G7 Summit

Lord Dobbs Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

The noble Lord is right that sometimes, in looking at strategic and wider issues, we forget the personal. I have no doubt that his wife has found that having family in Lebanon and Ukraine is quite a harrowing experience at times, when you do not know where they are and what is happening. So I imagine there have been some difficult days in his household. In terms of more support, we just have to keep this at the front and foremost of people’s minds: we have to continue being the best friends that we can to Ukraine, as President Zelensky said. My noble friend Lady Chapman, whom I mentioned earlier, recently announced a further £13 million-worth of support for Lebanon, because, unless we actually engage with these countries, in both their fightback and their reconstruction, we will not be able to see them have a viable future. Everything we do should be geared to that aim: not just support now, but looking to the longer-term future of those who live there.

[Lord Dobbs (Con)]

I welcome the words of the Lord Privy Seal about the need to engage all of civil society in the issue of what a dangerous world we live in. How does she reconcile that with the fact that, time after time, the heads of our armed services are saying that our Armed Forces have been cut to the bone and that they simply do not have the resources to deal with the threat against them? Is it not the case that we need to spend more on all types of defence—not just the defence of yesterday, but to fight the battles of today and tomorrow—and, thus far, have this Government not failed in that attempt?

[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

I have to say to the noble Lord that I think he has a short memory. When we look at what happened on defence under the Government whom he supported, the record is very poor. When the last Labour Government left office, we were spending 2.5% of our GDP on defence; that was then cut during the time the Conservatives were in office. We have now got it back up to 2.5%; we said that we would do that by the end of this Parliament, but we have done it sooner. Under the noble Lord’s Government, the Army was cut from 100,000 troops to just 72,000. His Government missed their Army recruitment targets every year for 14 years. We lost a quarter of our frigates and destroyers, we cut the minehunters and we failed to decommission decades-old kit and equipment; nor did his Government do anything to address the conditions that our military families were living in. We have made huge progress on a lot of those issues, particularly on accommodation and on procurement—which, I have to say, was a real mess. So it is a bit rich for the noble Lord to give lectures.

However, that does not mean that we do not have to do more. There are two things, as I said. One is how we provide the money, but the other is how we work with other countries to ensure that we can work together on our procurement and have interoperability between the systems that we use. We need to take this extremely seriously. When the noble Lord says, “You have failed”, he is not recognising the work that we have done to clear up the mess that was left, which we are proud to do. That is not to say that we do not want to do more. The world is a dangerous place, and there are a range of issues. I might suggest that the noble Lord writes a book about this—I feel a novel coming on. In the absence of that, I assure him that this is probably the most serious issue that is at the top of the current Prime Minister’s in-tray, and it will be at the top of the next one’s.