Global Britain

Julian Lewis Excerpts

Thursday 30th January 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mr Ellwood]

My hon. Friend is right, and I pay tribute to him for his knowledge, expertise and desire to educate the rest of us on the importance of what China is doing. There is a lot of duality in what China provides. It is providing some of the greenest capabilities in the world, but it is investing more in coal—it is building hundreds more coal-fired power stations at the very time when we need to wean ourselves off coal.

Militarily, I am also concerned. China’s space budget alone is £7 billion a year. Twenty years ago, its military budget was the same as ours. Today, it is five times that amount. Its navy grows the size of our Navy every single year. Those are my concerns in the longer term, and that is why we need an adult conversation with China, to work out what international rules we should be following.

Finally, I turn to the review that we will conduct. This is a pivotal moment for the UK to recognise and take stock of the threats that we face. We need a sober assessment of how the world is changing and an honest review of our own capabilities. Our battle tank is 20 years old; it needs an upgrade. Our aircraft carriers are fantastic, but no further investment in the Navy means that the rest of the surface fleet has been depleted. In the Gulf war, we had 36 fast-jet squadrons; today we have six. We need confirmation of our capabilities and our aspirations. What role do we seek to play on the international stage? We then need to commit to what is needed to get there, which will require an increase in our defence budget. We need to upgrade if we want to play that role.

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

May I warmly congratulate my right hon. Friend on succeeding me as Chair of the Defence Committee? I thank him belatedly for the courage he showed when, as a Defence Minister, he argued at the Dispatch Box that we needed to spend more on defence. I urge him, in what I can assure him is an influential new role for him, to make sure that the new combined defence review takes place before, and not after, the comprehensive spending round. Otherwise, the same thing will happen that happened with the national security capability review, and there will be a fight between the intelligence services on the one hand and conventional forces on the other.