Oral Answers to Questions
Adam Afriyie Excerpts(4 years, 8 months ago)
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Johnny Mercer
There is a range of help available, particularly for our service families. I am aware that a lot of the debate at the moment is about veterans, but our service families absolutely are on that level; indeed, the armed forces covenant talks about this nation’s debt to her armed forces and their families. The armed forces breakfast clubs are a fantastic idea. I went to the one in Plymouth a week ago, and I commend them for their work. There are lots of organisations out there in different parts of the country; the Office for Veterans’ Affairs brings them all together so veterans know where they and their families can turn at a time of need.
Adam Afriyie (Windsor) (Con)
The Minister for the Armed Forces (James Heappey)
The armed forces offer an exciting and fulfilling career, including to people from disadvantaged backgrounds and to young offenders who have completed their sentences. Outreach and engagement programmes include initiatives with young offender institutions to develop confidence and aspiration; the expansion of the combined cadet force, focusing on state schools; and enabling service personnel to volunteer with the Prince’s Trust to work with the most disadvantaged in our society.
Adam Afriyie
The Army’s youth rehabilitation programme does good work in the Windsor constituency and across the country. Sadly, however, it is sometimes unable to help recently released offenders due to the lengthy rehabilitation periods imposed. It would be great to see many more young people who would benefit the most from military youth engagement take part, so may I ask the Minister gently whether he will look again at reviewing the current policy?
James Heappey
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for raising this excellent programme that the Army offers. While on licence, offenders remain subject to automatic custody recall for failing to meet licence conditions or committing any arrestable offence and therefore cannot be recruited, as I am sure he appreciates. However, he asks me about a fantastic thing. The Army, Navy and Air Force are brilliant vehicles for social mobility, and I am sure we would be keen to expand that programme in any way we can.
Oral Answers to Questions
Adam Afriyie Excerpts(4 years, 9 months ago)
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Adam Afriyie (Windsor) (Con)
Tom Randall (Gedling) (Con)
The Secretary of State for Defence (Mr Ben Wallace)
My thoughts are with the injured victims of the Streatham attack and their families, and I express my sympathy and support on the Government’s behalf. I also pay tribute to the brave police officers who so speedily confronted and dealt with the attacker and to the other emergency services who assisted the victims and others.
We owe a huge debt of gratitude to our armed forces, who perform exceptional feats to protect this country in incredibly difficult circumstances. While our servicemen and women are rightly held to the highest standards of behaviour, we must ensure that the law is applied consistently, promptly and fairly.
Adam Afriyie
With Combermere barracks and Victoria barracks in the Windsor constituency, we are proud to be home to the Irish Guards, the Welsh Guards and the Household Cavalry. Following their many years of service to our nation, I want them to feel safe and secure in the knowledge that they will not be hounded and harassed by vexatious litigation for decades to come. How soon will our veterans be able to stand at ease?
Mr Wallace
As Her Majesty said in the Gracious Speech, the Government will shortly introduce a legislative package to ensure that our service personnel and veterans have access to the legal protections they deserve. That will build on the consultation held last summer on proposed legal protections and measures for armed forces personnel and veterans who have served in operations outside the UK. We expect those measures to be brought forward soon.
Defence and Security Review (NATO)
Adam Afriyie Excerpts(9 years, 8 months ago)
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Caroline Dinenage (Gosport) (Con)
It is a great pleasure to take part in this debate, not because I am a member of the Defence Committee or a former Defence Minister, but because I represent an area, Gosport, with such a proud military heritage. As far back as the Crimean war and beyond, my constituency supplied the Navy with explosives, fuel, food, equipment and people. Indeed, sailors injured in Crimea were attended to at the Haslar hospital, while others returning to Gosport from the campaign formed the naval lads brigade, which is today known as the sea cadets, to help orphans created by the conflict. Now, 160 years later, my constituents and our neighbours in Portsmouth harbour are still proudly serving our armed forces and once again find themselves concerned by events in Crimea.
As the excellent Defence Committee report sets out, the Russian invasion of Crimea and eastern Ukraine has created the need for a fundamental shift in calculations about European security. I fully support the recommendations regarding improvements to NATO’s rapid reaction force and the need to undertake large-scale military exercises, and I of course welcome the recommendations regarding preparations to defend the Baltic states from what they refer to as ambiguous warfare.
It will come as no surprise that I want to focus on the Prime Minister’s NATO commitment to spend 2% of our GDP on defence. Why does it matter? Quite simply, it matters because failing to hit the 2% target would degrade our armed forces, damage our standing with our allies and hit our credibility as a major player in NATO and on the world stage. Above all, it would clearly limit the ability of our armed forces to project and protect our interests around the world. As Professor Michael Clarke of the Royal United Services Institute says, it would have an obvious and overwhelming impact on the kind of military we can afford.
We already do not have enough combat aircraft, and yet, given existing spending commitments and the necessary replacement of Trident, there would probably be a fall in the overall number of combat aircraft for the RAF and the Navy. The Navy now has just 18 major warships and it may struggle to order the 12 or 13 new Type 26 frigates it had planned. The Minister will say that our naval ships are now better equipped and more advanced than ever before, but they still have not mastered the objective of being in more than one place at the same time.
The proud military heritage of my area on the south coast has sadly already suffered job losses as a result of BAE’s decision to terminate ship building at Portsmouth, and further jobs are now threatened by the early withdrawal of the Lynx helicopters, because Vector Aerospace, which maintains and repairs them, is the largest employer in my constituency. Further cuts to the armed forces could have a devastating impact on communities on the south cost.
The impact of failing to meet the 2% target goes far beyond the denuding effect it would have on our armed forces and the communities that support them. As the Government acknowledge in their response to the Committee’s report,
“the proportion of GDP devoted to defence is an important indicator of how seriously members view collective security.”
The 2% is not just about the additional troops, tanks, fighters and frigates that it will secure; it is a symbol, both to our allies and to our enemies.
Adam Afriyie (Windsor) (Con)
My constituency, like that of my hon. Friend, has a strong military history. Does she agree that one of the great insights in the report is that this is not only about the percentage of defence spending, but about the allocation of spending in a world where high technology and asymmetric techniques are used in modern warfare?
Caroline Dinenage
As the Chairman of the Defence Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart), has already pointed out, we face a more uncertain world than ever. The 2% level not only secures the right equipment, but is a sign of our willingness to back up our words with action. If we fail to meet the target, our credibility as a major player on the international stage is in question.
Teddy Roosevelt famously described his foreign policy by saying:
“Speak softly and carry a big stick.”
At the summit in Wales, we explicitly encouraged other nations to aim to spend 2% of their GDP on defence. If we fail to meet the 2% target, having stated our intention to do so and encouraged our allies to follow suit, we run the risk of shouting our heads off very loudly while brandishing a very unimpressive stick. There would be other repercussions. We are the lead military power in NATO Europe, so if we fail to meet the 2% target, other European NATO countries will follow our lead and cut back their own defences. Why should they invest when we are cutting back? It would also damage our reputation with one of the few other countries currently hitting the 2% target, the USA. As we have heard today, the head of the US army has said he is “very concerned” about the potential failure to meet the 2% target. Further cuts to our armed forces will undermine our credibility as an effective partner and ally.
Such a move would not go unnoticed elsewhere. All the strategies to protect the Baltic states will be meaningless —crucially, they will be seen to be meaningless by potential adversaries—if they are not properly financed. Russia’s defence spending has increased by an average of 10% a year since the invasion of Georgia in 2008. When we need to show strength to deter aggression, we cannot afford to cut back our military capability.
It is important to have both clarity and candour in this debate. There are those who believe that we no longer have a significant role to play in the world, and consequently that spending on defence is not a priority. I think that the nature of the threats we face from an aggressive Russian dictator who rips up the international rulebook, as well as those from ISIS and other terrorist organisations, means that now would be the worst possible time to cut defence.
There is at least a flawed logic to arguing that if we do not want to be a major player on the world stage, we do not need strong armed forces. What we absolutely must not do is kid ourselves that we can deprive our armed forces of the resources they need, but still hope to retain the same level of influence and security. We need an open and honest debate about what we want the armed forces to deliver and what we want their future to be. If our ambitions are smaller, then we need to come clean and say how many thousands of troops we are prepared to lose, how many frigates we are ready to scrap and how many job losses we will take. The worst thing we could possibly do would be to end up with armed forces that are shrunken and deprived of the resources they need but which that still expected to operate at exactly the same level.
I do not believe that we should retreat from the world. We are the fastest growing economy in the developed world, with a seat on the UN Security Council, one of the most extensive diplomatic networks and the best trained armed forces on the planet. We have consistently stood up for human rights, democracy and the rule of law, and the world would be worse off were we to shrink from that role. More importantly, I do not believe that we can retreat from the world. We cannot opt out of the threats posed by Russia, ISIS and others. Putin wants to take Europe back to the 19th century and the days of spheres of influence, and ISIS wants to burn western civilisation in the fires of an Islamist caliphate. Spending 2% of our GDP on defence is not a vanity; in a world that has not felt more unstable in my lifetime, it is the best way to preserve the peace and stability that our fathers and grandfathers fought so hard and sacrificed so much to achieve.
Nuclear Deterrent
Adam Afriyie Excerpts(11 years, 10 months ago)
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Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab)
There are two mindsets in this debate: there are those on the other side who are locked in the permafrost of the fear of cold war thinking and there are those who have hope for a better and safer world.
The hon. Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis) mentioned the 1980s. I vividly recall what the historian E. P. Thompson said at that dangerous time, when the world had enough nuclear weapons to kill humanity 57 times over and we were in deadly peril because the geriatric fingers on the nuclear buttons belonged to Andropov, who was on a life support machine and virtually dead from the neck down, and to President Reagan, who was dead from the neck up.
The likelihood of a nuclear war does not come from design, plans or escalation but from accidents. What the hon. Member for New Forest East, who introduced the debate, is arguing—there is no denying it—is for every country in the world to have its own nuclear insurance and nuclear weapons of mass destruction.
Things are changing. George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, William Perry and Sam Nunn, the four titans of American foreign policy, have all called for a world free of nuclear weapons and so has their splendid President. That gives a new momentum to the idea and hope that have become the centre of the policy debate—“They are the past and we are the future on this.”
Like my right hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham, Deptford (Dame Joan Ruddock), I have repeatedly asked for anyone to give a plausible future scenario in which nuclear weapons could be used independently by the United Kingdom. There is no such scenario. We are carrying on being comfortable with the policies of the past. We should go back to the vision of previous Governments. In 1968, a UK Foreign Affairs Minister urged the United Nations to sign up to the newly negotiated non-proliferation treaty. He promised United Kingdom support and added:
“It will, therefore, be essential to follow the treaty up quickly with further disarmament measures”.
That was 45 years ago. There was a clear vision and hope of declining stocks of nuclear weapons throughout the world.
The continued possession of nuclear weapons of mass destruction has a pernicious effect on our economy, with resources that could have been invested in research for the NHS, in education or improving our environment being squandered on high-tech killing machines.
Coming into the House today, I met a former Member—a distinguished Committee Chairman who stood down at the last election—and told him what we were doing today. He said, “That was the most difficult decision. I needed a Whip behind me with an arm lock to get me into the Lobby to vote for Trident”, and the Whip had told him beforehand, “I don’t believe in it either.” Ministers give the party line and the deterrence fiction when they are at the Dispatch Box, but we see a remarkable turnaround when they stand down and have an epiphany. Last Friday, Michael Portillo said that Trident was
“completely past its sell-by date”,
and added:
“It is neither independent, nor is it any kind of deterrent because we face enemies like the Taliban and al-Qaeda, who cannot be deterred by nuclear weapons...I reached the view after I was defence secretary.”
So we have nonsense when they are in power, when they can do something, and the truth comes out with their realisation afterwards. Why is good sense invisible to politicians in office but monumentally obvious outside office?
However, there is a glimmer of hope. Even our own Prime Minister is perhaps approaching a moment when he will change. Last October, he said that
“if we are to have a nuclear deterrent, it makes sense to ensure we have something that is credible and believable”.—[Official Report, 17 October 2012; Vol. 551, c. 319.]
Trident is neither credible nor believable. It undermines our credentials on non-proliferation, which is the best hope for a safe future. Its replacement should be cancelled, and then we could use the existing stocks of weapons of mass destruction—
Adam Afriyie (Windsor) (Con)
We should be proud of our role in the non-proliferation treaty and the fact that the nuclear deterrent has helped us to avoid wars in the past and is an insurance policy for the future. The hon. Gentleman seems to be arguing for unilateral disarmament. In that scenario, which other country would disarm because we had disarmed?
Paul Flynn
I am not arguing for unilateral disarmament because it is not a practical possibility; I do not believe that it is attainable. When the hon. Gentleman intervened I was about to say that we can use the weapons we have as part of our bargaining to achieve disarmament and to make the nuclear non-proliferation treaty a practical one. How can we say to other countries, “You can’t have nuclear weapons but we’re insisting on ours”? That way forward will not be possible.
The problem is the return of the mindset that our country is somehow very special. We are going back to the 19th-century view when we had an empire, insisting that we are powerful and determine world peace. That is a very damaging view. We saw it this week in relation to the fact that we have to join almost every war that comes along. It was said here on Monday that by joining the war in the state of Mali, even if there is no mission creep we have already exposed ourselves to the possibility of terrorist attacks. That was pooh-poohed by Ministers, but the attack has happened, a life has been lost, and others are under threat. That is the position we are in.
To some, Trident is a virility status symbol; to others, it is a comfort blanket. The Foreign Secretary of the moment will often say that we have to have it because the UK must punch above its weight. Punching above our weight means spending beyond our interests and dying beyond our responsibilities.