National Security and Defence

Dennis Skinner Excerpts

Monday 23rd November 2015 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I can absolutely give my hon. Friend that assurance. I found reducing the size of our Army to 82,000 the most painful part of the defence review in the last Parliament. That is why it did not go ahead to begin with; I wanted to find every way to try to and avoid it, so I can give my hon. Friend the assurance that it is not going below 82,000. One of the interesting things about this report is that, because of the way we are changing how the Army works, we would have the ability if necessary—I hope it will not be—to deploy an entire division of our armed services in one go. That is a higher number—50,000—than the 30,000 envisaged at the last SDSR.

[Mr Dennis Skinner (Bolsover) (Lab)]

Like many Prime Ministers before him, this Prime Minister is already talking about a decision that he is going to put before the House to wage war in Syria. Has he got an exit strategy? Nobody else has ever had one.

[The Prime Minister]

The exit strategy is a Government in Syria who represent all its people. I would just make the point that when I first became Prime Minister we were nine years into an Afghanistan deployment, and I delivered that exit strategy by setting a time and a date by which our combat troops should leave that country and by which we should be training up the Afghans to take over. So yes, there must always be an exit strategy, and there will be a very clear one for this.