Future Capability of the Armed Forces

Baroness Stuart of Edgbaston Excerpts

Thursday 16th July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stuart of Edgbaston (CB)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Harlech, on initiating this debate. I apologise for starting with something that he might feel he left out, because I am inviting this House to remember 1968. Quite a number of us will remember it, but I am not sure how many noble Lords will remember where they were on 21 August 1968 and how they felt that day. I do remember. I lived in a small Bavarian village, about 80 miles from the Czech border. The Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries started to invade Czechoslovakia, and the tanks started rolling. We did not know if the tanks would stop at the border, but we listened to the World Service as the one reliable source of information. We did not need to be persuaded that defence was important or that there were bad actors out there, or that at some stage people would have to give their lives to defend our values and what we stood for.

Today we are discussing the future capability of the Armed Forces against a slightly different backdrop. We should remember that the Armed Forces do not exist in a vacuum. They are part of a whole society and need its support, because true resilience requires a complete approach from every sector. It also means that if you spend more money on defence, then you forgo spending on other things. Military capability requires an underpinning of soldiers and the right equipment, and I am sorry to disappoint the noble Lord, Lord West, because I am not asking for more ships, even though I am an Honorary Captain in the Royal Navy. However, maritime resilience is also important.

I am glad that, if the papers are to be believed, we are starting a national resilience campaign and that later this year the Government will hold the largest national home defence exercise since the Cold War. There will be new guidance for schools and colleges to teach children how to stay safe in emergencies. As an aside, after we knew that the tanks had stopped rolling at the Czech border, in those days, between finishing O-levels and getting the results, you did training on what to do in the case of nuclear attack or how to administer first aid, and general resilience training. That taught me that this does not require a single conversation. We have been promised a national conversation. It cannot be a one-off exercise because the public conversation has to be ongoing.

I also urge that we stop assessing risk, based what we think we can afford. It has to start with what the real risk is. Unless we have defined our national values and can protect them, we cannot defend or protect our national interests. We need to ask where our food, energy and medicine come from. I am very taken by the suggestion from the noble Lord, Lord Forbes, of pulling all this together.

The threats are real, not imaginary, and they are here now. We said we were going to be war-ready by 2029, but we have not explained to the public in a way they can fully engage with why we need to be war-ready by 2029. I am therefore asking the Minister for a long-term strategic plan on how we will engage with the public on an ongoing basis. Because we are an island, that kind of threat sometimes seems remote. We seem to think that bad things happen only to other people and somehow it will pass us by. We do not have that guarantee. We need public support for the Armed Forces and to be prepared to forgo spending on some things which we value, but we need to value defence even more.