Defence Spending

Earl Attlee Excerpts

Thursday 31st October 2024 Grand Committee

[Earl Attlee (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Trenchard for introducing this debate. The noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, said that our Armed Forces were the finest in the world. I have to say that I am not absolutely convinced about that, and my noble friend Lady Buscombe outlined some of the problems. My noble friend Lord Trenchard talked about the problems that the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, may have in producing a defence review when he does not know how much money he has to spend, but he does know how much he can spend—it is about 2.5% of GDP.

If a defence analyst was to analyse both me and the Minister, he would find it very difficult to get a fag paper between us. I think we both think that we want to spend at least 3% of GDP on defence, but no more than 5%. The problem is that we live in a democracy, and political parties tend to use focus groups—and they ask the focus groups what their priorities are. We know what the priorities are for focus groups: it will always be the health service at the top, and the welfare state—all the lovely things that we want to be able to do. It is understandable why the electorate want that. If you ask them about defence, the focus group will attach a very low priority. But we do not explain to the focus groups or the general public the consequences of insufficient defence expenditure; we talked about that in the last debate on the failure of deterrence and its consequences. If you asked a focus group, “Are you happy for your daughter, son, sister or brother to be compulsorily conscripted for an overseas military operation that is not doing very well?”, just as we experienced in the 1940s, I suspect you might get a rather different answer.