Trident: Test Firing

Lord Benyon Excerpts

Monday 23rd January 2017 Commons Chamber

[Sir Michael Fallon]

We had this debate last July, when this House decided by an overwhelming majority to re-endorse the principle of the deterrent and to commit to our plan to build the four new Dreadnought submarines. I have made the Prime Minister’s position extremely clear. She has the responsibility for the nuclear deterrent and she is kept informed as to how that deterrent is maintained, including the successful return of HMS Vengeance to the operational cycle.

[Richard Benyon (Newbury) (Con)]

Like many of my constituents, I live in the shadow of a nuclear weapons facility, and I want to be certain that these weapons, at every stage of their development, are tested to the utmost, even to the point of failure. Will my right hon. Friend confirm that those tests should be secret, and that their not being secret gives aid to only one group of people—that is, those who mean us harm?

Counter-Daesh Quarterly Update

Lord Benyon Excerpts

Tuesday 24th May 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

Order. A further 29 hon. Members are seeking to catch my eye and I am keen to accommodate all of them on this important statement, the timing of which was flagged up last week by the Government, but there are also about 30 people seeking to contribute to the subsequent debate, so pithiness personified is what we require.

[Richard Benyon (Newbury) (Con)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that those who say that we must find some accommodation with Assad because we need to work with him to beat Daesh are missing the point? They need look no further than Darayya on 12 May, where a humanitarian convoy was prevented from entering the town to save the lives of starving children. The brutality of that regime means that we have no chance of working with Assad successfully in the future.

[Michael Fallon]

I agree absolutely with my hon. Friend. The brutality of the Assad regime means that he can play no part in the future of Syria. He and his forces have been using barrel bombs and chlorine, dropping munitions indiscriminately and robbing humanitarian aid convoys of exactly the medicines that the local communities need.

Oral Answers to Questions

Lord Benyon Excerpts

Monday 18th April 2016 Commons Chamber

[Michael Fallon]

I have made it clear that we are waiting to hear from Prime Minister Sarraj and the new Government, who have only been established over the past few days, what kind of assistance they want, whether it be training or other support. On notice to this House, I repeat that there is no plan to deploy British troops in any kind of combat role. If there were a plan to deploy troops in a combat role in a conflict zone anywhere in the world, we would come to the House first.

[Richard Benyon (Newbury) (Con)]

T4. A particularly nasty Daesh force has seized territory at the top of the Bekaa valley in Lebanon. Will my right hon. Friend assure the House that the British Government are doing everything they can to support the Government of Lebanon in tackling this particularly nasty group of people, who are inflicting misery on local people?

Oral Answers to Questions

Lord Benyon Excerpts

Monday 29th February 2016 Commons Chamber

[Michael Fallon]

We have been making our contribution through the United Nations and we are ready to help do more. It is not easy for convoys to get through to some of the very hard-to-reach areas. Last week’s aid drop was not entirely successful; it was dropped from a great height into a high wind, and a number of the pallets did not reach their target. The best way of getting aid in is by land convoys, but that is not easy in some of the particularly hard-to-reach areas.

[Richard Benyon (Newbury) (Con)]

Members of the Defence Committee also visited Jordan and Lebanon, and we were particularly concerned to see that Daesh was threatening the borders of relatively stable countries that Britain has assisted with huge and impressive investment. What more can my right hon. Friend and the Government do to support those countries in dealing with the clear and present danger of this evil organisation?

[Michael Fallon]

My hon. Friend is right to say that Daesh represents a threat to the stability of the entire region, including the neighbours of Iraq and Syria. We have already made a huge contribution towards training the Jordanian forces, and we have more to do. We have recently been playing role in Lebanon, too, in helping its border defences.

Iraq Historic Allegations Team

Lord Benyon Excerpts

Wednesday 27th January 2016 Westminster Hall

[Richard Benyon (Newbury) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the Iraq Historic Allegations Team.

[Albert Owen (in the Chair)]

Because of time factors, if the Member who secured the debate takes 10 minutes, all the seven Back Benchers, including Mr Stewart, who have indicated that they want to speak will have four minutes before I bring in the Scottish National party and Labour party spokespersons for five minutes each, and the Minister will have 10 minutes to respond.

[Richard Benyon]

Thank you, Mr Owen, for overseeing our proceedings today. I am grateful to the Minister for being in her place and to so many colleagues for showing so much interest in this important matter.

I have a view of our armed forces that is similar to my view of other public services. Just as with the NHS and the police, I revere the people who work for those services for being the best at what they do and for showing exceptional courage and professionalism. I also accept that the armed forces, like other public servants, sometimes fail. In wanting them to remain the best armed forces in the world, I want there to be a proper sanctioned system, clearly understood by all ranks, to act as a deterrent against those who might break the rules of law. Here I admit a prejudice. As somebody who has served on operations and saw men under my command have their self-control tested to the extreme, I constantly wonder how young men, often with little education, can show such intelligent restraint at times of great provocation. I am only talking about Northern Ireland.

This year sees the 25th anniversary of the first Gulf war. Hundreds of thousands of young men and women have seen more combat in the quarter century since than in any period since the Korean war. To mark it, Help for Heroes, in conjunction with King’s College London, has produced an in-depth report that shows that roughly between 60,000 and 70,000 regular veterans and around 20,000 reservists will need our support in the coming years as they face the effects of combat. Those are the people I will talk about today and they should be our absolute priority.

I secured this debate because something has happened to some of our veterans in recent years that I think needs the urgent attention of Government. Some call it “lawfare”. It is having a profound effect on the morale of our armed forces and on how we will be able to fight wars in the future.

[Mark Spencer (Sherwood) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that, in the security of this Chamber, it is difficult to second-guess the decision-making processes in the theatre of war, where the environment is entirely different?

[Richard Benyon]

My hon. Friend is right, and I would add that when decisions are taken through judicial process, with the benefit of hindsight, sometimes more than a decade later, it is very hard to try and put oneself in the position of those who are taking the difficult action.

[Nusrat Ghani (Wealden) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree with one of my constituents who explained in an email that the present wars are not the same as wars in the past, where it was obvious who the enemy was and certain standards were adhered to on both sides? We are working in very difficult times at the moment.

[Richard Benyon]

Most of the asymmetric conflicts that we have fought in recent years are extremely difficult. We are fighting an enemy who does not sign up to the Geneva convention and the basic rules of war. I will make suggestions for the Minister that I think might address those concerns. My hon. Friend is, as always, absolutely right.

My hon. Friend the Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Tom Tugendhat) co-wrote a landmark report last year called, “Clearing the Fog of Law”. I recommend it to hon. Members. In it he makes some recommendations that are intellectually researched and will go a long way to address the problem that we discuss today. I am also grateful for any contribution to the debate from my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Victoria Prentis) whose understanding of these issues within the machinery of Government is second to none.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Mid Sussex (Sir Nicholas Soames), who has asked me to say he is sorry he cannot be here as he is in hospital, wrote a powerful article last week in which he described an action in which a sniper shot and killed an insurgent who was about to fire an RPG-7 round towards troops. The shot was made from 1,200 metres—an act of skill that is hard to imagine. However, in absolutist terms, it could be that this fatality was illegal as the sniper did not issue a verbal warning. To give such a warning in a language that an assailant can understand over that distance is clearly a ridiculous concept, even before you try to second-guess the thoughts racing through the sniper’s mind as he balanced the rules of engagement with the safety of his mates. I think he did the right thing. Now we are led to believe that he is being investigated because a firm of lawyers—sitting, no doubt, in the comfort of offices in London or Birmingham—have realised that there is money to be made here. The lawyers have tracked down the deceased’s family, who have no doubt been told of the riches available on a no win, no fee basis or possibly from legal aid. This has to stop.

The Iraq Historic Allegations Team was being set up in the last days of the previous Labour Government. It was put into operation by the coalition Government for a perfectly respectable reason, and no doubt also to offset some of the threats from international judicial processes, to tackle alleged crimes in that conflict.

[Sir Gerald Howarth (Aldershot) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful case. I was an opponent of the International Criminal Court Bill that was proposed by the Labour Government and would have subjected our soldiers to the International Criminal Court. I said at the time that

“we must foresee the possibility of the court saying that this country has been unwilling to take action although we believe that it would be inappropriate for our national courts to do so. In such circumstances we must provide maximum protection to our troops.”—[Official Report, Standing Committee D, 1 May 2001; c. 247-48.]

Is it not the case that the Government introduced this because it feared that otherwise our troops would have been taken to the International Criminal Court?

[Richard Benyon]

I find it depressing that we are talking about this so long after my right hon. Friend made those remarks. It will be interesting to hear from the Minister what advice she has received about the need for the Iraq Historic Allegations Team. Perhaps the debate will be able to draw out some of the reasoning for it.

As we know, IHAT was set up in 2010 by the then Minister, Sir Nick Harvey, who in a written statement said that he expected it to complete its work within two years. In July 2014, the Secretary of State recognised that IHAT’s work was not going to be completed by the end of 2016. He approved additional funding of £24 million to cover the period from the end of 2016 to the end of 2019, which increased the level of funding of IHAT to £57.2 million. I want us to think of 2019 in relation to when some of the instances it is investigating actually took place.

IHAT employs 145 people and is still recruiting. The job specs actually say that contracts are initially short term, but are likely to be extended for significantly longer. The IHAT website gives 2019 as the likely date when it will complete its work. If it was exposing systematic and institutionalised war crimes, I would at least understand why such persistence was a good idea, and feel that the cost to the British taxpayer was justified. Estimates in the press say it costs £5 million a year, but other estimates vary. A look at IHAT’s website shows that 18 investigations have been completed, one of which has resulted in measures being taken against somebody, and a £3,000 fine being awarded. Of the others, 15 cases have been dropped and two cases have been passed to other authorities, but no action has been forthcoming.

By June last year, following a huge increase in IHAT’s caseload, the diagnosis was even worse. It is not necessary to be a mathematician to appreciate that, at this rate, the task of investigating allegations arising from the activities of British armed forces in Iraq will never be fully completed. The Ministry of Defence guide describes what has happened to the 59 allegations of unlawful killing that IHAT has reviewed up to this month: 34 cases have been closed, or are in the process of being closed, with no further disciplinary action; seven are currently subject to further limited, focused lines of inquiry; and 17 are under investigation. Only one of those cases was referred to the Director of Prosecutions, who directed that there should be no prosecution. So, on the face of it, that is not a great record.

At this stage, I want to make it clear that I do not blame the Iraq Historic Allegations Team. It no doubt has worthy detectives sifting the evidence, but after 10 years it is finding two things: evidential trails have run cold; and it is being inundated with claims, many spurious and many the result of the malign actions of lawyers, who see this is a Klondike-style fee-fest or, perhaps, as a way to get at the system that conducted what they believe to be an unjust war. If anyone doubts my last remark, I suggest looking at the interview on YouTube given by Mr Phil Shiner of Public Interest Lawyers to that great beacon of impartiality, Russia Today.

IHAT’s caseload now involves just over 1,500 alleged victims, 1,235 of whom are victims of ill treatment and 280 of unlawful killing. Given that backlog, the burden will hang over the heads of many of our veterans for many more months and probably years. That is utterly intolerable.

All that falls into the concept of what “Clearing the Fog of Law” calls “legal imperialism”. The worst case of such a culture are the allegations that culminated in the al-Sweady inquiry. The allegations surround actions taken during what became known as the battle for Danny Boy, a brutal attack on a checkpoint of that name resulting in a fierce firefight. British troops showed exceptional courage and resolve, and a number were decorated for bravery. The inquiry that followed cost £31 million; the fees were about £5 million. Some mistreatment was discovered, but the allegations of torture, mutilation and murder were baseless and the product, according to the judge, of “deliberate and calculated lies”.

The Government and many others have accused the two firms promoting the cases, Public Interest Lawyers and Leigh Day, of attempting “to traduce” the reputations of the Army units concerned. We have heard that the alleged actions of one of the law firms, Leigh Day, have resulted in referral to the Solicitors Regulation Authority. I hear that Public Interest Lawyers might also be referred to that body.

We could all take up lots of time venting our collective spleen at the behaviour of firms that trawl places such as Basra trying to convince people of the great riches in proving that they were victims of bad behaviour. We could take up much more time asking the shadow Defence Secretary, the hon. Member for Islington South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry), why she and the Labour party thought it right to accept donations or donations in kind from those firms.

[Julian Knight (Solihull) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on his speech. Does it not speak legions that virtually no Labour Member is attending the debate today? What does that show about Labour’s position on the military?

[Richard Benyon]

I share my hon. Friend’s feelings. Rather than spend the time talking about our views of those lawyers, however, which would be self-indulgent, I want to get to the bottom of this concept of legal imperialism.

I am glad that since I requested the debate the Prime Minister has announced that he has asked the National Security Council to produce a comprehensive plan to stamp out the industry. He is looking at banning no win, no fee schemes; he is speeding up the planned legal aid residency test; and he is strengthening penalties against firms that abuse the system, possibly even including suing those who have been found deliberately to withhold facts that could prove the innocence of the servicemen or women concerned.

That is all good stuff, but I want to press the Minister for more information on the timescale for the reforms. I suggest that they can only be seen as work in progress. May I respectfully suggest that the Minister add to the Prime Minister’s wish list the suggestions made in the report by my hon. Friend the Member for Tonbridge and Malling?

In order to draw a line under the situation, for recent and future conflicts the Prime Minister should consider these powerful recommendations. The Government should derogate from the European convention on human rights in respect of future overseas armed conflicts, using the mechanism of article 15 of the convention. The Government should revive the armed forces’ Crown immunity from actions in tort during all future “warlike operations” overseas by ministerial Order under the Crown Proceedings (Armed Forces) Act 1987. The Government should take the lead—this is important—in supporting efforts by the International Committee of the Red Cross to strengthen the Geneva conventions on the conditions of modern warfare, which addresses the point made in an early intervention by my hon. Friend the Member for Wealden (Nusrat Ghani). The Government should make an authoritative pronouncement of state policy, declaring the primacy of the Geneva conventions in governing the conduct of British forces on the battlefield.

[Danny Kinahan (South Antrim) (UUP)]

I am grateful that we are having this debate. Does the hon. Gentleman feel that alongside the conflicts of the past we need to concentrate on the past in Northern Ireland as well? We should also look at a proactive media presence so that we are in front when defending our servicemen, rather than waiting for every case to get to the papers.

[Richard Benyon]

The hon. Gentleman is right. I support the plea by my hon. Friend the Member for Aldershot (Sir Gerald Howarth) that incidents such as that of the arrest of Lance Corporal J of the Paras under caution should cease. Society wants a line drawn under such things. We seem to have moved too far towards favouring the actions of our enemies and we do not seem mindful enough of those to whom we owe a great debt.

The recommendations I have just outlined are clearly set out in the report of my hon. Friend the Member for Tonbridge and Malling. It makes it clear that we are not only talking about alleged victims of war crimes, excessive violence in combat or the mistreatment of prisoners. The definition of “lawfare” extends to the ability of the courts to judge the actions of commanders—decisions often taken in the heat of battle and then judged years later by people for whom such circumstances are alien and with the mantle of hindsight.

I go back to my own experience. I got to know well a 19-year-old soldier who, in a tense situation, shot and killed someone contrary to the so-called “yellow card” rules for opening fire. He was convicted for murder. The case has haunted me for 34 years. My worry is that the legal imperialism we have seen in recent years and the existence of organisations such as IHAT will put a dangerous caution in the minds of the sniper of the future. Rather than taking a life to save many, caution prompted by a fear of legal implications might, to quote my right hon. Friend the Member for Mid Sussex,

“put a splint around his trigger finger”.

The analogy extends into every area of war, involving everyone from the most junior soldier just out of training to the most gnarled veteran of a quarter century of expeditionary warfare. The Apache pilot, the mortar platoon commander and the frontline rifleman all need to be governed by the rule of law—but which law? That is the matter that the Minister and the Government must tackle with haste. However despicable we might think the actions of certain lawyers are, they are only responding to circumstances created by Governments past and present. My argument is that the rules we have created put our servicemen and women in greater danger in future. That cannot be right.

[Albert Owen (in the Chair)]

Given the length of the last speech, the remaining speakers have three minutes each.

--- Later in debate ---

[Richard Benyon]

You are very generous, Mr Owen. I thank hon. Members for taking part in the debate and particularly the Minister, who has proved, as she always does, that she is a very good Minister indeed and has understood the feeling in this place and beyond it—that is what is really important. Can she pick up a point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart) and really communicate to the cohort in our armed forces today that they will get our support throughout the process and ensure that they understand why this has been set up and that we are moving away from allowing this culture to continue?

I will finish by saying to the hon. Member for Dunfermline and West Fife (Douglas Chapman) that this has nothing to do with Europe. I have similar views on Europe to my hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Victoria Prentis). I understand the history of the European Court, its place in our society and the convention on human rights. This is about trying to ensure that we have the best legal vehicle for dealing with these matters.

Oral Answers to Questions

Lord Benyon Excerpts

Monday 23rd November 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Brazier]

As the hon. Gentleman knows, I cannot give him a detailed answer. I can, however, say that the future for Scotland will look even brighter after 3.30 pm. We have just completed, in the past few months, the largest far north exercise in NATO history.

[Richard Benyon (Newbury) (Con)]

3. What contribution the UK is making to international efforts to degrade and defeat ISIL.

[The Secretary of State for Defence (Michael Fallon)]

The United Kingdom is already making a significant contribution to the international counter-ISIL coalition, with strike aircraft, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, and in helping to train Iraqi forces. In addition to the intelligence co-operation and border security support we have offered to France, the House will wish to know that yesterday I authorised the use of RAF Akrotiri as a diversion airfield for French aircraft striking in Syria.

[Richard Benyon]

Many of us, on all sides of the House, will support the Government as they make the intelligent case for extending the air campaign into Syria, and we reject totally the accusation that such a move would be a gesture. Does my right hon. Friend agree that our allies—not us, our allies—have been diminishing ISIL’s command and control, restricting its ability to move en masse, and restricting its ability to take control of more ground? Is it not time to stop subcontracting our security to our friends?

[Michael Fallon]

I agree with my hon. Friend. We should not leave the fight against ISIL to French, American or Australian aircraft. While we are working through the Vienna talks, which aim to help to establish an inclusive transitional government to end the civil war and build more security for the Sunni areas of Syria, that should not either delay or deter us from degrading ISIL in eastern Syria, from where ISIL is directing the war in its region and directly threatening us.

Oral Answers to Questions

Lord Benyon Excerpts

Monday 19th October 2015 Commons Chamber

[Michael Fallon]

There is certainly a cost to military operations, but there is a greater cost in our not dealing with the growth and spread of ISIL across the middle east. We are doing this in response to a request from the democratic, legitimate Government of Iraq to come to their aid. We are also doing it for the greater stability of the region and, ultimately, to keep our own streets safe.

[Richard Benyon (Newbury) (Con)]

It is not a view I hold, but it is at least an entirely rational view, to say that Britain should never get involved in any military operations in the middle east. It is also rational to say that Britain should get involved in military operations across the whole area that our enemy occupies. Surely what is irrational is to do that just for part of it, and to recognise a border that ISIL, in this case, simply does not recognise.

[Michael Fallon]

I agree with my hon. Friend. Not taking action when one has the ability to do so also has consequences. I respect the position of various Members of this House in the previous vote two years ago, but a large number of people have died in Syria at the hands of Assad since this House was asked before to take action to stop him slaughtering his own citizens.

Britain and International Security

Lord Benyon Excerpts

Thursday 2nd July 2015 Commons Chamber

[Michael Fallon]

Absolutely; it is worrying. I will explain exactly what we are doing shortly.

Since September RAF planes, with the agreement of this House, have carried out nearly 1,000 missions in Iraq and 300 strikes against ISIL bases. Last month we sent another 125 troops to train Iraqi forces and help them counter roadside and vehicle-borne bombs. Our surveillance aircraft are already assisting other coalition countries with their operations over Syria, and British forces are helping to train the moderate Syrian opposition. Overall, we now have more than 900 British personnel in the region. Last year we spent £45 million in the fight against ISIL. This financial year we plan to spend at least £75 million[Official Report, 9 July 2015, Vol. 598, c. 1-2MC.].

[Richard Benyon (Newbury) (Con)]

Last year the Defence Committee visited Iraq and Jordan. We were briefed by the King of Jordan about his ambition, shared by other players in the region, for what he called “Arabising” the narrative and taking control of the strategy. How far is that going, and what more can be done to ensure that it is their strategy we are supporting, so that nobody can label us as somehow imposing our views on the region? We are supporting a serious attempt to deal with this cancer of Daesh in the region.

[Michael Fallon]

I discussed exactly that with His Majesty the King of Jordan when he was here last week. I assure my hon. Friend that we are doing everything we can to encourage the region itself to assist the legitimate Government of Iraq. For example, we are taking the lead in the strategic communications group, which is a smaller group of nations helping to battle that ideology. It is a fight in which the region itself must be fully engaged.

Oral Answers to Questions

Lord Benyon Excerpts

Monday 8th June 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

Order. We are deeply obliged to the Secretary of State, but the answer is too long. We have to move on.

[Richard Benyon (Newbury) (Con)]

We are all waiting for the National Security Council risk assessment that the Government are carrying out at the moment. Can my right hon. Friend assure me that there will be an intellectual and coherent thread from that through to the strategic defence and security review, and from that to the comprehensive spending review?

[Michael Fallon]

Yes, I can. The review will be based on the risk assessment that is now being updated from the 2010 assessment. That will take us through the work that is being done under the review, which is being undertaken at the same time as the spending review, so all these things come together in identifying the threats we face and the capabilities we need to address them.

Defence and Security Review (NATO)

Lord Benyon Excerpts

Monday 2nd March 2015 Commons Chamber

[Richard Benyon (Newbury) (Con)]

This has been one of the best debates in which I have taken part during my few years in the House. It is a great pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for North Wiltshire (Mr Gray), a fellow member of the Defence Committee. As he said in his powerful speech, the tone was set by my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart), who produced an outstanding summary of the difficulties that we face. If I could pick just one other speech, it would be that of the hon. Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Ms Stuart), who said things that were so similar to what my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border said to the Conservative dinner in west Berkshire in January that it makes me wonder whether she was there. It was a fantastic speech and I agreed with it.

At the same time as President Putin was exerting his pressure on Crimea, my right hon. Friend the Member for Mid Sussex (Sir Nicholas Soames) gave me the speech that his grandfather had made in the Munich debate in 1938. I urge all Members to read that speech and to take out certain place names and individuals’ names and replace them with more contemporary ones. If they do so, they will see how prescient that 1938 speech was, and how it applies to the crescent of instability that faces us.

My hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border spoke about an arc of instability around the eastern borders of Europe, but I would suggest there is a crescent of instability that starts in Nigeria and goes through the Sahel and the Maghreb. It includes parts of the horn of Africa and east Africa, and, of course, Iran. It then goes through to the tragedy of Syria and Iraq and up to the difficulties we face on Russia’s western border and the threats we have to consider in an article 5 sense in terms of the Baltic states. That is a sobering canvas for us to consider in our debate.

On Ukraine and the Baltic states, in President Putin we have the leader of a powerful nation that has surrendered all pretence of adhering to the concept of rules-based governance. That is profoundly worrying.

I agree with my hon. Friend that the world is in perhaps the most dangerous state it has been in for decades, and it is in that context that we encourage a future Government to look at our defence posture in the years ahead. As my hon. Friend the Member for Broadland (Mr Simpson) said, this process cannot, and should not, be driven through the silo of the MOD and how it is funded. It has to be looked at across whole area of government and beyond—not just in terms of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, our intelligence services and the Department for International Development, but in the context of our alliances, certainly with our most important neighbour, the United States, but also with France, our closest neighbour. I am particularly interested in that alliance. I am not as hopeful about that as I would like to be, but I believe we should be looking at that in the context of the Lancaster House agreement. I have learned profoundly to respect France’s defence forces. I have seen them operating in places like Mali. France has its own economic problems, but I feel there is the makings of a good strategy, as it has a footprint in certain parts of Africa and elsewhere which we should be supportive of, and we have a footprint in certain places, such as the Gulf, where we can take a lead, and together we can work in ways that benefit both of us.

My hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border, the Chairman of the Select Committee, mentioned a point to do with languages, and it is something that I go on about. I strongly believe that we should make that a virtue in the armed forces, particularly among those who want to acquire staff rank and beyond: they should be rewarded if they master a language, whether that is French, Arabic, Russian or something that we feel we may have need of in the future. There has been a lamentable lack of language skills in the past; we seem to have forgotten about that. To the credit of the Foreign Office, it is now trying to encourage our diplomats to speak many more languages, and we should do so among our armed forces as well.

My hon. Friend spoke about the two types of warfare that we face. We will not only face asymmetrical conflicts versus the al-Qaeda franchises that exist around the world—to which I would add extortionist campaigns by terrorist based organisations, perhaps in failed states such as Somalia, and the piracy conflict, which will be ongoing—but face what, for want of a better term, I shall call a conventional threat. My hon. Friend described that threat much more eloquently than I ever could. However, I suggest that there could be a third element, which I would describe, almost oxymoronically, as non-kinetic wars.

On the asymmetric counter-insurgency conflicts, there is great thinking—perhaps in the Government, perhaps in our normal institutions, but also in academia—about how we can fight using smarter, shorter and more intelligent interventions. We are unlikely to go in again in the way we did in recent conflicts. We are unlikely to build another Camp Bastion in the desert and remain there for a decade. We shall need less mass in terms of personnel, and that mass could be proxied to the host nation. The deployments will be shorter, but they will require certain skills that we are very good at delivering, including training, equipping, mentoring and carrying out humanitarian work. They will also involve the intelligent use of special forces and of specific equipment such as drones.

On conventional warfare, I entirely agree with the pervading consensus in the Chamber about the need to respond dramatically in regard to thinking, to equipment and to matériel in the context of an article 5 response. If there is one thing that should keep us awake at night, it is the threat from the extraordinary recent developments on Europe’s eastern border.

Non-kinetic warfare involves carrying out defence activities now so that we do not have to fight wars in the future. It is about looking at countries in which instability could emerge, and about engaging with them across a whole spectrum of activities—not only through the use of military personnel but through diplomacy and intelligence and the use of the private sector, non-governmental organisations and our aid budget—to stabilise them so that they do not descend into the kind of instability that would require us to fight an expensive war in the future. It is with pride that I say that the new 77 Brigade, which is based in my constituency, is starting to develop an interesting new style of combating this kind of threat. It is built on the finest traditions of our armed forces: let us remember the work of T. E. Lawrence and Orde Wingate and how we rebuilt parts of France and Germany after the war.

[Ms Gisela Stuart]

I absolutely agree with the hon. Gentleman, but must not those forces also have a clear sense of what they are fighting for, what they believe in and what they stand for? The new 77 Brigade, which is a great idea, will not be effective if we in this place do not give it a clear sense of why it is carrying out its activities.

[Richard Benyon]

I entirely agree with the hon. Lady.

Non-kinetic warfare also involves thinking about the way in which the great figures of the past behaved. To use modern management-speak, they thought outside the box. Sitting in some techie office in London, there is probably a 20-stone IT expert who knows more about social media than anyone in the armed forces ever will. He will never pass a battle fitness test, but he might be just the person to destroy the kind of social media development that we have seen Daesh operating in parts of the middle east. I really hope that that kind of innovative thinking will be carried forward.

I also hope that we concentrate on the need for intelligence gathering and recognise the lamentable failings of the past 50 years—relating, for example, to the Falklands war, the Arab spring and 9/11. There have been failings in almost every conflict, and it is not just us: let us not forget the Yom Kippur war. None of those attacks was foreseen, and our intelligence forces need to be better equipped and better skilled.

I agree entirely with the figure of 2%, although it is of course a political construct. We could achieve a figure of 2% by having more military bands and spending money in silly ways. Also, 1.9% well spent might be better than 2.1% badly spent. It is a line in the sand, however, and it is one that our friends and our potential enemies will see as vital as we tackle the crescent of instability that surrounds Europe’s southern and eastern borders.