Remembrance Day: Armed Forces

Iain Duncan Smith Excerpts

Tuesday 11th November 2025 Commons Chamber

[Al Carns]

The right hon. Member makes an interesting point. I want to be clear and concise: of all days, today is a day of remembrance and is not about political point scoring. There is a debate scheduled on Thursday when we can discuss the issue in detail. I would very much welcome a discussion with the individuals who sent the letter, as would the Defence Secretary and others, to talk through the issues, to provide balance to the argument, to ensure that we protect our country and our armed forces from lawfare, and to ensure that they are represented and their voices heard.

[Sir Iain Duncan Smith (Chingford and Woodford Green) (Con)]

I want to return to the point about commemoration. Having served before, I remember that when I got elected back in 1992, we were not allowed to wear uniforms in public because of the IRA threat at the time, and bit by bit commemorations were no longer attended. I remember my first commemoration in Chingford; we were lucky if 100 people turned out. May I say that that has been reversed? One good example is that on Sunday at the memorial in Chingford, nearly 2,000 people turned up to commemorate those who have fallen and those who went before. Is that not a very good example of how the next generation sometimes understands commemoration better than my generation did?

[Al Carns]

What a welcome intervention. I was stood with veterans during the Cenotaph march-past; it always astounds me that we stand there with 10,000 people, and as the guns fire, there is complete silence in one of the busiest capitals in the world. It is a sombre but hugely humble experience. It is an absolute pleasure to see and hear all the amazing stories of almost every constituency around this great nation, standing together united to celebrate those individuals who served or are serving, their families and the bereaved.

While we often focus on the individuals who have been lost, we must remember those who have been left behind—the mothers, the fathers, the brothers, the sisters, the partners, the wives and the husbands who, after one of those traumatic events, all need to adapt to a new way of life. We need to remember them all and acknowledge that while their loved ones perhaps paid the ultimate sacrifice, it is not just the individual who serves, but the whole family—and they often suffer in silence long after the event.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Mark Francois (Rayleigh and Wickford) (Con)]

It is a privilege to open this debate for His Majesty’s Opposition on 11 November, Armistice Day—a date on which the nation pauses and gives thanks for the sacrifice of our armed forces so that we can live in a free country.

It is a pleasure to follow the Minister for the Armed Forces, and I endorse his comments about the value of our armed forces and the vital role they play in the nation’s contribution to remembrance. We all thank them for their service. The Minister rightly paid tribute to the operational role of our armed forces, which remain as vigilant as ever around the clock to keep us safe in the 21st century. Nevertheless, perhaps he will forgive me if in my contribution I too take something of a historical perspective on the vital role that our armed forces have played in the defence of our nation down the years.

I was privileged to attend the Royal British Legion festival of remembrance last Saturday evening, which remains as moving an occasion as when I first attended as an MOD Minister over a decade ago. I pay tribute to the extremely valuable role that the Royal British Legion plays in both shaping our whole concept of remembrance and in supporting our veterans, some 2 million or so of whom are still living today. As well as the national commemorations, including those at the Cenotaph, the Royal British Legion, often supported by local armed forces personnel, plays a vital role in organising services at a community level in all our constituencies, up and down the length and breadth of the United Kingdom.

In my experience, every community tends to do remembrance slightly differently to account for local circumstances, but each ceremony has common elements with which we are all familiar: the emotive playing of the “Last Post”, the two-minute silence and, usually, the famous epitaph from the 2nd Infantry Division memorial—universally known as the Kohima epitaph—with those famous and stirring words:

“When you go home, tell them of us and say,

For your tomorrow, we gave our today.”

The battle of Kohima, brilliantly described in Field Marshal the Viscount Slim’s 1956 book, “Defeat into Victory”—arguably one of the best books ever written on the whole concept of generalship—was a classic example of a dogged defence by British and, crucially, Commonwealth forces in stopping the attempted Japanese advance into India in mid-1944. Indeed, the dogged, stubborn defence—often against superior odds—is a recurrent feature of British military tradition: including the English archers at Agincourt; the great siege of Gibraltar; Wellington’s army at Waterloo; the 24th Foot at Rorke’s Drift, which saw 11 Victoria Crosses awarded, the most ever awarded in a single action; “the few” of Fighter Command in the battle of Britain, to whom the Minister also referred; the Royal Navy escorting the Atlantic convoys; the Glorious Glosters at the Imjin river in Korea; and many more besides, including more recently in the middle east.

There are, of course, many comparable examples from the first world war, not least the stand of the British Expeditionary Force at Mons and the subsequent first battle of Ypres. Anyone who has stood at the Menin Gate when the buglers of the Ypres fire brigade play the “Last Post”, as it swirls around that famous arch, knows that it is a truly moving and emotive ceremony to behold.

[Sir Iain Duncan Smith]

My right hon. Friend has mentioned Bill Slim, who many who know history will say was probably the greatest allied general of the war—it was brilliant what he achieved with next to nothing. Does my right hon. Friend agree that there was something very special about the 14th Army, which comes out in other accounts? Apart from just fighting, there were both Indian and British members of the 14th. They served in the same slit trenches and ran to aid each other; regardless of race or anything else, they delivered for each other. The most remarkable bit of the story of the 14th was that it did not matter who they were or where they came from, they were as one against the tyranny of the Japanese.

[Mr Francois]

I completely agree with my right hon. and gallant Friend—the history of the 14th Army is a proud one. It was a marvellous amalgam, under a brilliant leader, of people from countries and races from around the entire Commonwealth who fought with one common aim: freedom. They were sometimes called the forgotten army, but they are not forgotten tonight.

After the horrors of the trenches and an understandable aversion to war in the 1920s, with Britain exhausted—both financially and emotionally—by the horrors of the great war, the Government of the day introduced what came to be known as the 10-year rule. This was not just the policy of the War Office or the Admiralty, as they then were; it was a pan-Whitehall edict, the essence of which was that Britain would not have to fight another major war for at least 10 years. This key planning assumption became the centrepiece of British strategic theory and, with strong endorsement from the Treasury, the 10-year rule soon became a rolling one, extended on an annual basis. Given that no war was expected for at least a decade, this allowed for major economies in the financing of the armed forces and an associated running-down of all three services. As one example of how seriously the 10-year rule was taken and implemented, even Winston Churchill during his time as Chancellor of the Exchequer in the 1920s exerted pressure to cut back on his beloved Royal Navy—the same service he had fought tenaciously to expand as First Lord of the Admiralty barely a decade before.

Indeed, as a mood of pacifism gripped the nation, in 1933—the same year in which Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany—the earnest students of the Oxford Union, who are having their own problems at the moment, passed a motion by a majority of over two to one that

“this House will under no circumstances fight for its King and country”.

The subsequent policy of appeasement from the 1930s British establishment—the blob of their day—was as erroneous then as it would be today. Authoritarian dictators tend to admire strength, particularly their own, and despise weakness—a lesson that any British Government, including this one, would do well to remember. History tells us again and again that the appeasement of dictators does not work, just as it failed to work in the 1930s

The 10-year rule, which by that stage had lasted well over a decade, was eventually rescinded in 1935-36 as Britain began to rearm in response to Hitler’s increasingly bellicose behaviour. Nevertheless, that rearmament, and comparable action by our allies, was ultimately insufficient to deter what then became the second world war—a brutal conflict in which over 50 million people died, far more even than had perished in the supposed war to end all wars some two decades before.

I mention all this not just because I studied history and then military history at university, but because if—as Members of this House believe, and as I have always believed—the ultimate goal of our armed forces is to save lives by deterring war and persuading any potential aggressor that they could not prevail, then even today we all need to ask ourselves, regardless of party, whether we are doing enough to secure the peace by maintaining sufficiently strong armed forces to provide such a vital deterrent effect. It is a historical fact that twice in the last century, this country paid an immense cost in both blood and treasure to defeat militarism.

Today, the threats are somewhat different, with a war on our doorstep in Europe following Russia’s barbaric and illegal invasion of Ukraine. The Ukrainians are in effect now fighting for our freedom too, and we must back them to the hilt as a result. We also see a major rearmament by China; North Korea continues to develop even longer-range intercontinental ballistic missiles, now with support from Russia; and Iran continues to exert malign influence across the middle east, even after the successful American strike on its emerging nuclear capabilities. The circumstances may have changed, but the principle remains exactly the same. We in the western democracies cannot drop our guard against the growing powers of the 21st-century autocracies—something that those who fought in the second world war would instinctively understand only too well.

Bearing in mind the Minister’s caution, I was genuinely concerned to read one passage of the Government’s recent strategic defence review—its seminal defence policy document. On page 43, under the heading “Transforming UK Warfighting”, it states:

“This Review charts a new era for Defence, restoring the UK’s ability to deter, fight, and win—with allies—against states with advanced military forces by 2035.”

I say to the Minister in all sincerity that that seems to contain an echo of the 10-year rule of the 1920s. While there was a great deal of good in the SDR, not least the intention to speed up our highly bureaucratic procurement system—about which I have always held firm views, as the Minister knows—I nevertheless worry, given increasing threats from Russia and now also from China, about whether the Ministry of Defence today displays the genuine sense of urgency that is required to meet the challenges we now all clearly face. Before I am accused of selective quoting, the same paragraph of the SDR goes on to say:

“This vision could be achieved more quickly should circumstances demand it and should more resources be made available.”

Notwithstanding those words, with much of the new money in the SDR unavailable for at least two years and a multibillion-pound programme of in-year efficiency savings now under way, I merely ask whether we have really learned the lessons of the past century as well as we might have.

In conclusion, we in these islands have always ultimately been prepared to make great sacrifices to uphold the freedom of Europe, and indeed of the wider world. That is why, given our history, we should never forget that the first duty of Government remains the defence of the realm. In response to the philosopher Edmund Burke’s famous challenge that all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing, twice in the past century our own good men and women across the nation stood up to and defeated such evil, with our armed forces in the lead. Rightfully, we solemnly remember that sacrifice each and every November, including in this House tonight.