Defence Expenditure (NATO Target) Bill

Debate between Kevin Foster and Gerald Howarth

Friday 23rd October 2015 Commons Chamber

[Sir Gerald Howarth]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right.

The problem is that today’s policy is driven by a belief that a key way to respond to the challenges we face is to increase our intervention upstream so that, by providing aid to poor and dysfunctional countries, we reduce the causes of tension and thus our need for hard power. My response is twofold.

First, there is little evidence, despite committing the massive figure of £13 billion of public money, that such soft power delivers the effect sought. We have provided more than £1 billion to assist refugee camps to cope with the Syrian crisis, yet there has been palpably no reduction in the tidal wave of migrants, whether economic migrants or those genuinely fleeing persecution. I support what the Government are doing in Syria, which is noble and right. We should seek to maintain refugees near their country of origin, not to uproot them and import them into the continent of Europe. I strongly support that policy.

Secondly, there seems to be a quaint idea that the exercise of soft power offers an alternative to hard power. Make no mistake, Mr Speaker: without serious hard power, your soft power is completely non-existent. As Theodore Roosevelt said, it is better to “carry a big stick”, and then you can speak softly.

[Kevin Foster (Torbay) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful point. Does he agree that the two budgets are not mutually exclusive? As things such as Operation Gritrock have shown, military capability gives us choices to deliver humanitarian goals.

[Sir Gerald Howarth]

I could not agree more. There is an argument that we should combine all such budgets. I am not in favour of that, because it might turn out to be an excuse for reducing our defence budget. I am not opposed to overseas aid, which has a role to play. We are talking about priorities or quantum. In trying to establish our priorities, I am pointing out that soft power— overseas aid is a massive implement of soft power—has limited value in terms of the threats we face around the world.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kevin Foster (Torbay) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to support the Bill. I welcome the fact that it has been brought forward by my hon. Friend the Member for Aldershot (Sir Gerald Howarth).

It is safe to say that I am probably only here because of the Royal Navy. In 1944, Philip and Dorothy Foster—both RN—met in a galley. He was in charge of the stewards and she was in charge of the Wrens in the kitchen. They both had a view on how the galley could perform better and they each blamed the other. Hon. Members can imagine what followed.

To know why the Bill is so important, we need think only about what we see when we are out and about as members of the armed forces parliamentary scheme, meeting many people in the Navy and looking at what they are delivering. I will stick with the Navy, because I am with that service, although the Royal Air Force and the Army also provide such a valuable role. As my grandfather would have said, however, I know which is the senior of the three services.

This is about defending and protecting our nation from all threats, not just military ones. The crew of HMS Iron Duke have been out in the Baltic to deal with a more traditional threat, but, as my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce) has said, others went out to fight Ebola, a virus that would have threatened lives in this country had it been allowed to spread. That is key: it was as much about saving lives here as about saving lives out in Africa. Had it become a pandemic, it would have reached this country. We could not keep out the black death in the middle ages, and we would not have kept out Ebola in the interconnected 21st-century world.

The Bill is about providing a basic level of support—a floor—in spending as an insurance policy. Why should that be put into law? In the past, I would have emphasised the view that it is for the Chancellor in each Parliament to set out the spending commitments and plans, and to put forward Budgets for approval by the House. The Act to enshrine the international aid commitment has changed my view. For the first time, the commitment of a specific part of GNI—in this case, it is of GDP—was enshrined in law. Now that such a precedent has been set, it is right to put into law one of our other key international pledges, the 2% of GDP on defence.

How we spend the 2% is key—nobody is arguing that it should be wasted or put into inefficient projects—but at 2% of GDP, given some of the historical spending figures that have been cited, we are hardly being spendthrift. It is vital to keep a minimum capability to be able to act. That should be not just through our nuclear deterrent, which we regularly talk about, but, as I said in an intervention, through the conventional deterrent that NATO needs to provide.

My hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) spoke about the German defence budget. Fundamentally, having a bulwark of conventional forces that can be rapidly expanded at a time of crisis is as much a part of NATO’s article 5 deterrence as is the threat of nuclear retaliation if an aggressor state uses weapons of mass destruction against any NATO member. For me, the Bill is about that.

The Bill is also about encouraging our allies by enshrining the commitment in legislation. A country cannot have the Rolls-Royce insurance policy of article 5 mutual self-defence if its budget is that of an old banger. Some countries are building such a capability, but others need to do the same, not least the larger European countries such as Germany and Italy. I would join my hon. Friend in saying that for Germany—a modern, democratic Germany, committed to human rights—to have a capable and effective military is as key a part of keeping security and stability and deterring potential threats to our allies as it is for the United States and the United Kingdom. We obviously had a few differences in history, but we need to look at the future threats, not reminisce about the past.

Putting the target into legislation will secure us against future Governments who do not have the same priorities as we have today. I believe that the current Chancellor and Prime Minister are committed to meeting the target of spending a minimum of 2% of GDP on defence, in accordance with the NATO standard, but imagine if we had a Prime Minister who took the following view:

“Wouldn’t it be wonderful if every politician around the world, instead of taking pride in the size of their armed forces…abolished their army and took pride in the fact they don’t have an army… That is the way we should be going forward.”

I do not think that the British people are very likely to elect to that role someone who believes that, but it is important to have a bulwark to ensure our ongoing capability. The NATO alliance is based on knowing that the allies that would come to one’s rescue will have their capabilities for 10, 15 or 20 years, not just for the lifetime of one Government.

As I said in a couple of interventions, I do not accept the argument that there is a conflict between our 0.7% commitment on international aid and our 2% commitment on defence. Our expenditure is about providing a military capability that gives this House and our Government—in particular the Prime Minister, who exercises the royal prerogative—choices when faced with situations. The choice could be to exercise lethal force to take out a threat to this country’s security in a lawless area where the application of international law or a request for extradition would be an almost meaningless gesture, as occurred recently.

The choice could also be to provide unarmed assistance, as in Operation Gritrock, which has been mentioned, thereby using the ability of the military to go anywhere, to deploy and to deliver a capability for a humanitarian end. That could be setting up a field hospital, providing medicine or providing people who are skilled and trained in dealing with biological and chemical warfare agents, whose skills are eminently applicable when a major illness or disease breaks out. As has been said, the military can deliver soft power as well as the hard power that we traditionally assume it will use.

The example that I always give is HMS Ocean, which I have visited. It can be viewed as an amphibious helicopter landing platform. I recently saw it used as part of the Wader exercise, which involved deploying marines and planning a beach raid. It can also be seen as a hospital, a place that can feed thousands of people in an hour and a place that can provide infrastructure for a country that has just had its infrastructure shattered by an earthquake or other natural disaster. It is still the same capability and the same money is being spent.

[Sir Gerald Howarth]

HMS Ocean serves a further purpose. It provides a magnificent backdrop for signing a treaty with Brazil, which I was privileged to do as a Minister.

[Kevin Foster]

Indeed, our Navy has always been part of our diplomatic missions across the seas. It has provided a platform not just for war fighting but for trade and diplomacy. It has literally flown our flag for all purposes, not just the traditional purpose of deterrence. Plenty of treaties have been signed on board our ships in the past, and hopefully plenty more will be signed in the coming years.

It is appropriate to commit to the target in the Bill because we do not know exactly what the future threats will be. Two hundred and ten years ago, our predecessors in this House were still awaiting the news of Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar, because HMS Pickle was still on its way to Falmouth. The threats we face today would have been unimaginable at that time. For me, this is about making sure that we have a minimum expenditure on capability enshrined in law, so that whatever threat comes along over the next 20 to 30 years we have armed forces that are able to respond to it in their current form or able to expand, as they did in the great crises of 1939 and 1914 to meet a new aggressive threat. At the core of those forces must be professionals who have been in the military for many years and can take their skills with them into an expanded military.

I believe that this is the right step to take. It is certainly one that many of our constituents wish us to take. If we had not put into law one international target, I would accept the argument that we should not put such targets into our national law, but the precedent has been set. It is therefore time to put this target into our law and send a similarly powerful message to other countries about our commitment to the north Atlantic alliance as that which we have sent about our commitment to the UN’s development goals. I might have accepted the arguments about relevance and so forth, but they were all dealt with in the consideration of the other Bill.

As has been said, NATO has now expanded to 26 members, and it is vital—