Future Capability of the Armed Forces

Lord Empey Excerpts

Thursday 16th July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Empey (UUP)]

My Lords, I join with the noble Lord, Lord Swire, in welcoming the fact that the noble Lord, Lord Harlech, has been recycled; the value of that is before us this afternoon. We have talked repeatedly about percentages of GDP to be spent on defence. I do not like the concept of percentages of GDP. The amount of money you need to spend is what you need to spend, and some artificial percentage does not make much sense. We need to re-evaluate that.

I was fortunate enough to be present when President Zelensky came into this building in March. I attended the meeting in Committee Room 14; many noble Lords will have been there. He had a big screen and a laptop, and he was able to show us in real time what was happening on his own battle-front: what was coming in and what was going out. There were four other laptops in Ukraine that were doing the same thing. Most of us went to that meeting on the understanding and acceptance that he presumably wanted more money or more ammunition. No—he was selling at that meeting, not begging. With his colleagues, he has developed a wartime economy. He has been agile and innovative, not simply for commercial reasons but out of sheer necessity to survive.

The noble Lord, Lord Robertson, started his lecture last night by mentioning that we are not engaging in a meaningful conversation with the general public on what confronts us. This is not a political thing; the noble Lord, Lord Harlech, opened the debate with that point. This goes back 40 years, to the end of the Cold War. We were all very happy, whether we were Ministers or whatever, to spend the money on things that we felt were important—non-defence matters such as education, welfare or health. We were all happy to do that and all allowed it to happen, so we are not throwing stones here, but we need to recycle—in our own minds, and in the minds of the general public—the issues that confront us now.

I do not believe that Putin’s tanks will roll up Whitehall or that his submarines will come up the Thames—although most of us would hardly notice if they did. The fact is that we do not have the right mindsets. We need to engage with the public to educate people on what we are confronted with: the damage that can be done to our infrastructure, such as the undersea cables on which so much of our wealth and commerce is dependent. Hardly a day goes by when we do not have a photograph in the paper of some ship or other that has been decommissioned or is laid up in a port somewhere. It is not good enough. We have to start a conversation, and I hope the new Prime Minister will do that, because we have to get the people onside. Unfortunately, that means difficult choices. We will have to rethink the post-Cold War spending profile and begin to get our heads around the fact that we face an enemy driven not by logic but by ideology.