Select Committee on Defence

Debate between Julian Lewis and Martin Docherty-Hughes

Thursday 7th July 2016 Commons Chamber

[Dr Lewis]

The hon. Gentleman makes an enormous and extremely valuable contribution to the work of the Committee, and I agree with him: the announcement of the creation of this new National Guard, which can muster hundreds of thousands of troops, according to some reports, but which, interestingly enough, also includes special forces, is a cause for concern. As it is directly responsible to the President, one can only wonder whether it has something to do with shoring up his position domestically, as well as with exerting power beyond Russia’s borders. The report says—I mentioned this in my statement—that the creation of the very high readiness joint taskforce is a step in the right direction, but the numbers that can be generated at short notice by the Russian armed forces seem to be substantially in excess of what NATO could generate now or in the immediate future, and we need to be able to do better in the medium and long terms.

[Martin Docherty-Hughes (West Dunbartonshire) (SNP)]

I welcome the report, but I do get concerned when I hear Russia being spoken of in a certain fashion in the House and, critically, when we do not speak of the communities in Russia, who have to live with the daily experience of the Russian state.

It is now clear that the Russian Federation views the United Kingdom’s global strength as profoundly weakened not only by the issues raised in the Committee’s report, but by Brexit. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that the lack of investigation by the Committee into the consequences of Brexit was an oversight and only gives succour to the idea in the Kremlin that the United Kingdom does not have a Scooby what it is doing when it comes to working with like-minded European nations to deal with the profound threats posed by the Russian Federation?

[Dr Lewis]

What a pleasure it is, after all those very supportive questions, to be able to say that I utterly disagree with the question that has just been asked. When did Brexit occur? It was a matter of days ago, but the Committee is to be coruscated and condemned because it has not already carried out a full-scale investigation of the consequences of something that the hon. Gentleman was hoping would never happen. Some of us hoped that it would happen, although I must say that a majority on the Committee hoped that it would not. The hon. Gentleman can be perfectly sure that the consequences of Brexit feature high up on our future programme of work. Indeed, I am surprised only that he thinks we should have carried out the research into the consequences of Brexit before we even knew that it was going to take place.