Defence Spending

Lord Shinkwin Excerpts

Thursday 31st October 2024 Grand Committee

[Lord Shinkwin (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Trenchard on securing this debate and his powerful opening remarks. I completely agree with other noble Lords that making rapid progress in laying out the road map to spending at least 2.5% of GDP could not be more important.

The Budget states that the Government

“will set a path to spending 2.5% of GDP on defence at a future fiscal event”.—[Official Report, Commons, 30/10/2024; col. 822.]

I think this misses the point. The point is Putin. He has to be the starting point because, ultimately, it is not a future fiscal event that is going to determine UK defence spending—it is a future military event, orchestrated by Putin and his allies.

So the question is: how committed are we to ensuring that that military event is not a third world war? As noble Lords have said, it surely depends on the extent to which we are prepared to invest now in defence and deterrence as a means of averting war.

I do not question the sincerity of the Minister here and the Secretary of State in the other place, John Healey, but I fear that yesterday’s Budget will be interpreted by Putin as confirmation that we intend to continue living in a never-never land. That is reinforced by this sentence in the policy paper on the Budget:

“This underlines the government’s commitment to strengthening the Armed Forces and protecting national security during a period of geopolitical instability”.


I must say, I sense the hidden hand of Sir Humphrey in such an understated, anodyne turn of phrase. I am not sure that it quite captures the urgency of the situations in Ukraine, Lebanon, Gaza, Yemen, Iran—the terrorist puppet master—Georgia, Taiwan and North Korea. The list is long, and it is red hot.

As the excellent report from the International Relations and Defence Committee of your Lordships’ House, Ukraine: A Wake-up Call, makes clear, any increase in defence spending

“should be seen in the context of decades-long defence cuts and recent inflationary pressures on the defence budget”.

However, one thing is clear: it would be unfair to accuse the Chancellor of producing a Budget for defence—including, as my noble friend Lord Attlee alluded to, the defence of items of expenditure such as the NHS, which focus groups say are so important to them, bearing in mind Putin’s fondness for targeting maternity hospitals and other crucial civilian infrastructure. Sadly, yesterday’s Budget was a vital missed opportunity, because it was in no way a wake-up call for Vladimir Putin. In fact, I suspect that he is laughing at us—laughing at our increased indebtedness and our reduced readiness for war.

I conclude with one question for the Minister, who will know that the economic and financial dialogue between the UK and China was paused after the imposition of the national security law in Hong Kong. Since more than 60% of the components used to prosecute Putin’s illegal war in Ukraine come from China, can the Minister assure the Committee that the UK will not seek to deepen trade relations with China, which is making not only the continuation of conflict in Ukraine possible but a third world war far more likely?