What’s next for Britain’s defence strategy

John Kampfner

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, whether you are here at Chatham House or whether you are watching us remotely. My name’s John Kampfner. I’m the – in charge of the new programme we have here called the UK in the World, which started in March, looking at the role, thank you, John, of the UK in the world over the next period. As part of that, we’re doing a series of speeches, events, and interventions, along with a new Advisory Council and specific work we’re doing on science and tech, trade, and other areas of the future of Britain.

It gives me enormous pleasure to introduce John Healey, known to you all, but first time I think, John, here at Chatham House…

John Healey MP

Indeed.

John Kampfner

…which is a particular pleasure for us, who will be setting out Labour’s defence strategy as it is now, three months into the war in Ukraine. John will talk for 20/25 minutes, then he – is that right, roughly speaking?

John Healey MP

Roughly.

John Kampfner

Más o menos, and then we will talk among ourselves and then we will throw it over to questions. I don’t need to introduce John, you know who he is, longstanding Labour MP, member of the last Labour Government, and has had a number of jobs in that Labour Government, a number of jobs in the Shadow Cabinet, and is now Shadow Secretary of State for Defence. So, without further ado, over to you, John.

John Healey MP

John, thank you so much. It’s an honour, it really is an honour, to join you at Chatham House today. No policy institution has a longer or stronger worldwide standing, and your founding aim after the First World War was to shape the new peace by educating the public on international affairs, and perhaps I can echo your philosophy today with an argument that a strong society is the basis for strong defence and successful armed forces.

I’ve had a number of calls from a number of leaders over the time for jobs in government and in opposition, but when Keir Starmer first appointed me to this privileged post a couple of years ago, as Labour’s Shadow Defence Secretary, I spoke that night with Ben Wallace, and I promised him that Labour would offer constructive opposition. I said, “Defence policy and defence procurement cycles are much longer and don’t match political cycles.” So I said, “I have an interest in you making the right decisions, and more importantly, especially at this time of acute crisis, the whole country has an interest in government getting decisions on defence and security right.” And I know that is what motivates many of you at Chatham House to make the contributions that you do to public policy and debate, and for me, good government depends on strong democratic debate and challenge, not just from Politicians, but from the range of expert voices in policy institutes, in industry, the military, and the media. So, I want to start by thanking you for the job and the contribution that you have on this.

John, I think it was earlier this month when President Zelenskyy spoke here. He said, “There is a bright future still ahead for us.” And this, after Vladimir Putin had launched Russia’s brutal, illegal invasion of sovereign Ukraine, a country whose independence Russia itself had guaranteed to protect in the 1994 Budapest Agreement. So we salute the bravery of the Ukrainians, civilians and military alike, the bravery of President Zelenskyy himself, the bravery of the troops who fought beyond the call of duty in Mariupol, the bravery of the residents of Kherson, who’ve staged passive resistance to Russian attempts to trample their culture and their language and their democracy.

And, you know, when David Lammy, our Labour Shadow Foreign Secretary, and I visited Kyiv in January before the conflict, Ukraine’s Former Prime Minister asked me – Yatsenyuk told us this, “That Western unity”, he said, “is Ukraine’s best defence.” And we told him then there would be total unity here in the UK, there would be total solidarity for Ukraine, and total condemnation of Russia, because we understood that Putin’s aim isn’t simply to conquer Ukraine, eradicate its national identity, seize its vital industries; it wants to divide NATO, to hold Europe hostage over energy, to flood our societies with disinformation, to persuade our own people that democracy’s just not worth it.

Yes, we’ve had our differences with the government over Ukraine, just like the British people. We wanted faster, tough sanctions, we wanted faster, easier, more compassionate treatment for refugees. But on military assistance to Ukraine, on reinforcement of NATO allies on the Eastern flank with Russia, and on the new security guarantees for Finland and Sweden, the government has our full Labour support, and this bipartisan backing will continue.

John, you said we’re into the third month of the invasion, I think this is the first day of the fourth month of Putin’s invasion, and we’re into a new phase, so let me turn to the conflict itself.

Putin underestimated the Ukrainian resolve to fight and the skill of its military Commanders. He overestimated the competence and capability of his Russian military. He’s been forced back now into a grinding battle to take the Donbas region and to hold the land bridge to Crimea for now, and whatever territory Putin gains in the short-term, we must ensure he fails in the long run, because Ukraine is only part of a broader strategy for Putin’s Russia. We’re facing a dictator ready to use armed force, casual brutality, nuclear threats, to redraw the map of Europe. He displays a contempt for international institutions, for humanitarian law, for the rules, the very rules of military conflict, and he wants to reverse three decades of democratic progress in Eastern and Central Europe to re-establish a buffer zone between Russia and the historical West.

And you know, when the US, before Christmas, forced the diplomatic hand of Russia, and Putin was obliged to submit a draft treaty for discussion, he demanded NATO withdraw all forces deployed on alliance territory since 1997. This was received with disbelief. Some saw this as Putin’s offering to avoid war in the Ukraine, but I think they missed the point. Those were a statement of his strategic war aims, and that is the gravity of the threat we now face. The demand for a veto over sovereign progress in Europe, the nullification of collective security arrangements, whether from NATO or the European Union.

And that’s why we, in the UK, need to shift now from crisis management in response to the current conflict, to delivering the medium-term NATO standard support Ukraine will need for Putin’s next offensive and beyond. And it’s why we also need to shift now to thinking longer-term about the strategy for European security and how that must change. And whilst I back and recognise the UK Government as being – providing immediate military assistance to Ukraine, it’s now time that Ministers shown some leadership on the bigger aims.

Now, I suspect the US went into this conflict on day one wanting to avoid World War Three, wanting to maintain the unity of NATO, and wanting to support Ukraine. Now the Defence Secretary, Lloyd Austin, has set out some clear strategic aims, and they’re twofold. First, to secure Ukraine’s future as an independent sovereign country capable of defending its own territory, and second, to contain and weaken Russia, so it can’t contemplate further such aggression. These are clear aims that Britain should endorse and the sooner that Ministers do this, the better.

And I’d add a third, a longer-term aim, and I think it’s this, to bring Russia back into compliance with the rules-based international order, because Putin and his brutal authoritarian system will not last forever. Those outside the regime and the younger globally-thinking generation will, as George Robertson has argued, not want to live with the stain of his aggression, and will still want Russia to be a player in the world.

But the point about government having strategic aims is this. It makes clear that these aims can’t be secured by military means alone, and it makes clear that this will be a long haul, especially as pressure from rising food and fuel prices, or the horror of the Russian atrocities in this war, may lead to a public cry to “Stop the war” becoming louder than “Win the war.” So that’s why I say to allies, as Putin’s forces grind out territorial gains in the Donbas, only Ukraine can own the terms and the timing of any ceasefire. We’re not doing the fighting, we don’t decide when it ends. Our role is to support Ukraine in the negotiations, as we have in the war.

President Zelenskyy and the Ukrainians have spoken about the imperative at least of the pre-February frontline. “The war must end,” his Chief of Staff said at the weekend, “with the restoration of Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty.” If so, then Ukraine’s immediate – and these are Ukraine’s military objectives, these should then become ours. And I should just reflect that a ceasefire that does cede new territory to Russia risks them regrouping forces and deepening their occupation, and not once has Putin, in more than 20 years, relinquished temporarily occupied territory, be it in Georgia, Crimea, or the pseudo-republics in the Donbas.

However, as the UK entered this crisis, we did so with the foundations for our defences weakened over the last decade. We have been unprepared to act, unprepared for war, and unprepared at home. I referred earlier to crisis management, and the UK’s response to the invasion has certainly been decisive, but it has been crisis action, despite Boris Johnson bigging it up to distract from his Partygate problems.

We were unprepared for the threat of Putin’s invasion or unwilling to act ahead of the crisis. Just consider this. The US started shipping defensive lethal weapons to Ukraine, the Javelin missiles, in 2018. Ukrainians had been asking for such assistance since 2015, yet it was January this year before the UK responded with our first supply of anti-tank weapons. And we know now from FOI answers that despite Putin threatening Ukraine with 100,000 troops massed on its borders last March, during last year, during 2021, the list of countries that Britain supplied arms to had Ukraine in 67th place. The league table of countries Britain supplied military training to, Ukraine was 25th.

So we’ve been unprepared to act until the crisis and I’d argue we’ve also been unprepared for war. We’ve taken peace and stability in Europe really for granted since the end of the Cold War, and we’ve been too complacent in almost every dimension of defence and security, especially at the political level. As Russia has been for years waging hybrid warfare against us, deliberately operating in that grey zone between war and peace, between international legality and organised crime. The Russian manual for the so-called new generation warfare speaks of victim countries, and that nerve agent attack in Salisbury was our really clearest warning.

But for the Ukrainians, of course, this period has been anything but peaceful and stable. They’ve been fighting the Russians on their border for the last eight years, 13,000 Ukrainians killed before the invasion on the 24th of February, and they’ve also been the targets for systematic Russian cyberattacks, subversion, corruption, election interference, and disinformation. Now, all of Europe confronts persistent confrontation with Russia, and a future of a volatile age of disruption, so this threat of confrontation with Russia and a volatile age of disruption does not go away with any ceasefire in Ukraine.

And when we face this challenge, we must be honest. A decade of defence cuts has weakened the foundations for our armed forces. We have been insufficiently prepared at home. Since 2010, our full-time armed forces have been cut by over 40,000. One in five ships have been removed from the Navy’s surface fleet. More than 200 planes have been taken out of service in the RAF in the last five years alone. As a result, our ability to monitor Russian submarines in our own coastal waters was outsourced to allies for nearly a decade. Our tanks and our armoured vehicles have not been renewed for over 20 years. And our carriers sail without vital supply ships, a new radar system, and with far fewer of the number of F35s needed to provide a minimal, credible force. Satisfaction with life in the forces is down from 61 to 45%.

So that’s, in part, why Labour welcomed the boost to defence spending announced to 2020, as Boris Johnson put it, to end the era of retreat. However, too much of that extra money is simply needed to plug the £17 billion black hole in the MoD’s budget. Last March, when the government published its integrated review, it confirmed that the threats to our security are growing and diversifying, yet despite this, MoD Ministers still plan to cut the number of troops, ships, and planes, between now and 2025. They can’t deliver a fully modernised warfighting division first promised in – for 2025 until 2030. They haven’t published the national resilience strategy promised nearly 15 months ago. They agreed a treasury plan for a 1.7 billion real terms cut in day-to-day spending up to 2025, which means less money for forces’ pay, recruitment, training, families. They put Ajax on an end-of-life watch, but they won’t make a decision to scrap it or stick with it for at least six months. And they’ve got no systematic plans to fix the military procurement system, which the Public Accounts Committee describe as “broken and repeatedly wasting taxpayers’ money.”

And I’ve updated Labour’s dossier of MoD waste in the last few days, it draws on the official data where MoD mismanagement or misjudgement have quantified costs. The total, since 2019 alone, while the current Defence Secretary has been in post, is now nearly £6 billion, with the figure since 2010 topping £15 billion. Ministers are failing British forces, they’re failing British taxpayers, and with the threats now acute, and the imperative for modernisation urgent, this is not good enough. So, we will work now to amend the government’s new procurement bill, to reduce MoD waste and secure a building Britain approach to defence in procurement. But the central question for me is what next? And while our UK response to Ukraine has been strong, there is a void in government vision about what next, so let me offer a Labour view and three imperatives. Reboot UK defence plans, rebuild European security allies, and reinforce Britain’s leadership in NATO.

First, UK’s defence plans. No country comes out of a war as it went in, and there’s a strategic inertia from British Ministers now over any domestic or international rethink. Within days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Chancellor Scholz declared it “a watershed in the history of our continent.” He discarded decades-long German defence policy, he doubled the budget, he gave it an immediate boost of €100 billion, a dozen other European countries have boosted their defence planning and defence spending. Finland and Switzerland – Sweden have overturned decades of non-alignment with their centre-left governments now applying for NATO membership, a move that we fully support, as the official opposition.

But this is now day 91 of Putin’s war in Europe, yet the government has taken no action to review our own UK defence plans. Instead, we’re told by UK Defence Ministers in the House of Commons “The invasion of Ukraine has proved the integrated review right.” Well, the integrated review was billed as threats led, much of it is sound, but it was trumpeted by Boris Johnson as a tilt to the Indo-Pacific, and scarcely mentions Europe outside NATO. It makes no mention of a Taliban takeover in Afghanistan, no mention of a Russian invasion in Ukraine. It confirms that Russian threats to Britain are increasing, yet it cuts the army by another 10,000 troops. It commits UK forces to persistently – being persistently deployed worldwide, yet it cuts the full fleet of our Hercules transport planes.

My basic argument is this. All democracies must respond to the newly realised threats to national and European security, just as we did as a Labour Government after 9/11, when we put 3.5 billion into the defence budget and brought in the largest sustained increase for more than two decades. Every government must respond, and that’s why I argue that Ministers must now rectify the flaws in the integrated review, review defence spending, reform defence procurement, rethink army cuts, and reinvigorate Britain’s leadership within NATO.

So, here’s the start that Labour would make. On day one, we’ll start work on a strategic defence and security review that builds in lessons from Ukraine and reinforces Britain’s leadership in NATO. We’ll run this as an open review, with broad engagement from the forces, from industry, from experts, and the opposition to build a strong consensus behind its conclusions just as we did in 1998. We’ll commission a rigorous assessment of national security risks, adjust our force designs to meet those threats, and we’ll put our servicemen and women at the heart of future defence plans.

Our ambition will be to complete this within the first year, and to allow the UK to contribute a full-strength warfighting division to NATO well before 2030. From day one, we will halt the government’s cuts to the British Army and start to rebuild the strength of our forces, and from day one, as the first steps to the far-reaching reforms required to military procurement, we will commission the National Audit Office to do an across-the-board audit of MoD waste, and we’ll make the MoD the first department subject to our new office for value for money spending decisions.

Second, on Europe. Despite the gung-ho, go-it-alone promotion of ‘Global Britain’, for me, the Ukrainian conflict forcefully reminds us that almost no nation can do anything on its own, and that Britain is a bigger force for good in the world when we act with our allies. So Britain’s supply of anti-tank, anti-air missiles into Ukraine has been a small fraction of the total of the weapons provided by the Western allies. Yet Britain has done a good deal more by calling donor conferences, cajoling other countries to give more, and co-ordinating the logistics of delivering those weapons to Ukraine.

And Ukraine also reminds us that our closest allies are in Europe, and that the European Union has a significant and growing role in Europe’s security, even though the Conservatives in government can’t bring themselves to admit this, let alone act on it. And Boris Johnson’s decision, during those Brexit negotiations, to take defence and security off the table in preparing the Trade and Co-operation Agreement, means Britain has lost all access to the Schengen information service, and means we’re cut off also from any new EU defence investment funding.

Now, Britain has never been signed up to the idea of a European army, the French-led concept of strategic autonomy. NATO is Europe’s defence alliance, but we have lost any say over EU developments, at the same time as EU heads of government had given the Commission more to do on defence spending, procurement, and military command. And meanwhile, President Biden has also now affirmed US support for strengthening the NATO-EU strategic partnership, and for US-EU dialogue on security and defence, so the EU is emerging as an organised force in geopolitical security.

We are outside it, and no amount of bluster about ‘Global Britain’ can alter this hard fact. So, to make Brexit work, Britain must rebuild security ties with leading European allies, and become again a most trusted partner. It’s in Britain’s best national interests to forge post-Brexit arrangements, to work with, not within, the European Union. This government can’t and won’t, Labour in government will.

Third and finally, let me turn to NATO. We’re here and we’re proud that Britain is the leading European nation in NATO. We don’t want to see this status damaged or deflected by the Prime Minister’s pursuing his Indo-Pacific tilt. The first priority for Britain’s Armed Forces must be where the threats are greatest, not where the business opportunities lie, and this is in the NATO area. In Europe, the North Atlantic, and the Artic. This is our neighbourhood, this is our primary obligation to allies, and Labour’s commitment to NATO is unshakeable.

And just as Russia’s invasion of Crimea and the Donbas in 2014, I think, strengthened Ukraine’s national unity and resolve to resist Russia, so this latest full-scale invasion has strengthened NATO’s international unity and our resolve to resist Russia, as well. NATO is becoming stronger. It is the world’s most successful alliance because of the strength of both its military and its values. It pools military capacity and capability in cash with a collective budget of more than a trillion dollars to protect one billion people. But alongside that commitment to collective security, the values of democracy, of individual freedom, of the rule of law, are also enshrined in the founding treaties.

So, next month, when NATO nations will set its strategy for the next decade, they’ll do so with all democracies now facing new threats to their security. As the Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg, has said, regardless of when, how, the war in Ukraine ends, the war has already had long-term consequences for our security, NATO needs to adapt to that new reality. Most importantly, NATO needs to adapt to its primary task of collective defence.

And when Keir Starmer and I visited to thank our British troops in Estonia in February, they talked about NATO’s tripwire deterrents with forward forces expected to give ground when attacked before retaking it later with reinforcements. We have to conclude that the horrific Russian destruction of Ukrainian cities, the shelling of civilians, makes clear that such a strategy of deterrents by reinforcement is no longer conscionable, and NATO must therefore aim instead for a deterrence by denial, which, of course, is the operational consequences of NATO leaders saying they will defend every inch of NATO territory. This means military capabilities must be seriously strengthened. More advanced systems, more permanent basing, higher levels of force readiness, more intense exercising.

And this NATO 2030 plan must spell out how we’re going to contain Putin, what forces we’ll generate, what new technologies we’ll accelerate, and how we’ll strengthen our homeland security – societies, and it must also set out a strategy for our open democracies and societies to deal with China, which, as the 2030 reflection group preparing NATO for this summit and these decisions now rightly describe as a full spectrum systematic rival, rather than a purely economic player or an only Asia-focused security actor.

And as the reflections group have also said, a line between civilians and combatants is being blurred, and this doesn’t just mean the executions and rapes and tortures in Ukraine, it means our own democracy, our own society. So the military policymakers that are accustomed to protecting territory must consider how to protect society, its critical functions in our democracies are susceptible to disruption, and the new emerging technologies are changing the very nature of conflict itself.

And so, when member nations meet in Madrid at the end of next month, we want the alliance to set a new core task for NATO. We want it to set that task as democratic resilience, because you can’t go far online without finding someone to tell you that Western democracies are just as bad or even worse than Moscow or Beijing. Putin spends billions every year trying to divide and degrade our democracies. We’ve seen this from meddling in elections to misinformation over COVID to criminal corruption. The waning of our belief in our own values has become the Achilles heel of the West. And just as we defend against attacks from beyond our borders, so we must respond to attacks within our borders, too.

The NATO parliamentary assembly, their recommendations for the new strategic concept also stress this central importance of resilience in our democracies and societies. This is the way that we can both counter hybrid warfare and shore up support for our increased defence commitments.

So, in the runup to Madrid, 30 and I hope 32 democracies and their civil societies will rightly demand a say in the priorities set for NATO over the next decade, and as the opposition party, who intend to govern Britain in the near future, so do we. Yet this is a closed process, it’s confined to governments, it’s confined to governments despite the fact that 19 of the 30 NATO mention – nations have national elections in the next two years. So that’s why I ask the government to open up the UK process to create a common British vision for NATO. I urge them to lay out for the public the UK’s view of NATO’s strategic goals and its military priorities, as well as the greater contribution that Britain will make to our collective defence.

I want the UK to be driving debates as NATO gives a greater focus to defence, alongside deterrents and diplomacy. I want UK leadership within NATO to anticipate areas of future Russia aggression, to respond as the Arctic opens up, to settle the alliance’s relationship with the European Union, and to challenge and compete with China. And I want this to be a unified UK commitment to NATO, not a current conversation for Ministers that happen to be in government behind closed doors.

Let me use NATO’s own reflections group to underline this point. “Political cohesion,” it says, “is the basis of effective deterrents, and political consultation remains the most important means by which NATO can reinforce political cohesion.” So I say to British Ministers, bipartisan support has strengthened Britain’s action to help Ukraine and confront Russia, it will also strengthen Britain as the leading European nation in NATO. But none of what we want to secure can be achieved without a clear vision of the goal. President Putin, alongside President Xi Jinping, spelled out their vision in the joint declaration of the 4th of February. A world where dictatorships and democracies are seen as morally equivalent, where crimes against humanity can be committed, safe in the knowledge there’s no investigative process, no human rights workers, no international court to call perpetrators to account.

Putin thrives on such despair, and when we see the resistance of the Ukrainian people, the good humour in the face of horror, we understand the antidote, and it’s hope. Ukraine has survived because it’s people, diverse in faith, age, ethnicity, language, they have a national story, a national story of hope to unify them, and their hopes are simple: prosperity, security, respect, and those are Labour’s hopes for the British people, because Putin has got this wrong.

Real leadership in the world is not earned by levelling cities to the ground with missiles, it’s earned by creating alliances of equals, and our surest defence is to build a country where prosperity, security, respect, are shared aspirations and guaranteed to all. A country whose citizens can say proudly, “In the face of most severe threats, we stood with Ukraine, we stood with our allies, we stood with each other.” A country worth defending and determined to defend itself. Thank you [applause].

John Kampfner

Thank you very much indeed, John, for a very substantial speech, there’s so much to get stuck into on that. If it’s alright with you, if we – we’ll probably extend this by ten minutes or so, there’s a coffee upstairs, but just to give people time for brief questions and observations. I’ve got three or four that I’d like to raise with you before throwing it open to the audience. I should have said at the beginning this is on the record, but we knew that anyway.

But first, I just want to ask Patricia Lewis, who’s – runs Chatham House’s International Security Programme, to respond with a question or observation of your own, Patricia. Is there…?

Patricia Lewis

Where’s the mic?

John Kampfner

Do we have mics? Just – thanks, and then we’ll just come back to the stage and then we’ll go to questions from the audience.

Patricia Lewis

Thank you, I hope everyone can hear me. I’m Patricia Lewis. I’m the Research Director for Conflicts, Science and Transformation and Director of International Security at Chatham House. It’s a great pleasure to welcome you here, John, and thank you…

John Healey MP

Thank you.

Patricia Lewis

…so much for your comprehensive remarks. So, I think what struck me is something that we’re all grappling with, and that is how we connect the issues of preparedness and resilience with procurement, and it’s the – a big problem and it’s not just in defence, but it – I think it really is a very pointy edge of defence and that is the long-term requirements where we have to make decisions now for 30 years ahead. And of course, the impossibility of being able to see the future for that length of time and to be certain what sort of technologies, what sort of equipment, what sort of forces that we will need and – over the next 30 years. So, how do we do this in a way that introduces agility and nimbleness, and at the same time, long-term planning? And it’s a circle that I don’t think any government is able to square completely, and it does lead probably to waste, it leads to, you know, technologies being put into equipment, which are then obsolete by the time they’re deployed, etc.

And I’m very struck by the work that’s being done by the National Preparedness Commission with Lord Toby Harris leading it, in which they’re looking very much at what’s sort of below the levels of requirement to the technologies that might service a wide range of things further down the line. So invest, if you like, in a smart way, invest with a long-term vision for the future, but things that can then be adapted as things go on, how do we do that?

We are very aware that we have to be prepared for the sort of aggression we’ve seen from Russia in the last few months, but we’re also aware that we have climate change barrelling down at us, coming at us, already here with extreme weather events, leading to high insecurity, conflict, food shortages, supply chain problems, and refugees, and we’ve already seen a pandemic, which may well be related to the issues that I’ve just outlined.

I’ve just come from Sweden where yes, everyone was talking about the joining of NATO, but they were also there for the launching of a big report called the Environment of Peace, which is about creating – connecting the issue of climate change and environment with the issue of conflict and peace, and there, the big message for me was about preparedness and resilience. So, are there new mechanisms? I’m thinking perhaps Orcus as one we might think about, smaller, more sort of technology based, ones that can be more light-footed, are there new mechanisms that we could look at for procurement, so that we can square this circle at least in some ways, and think much more long-term with certainty that we’ll have the tools and the equipment and the technologies for the future?

John Healey MP

Gosh, you could have written my speech for me.

Patricia Lewis

Sorry.

John Healey MP

Thank you, Patricia. You know, when anybody says to you after you’ve spoken as a Politician, “Thank you for your comprehensive remarks,” you always know that you’ve gone on too long, but thank you for that.

Let me start with Sweden. So, part of the response that Sweden made to the end of the Cold War was to dial down and discontinue its system prior to that, that it called Total Defence, which was a capacity and an exercising that mobilised people that weren’t in the full-time armed forces to be ready to respond if it came under threat. And in the last few years, part of what Sweden has done is to reintroduce what they were doing three decades ago, and one of the things that we do badly in Britain is actually to learn from what others are doing.

To link this with the theme of my – one theme in my comprehensive speech, this – earlier on, take Finland. Finland only has a full-time armed forces of 19,000, but one in six of the Finnish population are reserves, and the reason that they’re ready to serve in that way, ready to respond in that way, is because they’ve got a strong national identity, and strong solidarity within their society. They believe their way of life and their nation is worth defending, much stronger than ours.

So, as we pursue the work through Toby Harris’ National Preparedness Commission, as we start to rethink, as we need to, how we defend ourselves within our borders, not just at our borders, the imperative that I mentioned, a national resilience strategy promised 15 months ago and still to be published, becomes really important. So, one of the reasons for suggesting that NATO should have democratic resilience as a fourth core task is in part to reinforce the central importance of that, in my view, but second, between the allies, to make sure that we don’t just try and do this on a country-by-country basis, which has been the case today. So that would be my observations on your latter point there.

On the former, there is really no easy or single answer to how we do better defence and security procurement in the future. Some of the features that are clear and are causing difficulties is that we’re moving now, not just to a very much more rapid technological development, but we’ve seen in Ukraine actually the military and warfighting value of certain systems is more important than very expensive platforms, much harder to procure, to commission, to plan, to produce those, than it is – although we struggle with – don’t get me onto Ajax, but we struggle in that conventional. So I think it requires – I would – my starting point would be three things.

First of all, you have to have a long-term commitment from government. We know and we can say for ten to 20 years there is a public commitment of taxpayers’ money to defence and security. We have a broad view of the sort of threats we’re going to need to meet, we have a feel for some of the technologies and the weaponry we’re going to need. Which leads to my second, you have then to have the capacity within the country to be able to be create, invent, trial those, and we’ve given too little emphasis to our sovereign capacity to design and produce for ourselves.

And then that leads you onto I think the third element, which is the ability to commission as government, and here, for this type of development, you can’t be locked into the primacy of relationships with the biggest defence companies. Because much of the innovation is small, start-up countries – companies, small to medium-size companies, that have to have a framework within which they can develop their ideas, we can accept that some will fail, but we can also seize on the ones that have greater potential that we might have realised six months ago when we first set the relationship up.

And there’s an added dimension to this, which is if we are now going to have to do more public procurement, military procurement, of communications, data, artificial intelligence, systems rather than battleships, we’re going to have to be able to find a way of doing that in a different way. The closest that we’ve got of any real expertise or experience in this country of doing that effectively is actually through GCHQ and the Intelligence Services, because this is their – this is the domain that they’ve operated in for some time, and there are some, I think, important pointers, from their experience, and they haven’t necessarily got it right, but there’s some important pointers from their experience that I think the MoD needs to get to grips with pretty damn fast.

John Kampfner

So I’ve got three or four questions, which I’ll ask briefly to you, John, and if we could have brief replies, and then we’ll throw it open to the audience. You said we were unprepared for – if I remember your quote exactly, we were unprepared for the invasion or we were unwilling to act.

John Healey MP

Yeah.

John Kampfner

On the latter phrase, are you referring to our relations with Russia? And if not, I just want to probe on that. Was part of our unwillingness to act, to respond, to Ukraine’s calls for help earlier Britain’s dependency culture on Russian money?

John Healey MP

Good question. Actually one that you’ve got people much more expert than I am in the audience to offer dimensions. I don’t think there’s a single answer to that, and, you know, if people have got views on that, I’m interested. I was making the observation that we’ve bigged up the British response to the invasion, the contribution we’ve made to defending Ukraine, but we’ve in fact acted very late. We may have been held back by the sort of interests you talk about, we may simply have been held back by the – as I also described, really complacency about peace and security – and stability in Europe, a belief for too long that Russia really wouldn’t do a full-scale invasion in Ukraine, and we may also have been held back by almost a self-deterring concern about winding up President Putin.

Whatever the reasons behind that unwillingness or that unpreparedness to act until the crisis hit, that era has gone, and we need pretty rapidly to come to terms with the consequences and the implications for this now for the future, and that’s my central argument, that crisis response is fine, as far as it goes. What’s required now is a strategic response, which we’ve simply not yet seen from the British government.

John Kampfner

And you also said we must ensure he fails in the long run. Does that extend – where do you stand on his longevity? Is there a requirement, is one of the war strategies to ensure that Putin’s time in office is as short as possible?

John Healey MP

In my view, regime change is not a war aim, and which is why I believe that Lloyd Austin’s articulation of two clear war aims, aims within this conflict, are so important and so helpful, because they direct and guide the manifold response that’s required not just for Britain, but Britain alongside allies.

John Kampfner

You’ve spoke very passionately and cogently about our defence cuts, our inability to deal with the increasing threats that face us, and you talk of a – from day one, a new defence and strategic review if Labour comes to office. Therefore, does it – and you’ve also spoken of waste, but waste is always the thing that is easy to talk about, is Labour therefore committing to reverse defence cuts and to increase MoD and defence spending from day one?

John Healey MP

No, we’ve backed the increases the government’s been willing to make in 2020. I regard that as catchup funding for the cuts that we’ve seen over the decade before, and if you look at the long-run spend over the last decade since 2010, you can see exactly why those in our forces are so stretched. You can’t – in my view, you can’t make those hard decisions about levels of spend, let alone then the proper configuration of your forces to respond to threats, until you’ve got access to the advice, the assessments, the intelligence, that comes from government.

And you were kind enough earlier on to, in so many words, say I’ve been around for a long time. I’ve done a number of jobs from Cabinet and from Shadow Cabinet, and I’m particularly struck by the, sort of, asymmetry of opposition in defence. It isn’t just the, sort of, scale of resources available, but it is the fact that actually, uniquely, the information, the intelligence, the assessment, the details required to make good policy judgments, are all held within government, and it makes it harder to make the big calls. It certainly makes it harder to make the detailed calls from opposition, and again, it makes the, sort of, role of Chatham House and the, sort of, experts that we’ve got in this audience and online, and the contribution that you make to that wider debate, even more important, and by the way, very helpful to me, too, so thank you.

John Kampfner

And my – I could ask you questions forever, but I – that would be unfair. One more question and then hand it over to the audience. You talk also of democratic resilience, you refer to Finns being passionate about wanting to defend their country as reservists. When you look at this country at the moment, and at lunchtime the Sue Gray report will be published, we assume, and you have a picture, and literally now a picture, of, sort of, constant party time at Number 10, people sitting on each other’s laps, bringing in bottles of booze in suitcases, not during this war, but during the pandemic, does that have any read-across to the UK’s credibility around the world in foreign policy and in defence and security policy?

John Healey MP

Yes. You and I were talking before we came in here, and I’ve come from Rotherham, and John’s flown in from Germany, and you said to me before we came on here, as you left, they said, “Have a good time in party island,” and in a sense, that’s a jocular measure of the loss of authority that this country has because of a Prime Minister that has lost any authority in office. And as far as the report we expect this – today, we all made huge sacrifices during the pandemic, every one of us in this audience, I guess, can remember what we went without, who we were unable to see, during that period.

I spent the winter visiting my dad in his care home in Rotherham outside the bedroom window, and the Prime Minister may feel he gets away with this, but I think the British people have rumbled him. He set the rules, he broke the rules, systematically and routinely. He’s lost the – I think the authority to lead, I think he’s lost the respect of the British people, and this report is most damaging for a country that needs a strong leadership at home and a strong respect from allies abroad, and we have neither while Boris Johnson remains as Prime Minister.

John Kampfner

We have ten to 15 minutes of questions. What I would say, please could you – do we have the mics? If we could bring them over here into the front. Oh, sorry, you were here. Lady there, in – and Malcolm next, first of all, and please keep the questions really, really short, and I’m going to take those two together.

John Healey MP

What he really means is please keep the answers really, really short.

John Kampfner

No, no, no. No, we’ve just got a lot, and we could or, I mean, I could stay till 12, but I’m not sure others can.

John Healey MP

No, I can’t.

John Kampfner

Yeah, exactly.

Nomi Bar-Yaacov

Hi, John. I’m Nomi Bar-Yaacov, Associate Fellow in the International Security Programme here, working with Patricia Lewis, in Chatham House, and I’m also on the Advisory Board of the Chemical – the CBWNet, the Chemical Weapon – Chemical Biological Weapons Net that was launched in Germany earlier this month.

In light of the potential threat from Russia, in light of Putin’s continuous isolation, humiliation, and given that he has made threats to use weapons of mass destruction, I’m wondering what the degree of preparedness that the government has in these three areas, they’re all somewhat different, and what would – if you would just like to elaborate a little bit on that angle, and also what are the Labour Party’s views on the UN Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons? Anyone? I know they’re not – you’re not planning to sign onto it. Do you view it as an instrument that may prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons?

John Kampfner

That was a double question sneakily…

Nomi Bar-Yaacov

That was a double question, apologies.

John Kampfner

…rolled into one. Malcolm.

Malcolm Chalmers

Yes, Malcolm Chalmers from the Royal United Services Institute. I wonder whether you could reflect a little bit about the military operational lessons so far from Ukraine and for future defence reviews or indeed, what the government might do in this shorter-term on reviewing UK defence spending. And the particular issue I wanted to ask you about is ,we’ve seen a war going on for several months now, it shows no signs of stopping, and all the parties are going through their stocks of missiles and everything else at a remarkable rate. So are we in the UK doing enough to invest not in more platforms, but actually in the missiles and armaments and readiness required if we’re actually going to fight? We’ve perhaps designed our forces too long on the assumption that war’s not really going to happen now, it’s going to be in the long-term. So in the SDSR you’re talking about, is readiness and adequate war stocks going to be a priority?

John Kampfner

Just for sheer resilience, I’ll take the question immediately behind. The gentleman’s had his question – his hand up for a while.

Euan Grant

Yeah. Yes, thank you very much. Euan Grant, I was the UK Customs Service Intelligence Analyst for the Ex-Soviet Union, worked later for a number of years in EU programmes in Ukraine and Moldova, where I saw red – flashing red light after flashing red light ignored, particularly on the genesis of Wagner. My question is, how do you see solidarity on defence and security measures with individual EU member states, most, of course, members of NATO, and crucially with the Central European Commission? Is that deepening and widening? I always felt that many commission people frankly resented British capabilities and were – they weren’t entirely easy about military matters. Thank you.

John Healey MP

Let me do it in reverse order. No, it’s not deepening, it’s not widening, it needs to do both. It won’t be done under this government, it simply will not. David Lammy and I were in Berlin six weeks ago, we had two days of detailed discussion with our sister party and those leaders in the SPD about the development of better understanding, potential work as sister parties. I would like Labour to be able to go into the election and win the election and look for a Lancaster House style Agreement between Britain and Germany, soon after the election, just as Cameron successfully did with France after the 2010 election.

With France, it’s clear that Lancaster House Agreement was important, it’s – like much of the rest of our relations with France, let alone the rest of the European Union membership, has been severely tested and frayed by the Brexit process, and is at the moment is largely blocked by the way that we are unwilling to deal with the European Union effectively over the Northern Ireland protocol, but that must be rebooted. Macron, after he’s been re-elected, has given an indication he sees that there is something of a UK-shaped hole in European defence and is keen to explore that, but I don’t see any chance of any progress while you’ve still got Boris Johnson as British – Britain’s Prime Minister. So I hope that answers your question.

For Labour, for – well, let’s say for Britain, I made the argument in my speech, but really to make our position post-Brexit work for this country, we have to rebuild trusted relationships with some of those closest allies. Ukraine underlines that fact, we start with the major European allies like Germany and France, but there also has to be arrangements in place that we can deal on defence and security with the European Commission and the European Union, as well.

Malcolm Chalmers, the short answer is no. I don’t know if people remember the question, but we are really looking now, I think, at a conflict that will be long and slow. We have put into Ukraine something like 5,000 British-produced, anti-tank, shoulder-fired NLAW missiles, they’ve been really critical to defending some of the towns and cities in Ukraine, but we have run out of our own UK stockpiles, and do we have a procurement system designed for fighting? No, we don’t, and the proof point of that is I’ll be in Belfast tomorrow. I’ll be visiting the Thales factory that produces the NLAWs and the starstreak missiles, and let me tell you, we do not yet have the MoD that has got its act together to sign a fresh contract for producing replacement NLAWs, and it’s 91 days into this conflict. So our supply into Ukraine has been sustained, up to this point, because we’ve been able to divert those that are being produced by Thales under the orders of another European country.

So, stockpiles. We have a military system and our weaponry geared essentially to 24 hours fighting and that’s it. So if you want a list of hallmarks that suggest the – that need to be fixed in a procurement system, let me give you three or four Ss. Stockpiles, speed, sourcing, needs to be Britain where – Britain as a first option, and what we talked about earlier on, our ability to commission and procure systems, not just hardware. And the lesson from Ukraine is that we can’t just look to being fully fit to fight a war sometime in the early 2030s, you know, we need that new tech, we need that edge, in order to reinforce the deterrent that we’ve got by having those sort of capacities, but we need now tech as well as new tech, and we have a system that can’t do it.

Finally, to your question. I’m in opposition, I’ve absolutely no real idea about the preparedness in government, in NATO, and amongst our allies for response – detailed response to chemical, biological or nuclear weapon attacks. I have a great deal of confidence in the British ability to maintain and manage our own deterrents on behalf of NATO in the nuclear field, but that’s a good example where it is really irresponsible to speculate, and any comment is ill-informed. The government has briefed Keir Starmer and I during the course of this Ukraine conflict, that has been really helpful from the Chief of Defence Intelligence. The information we’ve been given is probably not much more than the best of the open-sourced information, but it has been enormously helpful as well because it’s given us a sense of the government’s thinking.

And finally, on the prohibition of nuclear weapons move in the United Nations, no, Labour will not be signing that. It’s a unilateralist move. It has an instrumental value in maintaining a focus on the imperative to see a reintroduction of negotiations that will allow us to control the proliferation and the increase in nuclear stockpiles, but it’s a declaratory position. No nuclear power has signed it, Britain shouldn’t, Labour wouldn’t, and if we want to be serious about the long-term nuclear threat, the only way to do that is multilaterally. That requires international leadership that we’ve simply not had from any of the leading nuclear powers, including Britain.

It is extraordinary that in the 12 months before the New START Treaty was discarded until Biden rescued it at the last minute with a short-term extension. There was no comment in public, in parliament, from any UK Defence or Foreign Office Minister during the entire 12 months that that cornerstone international agreement was fraying and being set aside.

John Kampfner

Right, we’ve got time for the gentleman here and there were two there, and that’s all we can do, and please could they be literally one-sentence questions. Thank you.

John Barn

John Barn, positioned 6,000 warheads in the US Russian arsenal, only takes 300 to eradicate the entire world population. Given the experience in Ukraine, why didn’t you have that as number one in your talk?

John Kampfner

Thank you.

Member

I was a member of Chatham House and a Journalist [inaudible – 75:27]. Mr Healey, what is Labour’s policy when China attacks Taiwan?

John Kampfner

And would you repeat what Joe Biden said at the weekend?

Jukka Siukosaari

Thank you. Jukka Siukosaari, Ambassador of Finland to London. Shadow Secretary, thank you very much for your kind words and also for the opposition support in the NATO application process. My question has to do with your third aim that you added to the two American ones, the long-term goal of bringing Russia back to the international order. Let’s presume that we have a Labour Government in 24 and we also have a new master in the Kremlin. How would you go about that?

John Kampfner

Thank you, and that’s a very good question. One question, and there’ve been a lot of people online, and to all of you who’ve asked questions or wanted to ask questions, apologies, we haven’t been able to get to you. I’ve just picked out one from Madeleine Moon. Is there an urgent need for the UK to balance its aspirations in the world and its defence spending with our economic wealth or are we destined to be trapped in a cycle of overreach and failure, in other words mismatch between rhetoric and reality?

John Healey MP

Right. People are fighting and dying in Ukraine now, which is why that was the focus of my speech and where we take the immediate lessons from. And, John, you know better than anyone our capacity in this country to have a serious, mature debate about nuclear issues is imperative, but impossible, and that’s the challenge that I, as a leading Labour Politician, need to find a way of helping deal with, but that’s also for others, as well.

On Taiwan, we have no defen – direct defence ties with Taiwan. I would, at this point, focus on the what nows rather than the what ifs, and the what nows lead me to link up with the discussion about NATO coming up with a strategy to deal with China as a systemic competitor, but also a country that we have to find a way of co-operating with, as well. And so, any stance that Labour in government took would be in lockstep with approach with NATO allies on that. If Labour was in government in 2024/2023, I doubt whether my – one of my day one decisions would be do I accept an invitation to go and meet President Putin in the Kremlin, but if – but you never know.

And finally, to Madeleine Moon, the fundamental change in the nature of the threat that we face as a country and Europeans – Europe faces as a result and the consequences of what we can see and what we can anticipate from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reinforces, just as those dozen other countries have already done, a requirement to reboot our defence plans and our defence spending. The pressure and demands on this country and other countries to do that will never have been fiercer from other needs.

And I touched on it in the middle of my speech, one of the reasons why it’s important to have a country and a people that believe in their nation is that they are more willing to support their contribution and the government’s action and potentially spending that’s required to protect it for the future. And for me, it’s one reason, one central reason, why our democratic and our social resilience has been, in recent years, tested, under strain, sometimes deliberately magnified in this country, why that rebuild and reinforcing exercise is part and parcel of having a stronger country and stronger defence and security.

I said at the start that I wanted to make an argument that a strong, confident society was the basis of strong, successful defence and the armed forces, and that, I think, to Madeleine Moon, is part of the vision and the virtuous circle that we’ve got to give more attention to, and I see as part of my responsibility, not just as Shadow Defence Secretary, but as a Politician in discussion with people like yourselves.

John Kampfner

John, it’s testament to you that there’ve been – there are a lot of questions still to be asked, both here in the audience and the many people watching online. In the best sense of the term, that was a really comprehensive readout on Labour’s position, it was full of – you tapped into a really rich vein of themes, which we could have gone on talking about for much longer. We hope we’ll have the opportunity of having you back here at Chatham House…

John Healey MP

Sure.

John Kampfner

…before too long. There’s a coffee moment upstairs, so those of you who hadn’t had a chance to talk to John or to ask him questions, for as long as you were able to, it will be great to see you up there. To all of you watching online, thank you very much for doing so. For all of you in the audience, to the Chatham House Events Team, thank you very much, and most of all, please give a warm round of applause to our guest, John Healey [applause].