My Lords, it is a pleasure to be able to speak in the gap on this incredibly important, comprehensive and wide-ranging report. I shall not detain the House very long but will just make a few brief points which I hope will contribute to other distinguished noble Lords’ thoughts today.
First, I start by joining other noble Lords in raising the issue of insufficient foreign affairs and security debates taking place in this House. I note a new tendency here in recent months, even when we have Statements to the House on matters of the utmost urgency, such as the events in Russia over the past week. The Statement we got on Monday evening was held in the dinner hour, when the House is necessarily thin on the ground, usually because you do not even know that a Statement will be made that day. I had applied by chance for an urgent Private Notice Question, but I was told that it would not be taken because there would be a debate. I then had to readjust my diary entirely to be able to come here for the Statement in the dinner hour. I address that criticism to the Opposition as well, because there is consensus between the two sides as to when Statements are taken, and it would be better for the whole House if we could take them as we used to, after Questions but before the dinner hour, so that more people can participate.
My second point is about the report itself. I want to pick up on just one issue in it. I agree with almost everything that was said, but I want to talk about the shift of emphasis: the tilt from the Middle East to Indochina. In 2020, I had the privilege to be part of the working group for the think tank Policy Exchange on the precursor to the 2021 integrated review. All of
us in that expert working group felt that we should concentrate on tilting to Indochina, because that was clearly where our future security threats would come from. As a veteran of the period 2010 to 2015, I recall that in this House we debated five almost simultaneous wars: Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, the intervention in Libya and, occasionally, the Russian invasion of Crimea. Which one has come back to bite us and will sustain our concerted efforts over the next decade at least? It is the Russian invasion of Crimea.
I am sorry to say that the report, even in its comprehensiveness, refers to the Russian invasion of Ukraine as having happened in February 2022. Most Ukrainians would profoundly disagree with that. It did not happen in 2022; it happened in February 2014 and had we been more vigilant about the impact of that, we would perhaps have found ourselves better prepared to deal with it.
That brings me, in the few seconds I have left, to my third point on the relationship between Russia and China. The noble Lord, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, who has briefly left his place, rightly said that the new world order will be written in China and supported by Russia. In March, Xi Jinping made a state visit to Russia, where he said to Putin, “Right now, there are changes the likes of which we have not seen for 100 years, and we should drive these changes together”. The current and persistent strategic challenge that we will face as a country is that of Russia and China acting in concert, and we need to be extremely vigilant about that.
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