Defence and Security Review (NATO)

James Gray Excerpts

Monday 2nd March 2015 Commons Chamber

[Sir Hugh Bayley]

I have had an interesting conversation with the statisticians in the House of Commons Library this afternoon. They provided figures for me in April of last year that showed spending as a proportion of GDP increasing from 2.48% in 1997-98 to 2.81% in 2009-10. Those are the Defence Analytical Services and Advice, or DASA, figures produced by the Minister of Defence. More recently—[Interruption.] I shall come to the point made by the hon. Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis) in a moment. More recently, the Library has given me the PESA, or public expenditure statistical analysis, figures, which show defence spending at 2.5% at the start of the Labour Government and 2.5% at the end of the Labour Government. I think the difference in the figures is covered by precisely the point that the hon. Gentleman makes. If we include the costs of Afghanistan and Iraq, there is an increase in real terms. If we discount them, there is no change in real terms.

In 2013-14, according to the Government’s figures, spending was at 2.1%. That is counterintuitive. I do not think that many members of the public would recognise that the Major Conservative Government substantially reduced defence expenditure in real terms, that the Labour Government maintained it and that this Government have substantially reduced it, but that is what the Government’s own PESA figures show us.

[Mr James Gray (North Wiltshire) (Con)]

I strongly agree with the hon. Gentleman’s powerful endorsement of the Prime Minister’s commitment to 2% at the NATO summit last September. Has he spoken to his own Front Benchers about whether an incoming Labour Government, if there were to be such a thing, would or would not maintain defence spending at 2%?

[Sir Hugh Bayley]

Yes, of course I have had that conversation—

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[John Woodcock (Barrow and Furness) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to follow such esteemed Members on both sides of the House, particularly the Chair of the Defence Committee, of which I am a member. I wholeheartedly endorse what he said about the threat from Russia. He talked about the arc of unpredictable threats that we could face from Putin, but he also put his finger on the overall problem that, whatever those threats are, a common feature of our response and posture is that we are signalling to Russia and to President Putin that we are simply not up for the fight. The longer that goes on, the longer we will give a sense that we will do almost anything to avoid confrontation.

I do not know whether the Minister for the Armed Forces is going to get to his feet later and repeat what his boss the Defence Secretary said last week, which was that there is only a diplomatic solution to the crisis. President Putin does not think that. As my hon. Friend the Member for York Central (Sir Hugh Bayley) rightly pointed out, President Putin is increasing his defence investment and capability enormously, and he is doing so precisely so that he can potentially bring about a military confrontation. The longer we maintain this stance of cowering in the face of that threat, the more likely it is that we will face a military confrontation. The longer we delay, the worse it will be. I hope that the Government will get the message that we cannot go on like this, with the scale of cuts in defence expenditure. Frankly, it is a disgrace that we have a Prime Minister who so recently was trying to convince all our NATO allies to maintain the 2% commitment but who will not make it clear, when asked repeatedly, that a Government led by him would maintain spending at 2% over the next five years.

[Mr Gray]

rose—

[John Woodcock]

Of course I give way to my colleague on the Defence Committee.

[Mr Gray]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman; he is extremely kind. We on the Government Benches entirely agree with him—we must hold our Prime Minister’s feet to the fire and insist that he live up to the 2% target. The more important question is whether the hon. Gentleman has had any indication from the Labour Front Bench that in the event of a Labour Government, Labour will go for 2%.

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[Ms Gisela Stuart (Birmingham, Edgbaston) (Lab)]

In July 2011, Anders Fogh Rasmussen said:

“Washington will not always take the lead when it comes to power projection. The United States will demand…that Europeans assume their responsibilities in preserving order, especially in Europe’s periphery.”

That is one of our greatest challenges. We have taken peace for granted, we have taken a status quo for granted, and we have taken American support for granted. Increasingly, we are, first, ignoring what is happening in Russia, secondly, cutting back, and thirdly, finding that America turns to the Pacific and has to justify to itself why it should support the Europeans in a pursuit that it regards as our job. That means that the situation becomes very difficult.

A war of information and propaganda is going on that we are singularly losing in the west but Putin is winning on his home ground. If we look at Russian opinion, we can see what Russians think. In 1997, they were asked:

“Are the big Western countries…partners or opponents of Russia?”

Then, about 50% regarded the US, Germany, Japan and Great Britain as partners of Russia. Now, 79% of the Russian population say that they think we are their enemies. If they are then asked whether Russia has the right to annex territories, the answer is interesting: 54% say that generally Russia has the right to annex territories, but the additional 34% who would usually say, “No, not generally”, will say with regard to Crimea, “Yes, of course it can do that.” That statement is as absurd as it would be if Angela Merkel in Berlin suddenly said, “Germany will annex Königsberg because it has traditionally always been German.” We would say that that was a totally, utterly bizarre argument, yet we are accepting it in relation to Crimea. We are also accepting, with a stunning silence, the fact that Putin has single-handedly redrawn international boundaries for the first time since 1945. We are all saying, “Well, he really shouldn’t be doing this, should he?”, but not offering options of any kind.

It is worth looking at what Putinism may actually mean. Strobe Talbott says:

“Putin’s aggression only makes sense against the backdrop of what has been the defining theme of his presidency: turning back the clock…Therein lies the most malignant manifestation of Putinism: it violates international law, nullifies Russia’s past pledges to respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of its neighbors, carries with it the danger of spinning out of control and sparking a wider conflict, and establishes a precedent for other major powers to apply their own version of the Putin Doctrine when convenient”.

This is not just about Putin’s single-handed redrawing of international boundaries, because a number of other countries would be very happy to do the same thing. Once he is allowed to do that, they will feel that they are being given the green light to do so as well.

When we discussed the Greek euro crisis, it was staggering to hear how relatively relaxed people were about Russia offering Greece money. That should have set just about every red light raging, because it represents an extension of influence and, if we do not challenge it, it will simply continue. Putin is not acting out of strength, but out of the fact that he is terribly weak at home and therefore has to make enemies abroad.

[Mr Gray]

To enforce the hon. Lady’s point, is it not chilling that 75% of all of the equipment used by the Hellenic forces is supplied by Russia?

[Ms Stuart]

Indeed. It is an incredibly malign force, but we are not prepared to describe it as such, not only because of the historic reason that at one stage we thought Russia could become a partner, but because we now feel there is nothing we can do owing to its size and perceived power. Our debate about the 2%, what it means and how we respond has to go much deeper and address the roots of the issue.

In idle moments over the past few weeks I have been reading a biography of George I. Interestingly, it says that when George I took the throne 300 years ago the Great Britain of which he became ruler was one of the great European powers and intimately involved with the continent, and its island position rendered it immune to invasion. It was assertive and knew that it could strike its own bargains in Europe—it did not need anybody else’s permission. There was also a big divide whereby the Tories advocated concentration on seaward expansion to the West Indians, while the Whigs thought that we should go into mainland Europe.

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[Mr James Gray (North Wiltshire) (Con)]

It is a pleasure, as always, to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Colchester (Sir Bob Russell), who speaks with passion for the military people of Colchester—nobody speaks better of them than him. He added to what has been a wide-ranging, interesting and well-informed debate of various topics, some broadly associated with the report on NATO that the Select Committee produced.

My hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart), the Chairman of the Defence Committee, ably set the tone of the debate. I stood against him for the chairmanship, but let me say in public that I am extremely glad that I lost that particular election. I am glad that he won it, and I am pleased to stand behind him now and will do so in subsequent Parliaments.

We meet in what can be described only as interesting times. There is a strange coincidence—or is it a conspiracy—of events happening in the world. We have talked extensively, of course, about Russia, Ukraine, Crimea, threats to the Baltic states and the assassination of Nemtsov over the weekend—and who knows what the consequences of that will be, what it means or who did it? We have talked about ISIS, or Daesh as we prefer to call it. An important assault on Tikrit is occurring as we speak, and again, who knows what the consequences will be? We look forward to the much anticipated assault on and retaking of Mosul—potentially later this year, although I sometimes find it hard to imagine that it will actually occur.

We have heard from others, including my hon. Friend the Member for Aldershot (Sir Gerald Howarth), about events in the South China sea, and about cyber-warfare and so many other aspects of the world that are extraordinarily worrying and dangerous, but also extremely unknown. We simply do not know what is occurring in most of the world, and we do not know what we are going to do about it. I find it concerning that we in the UK, leaving aside NATO as a wider force, seem to be so unclear about what we are planning to do.

Several Select Committee reports over the last months have touched on this failing. Our report on Daesh, for example, said that our contribution to the opposition to ISIL was lamentably small. We are responsible for something like 6% of the airstrikes, which is of course useful—it is important that we are doing it—but it is none the less an extremely small contribution. We have a tiny number of soldiers in Iraq. I heard the other day that the number of our personnel helping to train in Sulaymaniyah in north-east Iraq, which we visited, is being further reduced rather than increased, despite their ambitions.

We have no real idea why we are doing things in Syria, but not in Iraq—apart from the fact that is what the motion in the House lay down. We have no real plan: we do not quite understand what we are seeking to do against ISIL in Iraq and Syria. We know they are bad people; we know we do not like the atrocities that are being carried out; but we do not really have a grand plan for what we intend to do about them.

The same applies to Putin. We know he is a bad man; we know he should not have redrawn the boundaries of Ukraine; we know that the Baltic states are under threat. When General Sir Richard Shirreff was recently in front of the Select Committee—he was either still serving or had just stepped down as Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe—it was interesting to hear him say so plainly that we should have permanent forces deployed in the Baltic states. He thought our people should be there permanently and at the very least that a large-scale exercise should take place there with equipment delivered to the Baltic states and so forth. That afternoon, my right hon. Friend the Member for Runnymede and Weybridge (Mr Hammond), then Secretary of State for Defence, said that Sir Richard was absolutely wrong and that we should have no troops in the Baltic states. We should not worry ourselves about that, he claimed, as the main threat to the UK remained a terrorist threat. He stood by the tier 3 categorisation of state warfare as described in the strategic defence and security review in 2010.

So I was astonished when, very recently, the Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe and the Secretary of State for Defence disagreed in the course of a single day on what our policy should be on the defence of the Baltics. That raises an issue that will be the subject of a forthcoming Select Committee report, namely our distinct lack of understanding of who we are in the world, what our purpose is, what we want to do in the world, how we are to achieve it, and what kind of armed forces we need in order to do that.

The 2010 SDSR is woefully out of date. It downgraded all the threats that we now face, judging them to be potentially insignificant. The national security strategy, which was published on the same day as the SDSR, did not have a clue about what we are doing today. I was disappointed to hear the Prime Minister say recently that he thought that it was worthy of “tweaking” in respect of a few details. I think that he was absolutely wrong. I think that the Arab spring, the Russians, ISIL, events in the South China sea, and so much else that is happening in the world today require a fundamental rewriting of the national security strategy from scratch. We must identify what is wrong in the world, and say what we are going to do about it.

The notion that we could produce a new national security strategy—tweaked, as the Prime Minister had it—a few weeks or months after a general election and produce an SDSR at the same time strikes me as laughable, as does the notion that we should link the two in a strategic spending review, thereby handing all the controlling levers to the Treasury. The idea that we should say to the Treasury, “You tell us how much we can spend” , and the national security strategy will then be tweaked in an attempt to make it fit in with how much we can spend—and, incidentally, we will continue to cut our armed forces for that purpose—seems to me to represent a fundamental misunderstanding of the way in which we should consider how we intend to position ourselves in the world.

Surely it is entirely reasonable, basic and straightforward to ask, “What is our role?”, and we as a nation should be asking that question. Are we to serve as part of the American forces, as the American chief of staff was quoted as suggesting in The Daily Telegraph this morning? Most definitely not. Are we to do as President Obama suggested in his letter to the Prime Minister, and say that we are a second-rate nation that no longer pulls its weight in the world? No; for my money, we are not. But if we are to fight our corner in the world, we must know how we are to do it, and we must do it through an absolutely clear national security strategy which sets out, not vaguely but precisely, what our aims are and how we are to deal with ISIL. Will we deal with ISIL by means of containment, destruction or defeat? We do not know. We need to set out precisely how we view President Putin and what we intend to do about that, precisely what we intend to do in the Baltic states, and precisely what we intend to do about so many other things.

Some time after the publication of the national security strategy, we must have a defence and security review specifying the assets that we need in order to realise the vision in the strategy, and some time after that, the Treasury must come along with a fundamental spending review and say, “Here is the money that you require in order to realise that vision.” I know that that will not happen. I know what will happen after the general election, whether we have a Labour or a Conservative Government: the spending review, the defence review and the national security strategy will be rushed out as they were before, entirely driven by mandarins in the Treasury. However, I think that it is worth our recognising, and worth the Select Committee’s stating, that we think that that is the wrong way of going about the defence of the realm.

We think that Britain is probably in a more dangerous state today than at any time since the second world war. We think that the nation hangs on the edge of a precipice over which it may fall, and that we, the United States and our colleagues in NATO must act urgently to do something about it. Tinkering around with 2% or not 2%, tinkering around with the current sclerotic decision-making processes in the Ministry of Defence, and tinkering around with cutting our armed forces and trying to patch them up here and there is not the right way in which to proceed. We are in an incredibly dangerous place. We as a nation, and we as a House of Commons, must act now and act decisively to put that right.

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[Mr Jones]

If the hon. Gentleman lets me get on with my speech, I shall tell him what our position is.

Every Conservative Member has called for 2% or more, but in a few weeks’ time they are going to stand for election on a manifesto that would see a cut in our defence expenditure. I refer to the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s autumn statement, which clearly ring-fenced spending on schools, health, and overseas aid. The hon. Member for Aldershot mentioned overseas aid, which I know is dear to his heart. According to the Office for Budget Responsibility, 60% more cuts have got to take place, so if we take the ring-fenced spending out, we see that the rest of the cuts that will have to be made amount to about £86 billion. Of that, it is estimated that £9 billion will have to come from defence—some 36% if we take the figures up to 2020. Some are saying that the figure may be in the region of 8%. The Conservatives have form on 8% margins, because that is the level at which the coalition cut defence expenditure when it came to power.

We have heard it argued that the Prime Minister gave a commitment to, and lectured others about, the 2% NATO target. I understand that today he has been in the constituency of the hon. Member for Colchester (Sir Bob Russell), where he was asked about the commitment to 2%. As we expect from the Prime Minister, he dodged the question. He said that the equipment budget would be increased by 1%. He also made the remarkable statement that there would be no further cuts in the size of the Army. In that case, the situation for the defence budget is even worse than has been said, because the 9% cut that the Chancellor is arguing for will fall on only 55% of the budget. If the equipment budget has been protected, there are only two ways of keeping the Army intact while cutting 55% of the defence budget by 9%—by taking out of service equipment that is there today or by reducing the number of personnel.

The Prime Minister needs to level with the British people and be honest about what is being proposed. This is a charade. I do not doubt that the Conservative Members who have spoken—I know them all very well and they are very strong defence advocates—genuinely believe that more money should be put into defence or that the 2% NATO commitment should at least be met, but they need to challenge the Prime Minister on the figure. There is no way that the Chancellor’s cuts can be met by 2019-20 without affecting the 2% we currently give to NATO.

[Mr Gray]

I know that the hon. Gentleman is looking forward to being the Minister for the Armed Forces in the incoming Labour Government. Talking of levelling with the British people, would a Labour Government not do what he says we are about to do?

[Mr Jones]

I will level with the hon. Gentleman. What I will not do is what the Prime Minister and the then Members of the Opposition did at the last election by promising larger armies, more ships and more expenditure on the armed forces. The first thing they did when they got into power was cut the size of the army. Our position is very clear: we will meet the figure for 2015-16, but, as my hon. Friend the Member for York Central has said, that is still a reduction of £600 million according to the figures under discussion. Moreover, if we look at what the Defence Secretary has been good at, we will see that some £400 million has been given back to the Treasury over the past five years. That money was not even spent, which begs a question about the commitment.

Our strategic defence review will look at what most people want, as we did in 1997. It will be a proper defence review that looks at the bigger questions that many Members have raised today about our role in the world.