Defence Readiness

Alec Shelbrooke Excerpts

Wednesday 20th May 2026 Commons Chamber

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

It is a real pleasure to follow the hon. and gallant Member for Southend East and Rochford (Mr Alaba). He made some very important points about being prepared and the importance of the reserve.

I want to focus on the actual threats to this country as we stand here today. To a certain extent, the threats we face on a day-to-day basis get overlooked. A lot of people think a Russian invasion of the country would see missiles and bombs coming down, but there is a long, long way to go before we get to that sort of war. In fact, in many ways, we are already at war with Russia. Let us not forget that in 2017 Russia launched a chemical weapon attack in this country. If it had not been for favourable weather conditions, it could have killed thousands of people. In such circumstances, would article 5 have been triggered? In conversations I have had in the NATO Parliamentary Assembly at the North Atlantic Council, the general thought is that it would have been triggered. Whether accidental or not, a chemical weapon attack using one of the deadliest chemical weapons in the world was launched in this country.

Let me outline what the wrapper of hybrid warfare includes. Yes, there are cyber-attacks, which I will come back to. We also see sabotage across Europe, as well as arson, vandalism and terrorism. The destructive acts that we see on railway networks throughout Europe are almost certainly coming from the Russians. The chemical weapons attack I mentioned is not the only example of an assassination attempt on our soil. We know that malign finance, despite Governments’ praiseworthy efforts to crack down it, also takes place.

One thing that people perhaps do not realise takes place daily is information manipulation, or cognitive warfare. The Russians are brilliant at it and are well embedded in it, as are the Chinese. We have all described people who go down the rabbit holes of social media and the internet, but that is where it starts. They are monitoring people’s clicks. They are monitoring what you look at first of all. They are building a psychological profile of what you are, and then they identify your psychological vulnerabilities. They then feed that line. Why? Because they are trying to get this country, among lots of other countries, not to see the need to invest in defence.

I am sure that most Members will have first-hand experience of people saying to them that the war in Ukraine is NATO’s fault and Ukraine’s fault; that they represented a threat to Russia and Russia had no choice. Let me remind the House and the wider public that the only threat Russia felt was when the people of Ukraine said, in the purple revolution of February 2014, “We don’t want a dictatorial president,” and booted him out. They said, “We don’t want to look to Moscow; we want to look to Europe, because that is where they have the freedom of choice that we want to have.” That is what Russia saw as a threat. It could not let that happen and immediately invaded Crimea. It is to the shame of all of us that that was not taken as a warning at the time.

I am once again very pleased that my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Sir Julian Lewis) spoke before me, because he brings such experience to these issues. He spoke widely on that issue at the time. He makes the point that the money we were spending in the ’80s involved huge figures. That is the point we have to get back to.

We must get the public to recognise the threats that we are under. Today Marks & Spencer announced a £131 million loss from the cyber-attack it suffered. People saw empty shelves at Marks & Spencer, so they went to Sainsbury’s or Morrisons, but they did not see that a cyber-attack had emptied those shelves. They do not see that a software upgrade mistake can knock out the NHS for 24 hours, as happened a couple of years ago. That is what these threats represent.

Probably the most unpopular thing we can say to the public is that we must cut the budgets for other things to pay for defence. But the services that people want their money spent on will be gone if we do not pay for defence. They will not work. The biggest threat in the first 24 hours of any attack would be the knocking out of the power grid. Cyber-technology is embedded in a lot of areas, and we have to make sure that we can deal with that threat. Cyber-warfare has to have a whole-of-society approach to it. Governments cannot tackle it all on their own; they need companies such as Jaguar Land Rover and Co-op to protect those areas. It is going to cost an enormous amount of money but—in the old and well used phrase—the best way to have peace is to prepare for war. There are credible threats, so we have to spend huge amounts of money.

To deviate slightly from our policy, I think GDP percentages are a nonsense. It was ridiculous when NATO went there. We talk about what we were spending in the ’80s, but let me remind Members that the 2% of GDP came about in this century. The GDP figures of the past were what it cost. I urge the Government to look carefully at our proposals on reducing the welfare bill. Look at what Lord Robertson said about the welfare bill. The threats are real. We must have the deterrents in place so that an attack is not worthwhile, but the cost is an enormous amount of money, and the cognitive warfare that is taking place is making our citizens not recognise why we need to spend it. It will be a brave decision by the Government to spend that money, but as we have made clear, we would support them in it.

[Several hon. Members rose—]