The Development of British Defence Policy

Blair, Brown and Beyond

David Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754674894
• eBook ISBN: 9781317036005
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Britain's military forces have rarely been busier. It is therefore crucial to understand the developing trends and underlying assumptions of British Defence Policy, in regard to both foreign policy and international security. This volume, which covers both the Blair and Brown eras in defence policy making, places developments post 11 September in a wider context, assessing the impact of key personalities and events on a range of issues, notably the perennial concern of military overstretch. By critically appraising contemporary developments, and examining the driving policy in specific cases, this volume provides a relevant and up-to-date assessment of this vital policy area. As well as being contemporary in its analysis, the work is also comprehensive in scope, embracing both policy objectives - such as the expeditionary strategy and the desire to be a bridge between the US and EU - and the instruments that underpin such policy.

Chapter 1
Introduction: New Labour and Defence

David Brown1

A new dawn has broken, has it not? (Blair, 1997)

As if to suggest not only their mastery of the political environment, but also the environment more generally, the sun broke over the Royal Festival Hall in a moment of characteristic choreography, heralding the return to government for the Labour Party for the first time in 18 years. New Labour, boosted by a political landslide in the 1997 General Election that left them with a majority of 179, seemed like a breath of fresh air, sweeping out a tired, demoralised and discredited Conservative Party that would be left licking their political wounds for the next 13 years. While armed with a well-publicised pledge card, which focused exclusively on domestic issues, such as a commitment to cut class sizes to 30 or under for the years five to seven, New Labour seemed somewhat unprepared for the specific strains of government. This was unsurprising, given that only Margaret Beckett, of the initial Labour government of 1997, had any real prior experience of government, having served in a series of junior ministerial roles for both Harold Wilson and James Callaghan; it should be borne in mind that the only governmental position Tony Blair has ever held was that of Prime Minister. Such inexperience was particularly notable in the field of defence and foreign affairs, with Kampfner pointing out that Blair had only made one serious exposition of his views on international affairs prior to entering government (Kampfner, 2004 3–5). As such, much of the early deliberations regarding foreign policy more widely was made by New Labour’s first Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, with its emphasis on morality and human rights at the centre of New Labour’s international image (Wheeler and Dunne, 2004; Williams, 2002).

Cook was also to be a central figure in the development of New Labour’s first – and, to date – only formal defence review, the 1998 Strategic Defence Review (SDR). Having been scarred by the experience of dealing with defence matters, notably the future of Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent, during a succession of general elections in the 1980s, tactically the Labour Party sought to keep the electorate’s attention on matters domestic, whether it be the protection of the National Health Service (NHS), being ‘tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime’ (Labour Party, 1997) or bringing an end to the ‘boom and bust’ years of Conservative government (Gordon Brown cited in Swaine, 2009). Questions regarding the management of Britain’s defence were postponed to a future defence review, to be held once the Labour Party were safely in government; in this they were helped by the continuing internecine warfare over Europe that succeeded in highlighting the weaknesses of the Major administration and the adverse reaction to a series of Conservative defence reviews, notably ‘Options for Change’ and ‘Frontline First’, during the 1990s, which effectively robbed the Conservatives of one of their previously held ace cards.

The SDR was portrayed as a reaction against the perceived limitations of the Treasury led approach redolent of the preceding defence reviews, which had been primarily internal Whitehall affairs, predicated on taking advantage of the changed security environment of the perceived ‘peace dividend’ following the collapse of the Cold War. In its place, it was claimed, would be a more strategic approach to defence policy, based on a more explicitly stated foreign policy baseline, from which the projection of military force could be derived, subject to proposed limitations via the SDR’s stated ‘scales of effort’ (Ministry of Defence, 1998). This expeditionary approach to the use of military force would be used both to advance the United Kingdom’s (UK) strategic goals, as well as wider humanitarian concerns, as part of the newly declared ‘ethical dimension’ to foreign policy (Cook, 1997). Given that the SDR was based on the assumption that the UK was effectively safe from conventional attack for the duration of the review’s framework, such an approach seemed, on the face of it, to make strategic and practical sense – ‘we must prevent our enemies from tying up our forces in defence of the home base – otherwise they have won’ (Hoon, 2001). In addition, as part of a concept that would become ever more prominent as the years progressed, the projection of force would serve as one tool within a wider, more ‘comprehensive’ approach to international affairs, alongside both the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) and the newly created Department for International Development (DFID). Robin Cook and Defence Secretary George, now Lord, Robertson were to be in the driving seat in terms of determining the contours of the review, aided by a wider process of consultation, both of noted experts from the fields of journalism, academia, business and the military, and of the wider public (Ministry of Defence, 1998a; McInnes, 1998).

In 2009, under a different Prime Minister – Gordon Brown having finally achieved his ambition to move permanently into Number 10 Downing Street in June 2007 – the government committed itself to a second Strategic Defence Review, to be completed whichever party is successful in the 2010 General Election. At the time of writing, the Labour government, under its sixth Defence Secretary, Bob Ainsworth, has already committed to outlining its initial assumptions regarding the future of defence policy in a Green Paper, to be in place prior to the election. Both of the other main political parties are also committed to holding a formal review immediately after the election, should they take power, and all are committed to ensuring that such reviews will, henceforth, take place on a more regular, scheduled basis, whether it be on a four to five year review process or in the immediate aftermath of a General Election (Interview, 2009). Yet, the political atmosphere – and, equally importantly, the economic environment – is significantly different to when its predecessor was promulgated. Malcolm Chalmers, in one of the first comprehensive assessments of the impact of the economic crisis on defence spending, has highlighted the possibility of between 10–15 per cent cuts in real terms in the existing defence budget – predicted to be £36.89bn by 2011 – between 2010–2016 (Chalmers, 2009, 1). Such figures are predicated on a number of unknown variables, such as the level of political protection offered to other government departments (both Labour and the Conservatives are committed to protecting the health budget, while the latter has also ring-fenced DFID’s budgetary totals), the speed at which the total national debt interest can be serviced and the debt levels repaid and reduced and the longer term projected figures for UK economic growth (with its impact on the level of spending allocated to tackling unemployment and wider welfare concerns).

In addition, while the Labour Party was able to effectively silence defence as an electoral issue in 1997, there seems little chance of that happening again, with defence once again a central political issue in the run up to the 2010 General Election, featuring heavily in press coverage and popular debate. Propelled onto the front pages of Britain’s national newspapers by a tragic torrent of bad news stories and accusations of mishandling, both of the allocation and management of defence spending, defence has once again regained its place as one of the premier political issues of the age. This has been particularly prevalent during Gordon Brown’s premiership, where it has been intimated that decisions taken during his decade as Chancellor of the Exchequer have effectively come back to haunt him as Prime Minister (Cornish and Dorman, 2009a). Having finally – by the end of April 2009 – escaped from the shadow of the controversial deployment of UK troops to Iraq to concentrate more fully on the so-called ‘good’ war in Afghanistan, Brown has, at times, seemed almost helpless, despite his best efforts (Brown, 2009b–d), to stem the rising tide of concern regarding the overall purpose and likely outcome of the UK’s military intervention. A toxic combination of allegations of Afghan corruption, notably in the 2009 election, the seemingly slow-time search for a suitable strategic vision for Afghanistan in the US (carried out in public thanks to a series of well-publicised leaks) and the tragic roll-call of British deaths and life-changing injuries in Afghanistan (at the time of writing, Britain had suffered 289 deaths (BBC, 2010)) has sapped further the British public’s confidence in the military intervention.

Without the ‘cover’ of the Iraqi campaign to divert attention – although the political fallout from the 2003 intervention in Iraq may not yet be at an end, given that the Chilcot Inquiry only began its deliberations in the latter half of 2009 – scepticism over the UK’s efforts in Afghanistan has continued to grow. This has been evident in an array of opinion polls questioning the necessity of continued UK involvement – with one conducted in mid-November 2009 noting a substantive 71 per cent of those interviewed wanting the UK to withdraw from Afghanistan within a year (Merrick and Brady, 2009). Another noted that 64 per cent did not believe that success was possible, even if General Stanley McChrystal, Commander of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan, was to get his way completely in terms of the troop levels from the United States (US) and its partners in the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). More worryingly still, only just over half of those interviewed – 54 per cent – were confident that they understood fully what ‘success’ would look like in Afghanistan (BBC, 2009), a fairly damning indictment of both the UK – and the wider international community’s – failure to convincingly and conclusively get their message across with regard to the underlying rationale for the UK’s continued presence in Afghanistan.

This is not the only aspect of the wider defence debate that has coloured political discourse in recent times. In addition, there has been the high profile campaign to repair the so-called ‘Military Covenant’, an Army specific document that serves as the focal point for both the nation and its political elite’s moral, if not legally binding, obligations to ensure that service men and women are treated in a suitably respectful and acceptable manner, both on operations and at home (British Army, 2000). In operational terms, the focus has been on the need for a more speedy and effective provision of appropriate defence equipment, as highlighted by the pungent conclusions of the 2009 Gray Report into the so-called ‘Smart Procurement’ process (Gray, 2009). At home, campaigns have been undertaken to highlight the state of military accommodation, the provision of appropriate health care facilities and their relative pay levels compared to other public services, whether it be traffic wardens (Dannatt, 2008) or Ministry of Defence civil servants (Barker, 2009). Public outrage has been further fuelled by national campaigns by charity groups, such as ‘Help for Heroes’ and the Royal British Legion.

While media attention has become ever more focused on defence matters, academia has taken much longer to effectively catch up. By definition slower moving, focusing on more reasoned analysis, rather than immediate comment, it is clear that – with a few notable exceptions (Cornish and Dorman, 2009a–b; Dorman, 2006; Robinson, 2005a–b) – academia has not devoted sufficient attention to the wider development of British defence policy under the New Labour government as a whole. There have been campaign specific assessments, most notably of Iraq (North, 2009; Steele, 2007; Stewart, 2007; Synnott, 2008) and Afghanistan (Tootal, 2009), but also what Dorman terms the ‘successful war’ in Sierra Leone (Dorman, 2009). However, what has been lacking throughout this period has been a comprehensive assessment of how defence policy has been shaped, developed and undertaken by the successive governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. In fact, the last over-arching assessment of defence issues more generally – as opposed to highlighting specific aspects in article length treatments, such as the 2004 Future Army Structures (FAS) process (Dorman, 2006), or more ideologically inspired attacks on the underlying thrust of the Blair approach particularly (Robinson, 2005a–b) – was Stuart Croft et al.’s assessment of the initial SDR, undertaken in the first flush of the New Labour government (Croft et al., 2000). Given the central importance of defence in terms of assessing the effectiveness of the government more generally – the first responsibility of the state being to protect its people – and its foreign policy more specifically, as well as the impact that the conduct and consequences of both Iraq (primarily for Blair) and Afghanistan (for Brown) will have on their respective legacies, such an omission must be rectified. This volume, which takes a more holistic approach, in terms of both timescale and themes assessed, seeks to do just that.

Chronology and Chapters

Given that each chapter explores a different aspect of defence policy under New Labour, it is worth briefly outlining the key milestones in its development, to give some wider shape to the subsequent discussions. 1998 not only saw the production of the SDR, which still provides the general underlying framework for developing defence policy in the UK, but also saw two additional developments that are of particular interest to this volume. Firstly, significantly bolstering Blair’s eventual legacy, was the signing of the Belfast Agreement (known colloquially as the Good Friday Agreement – GFA), which took the peace negotiations in Northern Ireland into a new, and ultimately more successful, phase, providing the structures – an Assembly, cross-community Executive – that would eventually bring some greater degree of stability to the Province, in the unlikely form of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP)’s Dr Ian Paisley as First Minister and Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness as his Deputy. Such internal developments had noted consequences for the conduct and reputation of the British Army, and the impact of this peace process on British defence policy is given due consideration by Trevor C Salmon, an analyst with a long-standing interest in the politics of the Province, with a particular emphasis on what lessons can be learned from the Army’s experience in Northern Ireland for future operations. Secondly, as the year came to an end – on December 3 1998 – the UK and French governments signed an agreement at St Malo that would form the basis for wider European Union (EU) defence co-operation. The agreement called for the development of a Union ‘capacity for autonomous action, backed up by credible military forces, the means to decide to use them and a readiness to do so, in order to respond to international crises’ (Ministry of Defence, 1998b). It has subsequently been subsumed within the formal auspices of the EU, and has led to an array of acronyms – not least the European Rapid Reaction Force (ERRF) – operations and political debates, all of which is supported by its own rapidly expanding literature. One of the leading participants in the UK debate, Alistair JK Shepherd, considers the impact of such European developments, assessing whether a ‘permanent European turn’ has been taken in UK defence policy.

The wider development of EU specific policies and capabilities is only one half of the UK’s wider Atlantic commitment, as was emphasised the following year, when the UK played a leading role in both the conception, execution and presentation of the NATO military campaign to bring an end to ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. A key element of the wider legal and political justification for such an operation, which was undertaken without specific United Nations (UN) approval, was Tony Blair’s speech to the Economic Club of Chicago in 1999 (Blair, 1999). By proposing five ‘tests’ to be considered when assessing the legitimacy of the use of force within the wider international arena, Blair effectively outlined what has become known as the ‘Doctrine of International Community’ (a version of which was subsequently adopted by the UN in 2004 (UN, 2004)). Such an approach, as well as chiming with the earlier overt focus on an ‘ethical dimension’ to foreign policy, also contributed to a wider debate over the necessity and practicalities of over-riding state sovereignty in the name of wider humanitarian concerns, which now centres on the application of the internationally approved ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (R2P) concept. Steven Haines, a leading academic expert and practitioner in such legal debates, places this ‘Doctrine’ under the microscope and provides a critique of its seeming central importance to both national and international debates, particularly in relation to subsequent operations in the Middle East.

The controversial decision to join the US in its determination to permanently remove the threat posed by a Saddam led Iraq possessing Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) was considered to be part of the development of a wider ‘war on terror’ (although the relevance of Iraq to such a ‘war’ has been disputed, with many critics considering Iraq to be effectively a distraction from the main effort, to contain and combat the threat posed by a network of international Islamist terrorist groups, centred around Al Qaeda (see Clarke, 2004; Robinson, 2005b; Woodward, 2007)). The UK’s response to a more prominent terrorist threat, institutionally with the 2002 New Chapter to the SDR and operationally in both Afghanistan and Iraq, is critiqued by this author. The chapter focuses primarily on the deconstruction of the underlying rationales and priorities of the New Chapter and asks what role, if any, the British military can play in combating international terrorism.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq also serves as the apex – and, some would argue, the nadir – of the so-called ‘Special Relationship’ between the US and UK in action (although there were any number of points...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: New Labour and Defence
• 2 Permanent Allies or Friends with Benefits? The Anglo-American Security Relationship
• 3 Blair, Brown and Brussels: The European Turn in British Defence Policy
• 4 ‘A World Full of Terror to the British Mind’: The Blair Doctrine and British Defence Policy
• 5 Britain and the Politics of Counter-Terrorism: The 2002 New Chapter and Beyond
• 6 Securing Stability, Ensuring Change: British Defence Policy in Northern Ireland
• 7 Defence Policy and the ‘Joined Up Government’ Agenda: Defining the Limits of the ‘Comprehensive Approach’
• 8 MoD PLC: New Labour, Managerialism, Marketisation and the Privatisation of British Defence Policy
• 9 New Labour’s Governance of the British Army
• 10 The UK and Nuclear Weapons
• 11 An Instrument of Honour? Britain’s Military Strategy and the Impact of New Technologies
• 12 Striking a Balance? Labour’s Legacy and the Next Chapter of British Defence Policy
• Index