NATO

Bob Stewart Excerpts

Wednesday 20th June 2018 Commons Chamber

[Nia Griffith]

The hon. Gentleman simply needs to look at our record. We consistently spent well over 2% when we were in government. We do have a good record on spending.

I know that there is concern across the House about current levels of defence spending, as the hon. Gentleman has just indicated. The recent findings of the National Audit Office that the equipment plan is simply not affordable, with a funding gap of up to £20.8 billion, will have done nothing to assuage this. As I have said many times, the Government will have support from Labour Members if the modernising defence programme results in proper investment for our defences and our armed forces, but there will be deep disquiet if the review merely results in yet more cuts of the kind that have been briefed in the press in recent months.

The UK’s decision to leave the European Union means that our NATO membership is more important than ever. Although we have always recognised NATO as the sole organisation for the collective defence of Europe, and defence has always been the sovereign responsibility of each EU member state, it is none the less the case that from March 2019 we will lose our voice and our vote in the EU Foreign Affairs Council and in many other important committees. We must therefore look at other ways of co-ordinating action with European partners where it is in our interests to do so—for example, in defending the Iran nuclear deal, which was so painstakingly negotiated and risks beings completely trashed by President Trump.

It is also very important that we retain the position of Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe once we have left the EU and that we resist any attempts to allocate that role to another European state. Ultimately, Labour believes very firmly that Brexit must not be an opportunity for the UK to turn inwards, or to shirk our international obligations.

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

Speaking personally as someone who has worked for the Supreme Allied Commander Europe and been chief of policy at Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, I cannot see in any way how anyone could suggest that the Deputy SACEUR could be anything but British as things stands. It has absolutely nothing to do with the European Union.

[Nia Griffith]

I thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for allowing me to let the hon. Gentleman intervene. We absolutely agree with what he says.

--- Later in debate ---

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

NATO would simply be too slow to defend against a Russian force in somewhere like Estonia or Latvia. The Russians would beat us to the draw. The alliance’s much quoted article 5 is, in fact, a commitment to consult, but not a commitment to act. I wonder how long such a decision might take, and that would be before we deployed one single person, apart from possibly the high readiness force.

Since 2014, NATO has established this very high readiness taskforce, which our 20th Armoured Infantry Brigade currently leads. But I am very suspicious of words in military titles such as “very high readiness”. I reckon that it is a case of wishful thinking. This organisation deploys at the speed of a striking slug. A RAND study in 2016 concluded that the Russians would sweep through the Baltic states within 60 hours, which is about the time that the very high readiness taskforce would be thinking about getting on its transport to go to the Baltics.

It is good that NATO has four multinational battlegroups: in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland. We are the lead nation in Estonia, with a battlegroup headquarters and troops, and we also contribute a company group in Poland. But these forces are a trip wire, like my battalion was in 1970 to 1972 in Berlin, when we were surrounded by the East Germans and the Russians. They are obviously hostages to fortune. An attack on them should trigger NATO action.

I am a big supporter of NATO. It binds 28 states together and gives us common purpose. But in any high intensity war, NATO would have to change hugely. It is not good enough to fight at the moment, and it would have to change very fast indeed if it were actually to do the very dirty business of killing the enemy and winning the war.