Strength of the UK’s Armed Forces

Chris Clarkson Excerpts

Wednesday 14th April 2021 Commons Chamber

[Chris Clarkson (Heywood and Middleton) (Con)]

Mr Deputy Speaker,

“I hear it a lot on the Tory benches, this idea of a country that ruled the waves. Rule Britannia… I think that’s given way to a nostalgia rooted in the history of the Second World War that somehow says that we’re a small island nation that goes out punching above its weight, without ever really stopping to ask why on earth it is that we’re punching at all.”

Those are the words of the shadow Foreign Secretary, the hon. Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy), praising a pamphlet that called for the abolition of the Army, its replacement with a gender-balanced security force and the abolition of our submarines.

This volte-face to become the tub-thumping, flag-waving party of our armed forces is about as Damascene as a conversion can be. Not all that long ago, Labour Members were abstaining on giving legal protections to our service personnel while on overseas operations—those who did not actively vote against that. So today’s motion again has the whiff of insincerity about it.

I grew up on JHQ—the joint headquarters—in Rheindahlen in the 1980s, and the size of the forces and the nature of military operations then was light years away from where it is now. At the time the Berlin wall was standing, the Soviet Union was the biggest geopolitical threat and in 1983 the film “WarGames” depicted the science fiction scenario of an automated weapons system being hacked for a nuclear strike. Today, China joins Russia as a pre-eminent threat, the longest remaining section of the Berlin wall forms part of the East Side Gallery, several members of the former eastern bloc are now in the EU, and cyber-warfare is conventional.

The simple fact is that the world has changed; the nature of warfare has changed and therefore the way in which we configure our military must inevitably change. We do not have cavalry officers charging into battle on horseback, swords drawn; the needs of the forces today have changed.

What has not changed is the Government’s commitment to ensuring the men and women who keep us safe have the best support in terms of training, equipment and logistics, and it would be breaking faith with them for them to be under-resourced by adhering to a model designed for decades past. But we are going further, because the comprehensive review rightly focuses on the UK military’s single most important asset, its people. We are enshrining the armed forces covenant into law, we are making improvements to the justice system, and we are delivering a pay and career review to ensure military careers are as competitive as those in the private sector.

Labour stood on a hard-left manifesto which would have seen us led by a man who wanted to scrap Trident and leave NATO altogether. Its nationalist neighbours on the Opposition Benches still want to scrap Trident and wanted to tax service personnel more than in any other part of the UK. Our forces deserve our gratitude and our assurance that their Government will work to the geopolitical realities of the day, not the carping rhetoric of a bunch of crypto-Stalinists dragged up as flag-waving patriots in an attempt to hide the fact that they are hopelessly out of touch with the people whose votes they ignored for so long.