UK Defence Forces

Lord Davies of Stamford Excerpts

Thursday 23rd November 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Davies of Stamford (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Soley for this pertinent and important debate and congratulate him on his excellent speech.

The record of this Government on discharging their responsibility for national defence is truly awful. In the 2010 Parliament, they cut a number of essential defence capabilities, including long-range maritime surveillance, as has already been mentioned. The worst thing they did was to cut the Army. As they knew perfectly well, that has a gearing effect; whereas for years we were able to successfully deploy 9,000 men and women in Afghanistan, now we can only deploy perhaps 3,000 on a permanent, long-term basis. That is a puny number for a country that considers itself a serious military player, important ally and permanent member of the UN Security Council.

On top of all that, we now face the prospect of getting rid of our amphibious capability—HMS “Albion” and “Bulwark”; not replacing HMS “Ocean”—and, quite extraordinarily and horrifyingly, 1,000 of our very brave and professional Royal Marines. I find that almost unbelievable; it is an absolutely crazy solution to the problems of the modern world. Our amphibious capability is essential to our ability to deploy in parts of the world where crises and threats arise in unexpected ways. We cannot predict them in advance; in most of the crises we have had to cope with, our interventions and operations were caused by events that were unpredictable only a few years, or even months, before.

So, that decision is quite extraordinary; it can have only three effects, as I see it. One is to greatly encourage our potential enemies, who want to take risks with world peace. If other countries follow our example, that will happen even more.

The second effect of that would be to discourage our allies—we already hear the sadness expressed by the Americans at prospective cuts. The third point, which has not really been made today, is that it will discourage recruits. We have always managed to recruit the best and the brightest into the British military—thank God we have; we have really depended on them and they never let us down—but the best and the brightest do not join organisations subject to constant cuts. How could you possibly want to start a career in any organisation where, every year or two, the Government will come back for more cuts? This is a very worrying situation. I do not think that the Government care about it at all. They say that they are under financial constraints. They are happy to spend money on hiring thousands of new civil servants. The other day, I saw that they were about to hire 2,500 new customs officers. That is nothing to do with the referendum, by the way—the referendum did not deal with whether we should stay in the EU customs zone; this is an entirely gratuitous obsession of the Government. They are perfectly happy to hire far more customs officers, yet they are ready to release and make redundant excellent marines. It is quite an extraordinary order of priorities and a frightening, perverse and bizarre set of values. It was enormously eloquent that defence was not mentioned even once in yesterday’s Budget presentation. What a sad situation we find ourselves in.

I want to ask two important questions. I hope that, this time, I get answers from the noble Earl, because I am not very successful at doing so when I ask him questions in debates. The answers will clarify a number of doubts that many people in this country have. First, is it correct that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office is to receive compensation from the Treasury for the impact on its expenditure of the devaluation of sterling, although the MoD will not? Secondly, a rumour is going around—by raising it, I think I am doing a good service to everybody because if it is not true it will be of great service to the individual concerned that it has been formally denied on the record— that, alone among Ministers with major spending responsibilities, the new Secretary of State for Defence did not ask the Chancellor for a private interview in the weeks leading up to the Budget yesterday? I hope that it is untrue, but it is important that we should dispose of this potentially damaging rumour by getting a clear answer to that question.