

If the first duty of the state is to protect our citizens, do His Majesty’s Government believe that they are doing enough to ensure that our country is safe and that we will be able to meet our international obligations to our NATO colleagues and to defend ourselves, and to work with our NATO partners and allies to keep Europe safe? This Government, like their predecessor, put a lot of effort into supporting Ukraine, and that is absolutely right. But are we ensuring that we are doing enough to remain safe at home?

The Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady Ashton, and the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon, all talked about the three Ds—the interplay of diplomacy, defence and development. As the defence spokesperson for the Liberal Democrats, of course I am committed to increasing defence expenditure. However, like other noble Lords I would like to believe that the Government can come forward with a plan actually to increase defence expenditure rather than simply say that it is going to happen at some future point. A commitment is vital, but that commitment to increase defence expenditure must not be at the expense of development or of the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.

In cutting development aid as we have been doing, we lose influence and the ability to support communities abroad—precisely the sorts of communities that most need our aid, as so many noble Lords have pointed out. My noble friend Lady Northover raised the issue of development aid. The noble Baroness, Lady Royall, reminded us that the amount spent internationally on aid will be 0.24% in 2027. If we aspire to global influence, we need to be committed to aid and not simply to talking about what we might do and how we might have networks. Networks matter but the ability to deliver also matters.

As the noble Baronesses, Lady Verma and Lady Hodgson, said, there are real concerns about cuts to FCDO expenditure. Diplomacy is vital. If we are not committed to diplomacy, we will find that the pressure on defence is even greater. We need to focus on embassies and high commissions and ensure that we are not reducing morale within the FCDO. Diplomacy matters but not just the very high-level diplomacy which this country has been so good at. The Minister started off with what some people have referred to as “tiara diplomacy”—His Majesty the King’s visit to the United States, and his speech to Congress, which was so well received. His first state visit to Germany was well received, as was the return match last year.

The role of the Royal Family in diplomacy is important, but we need to go beyond wheeling out our royals on high-level occasions and ensure that our diplomatic links are thorough. We need them even more since we left the European Union because we have lost many of those behind-the-scenes informal conversations. For that reason, I very much support the call made by the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, for stronger bilateral relations. She talked about UK-Spanish relations. If I was giving a single speech, it would perhaps be on UK-German relations, but we need to be strengthening those bilateral relations and our relations with Europe. If one message came out most loudly and clearly from these Benches, it was the importance of strengthening our relations with our European partners. The partnership Bill is important, but it does not go far enough. My noble friend Lady Suttie talked about the future, particularly for her great-nephew—who is almost born but not yet with us. My noble friend Lord Thomas of Gresford called on the Government to be bold, to take a lead, to take back the future. There was a suggestion that it is not red tape that is holding the Government back but red lines.

The noble Lord, Lord Hannay, also talked about the great importance of Europe. Why does that matter so much? It is precisely because we have an unreliable closest partner in the United States. The Falkland Islands are perhaps held in some disdain by Donald Trump —it is not quite clear—but there are suddenly question marks over their future, which His Majesty’s Government should not tolerate. There are questions over what we should do with the Chagos Islands. That should be our decision and not subject to the vagaries of a President of the United States. There are questions around support for Ukraine: again, our closest ally is also an unreliable partner. So it is vital that we strengthen our links with our European partners, particularly over foreign and defence policy.

Finally on defence, this is one area where there is a small amount of legislation in the gracious Speech. The Armed Forces Bill is a carry-over Bill that will be coming to your Lordships’ House, where it will be most welcome, particularly as it enshrines the Armed Forces covenant, as was pointed out by the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Craig of Radley. The commitment to forces accommodation is very welcome, but, as so many noble Lords have pointed out, what is missing is the defence readiness Bill. What is missing is any sense of how His Majesty’s Government propose to have the national conversation that the SDR said was needed. It is the sort of conversation that we need to offset or ensure resilience against the hybrid threats that were mentioned by Fiona Hill, one of the authors of the SDR, and in my noble friend Lady Harris of Richmond’s contribution today. If we are at war with Russia, it is not a hot war, but we are vulnerable.

Many noble Lords, including the noble Baronesses, Lady Antrobus, Lady Fraser of Craigmaddie and Lady Hodgson, the noble Lords, Lord Forbes of Newcastle and Lord Naseby, and my noble friend Lady Harris all talked about the need for resilience. Only one talked about national service; I am not going to suggest from these Benches that we should have national service, but we certainly need a national conversation. We need to look for ways of finding resilience and we need to look at the models of our Scandinavian friends in NATO.

But we also need to be bold, to have leadership and to ensure that our defence expenditure rises not randomly but in a targeted way, as was pointed out by the noble Lord, Lord Forbes of Newcastle. Increasing defence expenditure is not just about making us safer or improving our alliances; it has positive consequences at home.

We heard a rumour of another £18 billion for defence. What I would really like to hear from the Minister today is whether that is merely a rumour or whether His Majesty’s Government are actually going to forward with a plan to increase expenditure. Are we going to see the defence investment plan? It is a Thursday afternoon just before a recess; that is very often a time when a Government slip things out. Might it appear in the next few days or do we have to keep waiting?

We welcome the prospect of the Armed Forces Bill, but we would much prefer also to have legislation on a resilience Bill. We hope that the Government will keep preparing, be bold and show some leadership.

My Lords, this has been a predictably good debate, with some excellent points punching through strongly. As my noble friend Lord Callanan indicated, I will focus on defence, but, before I do, I will stray very briefly into foreign affairs.

I listened with humility—I looked around the Chamber and I was not alone—to the lucidity, expertise and wisdom of the noble Baroness, Lady Ashton of Upholland, and to my noble friend Lord Lamont of Lerwick. I suggest to the Minister—with no disrespect to his colleague, the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, who introduced the debate so well—that this talented duo be brought into the FCDO to help inform policy and advise on how we disseminate UK influence in relation to Iran. I have not heard two people with more brains and knowledge than that pair to whom I listened today.

Since we last debated a most gracious Speech, the world has become demonstrably less safe. Not only has that been an unmistakable theme emerging in the course of the debate today, but it was acknowledged by His Majesty in the first line of the gracious Speech. To give me a comparison point, I looked back to see what I said in 2024:

“My starting point is the Government’s recognition in their manifesto that the first duty of any Government is to keep the country safe”.—[Official Report, 25/7/24; col. 633.]

So we have two immediate points of clarity and consensus: the Government must keep the country safe, and our safety is more at risk than two years ago.

The noble Lord the Minister knows that I hold him in high regard, as I do the noble Baroness the Minister, and I know that neither will question these two premises. But our situation is grave, and the Government have completely failed to grasp the gravity of the situation. Indeed, we are less protected, less war-ready, than we were two years ago. Who do I call in aid to support that view? I call the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, frequently referred to during the course of the debate.

If the noble Lord were remarkable only for having been His Majesty’s Keeper of the Swans in the upper reaches of the Thames, I do not suppose anyone would pay much attention to his opinion. But this man is a former Labour Defence Secretary, a former Director-General of NATO and the Prime Minister’s appointed author of the strategic defence review. When he accuses the Government of “corrosive complacency”, do you know what? I would start to tremble.

The Prime Minister’s own National Security Adviser, Jonathan Powell, is reported to have warned that Britain will struggle to maintain our position on the world stage without a significant increase in defence spending. Just today, there were contributions from the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, who said that weakness makes war more, not less, likely, and deterrence means capability plus political will. The noble and gallant Lord, Lord Houghton of Richmond, expressed his regret that the narrative on defence, in his opinion, was neutered. He was blunter when he said that defence capability is in a mess. The noble Baroness, Lady Kingsmill, in a cogent and, I would say, very plucky contribution, echoed the noble and gallant Lords’ concerns about the lack of a defence readiness Bill. I also noticed that the normally dependably loyal noble Lord, Lord Harris of Haringey, also referred to that omission. So there are serious commentators here who are expressing concern.

The chilling reality is that, despite the Government’s repeated claims—echoed by the noble Lord, Lord Livermore, earlier this week in this very Chamber—that they have instituted the largest sustained increase in defence spending since the Cold War, the Government have nothing to show for it. Any Government can give the MoD more money; what matters is what it does with it. What things does that money buy which better protect the country, make us more war-ready, and effectively deter?

The defence investment plan is still nowhere to be seen, despite being promised last autumn. Intentions to spend mean absolutely diddly squat if they do not translate into actual spend of actual extra money, and the Government have not spent any extra because they have not published their investment plan. We are in Alice in Wonderland territory here. Every time Ministers are quizzed, they simply respond by saying that it will be published in due course and that the MoD is working flat out to get it finalised. Well, if a nine-month delay is a result of the Government working flat out, we are in some state.

The reason I keep pressing the Government on the defence investment plan is because the delay and inertia have a real-time effect. Defence is in limbo. Military planners cannot plan. Orders have dried up. Defence companies cannot plan, do not know how to seek investment and do not know what to invest in. Procurement has been frozen. While the Government prevaricate, our adversaries become more brazen, and our allies become more frustrated.

I hate to remind the Minister of this, but when his party came to power, the previous Government left them a fully funded plan immediately to increase defence spending to 2.5% of GDP. The Government scrapped that plan—it was their privilege to do that—and it took them seven months to announce that they would reach the same figure, but not until 2027, and they still cannot guarantee that they will reach 3% within this Parliament. The previous Government left Labour a fully funded £10 billion munitions plan to replenish our national munitions stock. What did the Government do? They scrapped it.

Governments have the right to determine their own priorities—nobody disputes that—but what is completely unacceptable is laying waste all before them and putting nothing in place of the devastation. I say to the Minister that I think we are past the point of words—we urgently need action. The country is crying out for political leadership—I am not going to make cheap jokes about the Prime Minister, who is going through a most turbulent time—and we must have somebody who substitutes deeds for talk and a Government who show courage, face up to the hard decisions and have the grit to take them.

I remind the House where starvation of defence funding has got us. Recently, Britain was unable rapidly to move resources to the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East to protect our interests. British sovereign territory in Cyprus was left undefended. Our regional allies were left tearing their hair out at the glacial pace of our response.

On shipbuilding, we have all seen reports that the next Type 26 construction slot on the Clyde may be awarded to the Norwegians. That will further delay our frigate-building programme, which, given that the Royal Navy is now down to just five Type 23s, is not sustainable.

On aircraft build, the details remain sparse around one of the few procurement decisions that the Government have announced, the nuclear-capable F35A. In fact, I hesitate even to call it a procurement decision because, as far as I can tell, no aircraft has actually been procured, but we have a vague announcement that we will purchase 12 F35A fighters. In October, the Public Accounts Committee said:

“In June 2025, the Department announced that it intends to procure 12 F35As to be both training aircraft and capable of carrying nuclear weapons. But only now is the F-35 programme’s Senior Responsible Owner talking to other partner nations about what is required to deliver the new capabilities, and the Department has not produced any estimates of what these might cost”.

Can the Minister clarify what stage this procurement is at and how much these planes will cost?

I will fling in a few more questions for his attention. When will we start construction of the Type 49 destroyers to replace the current Type 45s, and how many of them will the Government commit to? What is the status of Challenger 3? When will the Government set out the procurement timeline for the remaining 90 F35Bs? When we should be moving heaven and earth to support British industry, why have the Government not purchased UAVs, such as Octopus-100 and Herne XLAUV, which are made by British firms?

This dithering and delay are having significant ramifications on our defence industry. Last week, sadly, Aeralis announced that it had been forced into administration. Announcing the news, the company said:

“The appointment follows a sustained period of pressure on the Company’s cashflow as a result of continued delays to the UK Defence Investment Plan”.

Aeralis is a marvellous British company. It has produced a modular, technologically advanced jet that could act as a future fast jet trainer and an aerobatic aircraft for the RAF. It could be a British designed and produced replacement for the Hawk trainers and the Red Arrows, yet Aeralis was forced into administration by the uncertainty created solely by the Government’s inaction.

The Minister will be quick to say that there have been announcements, for example, on the new medium helicopter and the RCH 155. These are welcome but the Minister knows that this is all too little, too late. If the Government are struggling to conjure up a plan to increase defence spending while maintaining fiscal discipline, perhaps I can help. My honourable friend the shadow Defence Secretary, James Cartlidge, has a fully costed plan to establish a sovereign defence fund that would be utilised to increase spending to 3% of GDP by the end of this Parliament. It would be funded by repurposing £17 billion from the National Wealth Fund, reallocating R&D funds and cutting the welfare and net-zero budgets. Now, that is a clear proposal. People may disagree with it, but that is leadership. There would be tough decisions involved in delivering it, but that is leadership. That plan could be implemented tomorrow.

I just hope that the Government are listening and that some food for thought is being provided to the Minister, as in, perhaps, my noble friend Lord Howard’s suggestion that if every government department were to accept a 1% self-imposed cut, money could be produced. Of course, there would be a huge rammy about who was doing what and what the consequences were, but that is what political leadership is about: you have to determine political priorities.

Funding and equipment are of course one aspect of our defence readiness and resilience. Another, and arguably the most important, is our people—the brave men and women of our Armed Forces who sacrifice so much to keep us secure. I know that everyone in the House joins in paying tribute to them. We would not have a military were it not for their sense of duty to King and country, so it is all the more painful for me to see the way in which they are being treated. Personally, I think it is quite wrong that those who have served, and those who continue to serve, should have to constantly look over their shoulders, awaiting the service of a legal writ. There are veterans from the Troubles who have faced decades of lawfare, dragged before investigations and hauled into courtrooms for the simple act of doing their duty for their country.

We now have the Government’s Troubles Bill, which, after the Supreme Court’s recent judgment, can only be considered as wholly unnecessary. The court has explicitly found that the commission established by the previous Government’s legacy Act can carry out investigations that are compliant with Articles 2 and 3 of the ECHR, so what purpose will the Government’s Bill serve? I fear the only outcome of repealing the legislation that we passed in 2023 is that the fear, the gnawing anxiety and the uncertainty that our brave veterans have had to contend with will be opened once again as their lives are raked over, with them asked to account for split-second decisions they made 50 years ago when serving their country. How do the Government justify going on with the Troubles Bill?

On the Royal Artillery monument at Hyde Park Corner there are inscribed the words:

“They will return never more but their glory will abide forever”.

We all owe it to those who have served King and country so gallantly to ensure that their glory does indeed abide for ever—and if we are to do that, we have to reject the temptation of historical revisionism. We have to support our veterans by having their backs, funding defence properly and robustly defending our nation’s interests wherever they are challenged. I thank the Minister for his unstinting commitment and his passion for defence, but this Government are failing these fundamental tests.

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Goldie, for those last remarks that she made.

I thank everyone who has contributed to the debate today. I thank particularly the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Goldie and Lady Smith, for their Front-Bench contributions, and my noble friend Lady Chapman for her opening remarks. This is a huge discussion. I will not answer every question that has been posed to me. However, given the importance of the debate, and given the times in which we live, it would be remiss of me not to ask my officials, with Foreign Office officials, to go through the debate and write to everyone who has contributed, to make sure that we respond to everything in full. We will place a copy of that in the Library. I make that commitment to everyone because it is an important thing for us to do.

I join the noble Baroness, Lady Goldie, in something I know we all share in: paying tribute to our Armed Forces, their personnel and their families, including those who have served in the past—our veterans. It is important to do that and to continue to do so, and I am very pleased to do it. We should also reflect on the recent tragic accident resulting in the death of Lance Bombardier Ciara Sullivan of The King’s Troop Royal Horse Artillery in Windsor. We remember her and her family and friends.

We come together at a really difficult time. I say that because, as I often say, there are differences between us and there will be debates both within and across the Chamber about some of the issues that we are confronting today, but the important thing that should come out of this—this is the important point that I make time and again, because our deliberations are read and looked at by our adversaries—is that there is nothing disunited about this Parliament, whether in this place or the other place, in our determination to stand up for our country and the values that we uphold and to work with our friends, partners and allies across Europe, and indeed the world, to fulfil those. That is an important point that we need to continue to make, because, as I say, and as others across this Chamber will know from their own experiences, what happens in this Parliament is repeated back to us. We appreciate the democracy in which we live, and it is important that free and frank debate should not in any way be construed as weakness on our part in the pursuit of that.

I turn to answering particular points, which the noble Lord, Lord Callanan, will be delighted about. It took 40 seconds for the noble Lord to get to the subject of Chagos—I should have had a sweepstake on it. He is quite right to ask those questions. I said I would find out a couple of things for him, and I will read him those answers because I thought he might ask them. On why the Government denied humanitarian aid to the Chagossians on the island, I repeat what I said to him in answer to the questions he asked on that: the reporting of the incident that we have read is inaccurate. The British Indian Ocean Territory Administration has not refused humanitarian resupply. BIOTA engaged in good faith and expedited discussions over the Easter period to facilitate a resupply mission, approving a permit covering approximately 140 categories of items, including several items not essential for humanitarian purposes. Upon the resupply vessel’s arrival in the territory, BIOT customs and immigration officers discovered aboard a number of items that were not on the manifest. Had those been prepared for the manifest, they would almost certainly have been permitted, so what was on the manifest was allowed.

On the question of resettlement, as the noble Lord pointed out, I have written to clarify those remarks. The proposed UK-Mauritius agreement provides the only viable path to resettlement on the archipelago. Mauritius will be able to resettle the islands other than Diego Garcia, and it will be for Mauritius to set the terms of and manage any future resettlement. That may not satisfy the noble Lord, but it is the answer.

With regard to the landings on Peros Banhos, the individuals who landed on that atoll did so illegally without a permit. There is no legal right for anyone, regardless of their citizenship or heritage, to enter the islands without a valid permit, and there is a temporary court order in place preventing vessels from transporting further people on to the Chagos Islands. I hope I have reassured the noble Lord by answering the questions that I promised him I would the next time I had the opportunity at the Dispatch Box.

Moving from the specifics to more general points, I will start by speaking about the national conversation. Let us be clear about this, so that noble Lords know whom to hold to account. In terms of the Ministry of Defence—not the whole of government—I have now been given responsibility for the national conversation. I am all for accountability; I will not shy away from it, but that is where we are with it. It is quite right that the noble and gallant Lords, Lord Stirrup and Lord Houghton, and others, raised the point, as did the noble Baronesses, Lady Harris, Lady Royall, Lady Antrobus, Lady Rafferty, and the noble Lords, Lord Naseby and Lord Hannan, my noble friends Lord Forbes, Lord John and Lord Harris, and others. The national conversation is crucial. I will come to defence spending and to the defence investment plan in a moment. But the national conversation is absolutely crucial, which is why so many noble Lords have raised the issue.

A discussion that we are having now in government is about how that starts—it will start soon—and what that national conversation should be about and what script we should take to the British people to discuss with them. The noble Baroness, Lady Goldie, and others, are right: we will ask other people about their views, and we will take advice so that we have an agreed way of speaking to the British public that is inclusive, which lays out the threat without being alarmist, and takes us forward. That is what we will do with respect to the national conversation, and it is absolutely crucial that we do that.

I cannot remember who, but somebody said that they were not necessarily frightened of Russian paratroopers arriving in their particular vicinity. The nature of the conflicts that we face, however, exist in the era of cyber, of grey warfare, of threats to underwater cables. These are all things that noble Lords in here will know. In that sense, we are already threatened; we are already being attacked. We need to do this for all of us and, of course, that requires resilience. What does this mean for us in terms of protecting our own infrastructure and protecting our own cyber space? What should we ask our population to be able to provide for themselves on an individual or family basis? My noble friend Lady Rafferty mentioned Defence Medical Services; again, we need to have a whole-of-society approach, not just in defence but in terms of medical provision and local authorities and all those things that each and every noble Lord would say are important.

On spending, I cannot and will not satisfy people in here about spending or about the defence investment plan, but, as has been pointed out a number of times, I think that if we are saying to our population that we require more money to be spent on defence, rather than on other things, then we require a conversation with them to address the fact that the prioritisation of spending—for this Government or for any Government —will have to change to a certain extent with respect to defence, and that will perhaps mean that less will be spent on this or that. We need to have that conversation and bring people with us to do that. No Government can shy away from that, and there will be differences of view. Your families may be different to mine, but we have good discussions sometimes in my own family about this, and that is a perfectly proper thing to do. Something that we will have to take forward is how we build that resilience. I understand the points that have been made about the defence readiness Bill that is being prepared at the moment.

Another general topic was soft power. The noble Lords, Lord Lamont and Lord Howard, and many others, made the point about the importance of diplomacy. Of course it matters how many tanks, ships, aircraft and submarines you have, but one thing this country has that sometimes we do not give ourselves enough credit for is our enormous ability to influence across Europe, and across the globe, through our relationships.

When I go to other countries—people here travel all over the world—they want the UK stood beside them. This is a Foreign Office/MoD debate. The noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, will know that having a British ambassador in a foreign embassy stood with British military personnel, going to discuss a particular problem, conflict or crisis —something that needs to be done—with the military-to-military and ambassador-to-ambassador co-operation and network, is fundamental to the architecture we have across the world. Nation after nation asks for that. I will tell noble Lords why I think they ask for it. The involvement of the British military, with the ambassador, gives a confidence, legitimacy and status to a particular Government who are seeking to do something to resolve a conflict in their area. The integrated global defence network that we run from the MoD, in partnership with our Foreign Office colleagues, is fundamental. We need to build and develop that.

On overseas development assistance, difficult decisions have been made. The only point I will make, which I think our population needs to hear, is that at current prices in 2026-27 we are still spending £10 billion on overseas development assistance. I will give noble Lords the figures; they will go down next year and I appreciate that. I am not saying it will not go down, but it will still be £8.9 billion. The year after, in 2028-29, it goes back up again to £9.4 billion. We can say that it should never have been reduced, but significant sums of money are still being spent by our Government—our country—to deliver certain things. I have lifted out particular things. The BBC World Service is receiving additional grants and the British Council grant in aid is also increasing. I appreciate the difficulties and points noble Lords have made. All I am saying is that, alongside that, we are still doing things.

On the defence investment plan, I cannot add much to the points I have made in the past. I know the noble Baroness, Lady Suttie, the noble Lords, Lord Tugendhat, Lord Magan, Lord Hintze, Lord Leigh and Lord Dannatt, and the noble and gallant Lords, Lord Houghton and Lord Stirrup, made the points—

Could the Minister tell us whether the defence investment plan is likely to be published during the premiership of the present Prime Minister?

No. I just cannot add anything further to what I have said. The defence investment plan will come forward and lay out some things, and that will be related to the spending we decide on.

On the UK-EU relationship, the Government’s position is quite clear. We have laid it out. There is a debate about rejoining the EU; I know the Liberal Democrat Benches want to lay out that we should rejoin. Our position is that it would be futile and silly not to say that we should have a close relationship. As my noble friend Lady Ashton pointed out, of course we should have a close relationship with Europe. It does not mean we are going to rejoin the EU. But we should have a relationship with Europe to defend Europe and work with Europe in terms of economic prosperity and military assistance to each other, given the fact that NATO is the fundamental defensive alliance for us. Of course we should do that.

The point was made by my noble friend Lady Royall about bilateral relationships. That is why we have signed agreements with France and Germany. The noble Lord, Lord Magan, was talking about Germany. It is why we have established and agreed a bilateral treaty with Germany, recognising the importance of that relationship. We have also done it with Poland and other countries. It is why we lead JEF. We have those relationships with Europe and we will develop and strengthen them. However, we will do it in a way that does not reopen arguments and get us into a sterile argument about whether we join the EU or not and whether we are respecting the referendum, when actually what we are doing and saying is that we need a close and proper relationship.

On the Middle East, the noble Lords, Lord Ahmad and Lord Howard, asked me specifically about diplomacy. We carry on with negotiation and diplomacy, of course. That is why my noble friend Lady Chapman went to Israel—and I think Gaza—last year, and it is why she met the Egyptian Foreign Minister yesterday, which the noble Lord asked about. Every single week, I have met defence attachés and ambassadors from the Middle East to talk about the supply of defence equipment and what we are doing to support them in a defensive posture with respect to the Iranian war. We have done all that. In answer to many of the points that noble Lords made, we retain that influence.

Antisemitism is an absolute national disgrace. To have what we have had happen is not just something awful; it is a national stain on this country. We must do all we can to ensure that that view, which the vast majority of people share, is heard loud and clear by the community. In answer to the question from the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, of course Israel remains important to us. But as my noble friend Lord Dubs and many others in this Chamber have said, we will criticise that Government where we think they are wrong. There is nothing contradictory in that. The US criticises us, and we criticise the US. We value Israel, but we are not going to stand aside if we think it has done something wrong. Indeed, another noble Lord made the point that people hold Israel to account in the Knesset.

The noble Lord, Lord Callanan, made a point about Palestine. Recognising Palestine was an important step. It was a way of saying that we want to move the negotiations and discussions forward. It does not in any way undermine the Government’s commitment to the two-state solution. Of course there should be a viable and strong Israel, but alongside that there needs to be a strong and viable Palestine. The only way of achieving that, however frustrating and demanding, and however many times we think it will not work and never happen, is through discussions and negotiations. Somebody mentioned how near we were to an agreement a few years ago. It fell at one of the last hurdles, but we need to recapture that optimism and hope for the future. The noble and gallant Lord, Lord Houghton, made the point that sometimes we have to have hope to take these things forward.

On the point that the noble Lord, Lord Leigh, made about genocide, the Government’s position is exactly the same as it has been for years. The UK’s long-standing policy is that any formal determination as to whether genocide has occurred is a matter for a competent national or international court, after consideration of all the evidence available in the context of a credible judicial process, rather than for Governments or non-judicial bodies. I could not agree more with the noble Lord, Lord Leigh, on his point about what a disgrace antisemitism is. I will think about the invite to the event—if that is the appropriate word—that the noble Lord mentioned.

On Pakistan and the role it has played with respect to Iran, without saying too much, if you look at the military-to-military co-operation there, it helps enormously. On Sudan, what is happening is an absolute disgrace. I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, that we are going to conference after conference to try to ensure that we move forward and deal with the crisis taking place. On Cyprus, I am very happy to meet the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, if he wants to. We have been delighted with the co-operation and support that we have had in Cyprus with respect to what has been going on.

The noble Lord, Lord Alton, mentioned the need to respond to not only China but Russia. He is quite right. It is important for us to consider the axis of Iran, North Korea, Russia and China and how we respond to that. His contributions in this Chamber are enormously helpful in holding the Government to account and reminding us of our responsibility on that.

As someone else said, it is an absolute delight that the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, can say what he says to all of us, although most of us disagree with him. I say again that much of what we are doing is to defend the right of people such as him to say what they think without fear of the police. That not a smart or a sarcastic argument but an important one. I think, from my university days, it was John Stuart Mill who said that you must always remember that the opinion of one is as important as the opinion of a majority in being respected and listened to. When you look back over the years, you sometimes find that a minority opinion at a particular time becomes a majority opinion when you roll it forward 50 years. We should reflect on that.

I will abuse my privilege for another minute or two. I turn to the noble Baronesses, Lady Royall and Lady Neville-Jones, and the noble Lord, Lord Magan. Let us be clear about this: the US-UK relationship is a fundamental strategic alliance that remains hugely important to this country and our global alliances. It is hugely important to NATO and to ensuring that we continue with our efforts. We will continue to work hard on that, however difficult and challenging it may be at times. The biggest strategic point is ensuring that NATO retains its credibility and importance, and we will continue with that.

The noble Baroness, Lady Kingsmill, mentioned the defence readiness Bill and the noble Lord, Lord McDonald, said that meeting strategic threats required political stability. All those sorts of things are important, and we continue to implement the strategic defence review.

If I have forgotten or missed out certain points that people have made, I apologise. We will go through the debate and return to them. I finish where I started and say once again that the influence of our country is enormous across Europe and the world. Europe wants us to stand with it, as do many other parts of the world. We have to have confidence and belief, whatever the challenges. We will in due course publish the defence investment plan and we will come to spending decisions that may or may not please different people, but, at the end of the day, it is significantly important that all of us are united in the determination to ensure that we play our proper part in the world and achieve what we all want: the defence of democracy, human rights and freedom in our own country, our own continent and across the world. All of us are united in that.