Defence

Alec Shelbrooke Excerpts

Tuesday 24th March 2026 Commons Chamber

[Brian Leishman]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. This will be a tough enough listen for many in the Chamber to hear it just the once—I do not need to do it three times.

In January, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the doomsday clock forward. We are currently sitting at 85 seconds to midnight: the closest the world has ever been to ending. We live in a time of great political turmoil—of that, we are all certain—but the debate about ramping up defence spending, and making cuts to public services to do it, has been going on for decades. The suggestion of reinstating the two-child benefit cap so that we can have more bombs and weapons is against everything that I believe in. We have seen austerity that has created immiseration and poverty up and down the United Kingdom. Then we had a pandemic, with an explosion in wealth inequality. Now, a cost of living crisis has taken hold to the extent that most of the public think it will never end. All of that means deteriorating living standards. The social fabric of our country has been ripped apart—this is life in the world’s sixth-largest economy.

Pursuing economic growth and improving people’s living standards are the right thing to do, but thinking that militarism is the way to achieve that is at best misguided; at worst, it will further jeopardise global security. It also makes little economic sense. Military spending has one of the lowest employment multipliers of all economic categories: it is 70th out of 100 in terms of the employment it generates. Energy, agriculture and food, chemicals, iron and steel, and construction all have far greater employment multipliers than military spending—for example, health is 2.5 times more efficient than military spending for job creation. British military spending supports less than 1% of the UK workforce. So let us not kid each other: it will not be working-class communities who benefit; it will be weapons manufacturers.

Defence is neither a UK-wide industry, nor does it massively help small or medium-sized businesses, as they only secure approximately 5% of all orders. Ministry of Defence figures highlight that defence employment is densely concentrated in specific geographical pockets of the country. Instead of bombs and weapons and talking about a defence dividend, what about what Tony Benn called a “peace dividend”? That is all about making political choices.

[Sir Alec Shelbrooke (Wetherby and Easingwold) (Con)]

Does the hon. Gentleman believe that there is any military threat to this country from abroad?

[Brian Leishman]

Yes, I do. But when I look at the threats that we face in this country, I have an inbox full of constituents who are saying that they have to make the incredible decision of whether to feed their family or put the heating on. That is actually killing people. I appreciate what the right hon. Gentleman said about perceived threats, but those are the actual threats that I am dealing with in my inbox.

As I say, there is a choice. We can build hospitals to save lives and schools to educate our children, and upgrade infrastructure—we all know that local authorities most definitely need that, as they need investment in public services. These are the things that really will improve people’s living standards up and down the United Kingdom.

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[Sir Alec Shelbrooke (Wetherby and Easingwold) (Con)]

It is a bit of a pity, is it not, that we seem not to recognise what is going on today? It would probably help to recognise that defence spending was cut from the end of the cold war to 2022, when the whole NATO alliance suddenly woke up to what the threat had become. One of the best speeches I have heard today—I am sorry to some of my colleagues—was from the hon. Member for Alloa and Grangemouth (Brian Leishman), because he had the honesty to stand up and point out what the choices are. I disagree with him, but he made an honest speech in that if there has to be an increase in defence spending, it has to be funded. I believe that if we want peace, we have to be ready for war. I am afraid that we are now in war, and things have to change.

I was in the United States last week in my role at the NATO Parliamentary Assembly. There are several concerns to bring back from that, not least that the American commitment to NATO is always predicated on saying to other members, “That is why we need you to spend 5%.” That gives it that little bit of wiggle room to say, “Well, if you’re not going to spend that, we can’t defend you any more.” Perhaps even more worryingly—this is where some of the dots need to be connected—one of the think-tanks that we were at made it clear that the Democrats, who will probably take the House in the mid-term elections, will use their leverage to control the amount of money that can go to the White House and the commander-in-chief. He can direct troops, but Congress has to fund that and it will say no. As a consequence, the President will say, “Well, I’ve already got assets and I’ve already got money, so I will use those,” which is to say in Europe. That should bring into sharp focus the threat that the defence of Europe faces.

What we are picking up in many of these debates, as my hon. Friend the Member for South Shropshire (Stuart Anderson) said, is talk about article 3. A lot of people overlooked article 3 for a very long time. Article 5 was never about the United States guaranteeing European security; it was about ensuring that we all acted as one. Article 3, which obviously comes before article 5, says, “You must be able to defend your borders for three weeks.” There are very few European nations that can do that.

I will touch on Security Action for Europe, which I am afraid to say is becoming a single market issue. It is becoming about protecting the borders of the single market, rather than the borders of Europe. We really do have to stand back and say, “Do we think the single market would exist if the borders of Europe did not exist?” We need to wake up and realise what is going on.

In the Czech Republic, we were given the example of a company that makes drones. Some 25% of the materials used to build those drones came from Canada. The AI to run them made up 20% of the spend and came from the USA. Under SAFE, both would be shut out, because those countries are not willing to pay into the budget just to have access, and that will set us back. We should be more concerned about the fact that the NATO industrial base does not have the ability to deliver on what it needs. The Americans themselves had $135 billion of exported arms last year and $160 billion of domestic arms manufacturing last year, and that did not even scratch the surface.

What the Americans are good at, which we have frankly never been able to deliver in this country, is the diversification into small and medium-sized enterprises. It was recognised that the big companies do not have the flexibility to develop at the speed that is needed in a rapidly changing world. We visited a company in Nevada that is making energy-focused weapons—or lasers, as we might call them—that are used to knock incoming ballistic missiles out of the sky.

I have very little time, and I could expand on so many more areas, but I make the point that we cannot fight the last war. We have pretty much used up all our munitions and weaponry in Ukraine, and the Russians know exactly how those weaponry and munitions work and how to defeat them. We cannot just restock what we have used before; we have to be able to develop, and that means that we need to be light on our feet. To be fair, in Bavaria in Germany there are drone factories that not only produce drones, but react quickly to the changes in drone technology.

To be fair to the Minister, he outlined some of the things that need to be developed in the Royal Navy—a service that is close to my heart. There is no doubt that this is about decisions that have been made over a very long period of time. I will gently prod the Minister and say that when we are talking about Royal Navy procurement, I think of the story of the aircraft carriers, which was probably not the greatest moment of the Labour Government—they spent tens of billions extra by changing their mind. We have to be able to adapt quickly.

There is plenty more that I could say, but the war exists today. Talking about what has happened ever since the end of the cold war and trying to place the blame on the last 14 years, on the last 10 years or on what has happened from 1997 onwards is irrelevant; we are at war, and we have to be able to develop. I am afraid that in the current political climate, Europe will have to look after itself.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Judith Cummins)]

With an immediate five-minute time limit, I call Sam Carling.

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[Sam Carling]

The shadow Secretary of State says, “Under successive Governments”—that includes his own, for 14 years. It is not often that I agree with Ministers from the last Government, but the former Defence Secretary was absolutely right. The smallest Army since the Napoleonic era, a record 13,000 complaints about defence housing in a single year, and investment grievously cut under austerity—that is the legacy we are looking at, no matter how much the Opposition want us to forget it.

As was recognised by my hon. Friend the Member for Barrow and Furness (Michelle Scrogham), the shadow Defence Secretary is criticising delays, but he was the Procurement Minister when 47 out of 49 major programmes were not on time or on budget, so we need to take what he says with a little bit of salt.

[Sir Alec Shelbrooke]

The hon. Gentleman is quoting some figures. Does he have the figures for the percentage of GDP spent on defence in 1991 compared with what it was in 2010, and how many troops there were in 1991 compared with how many there were in 2010?

[Sam Carling]

What I am very happy to say about defence spending is that when we last hit 2.5%, it was under a Labour Government. The right hon. Gentleman’s party failed to do so throughout their time in office. Although it has been quite entertaining in some respects watching old marital woes play out on the Opposition Benches today, it sounds like everyone agrees that bad things happened, but the two former partners—the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats—are evidently more interested in taking chunks out of each other than owning up to leaving the mess.

The motion before us today also calls for some of the Government’s legislation to not proceed on the basis that it is “a threat to morale”. The reference to morale is quite interesting, given that satisfaction with life in the services fell from 60% in 2010 to 40% in 2024. When it comes to satisfaction, one key issue is housing, so I welcomed the Labour Government’s decision to insource a huge number of houses that were wrongly privatised by a previous Conservative Government back into our ownership. Some 431 of those houses are in my constituency, and I hope we will be able to radically improve their condition, particularly through the work we have done to make defence housing subject to the decent homes standard at long last, which I welcome.

Unfortunately, we have a Leader of the Opposition who appears able to shoot from the hip without thinking too much about the consequences, and who has now changed to a very unclear position that none of us seems able to grasp. In contrast, this Government have taken the right decisions at the right time.

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[Mr Mark Francois (Rayleigh and Wickford) (Con)]

When I spoke from this Dispatch Box barely a month ago, I had literally just returned, hot foot, from Ukraine. Those who were here that evening might recall that I conveyed to the House a personal warning from the Speaker of the Rada, the Ukrainian Parliament:

“No one knows the Russians better than us. If we fall, you and your friends are next.” —[Official Report, 25 February 2026; Vol. 781, c. 423.]

Not only is that war in Ukraine sadly ongoing—and has been for 12 years, not four years—we now face a very challenging situation because of the two concurrent conflicts in the middle east and Ukraine. Yet again, as we debate defence in this House, the plastic patriots of Reform are absolutely nowhere to be seen.

Tonight’s debate is all the more pressing given the Government’s fundamental failure to display the requisite sense of urgency that is now clearly required. As an example, the Government’s much-vaunted strategic defence review, published last July, states on page 43:

“This Review charts a new era for Defence, restoring the UK’s ability to deter, fight, and win—with allies—against states with advanced military forces by 2035.”

That is nine years from now. Our Chief of the General Staff is on record as saying that he believes we might have to fight Russia by 2027 and the First Sea Lord estimates only a couple of years after that, yet it is the official policy of His Majesty’s Government that we will be prepared to fight a peer enemy almost a decade from now. That has terrible echoes of the so-called 10-year rule of the 1920s, and we all know what happened after that.

The all-party, Labour-led House of Commons Defence Committee, with its excellent Chair the hon. Member for Slough (Mr Dhesi), recently accused the Government of proceeding “at a glacial pace” in improving Britain’s war preparedness. As my hon. Friend the Member for Spelthorne (Lincoln Jopp) reminded us, on 10 March, after a classified briefing, the Committee issued a joint statement and urged hitting 3% on defence spending in this Parliament. That is already Conservative party policy. The matter cropped up yet again at the Liaison Committee yesterday, when the Prime Minister was clearly floundering about the ability of his Government to respond to emerging threats and about why the defence investment plan—the DIP—has still not been published.

Nowhere is the complete lack of strategic thinking from this Government more abundantly clear than in their barmy proposal to spend £35 billion of British taxpayers’ money to lease back the vital strategic outpost of Diego Garcia, which belongs to us in the first place. There is no credible legal threat to the sovereignty of Diego Garcia, and certainly none that would justify the expenditure of that much of taxpayers’ money. Instead, that money should be spent directly on our own defence.

Why do I say that the threat is not credible? First, when we signed up to the International Court of Justice, we specifically included an opt-out for any cases involving current or former Commonwealth countries. Any judgment by the ICJ—even a mandatory one, and we should remember that this one is only advisory—would still not be legally binding on the UK, because of that crystal clear opt-out.

Secondly, the Government attempted to argue that via the International Telecommunications Union, which is a UN agency like the ICJ, we could somehow lose control of our military spectrum. Again, that is absolute nonsense, because article 48 of the ITU treaty, to which we are a co-signatory, states clearly:

“Member states retain their entire freedom with regard to military radio installations.”

Again, that legal threat simply does not exist. Even the Government’s then telecommunications Minister, the hon. Member for Rhondda and Ogmore (Chris Bryant) confirmed that in a written answer to me a year ago on 12 February 2025.

Thirdly, the Government’s last trench, as cited on Second Reading of their Diego Garcia Bill, was the desperate argument that we could somehow lose a case under the UN convention on the law of the sea at the international tribunal for the law of the sea. However, article 298(b) of the UNCLOS treaty, to which we are a co-signatory, states clearly that we have an opt-out in the event of any disputes concerning

“disputes concerning military activities, including military activities by government vessels and aircraft engaged in non-commercial service”.

Quod erat demonstrandum.

We can throw in the Pelindaba treaty on nuclear non-proliferation, which Mauritius has signed and will prevent basing of nuclear weapons on the islands anyway, and, crucially, the 1966 Anglo-American treaty, which means that the United States has a formal written veto over Labour’s deal with Mauritius. The Americans are now almost certain to exercise that veto after we denied them the initial use of the runway, which our Ministers allegedly sought to protect in the first place. Ministers must surely know that the whole benighted deal is as dead as a dodo, and still they cannot bring themselves to admit it. They are totally and utterly in denial over Chagos.

The same obsession with human rights from a Prime Minister who once described himself as a human rights lawyer first and a politician second—he was not kidding there, was he?—has also led to the utterly despicable position of the Government, in their Northern Ireland Troubles Bill, seeking to pursue our veterans through the courts via a process of lawfare and two-tier justice. That is while alleged terrorists, who those veterans were sent to the Province to fight, effectively walk free with letters of comfort in their pockets. Not only is that morally wrong on a whole range of levels, but it has a debilitating effect on recruitment and retention, especially within our own special forces community. That is an area where, even to this day—as I am sure the Minister for the Armed Forces would agree—our nation remains world-class.

Then we come to the delay to the defence investment plan, which is simply unconscionable with not one war under way, but two. When the Government published the strategic defence review last year, they delayed most of the decisions on equipment capabilities to a subsequent defence investment plan, which we were promised would be published in the autumn. We were then faithfully promised it would be published by Christmas, and here we are in late March, all promises broken, and there is still no DIP. Ministers have been claiming for months that they have been working flat-out on this plan. What would have happened if they had not been trying?

The reality is that we still do not have this document, because the Ministry of Defence is totally and utterly at war with His Majesty’s Treasury. That vital intergovernmental relationship has effectively broken down, and the Prime Minister is simply too weak to bang heads together and force the plan to be published.

[Sir Alec Shelbrooke]

Will the shadow Minister give way?

[Mr Francois]

If I may, I will make just one more point and then give way. Moreover, Labour claims repeatedly that it is introducing the largest increase in defence spending since the cold war, but that is simply not true. In the current financial year, it has actually done precisely the opposite. It has introduced a £2.6 billion efficiency savings programme that viciously cuts operational spending across the British armed forces at the Treasury’s behest. That means fewer ships at sea and longer times to regenerate them, as with HMS Dragon; fewer training hours for our pilots; and fewer exercises on Salisbury plain.

So here we are, with two wars under way, and nine months later this completely dysfunctional Cabinet is still unable to publish a forward equipment programme for the British armed forces. Do Labour Members not realise that they can also see this in Moscow, in Beijing and, indeed, in Tehran? If Labour Members believe, as I always have, that the role of the armed forces is to save life by preventing war and by persuading any potential aggressor that they could not succeed were they to attack us or our allies, how in God’s name are we supposed to deter the likes of Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping if we are unable to publish the forward equipment plan for our own armed forces that is now nearly a year overdue? On what planet do Labour MPs think that this is an act of credible and effective deterrence?

To be fair to the Government, they have published something today. Just a few hours ago, they published the defence diplomacy strategy. They have been working flat out on it for months. They have been absolutely knocking themselves out to get that one away. I apologise to the House that I have not had the opportunity to read it yet, but I hope that it contains one very firm recommendation: “If you are going to maintain effective diplomatic relations with your strongest ally, the United States, whatever you do, don’t send to Washington an ambassador who had to resign from the Cabinet not once but twice for effectively being a crook and who has now had to be fired third time around.”