Defence

James Gray Excerpts

Tuesday 7th May 2024 Commons Chamber

[John Healey]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman only to a point. In his speech to the House, the Defence Secretary set out the range of increasing threats that this country and our allies now face. Those threats are very different from those of 14 years ago, so it is not simply a question of reversing the cuts that we have seen in recent years; it is a question of matching the requirements needed for the future with the threats that we face.

[James Gray (North Wiltshire) (Con)]

I very much agree with the right hon. Gentleman that defence has to be a consensual matter. All the work I have done with the Labour Front-Bench team has been very consensual, because they have talked a great deal of sense. Every single thing that the shadow Secretary of State has said this afternoon could easily have been said by a Conservative Secretary of State—there is nothing wrong with it whatsoever. Will he therefore continue that worthwhile cross-party consensus by agreeing to match our defence spending commitment of 2.5% of GDP?

[John Healey]

We share the ambition to hit 2.5%. Our commitment to 2.5% is total. We will do it in our own way and we will do it as soon as we can. I will come on to the flaws in the plan set out by those on the Government Front Bench.

[James Gray]

The right hon. Gentleman is extremely generous to give way again. There is a very important difference here. Ours is an absolute 100% cast-iron guaranteed pledge to spend 2.5%. Will he match that?

[John Healey]

I am afraid there is nothing cast-iron about the figures, the plan or, indeed, the proposals for paying for it. I will come to that in a moment.

Before I took the first intervention from the hon. Member for North Wiltshire (James Gray), I wanted to pick up a final point that was made by the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron) on the question of reviewing what we need to face the threats that we now face. The Defence Secretary is dismissive about the need for a strategic defence review, despite the fact that his own Department is preparing for exactly that, whatever the result of the next election. That was confirmed in the House last month by the Minister for Defence Procurement. He also made the point a month before, when the right hon. Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood) talked about a defence review and the Minister for Defence Procurement said,

“he makes an excellent point.”—[Official Report, 11 March 2024; Vol. 747, c. 27.]

The problem for the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale, who was involved in the five years of coalition government after 2010, and the problem for the Conservative Front-Bench team, who have been in government for the past 14 years, is that people judge Governments on what they do, not on what they say.

The Defence Secretary mentioned his January speech at Lancaster House, and he is right when he argues that what we do on defence sends signals to the world. What signal does it send to Britain’s adversaries when our armed forces have been hollowed out and underfunded since 2010, as his predecessor admitted in this House last year? What signal does it send to our adversaries when defence spending has been cut from 2.5% under Labour to 2.3% now, when day-to-day defence budgets have been cut by £10 billion since 2010, and when the British Army has now been cut to its smallest size since Napoleon?

--- Later in debate ---

[Martin Docherty-Hughes]

Let me come to that in a second, but in common parlance, I think they are always called the “ordinary ranks”—[Interruption.] The Minister may want to listen for a wee second. Whether it is “other” or “ordinary”, that type of terminology says nothing about the men and women who served in Iraq, such as my brother; in Afghanistan; out in the Red sea, no matter what happens there—and there is concern that there might be mission creep—or in other deployments such as the joint expeditionary force in Estonia, which I know, as the co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on Estonia, that the Estonian Government welcome.

Those ranks deserve more from us—not just from the Government and the official Opposition, but from all of us as parliamentarians. They deserve it that we take them more seriously in the structure of how we support and pay them, and in their entire terms and conditions. I know that there is probably profound disagreement about my approach, which would be an armed services representative body. Although I am saddened that the official Opposition changed their position, if they form the next Government, the SNP would support their new approach, which we think is at least a step in the right direction.

However, I do not think that having a Government appointee represent the armed forces personnel is the right step forward, because the lived experience of members of the armed forces who have been on the frontline needs to form part of an understanding, as with any engagement on terms and conditions with a trade union, for example—although an armed forces representative body from this party is not a trade union and does not have the right to strike our proposals. We have to say to those ranks that we believe they can come together as a collective and have critical engagement with Government and, more importantly, with Parliament more broadly. We need to have that discussion with them; they need to be part of defence policy and posture. They are people we want to send to the frontline to fire a gun or a missile, but technically we are saying to them that we do not believe they have the capability of coming together to discuss and debate collectively their terms and conditions. I find that slightly bizarre.

If we do not engage with those ranks in a more robust fashion, as equals, we will go around a consistent revolving door of reports, as we have seen for years in Committees, especially the Defence Committee. I am mindful of the report produced by the Women in the Armed Forces Sub-Committee—I intimated that I would mention them—which was chaired by the hon. Member for Wrexham (Sarah Atherton), who is not here today. That report was profound. Do I think that if we do not have real engagement with the frontline, there will be substantial change? I have grave concerns that there will not be.

[James Gray]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right about that close engagement with the other ranks. He might well benefit from serving on the Armed Forces Parliamentary Scheme, where he will discover that all of our time is spent with the other ranks.

[Martin Docherty-Hughes]

I am grateful for that opportunity, but I have previously declined it for various reasons. I will get into that in a wee bit more detail and, although the hon. Member may not agree with me, I may want to reflect on some of the profound experiences that we saw in that report. I am afraid that we would not hear those things talked about on the armed forces parliamentary body. I am talking about ordinary service personnel, in private meetings with parliamentarians as part of a Committee inquiry, talking about the dreadful conditions that they suffer because of their gender, sex, sexuality or ethnicity. Some of it has been like a revolving door.

--- Later in debate ---

[James Gray (North Wiltshire) (Con)]

When you took the Chair some time ago, Mr Deputy Speaker, you observed that the House was stuffed full of defence expertise, and that has been demonstrated amply in the debate that has followed your taking the Chair. Once or twice, I felt that I had inadvertently stumbled into a private meeting of the Defence Committee, since most Members who have spoken so far—though not all—are either present or previous members of that Committee. I pay tribute to their huge expertise, particularly on defence procurement. They know what they are talking about in immense detail and I fear that I simply do not, so I will not try to compete with them on that.

However, it has been a very important debate for this reason: this is the first occasion, I think, on which the Government have given us a debate in Government time on the subject of defence. I have banged on for many years, trying to persuade the Government to do that, but this is the first such debate, and I hope it is the first of many. We used to have five every year, so I hope very much that we will have a significant number of debates over the years to come.

The important point about these debates is that, as a number of people have commented, we live in exceptionally dangerous times, in an exceptionally dangerous world, and we simply do not know what is going to happen next. There could be all kinds of warfare and trouble to come. It is therefore very important that the House as a whole—not just the Defence Committee, the Intelligence and Security Committee and the Foreign Affairs Committee, but the House as a whole—should have a serious understanding of defence and foreign affairs. It is terribly important that debates such as this are used towards the better education of all our colleagues across the House.

In that context, I am particularly proud of the work I have done for quite a long time to seek to educate better Members of Parliament across the House. I have used two mechanisms. Many Members here will be familiar with the armed forces parliamentary scheme, which this year has seconded 64 MPs and peers in uniform to the three armed services. As of this year, thanks to an initiative by the hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Luke Pollard) , we have introduced a fourth course, namely the strategic command course, which has been widely enjoyed. There are 64 people altogether, four of whom go to the Royal College of Defence Studies—the ultimate in thinking in the armed services.

That seems to me an extremely important contribution that we have made over the last few years. I am glad to say that this is the 10th anniversary of the revived version of the armed forces parliamentary scheme, which I have chaired, and I pay tribute to the people who run it for me. Lieutenant Colonel Johnny Longbottom, in particular, has done great work over those years. The scheme has made a huge contribution to the better understanding of defence by people in this place.

Alongside that, I also chair the all-party parliamentary group for the armed forces, which holds two or three events a month, very often downstairs. Again, that is widely enjoyed by a large spectrum of people from across the Chamber. It enables the Ministry of Defence to get its messages over to ordinary Members of Parliament in a way it would not otherwise be able to do. We have laid on various welcome home events when people come back from overseas deployments and laid on individual meet-and-greets in Speaker’s House and the occasional breakfast.

I remember in particular the Fighting With Pride breakfast, which moved us all a great deal through the things it brought to light. I did not know before that about the appalling things we had done to LGBT soldiers, sailors and airmen until 2001. Certainly for me and a number of other Members, that breakfast gave us a determination to do something about it. I am glad to say that at the end of a year’s campaigning, we did achieve something of that kind. The APPG does an extraordinarily useful job, and I am proud that I chair it. I pay tribute to Amy Swash and Sophie Lane in my office who run it for me. It is a great organisation.

The reason I am proud of all that is that sometimes when people talk about defence in this Chamber they talk about the role that Parliament might have in the event of our going to war. They come to an entirely false conclusion that we should therefore have a debate and a vote in this House on the deployment of troops overseas. This important matter has been troubling me for many years now. Of all the 175 wars we have fought since 1700, only two have had a substantive vote in this House before deployment. The first was in 2003, when Tony Blair sought top cover by insisting on votes on the invasion of Iraq. The second was in 2013 when David Cameron again sought top cover in seeking to retaliate against Syria for using chemical weapons. On the first occasion, we voted in favour of it—what a mistake that was, and I am glad to say that I abstained—and on the second occasion we voted against it, and we did not go to war with Syria. Most people would now say that much of what has happened in the middle east since then would have been different had we done so.

On both occasions where the House of Commons has voted on a matter of deployment, we have got it wrong and done the wrong thing. On all the other occasions where we have gone to war, it has been done by the Prime Minister and the Executive under the royal prerogative and we have tended to get it right. Our role then becomes scrutiny of what it is that the Prime Minister and Executive have done. We can stand here, ask questions, call debates and do all sorts of things to scrutinise how the Prime Minister has done what he has done. That is an important role for Parliament to play. If we are being asked to vote for something, as Labour Members were forced to vote on a three-line Whip in 2003 in favour of the Iraq war, we cannot then turn around and criticise it. Our job here in Parliament is to scrutinise and criticise what the Government have done, not to give them top cover for it.

It is therefore important that, whatever may be about to befall us in this world—who knows what that might be—we do not once again fall into the easy truism that on such vital matters we in the House of Commons must be given a vote. No, we must not. That is to emasculate us as Members of Parliament and to prevent us from holding the Government to account. It presumes that we have the secret intelligence, legal advice and all the other things one needs to take that kind of decision. We must not do that. We are ordinary Members of Parliament; we should be better informed about defence, which is why I welcome debates such as this, and we should know what we are talking about, as well as we can in this place, but the notion that that should lead us to conclude that somehow or other we have Executive power over what the armed services do is, I fear, entirely fallacious.

I very much hope that we will use these debates, the armed forces parliamentary scheme—or the new scheme that will be launched shortly—and the all-party parliamentary group for the armed forces for the better education not of the specialists who we see around us in this debate this evening to whose great expertise I pay tribute, but of the generality of Members of Parliament and the generality of people who look into these things, feel concerned, but may not have the detailed expertise that we have seen demonstrated in the Chamber this evening. I want to see Parliament a better informed place about defence and foreign affairs, and I hope that those two organisations will play some part in doing that.