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National Security Strategy

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord King of Bridgwater, for securing this debate. In a past life, the noble Lord was both Secretary of State for Defence and Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. If he will forgive me, I would like to, as it were, mimic his career by moving between those two fields, because there are at least some aspects of this issue that can be illuminated by the Northern Irish experience. One point that is not often made is that, on 9 December 1975, the Daily Telegraph carried out a poll that showed that two-thirds of the British people wanted to get out of Northern Ireland immediately. It is not difficult to see why. Between 1971 and 1975, we lost more British soldiers in Northern Ireland than have been lost thus far in the campaign in Afghanistan. The truth, as all of us in this House know, is that that mood of public opinion was not responded to. Today, I think that the British people would take the view that the decent settlement that we now have in Northern Ireland justified—at least to some degree, if anything ever could—the sacrifice of those young men. We must hope that we will be able say that some day about Afghanistan. The Northern Ireland story, despite its present difficulties, is, by and large, a success story for our characteristic approach to national security. It is a victory for our typical virtues, as we like to see them: pragmatism, compromise and willingness to include violent extremes if they give up violence. In 2002, the noble Lord, Lord Mandelson—himself an impressive Secretary of State for Northern Ireland—argued that the United States, in pursuing its war on terror, should reflect on how the British fought terrorism, opting to negotiate with the IRA through its political wing rather than to defeat it. All that I respect and understand, but a serious feature of what might be called the characteristic British approach to national security is perhaps less impressive and requires some comment. That is a strong tendency in discussion of these matters to downplay the role of political ideology and, in particular, the political ideology of those who declare themselves to be the mortal enemies of our state. The Government’s recent documents, the National Security Strategy of the United Kingdom—the 2008 and 2009 versions—reflect that tendency. Reference to ideology—whether we are talking about al-Qaeda or dissident Irish republicans, which are mentioned in those documents—is scant indeed. There is none at all in the first document. The second document, which in some ways is a better and more expansive document, has almost a whole paragraph devoted to the ideology of al-Qaeda, but that is an incredibly scanty reference to what surely is a central question. In fact, the first document is more vivid on how the impact of climate change could be destabilising for the United Kingdom than it is on the ideology of al-Qaeda or dissident republicans. To take that further, the Statement read in your Lordships’ House on 20 January—the most recent Statement on security and counterterrorism—arising from the Detroit affair was again silent on the matter of ideology. At the very same time, Mike Leiter, head of the National Counterterrorism Center in the Obama Administration, was giving evidence to both congressional and Senate committees. He talked about a scale, scope and depth of radicalisation in the United Kingdom that was not to be found in the United States. I do not want to enter the debate as to where the Detroit bomber was radicalised, but we must surely note that we are avoiding an issue and giving the impression to the world that we are sticking our head in the sand in our documents and statements on these matters. Why is that important? First, we need to be clear about what we are defending in our way of life. We are not being clear. The recent debate on Britishness, for example, initiated by the Prime Minister, fizzled out. I dare to say that not a single Member of your Lordships’ House is surprised that it did. It is also important to say something else. Although concern for civil liberties, which was very marked in your Lordships’ House in the debate about 42 days, is a crucial and defining feature of the British tradition, we must recall that democracies can and do take exceptional measures to survive certain types of threat and then abandon those exceptional measures when conditions change and permit their abandonment. Annexe A of the Intelligence and Security Committee’s document Could 7/7 Have Been Prevented? shows how very far we are from being any type of surveillance state. We should keep that in mind when we discuss these matters. Finally, our ideological agnosticism, so characteristic of the British cast of mind, often coupled with a tendency to blame others for causing terrorism, such as reactionary Ulster Protestants, stiff-necked Israelis or George Bush, is both a strength—I admit that it is a strength—and a weakness. We must recall that we have a situation where dissident republicans are now so active in Northern Ireland that, despite the obvious threats of an al-Qaeda link to the United Kingdom, we have had to make a major shift of intelligence resources back to Northern Ireland to deal with the problem there. This tells us that there may be some problem in our approach, even where we have been largely successful. It may be in part because we have not taken seriously enough the business of delivering a killer blow to pernicious ideologies and have almost stepped away from the question. The Prime Minister’s preface to the national security document states that we no longer face the threat that we faced from fascism or from the Soviet Union and the current threat is not as challenging to the way of life of the United Kingdom. In the sense that no large state, with the possible exception of Iran, is involved in international terrorism, I see the point, but the threat that we face today is stronger if we take, say, women’s rights seriously than the ideological threat from the Soviet Union. It is certainly not less than that threat. It is essential that we are not shamefaced in defending our values. If we are, we send out a permissive signal to terrorists that they have at least half a point, as significant parts of our metropolitan elite did during the Troubles and, by so doing, merely extended the agonies that unfortunately still continue to plague us.