Defence

Jim Shannon Excerpts

Thursday 11th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

It is always a pleasure to speak in this House on any issue, but defence is an issue in which I have a particular interest. I congratulate the hon. Member for Gedling (Vernon Coaker) on securing the debate and on putting forward a detailed, succinct, balanced and informative case for us all to support. I am pleased to be a signatory to the motion, and it was a pleasure to appear before the Backbench Business Committee with him to ask for the debate. I never doubted for a second that the interest in this subject would be enormous, and of course it is.

I should like to thank all right hon. and hon. Members who have spoken in the debate, some of whom have served in the armed forces. It is always a pleasure to listen to the words of wisdom of the Chair of the Defence Committee, the right hon. Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis), when he gives us his knowledge and expertise. We are grateful to have benefited from that knowledge and expertise today as well.

I should also like to thank the gallant Members who have served in uniform. I hope that the Under-Secretary of State for Defence, the right hon. Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood) will not mind my saying that we are immensely impressed by him, and not only because he has served in uniform. We have not forgotten the occasion last year on which his particular qualities shone out. I can honestly say that I think about that occasion often, and I know that others in the House feel the same. I should like to put on record my thanks to the Minister for that. I hope the message is coming through from all Members here that we want to support him. Others have already said this, but I repeat that we want to strengthen his hand when he goes to the Chancellor to get the moneys that the Ministry of Defence needs to spend.

I should like to declare an interest as a former member of the Ulster Defence Regiment, in which I served for three years in an anti-terrorism role. I then served for eleven and a half years with the Royal Artillery as a part-time soldier. I am pleased to have had those opportunities; it was good to have that experience. I should like to pay tribute to all our armed services personnel who are currently serving, to their families and to our veterans. Theirs is the ultimate form of service, and they all too often make the ultimate sacrifice. The words that adorn the tomb of the unknown warrior in Westminster Abbey sum this up perfectly:

“Man can give life itself

For God

For King and country

For loved ones home and empire

For the sacred cause of justice and

The freedom of the world

They buried him among the kings because he

Had done good toward God and toward

His House”.

This is a hugely important debate at a critical time in global defence and security, and it is vital that we in this House, as guardians of the decision to go to war, should take the time to debate the Government’s current policies and plans for ensuring that our armed forces are fit to fight and that they can truly “be the best” in these dangerous times.

I want to pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Belfast East (Gavin Robinson), who serves on the Defence Committee. As other members of the Committee will know, he makes a massive contribution to it, but he could not be here today owing to constituency duties back home. Speaking on behalf of the Democratic Unionist party, I am happy to add our support to the themes that have emerged clearly from the debate so far.

It is an inescapable conclusion that our armed forces have been in demise since 1979. We cannot deny that fact. I accept that dividends were rightly taken as a result of the end of the cold war, the eventual end of the troubles and the impact of new technologies. However, I believe that it is plainly wrong—indeed, it is folly—to think that any current or future threats across the world will be of a lesser magnitude of consequence to our defence and security than what we faced in Berlin, or in Belfast in the 1970s and 1980s.

I would gently remind the Secretary of State, who is not in his place, and the Minister that the majority of Governments since 1979 have acquiesced in the managed decline of our armed forces, hollowing out manpower, materiel and morale in equal measure. The Secretary of State needs to bring that decline to a halt, and we want to strengthen his hand to enable that to happen. He and his colleagues—a number of whom have given gallant service in uniform, and of whom we in this House are rightly proud—must begin the much-needed process of rebuilding our defence and security capacity for the role that we must play in world and European affairs post Brexit. We need our armed forces to be ready and able to deal with the hard-power challenges of the 21st century, not just fit to engage in soft diplomacy and, if I may say so gently, shadow boxing.

On 11 November 2018, we will pause and reflect on the centenary of the end of the first world war. The history books tell us that it was the war to end all wars, and 100 years on we have an army smaller than that which we had at the advent of the first world war. We know all too well what happened to that British Expeditionary Force: defeat followed by retreat and then entrenchment. We did not learn, because by 1938 we had once more hollowed out our armed forces and chosen to ignore the real existential threat of an ambitious expansionist enemy. Once more, we met with defeat and retreat, culminating in the Dunkirk evacuation, five years of hard-won battles and losses, and the loss of hundreds of thousands of our finest young men and women. We are at grave risk of setting the same conditions again. We risk ignoring threats from all around us: under the sea, on the surface, on land, at home and abroad, in the air and in cyber-space. Returning jihadists, dissident republicans, Russians, ISIS, Iranians, North Koreans and home-based cyber-terrorists all present us with a problem.

We continue to pursue the disingenuous process of so-called security and defence reviews and—I do not mean this unkindly—we have to and should ask questions. Defence reviews are nothing more than budgetary exercises where we suspend reality, forget the past, ignore the present and dilute the future to reverse-engineer the military into a smaller fiscal envelope. The warning signs are all around us. There are doubts about whether the Royal Navy is able to put its Type 45s to sea. We have aircraft carriers with no aircraft, and helicopter carriers are sold off before they can be replaced. The fleet cannot be fully manned, and less than a third of it is at sea. The Royal Marines do not have the amphibious capability to get ashore. Contrast that with the taskforce that we sent to recapture the Falkland Islands in 1982. Can the Minister offer any reassurance that we could emulate that today? Others have said that it would be impossible. I do not say that, but it would be much more difficult.

The Army gets smaller and smaller by the week. Reduced recruiting targets are still not met, equipment promises are reneged on, fleets are cut to the core and, as others have said, housing is in disrepair. Training budgets have been slashed and overseas training areas have been closed or restricted. The long-promised Army Reserve experiment is still in the test tube. I have been privileged enough to be on the armed forces parliamentary scheme for several years, and I have been on the Army scheme for the three years. We get the chance to speak to Army personnel, to officers and to families, and we are well aware of the problems. I praise the hon. Member for North Wiltshire (James Gray) for his role in the scheme, because he enables many of us to participate in it, and we can learn more and become more knowledgeable in the House.

I do have some good news, however. I cannot speak about it much more than generically, but I understand that the Government and the Ministry of Defence have confirmed that they will increase the number of reserves in Northern Ireland. We are at 95% of capacity, and we want to grow, so we have asked for that and the Government have responded. I also understand that some capital spending is coming through, which we welcome.

I heard the Chief of the General Staff trying to explain the frankly bizarre decision to abandon stable branding on TV, to which the hon. Member for Gedling referred, and a hard-won ethos in pursuit of fleeting and fashionable politically correct soundbites and millennial tastes. He said that the traditional recruiting cohort that the Army would usually draw upon is 25% smaller, but the fact is that the Army is 33% smaller, so we have missed a target there as well. The plain and simple fact is that we need an Army that is able to engage with and defeat the enemy, with bayonets or bare hands if needs be. It is a horrible image and an awful thing to imagine, but that is the gritty and enduring reality of what we are asking our young men and women on the frontline to do.

Our Air Force is also in a perilous state. I am serving for the RAF on the AFPS this year, and we get to know such things. We talk to the officers and other personnel, and we see the realities. The RAF suffers from chronic underfunding, undermanning and an ageing fleet of aircraft. The Tornadoes, for example, have now had more upgrades and life extensions that most. The reduced Typhoon fleet has much to admire, but it has not proved itself to be the answer to the multi-role, multi-platform challenge that it needs to meet, and it is now regularly overmatched by aircraft from potential aggressors. Closing that gap will be a challenge for the joint strike fighter programme. I hope to be proved wrong, but I fear we will never again be able to conjure up the battle of Britain spirit that has come to define us in our darkest hours.

The House will be glad to hear that all is not lost. The opportunity to intervene and address this difficult situation has not yet passed us by. This debate is a step on the way, and it will strengthen the hand of the Minister and the Secretary of State in ensuring that the Chancellor finds a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, or whatever it may be, so that we can fill the gap. The United Kingdom will once again take its place on the global defence and security stage, stepping out from the shadow of the European common security and defence policy. We need to express a clear and bold statement of intent about who we are and what we stand for. We need to invest in our armed forces by putting our money where our mouth is, as befits our UN P5 status. We need to step up to the plate as the second senior partner in NATO and give a much-needed lead to other members who draw their inspiration from us.

Yes, health and welfare remain this nation’s priority, as they should, and spending priorities reflect that. However, Defence has been playing second fiddle or, more accurately, third flute to other Departments for too long—we are well aware of the third flute in Northern Ireland. We do not want to be a third flute when it comes to defence. We want to be more than that, so we gently and respectfully look to the Minister.

The House must cease to be supine on matters of defence and security spending. The Government cannot continue to degrade our armed forces while we turn a blind eye. Hope and good fortune are simply not good military expedients, and we have become over-reliant on the world behaving broadly in our favour.

I take this opportunity to plug a book to book readers. If Members have not read it already, they should make it their business to get “2020: World at War” by a friend of ours, Kingsley Donaldson, who has an experienced and knowledgeable point of view on where we are on defence.

Taking Northern Ireland as a simple case in point of a wider malaise, in 1979 thousands of men and women were serving full time and part time in the Ulster Defence Regiment, in which my right hon. Friend the Member for Lagan Valley (Sir Jeffrey M. Donaldson), my hon. Friend the Member for East Londonderry (Mr Campbell) and I served. We will never be able to recover that capability because of the cuts to the Army. I question whether the Ministry of Defence and the Home Office have anything like the capacity or capability to deal with resurgent terrorism of the scale we lived through in the troubles, as the hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Jamie Stone) said—he is well aware of it from his family connections in Northern Ireland.

In regular recruiting, Northern Ireland furnishes two armoured regiments—the Queen’s Royal Irish Hussars and the 5th Inniskilling Dragoons—the Irish Guards, two battalions of the Royal Irish Rangers and an infantry training depot. Six Regular Army units are permanently garrisoned in Northern Ireland. There are Navy ships on station in Carlingford, Belfast lough and Foyle, air stations at Ballykelly, Aldergrove, St Angelo and Bishops Court, and thousands of servicemen and women across the Army, Navy and Air Force.

Over the years Northern Ireland has provided thousands of reserves to the Army, Navy and Air Force. We have two Territorial Army infantry battalions, a Royal Armoured Corps regiment, an artillery regiment, an engineer regiment, a signals regiment, transport units and two field hospitals, as well as Royal Naval Reserve and Royal Auxiliary Air Force units.

There are many talented young men and women in Northern Ireland of all ethnic diversities and social backgrounds who would make excellent recruits to our armed forces. I am a spokesperson on reserve force and cadet organisations in Northern Ireland, and I commend the Minister and his Department for their work with the cadets. We are growing the cadets in all capacities and across all communities in Northern Ireland, which is an indication of where Northern Ireland is going. Northern Ireland could go further if we get the opportunity.

I say gently to other Members—this is not a game of one-upmanship—that educational attainment standards across Northern Ireland are much higher than in the equivalent armed forces recruitment hotspots in Scotland, northern England and the midlands. I welcome the commitment of the Minister and the MOD to increase the number of TA and reserve forces.

Wellington, one of many famous Irish soldiers, famously commented that more than a third of his Army at Waterloo were Irish. Four of the nine Victoria Crosses awarded to the British Army at the Somme on 1 July 1916 were won by Ulstermen of the 36th (Ulster) Division. The British Army generals who orchestrated the eventual allied victory in world war two included many notable Ulster connections among them: Field Marshals Alan Brooke, Alexander, Auchinleck, Dill and Montgomery; and Generals Cunningham, O’Connor and Ritchie. Indeed, Churchill said of Field Marshal Alan Brooke:

“When I thump the table and push my face towards him what does he do? Thumps the table harder and glares back at me.”

He also said:

“I know these…stiff necked Ulstermen, and there is no one worse to deal with than that.”

I am not sure we are all that bad, Madam Deputy Speaker, but we do not take being told off too easily. That came from such a national hero as Churchill, so what greater epithet or encouragement do the Minister and his colleagues need to get on the front foot, starting with defence money? We need to invest in our rich source of martial fighting spirit, dogged determination, moral courage and fearlessness. Those are the characteristics of our armed forces that we need, whether it be in fighting floods, defeating ISIS, keeping our islands and dependent territories safe, policing the seas and skies, or just supporting our allies’ efforts.

I am very conscious of the time, Madam Deputy Speaker—[Laughter.] I have just realised, and I apologise. I wish quickly, however, to commend the charities that work in my area, including SSAFA, which does tremendous work. I do a coffee morning with it once a year and we have raised almost £30,000 over the past six or seven years, so we have done very well, as have the people of Newtownards and the district. I should also mention Combat Stress and Beyond the Battlefield, another organisation that reaches out to people that other charities may have missed.

It is clearer than at any point in the recent past, certainly since 1979, that our armed forces are in a perilous state. We must stop that rot. A bare minimum of 2% of GDP will not keep pace with rising inflation, so standing still is not an option. I well understand that the Minister wants to see the spend increasing, and we are behind him in making sure that that happens. It is time we reconsidered the funding priority for defence and placed greater importance on the assets that are at the core of the values of our nation. We need to distance ourselves from these reductionist security and defence reviews, and instead look at funding programmes that match our ambitions for our global status post Brexit. To do otherwise is to leave us vulnerable to our enemies and incapable of defending ourselves, never mind assisting our friends and allies, and certainly not fully able to answer to our responsibilities in NATO and the UN. Thank you for your patience and your indulgence, Madam Deputy Speaker.