Defence and Security Review (NATO)

Keith Simpson Excerpts

Monday 2nd March 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Keith Simpson (Broadland) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart) on introducing the debate with such clarity and depth of knowledge.

This autumn the Prime Minister, whoever he is—no doubt it will be my right hon. Friend—will revisit the strategic defence and security review. He is on record as saying that he thinks it just needs a light touch. With the greatest respect to my right hon. Friend, I think he is wrong for every reason that my hon. Friend and other colleagues here have pointed out. It is a horribly complex situation.

I remember, in the early 1970s, going to seminars on military history, defence and international relations at the Institute of Historical Research, where one sat at the feet of Professors A. J. P. Taylor, Donald Cameron Watt, and Sir—as he is now—Michael Howard. A lot of the talk was about rearmament and appeasement in the 1920s and ’30s, and I used to sit there and think how naive and stupid were the chiefs of staff, the politicians and most of the advisers of that time. In the past 20-odd years, I have gained more sympathy for them, because they were faced with financial collapse and a multiplicity of threats. The armed forces had been reduced in number, most Government expenditure had been reduced, and the armed forces themselves could not agree on priorities. In relation to the Ministry of Defence’s budget, the armed forces—I say this with regret—have been log-rolling for decades, often wasting billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money.

In the few minutes that I have, I want to emphasise the fact that we should have a national security policy. That is of the things that the Government should be addressing this autumn. I hope that the discussion will not just be confined to Government Departments and to Parliament but open to wider outside expertise, as happens in the United States of America, Canada, Australia, and most European countries. That is absolutely crucial. Although this debate has—rightly given the nature of the publication—concentrated on the defence aspects and highlighted the threat from Putin, we all know that in fact we face a multiplicity of threats. If anything, the situation is more challenging for a Government now than it was even for the Governments of the late 1930s.

In looking at a national security policy, we must think not only of the threats that our country faces and is going to face, which have been outlined by my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border and others, but what the market will bear in terms of the money that is going to be allocated. It is a sobering thought that, looking at the national security budgets in the round, one of the poorest Departments is the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, with £1.72 billion. The Department for Work and Pensions could lose that kind of money in an afternoon, and Government IT budgets have invariably done so. The MOD’s budget is £34.34 billion, and the budget of Department for International Development, which I would include in the national security budget, is £9.89 billion. I will not go into the arguments about whether DFID’s budget should be reduced.

[Sir Gerald Howarth]

The latest figures I have indicate that the figure is actually £13 billion—it has gone up from £8.5 billion.

[Mr Simpson]

I am using the latest figure provided by the House of Commons Library. There are lies, damn lies, and statistics. The fact is that if we put together the budgets of those three Government Departments, that part of the national security budget is about £45.95 billion. If we throw in, say, another £5 billion to £10 billion for the intelligence services and GCHQ, we have about £55 billion. That is not a vast sum of money, but it is quite large. We need to consider whether we are spending our national security budgets correctly. They are in separate silos, and it would be much better, in the modern world, to look at them in the round.

In outlining the threat of Putin and all the other threats, we need to think about how we get public opinion alerted to this, and whether public opinion is prepared to see more money spent on national security. The latest polling done this weekend by YouGov shows what the public think about the amount of money spent on defence: 49% think it is too little, 20% about right, and 16% too much. Yet if we drill down into the 49% and tell those people that to get the extra money we must either, in simple terms, put up taxes or cut other areas of public expenditure—some will say “Transfer the money from DFID”—they do not much like either alternative.

Another aspect of the poll—this relates directly to what my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border has been saying—showed that 52% of those asked believed that resources on defence should be focused on dealing with the threats from Islamic terrorism rather than threats from states like Russia: in fact, only 18% thought that we should allocate resources to that. We can play with statistics, and public perception changes. In September 1938, the overwhelming majority of people welcomed the Munich agreement, but by April 1939 they had changed their views completely. Things will always change. The challenge that we all face is in being open in our debate and in getting public opinion to think about this, but also in getting the Government to move away from what can only be seen as cold war thinking in relation to cold war structures of the sort that still exist today.

To be fair to the previous Government, and our own Government, they did, between them, set up the National Security Council. Things are much better co-ordinated than ever before, according to everybody I have spoken to, including Opposition Members. The success of the National Security Council depends on the personality, interest and drive of the Prime Minister. Although one might disagree with some of the decisions that the current Prime Minister has made, he has provided that drive by regularly attending the National Security Council. There is nothing set in concrete to say that another Prime Minister would do that. As with Departments, once we remove a Minister who takes real, direct action, we can see things drift.

This has been an important debate. The national security budget and the strategic defence and security review do not need a light touch, but some serious thinking. We should have a debate not just about whether we spend 2% of GDP on defence but about how much we spend in total on national security and whether we can move any of that money around between Departments.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Jones]

I have made that clear. I will not promise things I cannot deliver, which the hon. Gentleman’s party did at the last election. He will have to stand up in front of his electorate in Stroud in May and say that he disagrees with the Prime Minister and will not sign up to the austerity Budget outlined by the Chancellor in the autumn statement. He needs to be honest with his constituents by saying that, because that is what will happen to the defence budget. He can make all his points about our position, but we have been very clear that we will meet the 2015-16 targets.

The hon. Member for Broadland (Mr Simpson)—I will call my fellow war graves commissioner my hon. Friend—made this point about those in the Ministry of Defence. I think he said that they were rolling the logs along the path, and they have in certain ways. What is needed, and this is part of our zero-based budget review, is to look in detail at exactly how our defence budget is spent. There is an argument for efficiencies that can be made, and they will be made.

The defence review must involve the largest possible number of people; otherwise it cannot be done. If the Treasury is just let loose, as it was in 2010, it will have the same result. I will say something that is perhaps out of character, but when he was Defence Secretary the right hon. Member for North Somerset (Dr Fox) did at least try to keep the Treasury dogs from the door, although he unfortunately failed.

[Mr Keith Simpson]

Does not the hon. Gentleman, as well as my hon. Friends, accept that we can all caricature the Treasury for obvious reasons, such as in 1998 and 2010, but if we sat in the Treasury and looked at the way in which the Ministry of Defence under successive Governments has been totally incompetent—in handling budgets, the overruns and the way in which individual services have competed with each other—to the detriment of national defence, surely we would agree that decisions should be collective? The Treasury does not necessarily have to have a veto, but it has a point of view and should be listened to.

[Mr Jones]

I do not disagree with the hon. Gentleman. When I chaired the value for money group in the MOD during the previous Government, it was certainly my experience that the Treasury can make a contribution. Unfortunately, it sometimes has a very blinkered view of the world, but it has to ensure that every defence pound we spend is actually well spent.

May I turn to the issue of soft power, which was raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford South and by the Chairman of the Select Committee, the hon. Member for Penrith and The Border? I always think “soft power” is a strange use of words because when we look at what is happening in Russia, we can see that its use has been very effective. Soft power is part of the Russian strategy not only in changing the complete news agenda on the invasion of Crimea, but in continuing to do the same. My hon. Friend the Member for Ilford South made his point in relation to the World Service, which is again a case of a short-term saving having long-term consequences. We need to address the issue that what might be seen as public relations or news management is clearly part of the Russian armoury for changing the agenda on Ukraine and other parts of the world. We need a similar type of force to make sure that we not only influence the debate, but can react very quickly to events as they happen.

The hon. Member for Colchester raised issues about the Falkland Islands. The Labour party is certainly committed to ensuring that the people of the Falkland Islands determine their own future, but that must be taken into account in the future defence and security review. Given his long-standing interest in housing, I am surprised that he has not thanked the Labour Government for the investment they put into Colchester and Army housing. It was sad that when this Government came to power they stopped the modernisation programme as well as the scheme that allowed members of the armed forces to buy their houses, although I know that has now been resurrected under a different heading.

The threats we face are numerous. Can we predict the future? No we cannot. We must ensure that the armed forces at our disposal are linked not only to our security networks and to MI5 and MI6, but to our homeland defence. That can be achieved only if a proper security and defence review in 2016 covers all those aspects, so that when we need the brave servicemen and women on whom we rely, we can ensure that they have the equipment and training to carry out that role. We must also deter aggressors who are clearly working to affect the way of life that we have all come to respect and take for granted.