Diego Garcia Military Base and British Indian Ocean Territory Bill

Debate between Iain Duncan Smith and Stuart Anderson

Committee of the whole House
Monday 20th October 2025 Commons Chamber

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

I just want to re-emphasise the point that my hon. Friend is making about the growth of the threat. Is he aware that China today has 130 times the capability to build naval ships that America does? One shipyard in China in this last year has built more naval ships than the whole of the United States. We talk about the threat to the South China sea. It is done.

[Stuart Anderson]

My right hon. Friend makes a great point. I spoke to one of the submarine commanders from the US navy only about six weeks ago. He told me that 15 years ago he would see one Chinese ship or submarine per week, and now he sees 100 a week. The whole area is full of them. When we start looking at the security of buffer zones, we see that we cannot move in this area for Chinese submarines. The whole space is swamped with them.

We are doing a deal that will remove our ability to sit at the table where we used to have such strength. Our armed forces now would have trouble supporting our allies in any area, particularly the Indo-Pacific—[Interruption.] The Minister for Defence Readiness and Industry says that is not true. We have HMS Spey and the carrier strike groups, but we have no permanent presence in the Indo-Pacific. With our current commitments, we would need a brigade strength or more to enable us to have a permanent base, to rotate troops through and to have a credible offering without burning out the UK armed forces, given the numbers who are currently on sick at the moment and the strength of the military. I want to see larger armed forces, but we do not have the ability to offer the level that we want.

We believe that the world is playing by an international rules-based order, but not all countries will do that. An international rules-based order is a set of rules set out by, normally, the largest countries around the world. When countries such as Iraq or Kosovo do not adhere to them, they expect everyone else to accept it, but the rise of China, Russia, Iran and North Korea is throwing everything into the mix. I believe that this will be a huge loss for us strategically. I reiterate my point that the ceding of Diego Garcia is a monumental strategic error that, in the next decade, we will come to regret.