King’s Speech

Lord Hintze Excerpts

Thursday 21st May 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hintze (Con)]

My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow—and more to the point, to listen to—the noble Lord, Lord McDonald of Salford. Here, I must declare an interest: Salford City, his namesake, is this Monday fighting for promotion from League Two to League One against the wonderful Notts County. Let us hope we win—and I declare an interest in that result.

Let me go back to something more to the point. I welcome the renewed commitments to defence spending and NATO, but we absolutely cannot ignore the recent observations of the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, of “corrosive complacency” in government on defence, and his warning that

“we cannot defend Britain with an ever-expanding welfare budget”.

Politics is about choice and government is about priorities.

The first duty of government is defence of the realm. Before every other programme stands the obligation to keep the nation safe. We are living in a very dangerous world; many Peers have already spoken to that point. The peace dividend that we saw in 1989 has been spent—it is gone. We face a belligerent Russia, an expanding China, instability in the Middle East, a contested Indo-Pacific, cyber attacks, economic coercion and hybrid threats that respect no borders—and we have not even talked about international criminality. In a world such as this, defence is not one departmental claim among many but the foundation on which every other claim rests.

Unfortunately, for too long, successive Governments have treated defence as a residual claimant on the public purse. I am sick and tired of hearing politicians from the other place, and potentially from here, blaming the Treasury. This is nonsense. “Blame yourselves. You are in charge, you have been elected. I am sick of this. You cannot blame the Treasury; that is enough.”

Britain is not a poor country. We are the fifth-largest economy in the world. We have science, innovation, the City, universities, the legal system, Lloyd’s of London, our leading AI practitioners, alliances and the history to be the great power that we are. We are a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, a founder of NATO, Five Eyes, AUKUS, the G7, the G20 and the Commonwealth, and we lead the Joint Expeditionary Force. We are a nuclear power. Please, let us just get a grip here.

Britain is in fact a great power, and we have obligations. But greatness is not an inheritance; it must be nurtured. We comfort ourselves with talk of soft power. Enough of this. Soft power without hard power is no power at all. We are not the Vatican, in case anybody has missed the point. We cannot simply will stability, deterrence, freedom of navigation and support for our allies while failing to train people and to provide the ships, aircraft, munitions, and the industrial capacity and resilience to fight and win.

This is a question of priorities. The state has the obligation to protect the vulnerable, undoubtedly, but we cannot become a transfer economy in which welfare drifts from a safety net—an important safety net—into a very unpleasant way of life. It is unfair to working people, it is corrosive to society and it is divisive. Everyone wants to blame every other party around here—“Look at these guys, look at those guys”—but the corrosion starts from within.

Let me give one illustration: the Motability scheme. For many, it is a vital and good scheme, but its scale and scope have ballooned beyond being a true safety net for the vulnerable. The latest figures show there are 875,000 vehicles on the road. At roughly £25,000 per vehicle, this is £21.9 billion of national resource deployed. Using Babcock numbers of £250 million to build a core Type 31 frigate, that sum is equivalent to over 87 frigates. So, when we ask, “Where are our frigates?”, we can see where they are—they are travelling around our roads.

This is a choice that we have made to expand entitlements at the expense of the safety of the nation. We need a new settlement and we need some backbone. The question is not whether Britain can afford to remain a great power—we can and we are; the question is whether we choose to be. With that, I end with my previous question: where are our frigates? They are in the priorities that we and prior Governments have chosen, and, frankly, it is time to choose again.