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Armed Forces: US Missile Defence

My Lords, since I am the first to respond I am happy to be the first to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, on having initiated this debate on what is manifestly a fundamentally important topic. To begin with, I should say that I have very considerable disquiet about how the Government have approached this issue and its wider implications. Many points can be made about this and I am sure that they will be made by other speakers. I will not discuss whether the thing will work because I find it impossible to conceive that a failsafe anti-missile system could be constructed. You would need a hell of a lot of trust in it to sit underneath it while someone launched a missile at you. I want to raise three points which to some extent overlap with those made by the noble Lord. First, I turn to the manner in which the decision was taken by the Government on further involvement with the US missile system. As they say of marriage, it left a lot to be desired. The Defence Select Committee said: "““We deplore the manner in which the public debate on this issue has been handled””." That is a strong statement. The Government responded to it by saying, ““Oh well, we have had quite a bit of consultation with different interest groups””. But that is not the same as having a proper public debate on the issues, so I agree fairly strongly with what the noble Lord said about that. The other countries involved in the missile shield are Poland and the Czech Republic, both of which at least were governed by far-right Administrations. It is quite significant that the new Polish Government have started to make different noises from those of the previous Administration about their involvement. A YouGov survey in this country showed that only 26 per cent of the population thought that our involvement with the missile shield might make either the UK or Europe safer, and the percentages against it in the Czech Republic and Poland are considerably higher, at around 70 per cent. Therefore maybe this should have been a more substantial debate given that, at least in those parts of the European Union affected by the shield and that have agreed to go along with it, the weight of public opinion is against it. Secondly, the literature the Government have published on the missile shield seems consistently to downgrade its importance. They speak of an upgrade in our radar protection system. Of course, in a technical sense it is an upgrade because it is in large part a modification of what we already have, but in a wider sense it is very different from that. As the noble Lord also said, the initial introduction of the missile shield was made against the backdrop of one of the most significant shifts in international relations that we have seen for the past 30 to 40 years. Most noble Lords, and I am sure most noble Lords present, will have read President Bush’s address made at West Point in 2001, not long after the attack on New York, where he said that he would define the world primarily in terms of American power, that America would be the dominant state in world society, and that he did not intend to go along with the multilateral agreements which have existed so far. Even before that, the United States had withdrawn from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, so the existence of this project is quite interlocked with—I do not like the word ““neoconservativism””, which is a sort of scare term—a fundamental shift in international relations in which, if I understand the position of Prime Minister Brown’s Government, to whom I now belong, there is a return to multilateral negotiations. There is a clear inconsistency here. Thirdly, the Government say blandly that they will work on further co-operation with the EU and NATO, but the decision to take part in this endeavour is one fraught with implications for the whole of Europe and beyond. When the Minister in the other place was asked about the effects of this, he said that it would make Britain a safer place. But if it creates a belligerent and hostile Russia on the edge of Europe, in what sense are we in a safer place? We all know that Russia’s response to the missile shield has been consistently hostile. The latest statement, made yesterday by the Russian Foreign Minister, reiterates the position taken previously, so you cannot pretend that this decision does not have very wide geopolitical implications. I ask the Minister three questions. First, would she accept that the siting of installations here marks a distinct loss of UK sovereignty? I do not mean this question in the same way as the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, asked it, because I do not think that the issue here is who controls the base—whether you have an American commander or British control. I take it that this Government will have sovereignty over what goes on inside the base, but will we not lose sovereignty in terms of wider decision-making? If we get involved with an installation, we are involved necessarily in a wide project whose parameters will be sketched by the large-scale powers, not by the UK—by America, Russia and, it is my hope, anyway, the European Union and maybe China. I cannot see that the UK will have a significant impact on something that it has committed itself to. Therefore, it seems a loss of sovereignty in a rather broader and more significant sense than the noble Lord sketched in. Secondly, how would the Minister counter the argument that the introduction of a missile shield, or a missile shield project, inevitably brings a strong possibility of further confrontation, and further escalation in the existence of missile systems and hostile arrangements of armaments in the world? Russia has already said that it is producing a missile system with multiple warheads, more sophisticated than those that have existed for some years previously, and which it says will outwit any possible missile shield. How can one prevent further escalation—if you like, a renewed arms race—in which Europe again might be the pawn, caught in the middle, if such an escalation should happen? I think that the Government at least owe us an explanation of why this would not be the outcome of the project in which they are involving us. Thirdly and finally, if there is indeed to be a new missile system—and unlike the noble Lord, I am not a fundamentalist; I am not against the idea in principle, under certain conditions—it would manifestly be safer if Russia, the EU and the United States collaborated on it. Russia, of course, has set out a plan, which the American President has straightforwardly rejected. My final question is: does the Minister see a way in which Russia could be involved, and in which therefore there could be a missile shield that would indeed protect us all, because it would be based on a multilateral set of agreements, rather than the international relations regime that the Bush Government have perpetrated?