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National Security Strategy

My Lords, I join everyone who has taken part in the debate in thanking my noble friend Lord King of Bridgwater for introducing this important debate and for doing so with such cogency. The range of speakers and their contributions have reflected the scope and breadth of the concept we now call national security—a phrase which has relatively recently entered the British bureaucratic vocabulary. The subject is no longer confined—as it was at one time—to diplomats, the Armed Forces and the intelligence community. The noble Baroness, Lady Manningham-Buller asked a pertinent question about what we mean by "national security". I think she is right to say that in no official document—or, indeed, in any issued by my party—have we attempted a definition. That is part of the difficulty. Whereas in the Cold War, when we talked much about defence and deterrence, we used to think about security in terms of the functioning of the organs of the state, power and ordered government, we now mean something much broader, which has to do with the capacity of society as a whole to function through emergency. It means a form of daily safety; it has a much larger human element; and it encompasses not just threats of a man-made, traditional kind such as a war but also other things that can constitute such disruption to a society, if they succeed or do damage, that they affect security in a fundamental sense. Very poor societies, if hit by a tsunami, for instance, can travel back so far in their development that their nature is changed. We therefore need to have in mind when we talk about national security a much broader concept. There are no boundaries. It is no longer a question of abroad and at home; it is the interaction of these two. The threats and hazards that we face take place and interact on both sides of national borders. I think that there is much consensus in the Chamber on what we are confronted by and what we should try to do next about it. We are in the process of making a new institutional framework, about which I shall say more in a minute, in order to cope with it. Despite there being much consensus, the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, struck a rather different note in his vision for the future of this country, which was much narrower than what I heard from other parts of the Chamber. We are much stronger as a nation if there is fundamental agreement and broad consensus on what we are trying to do. I hope that this debate and others like it, which I hope will take place, begin the process of teasing out the issues. Earlier this week, the Home Affairs Select Committee in another place published a report on the Home Office’s response to terrorism. The committee said: ""The structures that are now in place may be suitable for combating the terrorist threat as currently constituted, but we are not confident that government institutions have the desire to constantly adapt to meet ever-changing threats"." That is an illuminating comment. The committee distinguishes between structures and institutions. It seems broadly to be saying, "The structures are OK, but institutions are falling short". Considerable progress has been made on confronting the major threat to our country in the past decade or so—terrorism—for which the Government and the agencies should be given credit. On that, the committee is in effect saying that it is satisfied. Institutions, on the other hand, come in for criticism. What I think is being said is that government as a whole, and possibly Parliament as well, are not doing so well in that area—we have heard comments, on which I shall not elaborate, about the phenomenon of sofa government, which it is important not to repeat. It was against the background of a lack of a really strong institutional framework that three years ago my party said that there needed to be a national security council to provide an integrated and comprehensive approach to national security. The way in which one needs to go about making policy these days is different because of the changed nature of the threats and hazards that we face, and one therefore needs to adapt the structures and institutions of government to meet them. It is fair to say that the Government have gone some way towards adopting these ideas but, as the Home Affairs Committee points out, there is still some way to go. The immediate impression that you get from the committee’s report is that while there has been progress on counterterrorism, as a part of policy it lacks proper integration with other aspects of national security policy—indeed, I would say, with other aspects of CONTEST. Other noble Lords have outlined very well the nature of the strategic context in which the UK finds itself. I will not go into an exhaustive analysis. The factors that aggravate the causes of insecurity are well known, and noble Lords have spoken about them. They include globalisation, climate change and demographic changes—population tends to be a considerable intensifier of some of the threats that we may face in future—and they are a background to our immediate problems. It is fair to say that the chances of conventional state-on-state conflict are low, although not absolutely to be excluded; we should never forget that the problem of Iran confronts us even now. The UK, along with others, has to contend with proliferation and, as has been mentioned by other noble Lords, the potential and sometimes actual destruction of the supply of essential commodities. The worldwide increase in wealth and wealth generation has put pressure on natural resources in a way that we have not hitherto seen. Alongside the benign side of things like the development of China, we also see challenges from countries such as China, Russia and Iran. Other noble Lords have mentioned some of them; indeed, the cyber threat deserves a debate in its own right since it is a significant issue now and has very many facets. It is also fair to say that states increasingly use proxies, whether they are organised criminals, terrorists—Iran does this—or insurgent groups. Sometimes, to come back to what noble Lords have been saying, they interfere in the personal computers of ordinary citizens to launch cyber attacks. The non-state actor has emerged as a phenomenon over the past 20 years and is beginning to reach a significant level of offensive capability against ordered society. I fear that the militarily capable non-state actor—a terrible term for these individuals—who is not part of organised authority but is challenging both the power and authority of the ordered state will be a challenge with which we will have to deal for a significant part of this century. Their aim, of course, as many noble Lords have said, is to undermine the principles and freedoms that we are trying to defend. The terrorist and the organised criminal are soulmates. They help each other to exploit failed or failing states and increase the fragility of states that are not well founded. The convergence of these various actors and the combination of these challenges is one of the reasons why we need to organise our Government to be able to meet them in a similarly combined fashion. The Government need to adopt and embed a comprehensive all-hazards approach in developing their capabilities and responses. As I hope our Green Paper made clear, we think that we need to clarify the strategic connections between the different risks, focus departmental attention on those connections, identify where cross-departmental working is required and develop a cross-government planning process to ensure joint working. The noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, rightly said that departments have different cultures, and that is a real barrier to working together. The Government have made some real progress in this area with their notion of the pools. The funding and the pooled effort have shown how difficult it is to get it going and how worthwhile it is when you actually succeed. But this approach needs to be taken a good deal further. I am sorry, I am exceeding my time. In approaching these challenges, built on a national security approach, the last thing that the Government have to do is to provide real leadership. My noble friend Lord King made that point very powerfully. It is important, and communication by government is also extremely important. The noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, made that point and I agree with her, although I am not sure how easy it is to have the media as a companion in that area. We need more transparency and more trust in the public. We must allow individuals to participate in their own security and contribute to it. That is an important part of a modern approach to national security. Individuals, communities and businesses can make a very real contribution. Finally, of course, so can minority communities. It is very important that we recognise that there is an ideological challenge and that we face it together. We must face the challenge of radicalisation together as a society because in the end, it lies at the roots of our ability to protect ourselves as a secure nation.