Defence
Julian Lewis Excerpts(3 days, 11 hours ago)
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Grant Shapps
My right hon. Friend makes an excellent point. One issue we face is that if you are not Iranian or Russian and living in the UK, you may believe that this does not affect you too much. My entire argument—indeed, the argument I made at Lancaster House—is that this is not just something that impacts on foreign nationals in the distance; we are all, in effect, under attack. For evidence of that, we can see up and down the land the direct impact on every single family as Putin drove into Ukraine. Every single household budget in Britain was under attack. Remember, the winter before last we were paying up to half of the average family’s energy bill. This really does matter back home. It is again why I stress that defence is the cheapest version of looking after ourselves, not the most expensive one. That is why it is so important that, with Putin inflicting that inflation on British households and British business, we wake up to that fact and understand it. I actually think the British people do understand. They do want us to do more. It is popular to make sure that we properly defend these isles and defend our interests overseas. That is why this party has been proud to bring forward this big boost to our national defence.
As was mentioned earlier, this year I have—because this battle is so very important for all of us, not least our Ukrainian friends—provided another half a billion pounds of aid to Ukraine. That will take our total 2024 military package to a record £3 billion, which is the most we have provided in any year. Previously, it was £2.3 billion and £2.3 billion. It brings our total support overall to £12.5 billion, in addition to other aid. In addition, to help Ukraine repel Russia’s mounting attacks, we gave, a couple of weeks ago, the largest tranche of military gifting assistance to date.
It is worth reiterating the size and scale of that, because I fear that with the announcement of the 2.5% and the trajectory—I think all Members believe that Ukraine’s win is absolutely existential and important—the scale of the gifting was perhaps not noticed. It included 4 million rounds of ammunition, 1,600 key munitions, including air defence and precision long-range missiles, all our remaining AS-90 artillery platforms, 60 combat boats, 400 armour-protected and all-terrain vehicles, and hundreds of bombs for Ukraine’s new fleet of F-16 combat aircraft. Just as we initially provided our Ukrainian friends with trained troops, anti-tank missiles, main battle tanks, missiles and so many other firsts, we will now ensure that the aircraft we cannot provide for them—we do not fly F-16s—are properly provided with munitions.
Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)
I know that the Secretary of State’s personal commitment to Ukraine is second to none. Does he agree with me that if Putin is seen to fail in Ukraine, the threat to western Europe, the United Kingdom and NATO countries will recede for a generation? If Putin is seen to gain any sort of victory in Ukraine, the opposite will happen.
Grant Shapps
My right hon. Friend is absolutely correct. That is precisely the point, and that is exactly why it is right to invest in Ukraine. I do not want to make this a political speech—
Grant Shapps
I certainly do agree: all parts of the United Kingdom have a very important role to play, especially Northern Ireland, where missile production, ships and electronics are particular skills. It is important for people there to have a level of certainty that we intend to invest and will carry on investing. Today we can outline exactly how much we would spend each year in the future. By doing so, it is worth them investing. It is cheaper for them to invest. The cost of capital to build and maintain factories falls when we provide that certainty. I therefore hope that the Labour party will match our long-term pledge to Ukraine and to defence spending, because there is no way that warm words about defence spending make a difference to the frontline; the difficult choices have to be made. We have made our choices and we will reduce the size of the civil service back to pre-covid levels. Labour can make its own choices, but I encourage it to join us in the defence boost pledge.
There is no more important element of defence than our nuclear deterrent. Again, it is good to hear that both sides of the House now seem to back the nuclear deterrent, but that cannot be done without backing the money to support it.
Sir Julian Lewis
It is true that both sides of the House strongly back the nuclear deterrent at the moment, if my right hon. Friend is talking about the Labour Opposition. However, with recent talk of the prospect of a hung Parliament, one could find oneself in the same situation as the Cameron Government in 2010, when the right hon. Member for Warley (John Spellar) and I were begging for a vote to be held to renew the nuclear deterrent, but because of the coalition deal with the Liberal Democrats, that vote was postponed, at great expense, for four years until 2016. We would like to hear assurances from both Front Benches that no such situation will ever be allowed to arise again.
Grant Shapps
I am pleased to reassure my right hon. Friend from this Front Bench that no such delay would be countenanced. Just in the last few weeks we have issued the defence nuclear enterprise Command Paper—[Interruption.] I thought the Opposition Front Bench knew that there was a coalition Government, but perhaps they missed it. Perhaps they also missed the point that my right hon. Friend was making.
Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)
Earlier this afternoon I counted over 50 right hon. and hon. Members of the Labour party alone packing the Opposition Benches for the urgent question on the middle east. Sadly, though predictably, by the time we got to this important debate we were down to the usual suspects—the usual stalwarts, about half a dozen to a dozen Members on each side of the House. That difference in the numbers is relevant: the reason for it is that an actual war is going on in the middle east, so people are very focused on it, now that it is too late to prevent it. Our purpose in holding debates such as this one should be not to get to that situation.
I have some reservations about the constant references to us being in a pre-war world. I know what the Secretary of State and others mean when they refer to that, but it can be taken as meaning that we are in a situation where war is inevitable, and it is not. We have to behave as if we were going to have to defend ourselves in a real war, because if we make those preparations adequately, we will, through a policy of deterrence, prevent the war from happening in the first place.
This close to a general election, it is perhaps inevitable that we will hear people on both sides of the House, but on the Front Benches in particular, quibbling over percentage points of GDP being allocated to defence expenditure. But I have to say that 2.5%, 3% or even 4% would not be anything like adequate if a war actually broke out—44% is probably more like what we would have to spend. This is not just about a loss of treasure; even worse, it is about the human suffering and loss of life that would happen if we fail to invest adequately in peacetime to prevent that from ever coming to pass.
The economist Roger Bootle recently explained:
“During the Second World War, we spent roughly 50% of GDP on the military and slightly more than this in 1916 and 1917, during the First World War.”
So for goodness sake, let us be serious about this. No Government can be exonerated for the Kool-Aid that they drank after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
During the 2015-17 Parliament, the Defence Committee spent a bit of time trying to establish what had happened to defence expenditure in the post-war era. What we found was this: in 1963 we spent similar sums—about 6% of GDP—on both welfare and defence; and by 2017, after the study was carried out, we were spending six times as much on welfare as we were spending on defence. Similarly, it was found that in the mid-1980s we had been spending similar sums—about 5% of GDP then—on education, health and defence. By 2017 we were spending 2.5 times as much on education and nearly four times as much on health as we were spending on defence.
At the height of the cold war confrontation, and every year from 1981 to 1987, we spent between 4.3% and 5.1% of GDP on defence. From 1988—when the cold war began to evaporate—until 2014, defence spending almost halved as a proportion of GDP. Of course, there was a reason for that: it appeared that the threat from Russia had gone away. Well, now it is back. The question is this: are we prepared to revert to the sort of investment in defence in “peacetime” that we made so successfully during the 50 years of the cold war, which prevented an outbreak—a terrible further global conflict—between the then superpowers, both of which were armed with nuclear weapons?
I revert to what I said in an intervention on the Secretary of State when he was opening the debate: everything depends on what happens in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Let us be honest that when the threat of a Russian invasion of Ukraine arose in early 2022, not many people—hardly any in this Chamber, I suspect, myself included—predicted that Ukraine would be as successful as it has proved to be in resisting the might of the Russian invasion. I suspect that what had made that possible was that the shock that they had experienced in previous years over the loss of Crimea, which, if I remember correctly, was taken over by the Russians quite easily, focused their minds, their efforts and their investment upon the dire possibility that Russia might come back for more. That is why Ukraine was so much better prepared, with the covert assistance of other countries, not least this one, to resist the second Russian invasion when it happened.
I cannot stress too strongly that Ukraine’s battle is our battle. If Putin is seen to be unsuccessful in Ukraine, then the threat to us and to the rest of NATO will recede for a generation. However, if he is able to claim some sort of success, by ending up with significantly more territory at the end of the process than he had under his control in February 2022, then it will only be a matter of time before he comes back for more.
I want to say a few words about the middle east, but they are not actually my words; they are words from a remarkably perceptive article written by a Member of the upper House, the noble Lord Hague—William Hague, to us. He outlined his reaction to the atrocities of 7 October in an astonishingly perceptive way in The Times within 48 hours of that attack. I want to set some of what he said on the record, because he raised the question of why on earth Hamas should have undertaken such an action when they must have known it would provoke a horrifying response. He asked the question:
“Why, as well as murdering hundreds of defenceless young people at a rave, parade dead bodies as evidence of the atrocities? The answer is that their objective is uncontrolled rage. It is to make Israel lash out in a way that starts a conflagration. To start a war so intense that it spreads, igniting an explosion of violence in the West Bank and bringing in Hezbollah from Lebanon in the north, with Israel fighting on multiple fronts. To see so many Palestinians killed that the Israelis lose the moral high ground of defending themselves against mass murder. To use the fate of hostages, with maximum cruelty, to intensify a frenzy of hatred whenever that seems to be abating.”
That is still going on now. We heard reference to the Israeli soldiers recently killed in a Hamas artillery strike close to the one entrance where aid was coming into Palestine. Guess what happened? The Israelis immediately closed that entrance, thus intensifying the crisis. The Hamas strategists clearly know what they are doing. It is horrible—devilish— but there is a cruel logic to it.
The heading that Lord Hague—or his sub-editor at The Times—used for that article was:
“Hamas has set a trap that Israel must avoid: Iranian-backed attacks are desperate attempts to halt growing collaboration with Saudi Arabia and the UAE”.
The only element that was missing in the article was that that strategy, promoted by Iran, was also extremely beneficial to Russia, because now we spend rather more time considering what is happening in Israel and Gaza than we spend considering what is happening between Russia and Ukraine, despite the fact that what is happening between Russia and Ukraine cannot be emphasised too often because it is of crucial significance to the future peace, or lack of peace, of NATO countries vis-à-vis the Russian threat.
I will close with some remarks about the nuclear deterrent, which has been touched on a few times. One of the votes took place under Labour, as we have heard, on 14 March 2007, when there was a substantial majority for the deterrent. Parliament voted by 409 votes to 161 in favour of proceeding with the initial gate for the renewal of the Trident submarine fleet; but even that huge majority of 248 was eclipsed on 18 July 2016, when under the Conservative Government—free from the coalition—the majority rose to 355 when MPs voted for the decisive main gate stage to proceed. That vote was won by 472 votes to 117.
That shows near unanimity in the House for the maintenance of our strategic nuclear deterrent—and all that happened before the various crises that we have been concentrating on today. Let us hope that unity prevails. I, for one, welcome the comments of the Liberal Democrat spokesperson, who said that his party is now committed to four submarines and to the maintenance of the continuous at-sea deterrent, which presumably means with the use of Trident missiles. I say “use” because they are used every day of the week. Their use is as a deterrent. If ever—heaven forbid—they had to be fired, they would fail in their purpose.
We have come a long way and we have made a lot of progress. It is just as well that we are united, given the way in which the international scene has darkened, but both Front Benches have a long way to go if they are to reach a stage where we are making the sort of investment, the sort of insurance and the sort of effort that has to be made to deter an aggressive Russia and to ensure that Ukraine prevails.
Several hon. Members rose—
Defence Personnel Data Breach
Julian Lewis Excerpts(3 days, 11 hours ago)
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Grant Shapps
I can tell the House that, specifically for the MOD estate, we do that all the time—every day. With regard to this particular contract, I am aware that we have been in contact with the contractor about its cyber-security arrangements. For the purposes of national security, I cannot go into detail in the House, but I can perhaps provide the hon. Gentleman with a little further context separately, if that is helpful.
Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)
I welcome the fact that the helpline has been established so quickly, and I encourage the Government to be proactive in publishing advice on what people can do, for example to secure their bank accounts. What specialist advice does the MOD routinely seek before outsourcing data on service personnel to external contractors, and what standards must be verified before such outsourcing to a civilian organisation is allowed to take place?
Grant Shapps
It is obviously completely unacceptable for a contractor to leave our brave servicemen and women in this position, so we take it incredibly seriously and are very concerned by what has happened. My right hon. Friend asks about the checks that are in place. Of course, this contract long predates current Ministers, but we are checking through the details at considerable speed. As Members can imagine, we think the contractor has many questions to answer, and the ones that he asks will be included in them.
UK Armed Forces in Middle East
Julian Lewis Excerpts(1 week, 4 days ago)
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Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)
One of the main strategic aims of Iran, Russia’s ally, in supporting what Hamas did in October last year was to suck western powers into the middle eastern theatre, thereby diverting them from Russia’s existential conflict with Ukraine. May I urge the Minister not to comment on the suggestion that we might have British boots on the ground in the Gaza strip, but to take the message back to the Secretary of State that this would be a completely insane idea? It would be far better to have moderate neighbouring Arab states deal with any distribution of aid that we have facilitated as a result of the viable RAF and sea power that we have rightly exercised.
Leo Docherty
My right hon. Friend is right: the answers to the humanitarian and political challenges in the region lie within the region. I entirely agree with his analysis. He made a relevant and good point about the requirement for us to maintain focus on our efforts to support our Ukrainian friends in defending their sovereignty. That is why last week we announced an additional uplift in our annual support for Ukraine to the tune of £500 million, bringing this year’s support to £3 billion—a record amount.
Defence Spending
Julian Lewis Excerpts(2 weeks, 2 days ago)
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Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)
The main reason why this welcome uplift has come when it has is Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. Does the Secretary of State agree that if Russia and Putin are seen to fail in Ukraine, the threat to NATO will be put back for at least a generation? Conversely, if they succeed, the threat to NATO will intensify. Will he therefore do everything he can to persuade our allies, especially certain parts of the United States’ new political establishment, that the success of Ukraine is essential for the peace of Europe and, indeed, the peace of the world?
Grant Shapps
My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. Although this is £75 billion and although it takes our budget to 2.5% of GDP, that is a fraction—a fraction—of what it would cost if Putin were successful in Ukraine. There is no chance he would stop there—none. Other autocrats elsewhere would look at that and exploit the idea that all they have to do is outwait the west and we will get bored of it—through some form of attention deficit—and give up defending the things we said we would never stop defending. That, in the end, would cost us all a huge amount more.
Armed Forces Readiness and Defence Equipment
Julian Lewis Excerpts(1 month, 2 weeks ago)
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Mr Francois
The Chair of the PAC is entirely right, although in the MOD context, if it is groundhog day, “groundhog” sounds like a vehicle that has slipped to the right.
More recently, after a detailed inquiry, the Defence Committee, on which I serve, published a damning report on 4 February 2024, entitled simply “Ready for War?”. I have served on the Committee since 2017 and this is one of the punchiest reports we have ever produced. In answer to the question in the title, the all-party Committee, which includes six former MOD Ministers, concluded:
“Despite the United Kingdom spending approximately £50 billion a year on defence (plus more for Ukraine) the UK’s Armed Forces require sustained ongoing investment to be able to fight a sustained, high-intensity war, alongside our allies, against a peer adversary. ”
In plainer English, and as the subsequent detail in the report starkly points out, despite a considerable outlay of taxpayer’s cash, we could not fight a sustained war with Putin’s Russia for more than a couple of months before we ran out of ammunition and fighting equipment, not least as we have very few tanks, ships or combat aircraft in reserve. The full report can be found online.
Given that it takes years to build a modern warship—a totally ridiculous 11 years in the case of the new Type 26 frigate—and four years to build a Typhoon fighter, if we had to fight what the strategists sometimes describe as a “come as you are war”, one with little further warning, we would have to rely on whatever equipment we had to hand or could rapidly remobilise. We simply do not have enough war-winning kit to win as it is. As the Public Accounts Committee’s report on the 10-year equipment plan illustrates starkly, the difference between what the MOD aspires to buy and the funding it is likely to have available is £17 billion. However, it is worse because the three services account for the plan on a different basis. Without going into all the technicalities, an apples and apples comparison across the three services shows that the gap is £29 billion. Even beyond gaps in capability of our kit, our greatest weakness is now the lack of skilled personnel to operate and maintain the equipment that we do have. Without them—and far too many of them are leaving, as the Chair of the Defence Committee said—even multi-billion dollar aircraft systems simply remain in the hangar.
One perfect example of how dysfunctional the MOD has now become in relation to people is the saga of Capita—or, forgive me, “Crapita”, as it is now affectionally known to the Defence Committee. It has totally messed up the recruitment system for the British Army. A few years ago, its share price topped £4; today, it is barely 13 pence. Everyone in Defence knows that the outsourced contract has been a disaster, yet absolutely no one in the upper echelons of the Department has the moral courage to sack the company. The Defence Secretary recently described the situation in The Times as “ludicrous”. He is absolutely right. Indeed, no doubt he has made a note of his own comments on his own famous spreadsheet, but still nothing actually happens. Capita limps on as the Army bleeds out—with, in some parts of the Army, three soldiers now leaving for every one that Capita somehow, painfully, manages to recruit. If we think we are going to deter the likes of Vladimir Putin in this manner, we are living on a different planet, in a parallel universe, in a fantasy dimension.
Given that we now spend the thick end of £50 billion a year on defence, the British taxpaying public are quite entitled to ask why so little of our defence capability works properly. Why are some of the Army’s fighting vehicles 60 years old? Why do we have hardly any battle tanks that actually work? Why do we have hardly any submarines that are now regularly put to sea? Why do we have aircraft carriers that perennially break down whenever they try to leave port? Bluntly, it is because we now have a Ministry of Defence that has become in recent years a gigantic, sclerotic bureaucracy; constantly hidebound by needless, self-generated red tape; obsessed with process rather than outcomes; in which some senior civil servants are now more interested in wokery than weaponry, endlessly ripped off by some of their own major contractors, such as Boeing, to name but one; and in which key elements of our fighting equipment are so old—and the procurement system for replacing them so broken—that we now cannot fight a major war with Russia for more than a few weeks, as it well knows.
Moreover, as the Red Book clearly shows in tables 2.1 and 2.2, we are cutting the core UK defence budget next year by £2.5 billion and playing “smoke and mirrors” with the donations to Ukraine and with addressing an overspend on the nuclear enterprise from the Treasury reserve in order to pretend otherwise. This act of what the Russians call “maskirovka”, or strategic deception, is wholly unworthy of a Conservative Government. If Members happen to believe, as I do, that the role of our armed forces is determinedly to save lives by convincing any potential aggressor that, were they to attack us, we would defeat them, then we are palpably failing.
This is not an intellectual parlour game. Ultimately, this is about whether our grandchildren are going to grow up in someone else’s re-education camp, but we might not know that if we walked into the current MOD. We can try to blame the military, for instance, for so frequently over-specifying new military equipment, such as Ajax, that it enters service many years late, but in the end the responsibility lies with the politicians who, theoretically at least, are supposed to be in charge.
The Romans had a famous saying about military matters: “Si vis pacem, para bellum”—he who desires peace save-line3should prepare for war. Given that the Secretary of State, the man who runs the Department, has told us that we are in a pre-war world, surely we had better start preparing for it, if we are to have any chance whatsoever of preventing it, and we should now do that in earnest, before it is too late.
Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)
I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for giving way. I know that he is coming towards the end of his speech. Would he care to remark on a couple of slightly more optimistic features of deterrence, because deterrence of conventional forces depends on far more than an equal balance of equipment, even though, as he says, we are nowhere near achieving that? It also depends on our allies and others who will fight in the same cause. Does he not accept that it is not just enough to take our defence spending up to 3% or more, such as the 5% we regularly spent through the cold war, but essential to ensure that our American allies remain totally involved in the deterrence process and that the Ukrainians succeed in fending off Russia, because if they succeed we can contain Russia in the future, as we successfully did in the past?
Mr Francois
I agree with every word my right hon. Friend, the former eminent Chairman of the Defence Committee, just said. My one caveat is that the MOD’s excuse for these capability gaps is that we can rely on allies to fight with us. But they will be relying on us, and if we are unable to support them or they are on wartime tasks elsewhere, things might go horribly wrong.
I say all of this not just as someone who served proudly as a Territorial Army infantry officer in my local Royal Anglian Regiment during the cold war; not just as someone who is still very proud to carry the late Queen’s commission; not just as a former veterans and then Armed Forces Minister in the Ministry of Defence, albeit almost a decade ago; but most of all, as I said at Prime Minister’s questions last week, as the devoted son of a D-day veteran. Stoker 1st Class Reginal Francois died when I was 40 years of age. He told me one night of the carnage—his word—that he witnessed that day, albeit from offshore, on a minesweeper named HMS Bressay. In the afternoon, they were opposite Omaha beach.
Let me quote Shakespeare’s famous phrase:
“This story shall the good man teach his son.”
My father was a good man. The story that he told me was of a country that eventually, reluctantly, had to go to war against the evil of Nazi tyranny because for years its politicians had been so parsimonious—he actually said “tight”—and so naive that when Nazism emerged, we completely failed to deter it. That is the lesson of the 1930s, but it was also his lesson to me.
My father made me take a solemn vow that, as his son, I would never take living in a free country for granted, because, as he said, too many good men had died to achieve it. Two years after we had that conversation, he was dead. That is why I am here this afternoon. That is why I came into politics in the first place. As a wartime serviceman, my father was a great admirer of Winston Churchill, our greatest ever Prime Minister, who led this country through a war of national survival and then lost a general election for his trouble. When I walked into the Chamber earlier this afternoon, I could still see the damage caused when the Chamber was bombed in 1941. Churchill insisted that it not be repaired, lest we forget, and he was right.
In summary, I may not be my father’s contemporary, that famously courageous MP, Leo Amery, so I cannot claim to “speak for England” on this matter, but I was elected to speak for the people of Rayleigh and Wickford, and so, on their behalf, I issue this stark warning today. The skies are darkening. Brutal dictators with powerful weapons at their disposal are on the rise. The democracies are on the backfoot rather than the front. History tells us time and again, and indeed ad nauseam, that the appeasement of dictators—be they called Adolf Hitler or Vladimir Putin—does not work. We should be increasing the defence budget to at least 3% of GDP—what my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Sir Julian Lewis) used to call “at least three to keep us free”—not cutting it, as we now are, and pretending that we are not. The first duty of Government, above all others, is the defence of the realm, and we forget that at our peril. Si vis pacem, para bellum.
Mr Jones
It is laughable, as my right hon. Friend says. We need to make sure that we actually invest, because this is about skills and about ensuring that we have the workforce.
We have seen the effects when we just pull out of such work. We cannot look at our skills base as a tap, which we turn on when we want it and turn off again when we do not. We cannot do so, because we have seen the costs of that—for example, on the Astute programme. To be political, it was again the Conservative Government who stopped building submarines, so we had a gap in skills, and it has taken all the effort recently to rebuild that skills base and ensure we get it back. We must have such a skills base continually, and that has to be done by working with our European allies. Whether the zealots of Brexit and the anti-Europeans like it or not, if we are talking about things such as stockpiles, we do have to work with allies and make sure that we can deliver them through the supply chain we have.
Mr Jones
No. I am sorry, but I do not have the time.
I now come on to what will happen after the next general election. Is there going to be a massive increase in defence expenditure whoever wins the election? No, there is not. We know that, so let us just tell the public that. What we need to ensure is that we get the maximum effect from what we do spend. My right hon. Friend the Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey), who speaks for the Labour party on defence, will—if he gets the job—have a big task facing him if we are successful at the next general election. My heart sinks a little when he talks about reviews. Yes, we need to have a review, but we also need action straightaway.
It is now critical that we take some key decisions, and there are very difficult discussions to be had, not just with the British people about where Britain is realistically in the world today, but with some of the members of the armed forces and the chiefs, in saying, “We’re going to do this, and we’re going to do it well, and we’re going to make sure we are safe as a nation.” Is that defeatism or saying that Britain is finished? No, it is not. I think we have a proud future, and we have some great military and diplomatic assets, including in the way we do things. However, we should not delude ourselves that we will be going back to some pre-Suez or pre-second world war global Britain as an imperialist power. We are just not going to be able to do that, and I think we have to be honest with the British people.
There also now has to be speed. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Warley (John Spellar) said about munition shelling, we cannot have a situation in which it takes a year for munition stocks to be replaced. The tempo has to be increased, so action will have to be taken very quickly. I am all in favour of a review and a study of policy—in the last few years in this country we have lacked any thought-out policy work or strategy, and we need that—but we also need action.
It is a daunting task that will face any Government after the next general election, but let us be proud of the members of our armed forces, who work on our behalf to keep us secure. There is an impression that defence is somehow a Conservative issue; I am sorry, but it is not a Conservative issue. A lot of the men and women in our armed forces come from the poorest and most deprived communities in our country, but they are proud to serve their country, and I think we should be proud of them. We should give them the clear commitment that they have our backing, but be clear with them that we must be realistic about the tasks we ask them to do to keep us safe.
James Cartlidge
I am grateful for the right hon. Gentleman’s clarification. Either way, I think we can all agree that it is important that we understand the extent to which our armed forces are ready and are out there serving the country as we speak.
Our continuous at-sea nuclear deterrent is entering its sixth decade of service, and our armed forces have helped us to become Ukraine’s most front-footed ally. We have trained more than 60,000 Ukrainian military personnel since 2014, and we are delivering more than £7 billion of military aid to Ukraine within our overall aid package worth almost £12 billion. That support is unwavering, with the recent announcement of our latest £2.5 billion package of military support for Ukraine being a £200 million uplift on the previous two years. Beyond our support for Ukraine, our armed forces are participating in every single NATO mission.
Sir Julian Lewis
I am grateful to the Minister for allowing me to intervene. I did not apply to speak in this debate because I could not be sure that I would be here at the end. Will he impress upon the House how our aid to Ukraine is vital because, if Ukraine successfully thwarts Russia, all those dread scenarios about an attack on NATO will not happen? Similarly, although President Trump is a worry, it is at least a relief that he has begun to say that, provided Europe does its bit, he will continue with America’s support for NATO, should he be elected.
James Cartlidge
My right hon. Friend makes an excellent point. The hon. Member for Rochdale (George Galloway) accuses us of imperialism in how we deploy our armed forces, but the whole purpose of our support is precisely to help Ukraine resist the imperialism of the Kremlin that he has shamefully supported while condemning what he calls the “Zelensky regime”. We heard him say it, and it is absolutely shameful.
James Cartlidge
My right hon. Friend makes an excellent point. It shows why I want to see us supporting our sovereign capability, because where the Spitfire was there in the 1930s, we hope that the global combat air programme will be there in the 2030s.
James Cartlidge
As my right hon. Friend has already intervened, I hope he will allow me to make some progress and refer to comments from colleagues.
Obviously, there has been particular debate about spending. The shadow Secretary of State was unable to answer whether Labour would match the figure of 2.5%, but a number of my colleagues wanted us to go further and faster. This point was put well by the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Richard Foord). The Chair of the Defence Committee and others have suggested that we should look back to the sort of GDP figures in the cold war, although they did not necessarily say that we should go to exactly those amounts. However, as was said by the hon. Gentleman, who I believe was in military intelligence, in those days almost all of eastern Europe was an armed camp full of Soviet divisions, whereas now those countries are in NATO, so the situation has changed profoundly.
As was rightly said by my right hon. Friend the Member for Elmet and Rothwell (Sir Alec Shelbrooke)—one of my predecessors as Minister for Defence Procurement—if we increase defence by a significant amount, the money has to come from somewhere. An increase from the current level of about 2.3% to 3% equates to £20 billion, which is not a small amount of taxpayers’ money. Even an increase to 2.5% equates to an extra £6 billion. So it is Government policy to support that but to do so when we believe the economy can support it on a sustained basis.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Rayleigh and Wickford (Mr Francois) made a passionate speech about how there had, in effect, been a cut to defence spending in the Budget, and several other Members said the same. I do not agree, although I accept that there is a debate about it. It is about the difference between the main estimate and the supplementary estimate, and some people have said it is about the inclusion of nuclear. To me, the nuclear deterrent is fundamental to defence, so of course it should be in the defence budget. We are not going to take out GCAP or frigates, and we are certainly not going to take out the nuclear deterrent, which is at the heart of the UK’s defence.
UK Armed Forces
Julian Lewis Excerpts(2 months ago)
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James Cartlidge
To be fair to the hon. Gentleman, he makes an important point about the importance of alliances. NATO is fundamental to the defence of our country, the wider western world and our allies beyond. Critically, to put this in context when we talk about the state of the armed forces, which is what the urgent question is about, and the alliances that he referred to, let us remember that we have just launched Steadfast Defender, which is one of the largest ever NATO exercises, involving 96,000 personnel, of which almost 20,000 are from the UK. I believe that we make up 40% of the land forces. That is an extraordinary contribution by the UK. We also offer our nuclear deterrent to NATO. We are supporting our allies, we stand together under article 5, and we should all do everything possible to support NATO in its 75th year.
Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)
May I commend to anyone interested in the historical context a report produced by the Defence Committee in July in 2019 called, “Shifting the Goalposts? Defence Expenditure and the 2% Pledge: An Update”, HC 2527? It shows that for the last 20 years of the cold war this country spent between 5.6% and 4.1% of GDP, calculated in the same way we do today, on defence. Does that not show both sides of the House that we have an awful long way to go now that there is a hot war in Europe before we match what we used to do when there was a cold war in Europe?
James Cartlidge
My right hon. Friend put that eloquently, and he speaks with great passion and expertise on the cold war and our recent history. As he knows, in the cold war era we had the working assumption that an invasion—or certainly a confrontation—could be launched on the border in Germany very quickly. We had a huge number of forces deployed, and given that threat we spent, understandably, a higher percentage of GDP on defence. Since then, we thought we had a more peaceful era. Those illusions have been shattered by Putin, and we have all had to wake up to that. That is why we have done so much to support Ukraine and, yes, why we will do everything possible to support our armed forces.
Situation in the Red Sea
Julian Lewis Excerpts(2 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Grant Shapps
I thank the hon. Member for his—as he has described it—tentative support. I have noted that the House has been largely unified on this issue during the past four statements, following previous attacks. He asks about the mission creep situation. I hope he feels reassured by the concept that we have waited longer, in part because the Houthis’ capabilities have been damaged, so that there is a longer gap and we do not see this thing speeding up. We have no intention or desire to see it increase, but we will act if there continue to be attacks on commercial and naval shipping.
The hon. Member asks about China and Russia and I have to say that I agree; it is important that countries that are impacted by this—the entire world, but perhaps China in particular—do speak up. We would welcome China being more vocal about the situation. As I mentioned in my comments, a Chinese vessel has been attacked, so this is of direct concern to the country. I call on China and, of course, Russia—for what it is worth—to be more vocal on these issues.
Lastly, I just do not accept this Gaza-Houthi connection. I remind the House that the Houthis were against Hamas until 2015, and now they arrive on the scene and pretend to support them. They are opportunist thugs taking advantage of the situation and of people’s lives and misery—not just in Gaza but in Yemen—and they should stop and desist immediately.
Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)
The Secretary of State will recall that, in handling this topic on 5 February, he strongly endorsed the suggestion that a lot of this trouble in the middle east was linked to tactics to divert from the war in Ukraine. Given that the route from what is happening in Ukraine to what is happening in the middle east is via Russia and Iran, is he satisfied that there is no inconsistency between the tough line being taken by the Ministry of Defence against the Houthis and the soft line being taken by the Foreign Office against their Iranian sponsors?
Grant Shapps
I somewhat reject that characterisation. To be absolutely clear, we are very much of the view that Iran is responsible; it funds, trains and provides equipment to the Houthis and many other Iranian-sponsored proxies in the region. It is also the case that it has probably lost control of some of them. It is important that we deliver those messages in many different ways to the Iranians. I have seen the read-outs of the ways they have been delivered, including directly, by the Foreign Secretary—and they were anything but weak.
Oral Answers to Questions
Julian Lewis Excerpts(2 months, 3 weeks ago)
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James Heappey
Such conversations happen all the time. Only last week, the Secretary of State was at the latest donor conference, followed by NATO Defence Ministers. I was in Norway a week or so earlier, having exactly those conversations with allies. As the right hon. Gentleman suggests, while traditional armaments such as artillery ammunition are important, so too, increasingly, are the novel precision weapons systems that the UK is very much at the forefront of supplying to our Ukraine friends.
Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)
Is it not time that both sides of the House came together to agree on a common policy of increasing defence expenditure, so that by increasing our support for Ukraine, we can set an example to our American allies, without whose help there can be no future for peace and security in Europe?
James Heappey
My colleagues on the Opposition Front Bench know that I try not to throw gratuitous punches in the House, and I know that they are enthusiasts for military spending, but their colleague the shadow Chancellor has thus far declined to say that she would adopt anything other than the 2% target for NATO spending, which is not the same as what the Government are currently spending, or what they currently intend to increase spending to, so the suggestion made by my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Sir Julian Lewis) is timely. It would be fantastic if, in the next hour, the shadow Secretary of State were to make the same commitment as we have.
Grant Shapps
The hon. Gentleman will be familiar with answers I gave last week or the week before at the Dispatch Box, when I said that we will always look at what is happening in the Red sea. I have been there to meet the crews myself, and will make a judgment based on the reality on the ground. There is now also input from a conglomeration of EU countries that are coming to join Prosperity Guardian, and we welcome that input.
Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)
In the debate on the Red sea on 24 January, I asked for confirmation that HMS Albion and HMS Bulwark would not only not be scrapped, but would not be mothballed. The deputy Foreign Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell), with the Secretary of State for Defence alongside him, said in response that I was
“absolutely right to detect the supportive view of the Secretary of State for Defence.”—[Official Report, 24 January 2024; Vol. 744, c. 402.]
However, a journalist was subsequently told by the Ministry of Defence that nothing had changed, so are those ships going to be mothballed or not?
Grant Shapps
My right hon. Friend can rest easy: I have been down to visit HMS Albion since those questions, and I can confirm that one of those ships will always be being made ready to sail. He can therefore be very relieved.
Situation in the Red Sea
Julian Lewis Excerpts(3 months ago)
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Grant Shapps
First, I welcome the right hon. Gentleman’s support for this action. He asked a series of questions, which I will rattle through. Were the actions effective? Yes, they hit the targets. Were all the targets hit? Again, yes. We are still carrying out surveillance to find out the exact impact, but I think we can be very confident that all the relevant objectives were reached. We combined very closely with our US colleagues, and sometimes interchanged some of those targets with them. The right hon. Gentleman will have noted that, on this occasion, we were involved in dropping munitions on more targets than previously, so we carried a slightly greater weight than before.
The right hon. Gentleman asked whether the action was successful, and rightly pointed out that what we are seeing is rather more sporadic: the attacks, including on HMS Diamond and on merchant shipping, have continued, but in a much more ad hoc fashion. It is perhaps relevant that there has been no attack using multiple different weapons at the same time, which we saw, for example, on 11 January. The degrading will have had some impact on that. I will come back to the right hon. Gentleman’s comments about the Prime Minister at the end—I want to set the record straight.
The right hon. Gentleman asked about Operation Prosperity Guardian. The simple answer, of course, is that none of us knows how long it will need to continue for, but we want it to come to a conclusion as quickly as possible.
We utterly reject any notion that these continued attacks by the Houthis are anything to do with the situation in Gaza. The Houthis are opportunist pirates who are using a situation to their benefit: a few years ago, they did not even support Hamas, but suddenly they want to be their greatest champions. They are over 2,000 kilometres away from Gaza; they are simply using the situation to their advantage, and it is wise for the House to not over-link the two. None the less, the right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right to about the need to see a humanitarian truce and a sustainable ceasefire—that is the Government’s policy. We are working extremely hard to try to achieve that, including through discussions that the Prime Minister, the Foreign Secretary and myself are having. Just yesterday, I was having those discussions in the middle east.
The right hon. Gentleman asked about RAF flights. The issue is not getting the aid to location—I have been working very closely with the Cypriot Government, for example, on how we can increase the amount of aid. The single biggest problem remains getting the aid into the country. We had some success with getting Kerem Shalom open, but what we really need to see is Ashdod open, in order to route that aid to Kerem Shalom and straight into Gaza. The Government and I will continue to push for that route, but the problem is not the flights taking off; it is the aid getting in.
Finally, turning to the fact that it is myself as Defence Secretary standing at the Dispatch Box, rather than the Prime Minister, the first thing to say is that it is the Secretary of State for Defence who actually has legal responsibility for these actions—who signs off the targets and, indeed, the legal authority. Technically, it is me who should be standing here, other than for the first couple of rounds, where the Prime Minister was dealing with something new and it was therefore very appropriate for him to be at the Dispatch Box.
The wider point that I would gently make to the right hon. Gentleman, though, is that the Prime Minister is in Northern Ireland today, doing incredibly important work—[Interruption.] I hear from a sedentary position the suggestion that we should have been recalled yesterday, but I unsure whether that would have been entirely practical. It is entirely appropriate that the Prime Minister is in Northern Ireland. I would have thought that the House would welcome the fact that that historic breakthrough has been marked by the Prime Minister, and it is very appropriate that I am here today to explain the activity of Saturday night to the House.
Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)
Do the Government accept that it is difficult to deter terrorist fanatics, and that one mainly has to contain the effectiveness of what they do until they are ultimately destroyed, preferably by our regional allies? Does the Secretary of State feel that there is in fact a link to a separate conflict, and that is the conflict in Ukraine? Is it not more than a coincidence that the proxies of Russia’s ally in the middle east have been so much more active while Russia is so desperate for us to turn our attention away from supporting Ukraine?
Grant Shapps
As ever, my right hon. Friend has absolutely hit the nail on the head. Russia and Iran are working together. Actually, the same kind of drones—sometimes the Shahed drones—that are being fired in Ukraine by the Russians, courtesy of Iran, are also being fired by the Houthis. He makes an excellent linkage point, and he is absolutely right.
Oral Answers to Questions
Julian Lewis Excerpts(4 months ago)
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James Heappey
Within the serving cohort, such is the turnover of staffing within the armed forces that very few will have had direct operational experience alongside either the Afghan armed forces or even the patrol interpreters and others who are eligible for ARAP, but the hon. and learned Lady is right that some element of the serving force will be deeply invested in this matter. Obviously the chain of command is there to support them and answer their questions. Within the veterans community, the sentiment is very strongly held. The reality is that there have to be limits to the UK scheme, as there are to those of other countries. No country has made an open offer to those who served in the Afghan security forces; all countries’ offers are focused on those who worked directly with that country. Clearly what direct service looks like is a matter for debate. I suspect that a question on that is coming.
Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)
Surely special consideration must be given to those members of the Afghan special forces who, even if they did not work directly for us, worked extremely closely with us. Can the Minister tell the House how many, or how few, members specifically of the Triples and the special forces face a constant threat to their lives and ought to be rescued?
James Heappey
The number that is circulated is around 400 to 500, but that is not a number that the UK Government can necessarily verify because we do not have the employment records of those units.
Grant Shapps
It is very important that our service personnel feel that they are not only honoured when they go to war but comfortable at home. One of the big things I am doing is pressing forward with the review of armed service accommodation, including by providing £400 million to improve that accommodation, which will make the lives of service personnel better at home.
Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)
A
“short-sighted, militarily illiterate manoeuvre totally at odds with strategic reality”
was how the Defence Committee described, in February 2018, the proposal to retire HMS Albion and HMS Bulwark ahead of their anticipated lifetime dates of 2033 and 2034. May I advise and warn the Secretary of State not to be blindsided by the people who are raising this matter again after a change of Secretary of State for Defence?