The Orwellian implications of gearing up the nation for permanent war preparation
Robert Skidelsky is professor emeritus of political economy at Warwick University. He has taught international relations at the SAIS in Washington DC. He is the author of a prize-winning biography of the economist John Maynard Keynes. A member of Britain’s House of Lords since 1991, he has taken a principled position of “peace without victory” in the Ukraine war.
Cross-posted fron Robert Skidelsky’s Substack
Note: I post below my speech of 18 July in the House of Lords on Britain’s Strategic Defence Review. (The section in brackets was left out due to pressure of time. Backbenchers were allowed 5 minutes each). I was the only one of 39 speakers to have any substantial criticisms of the Review. The near unanimous tone was one of approbation for the Review’s ‘call to arms’.
Lord Robertson, one of the three authors of the Review, set the scene in his opening speech:
‘The brutal, full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Putin’s Russia three years ago was a savage wake-up call for all of us………..Putin is now a threat not just to Ukraine but to the whole of western Europe’.
Lord Soames, warned of the dangers facing the UK in language suitable for the grandson of Winston Churchill: :’our communications networks are being hacked; our social media is flooded with disinformation; our free elections are targeted; our undersea cables are cut; our military bases are buzzed by drones; our infrastructure has been sabotaged; assassinations have been carried out on British soil; financial and media companies are regularly blacked out; and bombs have been placed on cargo flights’. Civil defence must train millions in how to respond to such attacks.
This is my speech:
I have a long-standing respect for Lord Robertson. In the early 2000s, we were both engaged in trying to build better relations with Putin’s Russia—he as chair of the NATO-Russia Council and myself as founder of the UK-Russia round table, whose efforts were then openly encouraged by the Prime Minister, Tony Blair. Since then, our paths have diverged. I have huge reservations about the report that Lord Robertson so ably presented earlier—mainly because I believe that it greatly exaggerates the threats that we actually face.
I am perhaps the only person in the House who takes this view, but I am happy that complete unanimity is not a requirement of membership of our august assembly. On one thing we can all agree—that we should spend more on our own defence, if only because the United States is no longer a reliable guarantee of our security. However, this salutary prudential note is overwhelmed by the report’s concentration on the need to guard against a supposedly imminent and potentially lethal Russian danger. The SDR states:
“Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 … irrefutably demonstrated … the threat, with state-on-state war returning to Europe”.
It goes on to say that the UK and its allies are “under daily attack” from Russia—note that word “daily”—
“with aggressive acts—from espionage to cyber-attack and information manipulation”.
We are told that Russia has demonstrated
“its willingness to use military force, inflict harm on civilians, and threaten the use of nuclear weapons to achieve its goals”.
The conclusion from all this is that Britain must rearm to deter and, if necessary, “fight and win” a war against Russia. As Mark Rutte, NATO’s Secretary-General, put it, the British had better rearm or “learn to speak Russian”.
This view of the matter is wildly overwrought.
The report then argues that, since Russia has intentionally blurred
“the lines between nuclear, conventional” and sub-state warfare, an integrated British response should combine both conventional and hybrid forms of war preparation.
So great stress is placed on the need for a resilient home defence to guard against “espionage, political interference, sabotage, assassination and poisoning, electoral interference, disinformation, propaganda, and Intellectual Property theft”—
all those weapons daily used by our adversaries!
To my mind, the tone is dangerously over the top. Let me point to two specific defects. First, the SDR wants to prepare the UK for “high-intensity, protracted war”, but it says nothing about its possible duration. The Cold War ended with détente, but there is no peaceful endgame in these pages, only a continuous state of armed alertness. As the the Bishop of Bristol asked: where is the peace strategy?
Secondly, to keep the UK in a constant state of war alertness requires, as Prime Minister Keir Starmer has frankly admitted, a radical “shift in mindset”, a transformation of culture and the eradication of unacceptable behaviour—in short, acceptance of defence and security as the “organising principle of government”. Have the authors of the SDR stopped to consider the Orwellian implications of gearing up the nation for permanent war preparation?
[None of this is to deny that we have to take precautions against the possibility of a pullout and Russian dirty tricks. But this is a fast cry fro proposing, as the SDR does, a national mobilisation in face of an existential Russian threat]
The SDR rightly draws attention to the increased, and often subterranean, threats of harm opened up by rapidly accelerating technological innovation. But I draw the opposite conclusion: the multiplication of technological threats provides a compelling argument, not for a nuclear or an AI arms race, but for global co-operation to limit the malign use of technology. It is the joint responsibility of leaders of all the great powers to act as adults and not as children playing around with their lethal toys. It is the duty of those with the greatest power—for good or ill—to behave in such a way as to maximise the chance of a peaceful future for us all.
Poor Lord Skidelsky is up against a nest of liars!!!!!! I trust his judgment against theirs!!