Salisbury Incident

Debate between Andrew Murrison and Leo Docherty

Wednesday 12th September 2018 Commons Chamber

[Leo Docherty]

I am very grateful for my hon. Friend’s contribution. Like him, I have enjoyed travelling in Russia—in Moscow, St Petersburg and many other cities—and I have always been very touched by the Russian people’s hospitality and tremendous sense of pride in the magnificent Russian heritage and culture, which we should all enjoy. He is right that our argument is with the Russian state, not the Russian people.

As I have said, our Prime Minister achieved a tremendous diplomatic coup, but our resolve and response must also be in the conventional sphere. I am very pleased, therefore, that we now contribute some 800 soldiers to the enhanced forward presence—a combined NATO presence in Estonia and other Baltic states and eastern countries. That is a very clear signal that we will commit conventional forces to deter Russian aggression on NATO’s borders.

We must also be aware that our deployment to Estonia and our contribution to the enhanced forward presence contains a lesson, which is that we urgently need to relearn our ability to exercise, deploy and sustain military force at scale. We have not done that since the end of the cold war. We must take note of the fact that, this week, the Russian military is conducting a large-scale military exercise—the Vostok manoeuvres—involving some 300,000 soldiers in eastern Siberia. Our NATO equivalent, which also takes place this month, will involve 40,000 soldiers. We need to relearn those lessons urgently, and I hope they will be incorporated into the modernising defence programme. Simply put, the British Army needs two fully manned, fully equipped divisions that can be deployed at reach and sustained for as long as we need them to complete those sorts of operations.

[Dr Andrew Murrison (South West Wiltshire) (Con)]

I very much support everything my hon. Friend is saying. Does he agree that, in retrospect, it was perhaps a bit premature to abolish, as part of the strategic defence and security review in 2010, the joint chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear regiment, which was created in 1999? He will have noticed members of our armed forces on the streets of Salisbury recently, and if there were incidents of that sort in the future, possibly involving biological or nuclear devices as an alternative to the chemical one that was deployed on this occasion, we might need the kind of expertise that we thought we were growing from the Royal Tank Regiment and the Royal Air Force regiment in 1999.

[Leo Docherty]

I agree entirely. We need to maintain the ability to react to chemical, biological and nuclear warfare, and I hope that lesson will be contained in the findings of the modernising defence programme, which should be announced towards the end of the year.

The approach of achieving peace through strength is something we learned in our historical dealings with Russia; it is not new. Indeed, in 1858, our Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, declared:

“The policy and practice of the Russian Government has always been to push forward its encroachments as far and as fast as the apathy or want of firmness of other Governments will allow them to go, and always to stop and retire whenever it was met by decided resistance.”

Lord Palmerston knew what he was talking about, because at that point he had just concluded, in victorious fashion, the Crimean war with Russia.

I will finish by saying that this decided resistance—this resolve—has been exemplified in a superb fashion by our Prime Minister and our emergency services. I hope and am confident that this resolve throughout our Government, our armed forces and our emergency services will be maintained in our dealings with Russia long into the future.