On Monday Gordon Brown announced the creation of a National Security Forum. The forum, which will be supported by the National Security Secretariat, is made up of twelve individuals and what a super list it is:
Professor Michael Clarke CBE; Ex Deputy Assistant Commissioner Peter Clarke CBE; Sir Ronnie Flanagan GBE; Professor Julia King CBE; Sir David Manning KCMG; Sir David Pepper KCMG; Sir Michael Rake, Professor Ziauddin Sardar; Professor Amartya Sen; General Sir Rupert Smith KCB, DSO, OBE, QGM and Dame Juliet Wheldon DCB, QC
It must have been a real coup to get Amartya Sen to agree to sit on the forum. Likewise Peter Clarke and Sir Ronnie Flanagan between them have years of experience in policing and CT. Julia King , the materials engineer is a brilliant choice as is Juliet Wheldon QC, Chair of the Human Rights Lawyers’ Association. For a dissenting voice I don’t think you could have chosen anyone better than Ziauddin Sardar . Michael Rake may be the token industrialist (although Juliet Wheldon worked at Rolls Royce) but he also sits on a number of academic boards – notably The School of Oriental and African, the Judge Institute at the University of Cambridge , Chatham House and the Oxford University Centre for Corporate Reputation . These links will be very useful when the NSF looks to identify a further 100 or so specialists. Sir David Manning was our man in Washington and recently (I gather) advised Brown and his team on relations with the new US administration. Sir David Pepper was Director General of GCHQ and will be, I assume, making sure cyber security is taken more seriously in HMG and is made one, of a number of number one, priorities . General Sir Rupert Smith – experience in UN and NATO and author of ‘war among the people’ – who else would you want to discuss the most pressing issues of defence? (It will be interesting to know how he and Lord West get on in the coming months).
But – and it’s a pretty big but – what is the national security forum going to do that couldn’t be done by the system already? If I were a betting man I would suggest that a number of these men and women are currently advising HMG – so why the need to bring them all together under one Lord?And if the forum is meant to be a visible challenge function (as has been suggested) why not make it’s minutes etc public? Why go to all the bother of creating a national security forum if we never hear about its work again?
I would also hazard a guess that the brace of Sir Davids, plus Sir Ronnie and Peter Clarke are all HMG pass holders and DV’d as well – which on the plus side means they can see classified intelligence but on the downside may mean they are too close to the machinations of Government to provide a broader/ independent perspective. This is why I wonder if the NSF is really an admission of failure by the Government that it’s own processes and structures don’t work – and instead of tackling the systemic issues inside HMG it has created an external body to challenge ideas and assumptions outside. I raise this point now as I am wondering whether it is of value – financially speaking – to make the NSF an NDPB in 2010 – when these men and women are already working with and sometimes for the British Government (I don’t believe the new team which will come into force in 24 months will be very different to those involved now).
Finally, Spy Blog make a good point when they ask why there is no pandemic disease, biotech or financial market, or cyber security expertise in the forum. If the NSF is there to provide advice it would seem sensible to have such experts on future risks involved…
