NATO Summit

Jeremy Corbyn Excerpts

Thursday 9th July 2026 Commons Chamber

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Judith Cummins)]

I call Jeremy Corbyn.

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Your Party)]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. [Interruption.]

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

Order. I remind the hon. Member for Dewsbury and Batley (Iqbal Mohamed) that he must not walk in front of another Member when I am calling him.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jeremy Corbyn]

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, global arms expenditure has now reached $2.8 trillion, with the USA, Europe, Russia and China spending the largest amounts. At any time during the NATO summit was there any strategic discussion about the way the world is spiralling out of control, with massive levels of expenditure on armaments, increasing wars, cuts in overseas aid by almost every country, and attacks on welfare budgets in every country as well? We are becoming a world that is increasingly at war, with increasing poverty at home. I realise that none of these issues is simple, but surely there needs to be some strategic look at what we are doing, or is the history of the 21st century going to be how we allowed the world to burn and spiral into war while increasing poverty at home in every country?

[Yvette Cooper]

As I have said, our security since the second world war has very much depended on the NATO alliance, which has always been a defensive alliance that has built its strength through deterrence. Deterrence is immensely important. When we reached the end of the cold war in 1990, there was at that point a substantial peace dividend. Many countries, including our own, saw reductions in investment in defence and more money went into other things in that period. Sadly, since then, what we have seen, including in Europe since Russia’s invasion of Crimea, is the end of that post-cold war peace dividend.

When we see growing threats to our security, we have to maintain the defensive alliance that NATO has always been and make sure that NATO has the capabilities to respond to any threat that might come in our direction. That is how we deter those threats, whether that is through our deep precision strike capability that we have been talking about or through other increased capabilities, such as matching the technical capabilities that Ukraine has demonstrated in anti-drone warfare. We have to ensure that we have all those kinds of capability, including air defence capabilities, so that we deter the threats against us and maintain our security. It is troubling that we now live in a more dangerous world, but we have to rise to that threat and ensure that we can keep our people safe.