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?

Ukraine

Lord Shinkwin Excerpts

Friday 25th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Shinkwin (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, for allowing me to speak from the Cross Benches while my leg is misbehaving.

I was recently asked by a member of the public, “When are we going to stop giving all this money to Ukraine? Surely we should be spending it on things that matter, like the NHS”. I naturally agreed that the NHS matters—of course it does—but I also said, as my noble friend Lord Banner’s family sadly knows at first hand, that one of the first places that Putin bombed was a maternity hospital. There is no reason to think that St Thomas’, for example, would not be in his sights. What better way to terrorise the British people and make them realise the price of standing up for Ukraine than to bomb a landmark hospital across the river from where we are sitting today?

Does any noble Lord seriously think that that could not happen and that Putin is not capable of such an outrage? Indeed, why would bombing St Thomas’ be any more outrageous than the crimes that his forces have already committed? If ever we need to be educated in Putin’s macabre mindset, we need only remember what his soldiers did in Bucha. As my noble friend Lord Robathan implied, the British public cannot assume that his bloodlust will not be visited on us, even if only by drones, cyberwarfare and missiles rather than by soldiers.

Yet, as the International Relations and Defence Committee of your Lordships’ House has warned, we are underprepared, including as a society. Everyone said “Protect the NHS” during the Covid pandemic, but does the Minister—the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman —agree that investing in the NHS is academic if we have not also invested adequately in the military means to defend it and our other civilian infrastructure? Can she reassure the House that this is being factored into determining the relative priorities of defence versus health and other domestic spending?

Surely the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, and the noble Lord, Lord Spellar, in his powerful maiden speech, are right when they warn that too many western policymakers still delude themselves that a compromise with Putin is possible. Indeed, I agree, as the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, reminded us, that following such a futile approach, as we did in 1938, will simply postpone and magnify the pain, as we deluded ourselves that Hitler could be appeased.

Effective deterrence may be expensive, but it is an awful lot cheaper, both financially and in human costs, than war. Yet, despite the horrors visited on Ukraine and the awful scenes from the Middle East following Hamas’s barbaric invasion of Israel from unoccupied Gaza only 12 months ago, I sense that too few outside your Lordships’ House and the other place can compute the devastation that awaits us should Ukraine be defeated. As the Minister—the noble Lord, Lord Coaker —said, Putin must be seen to lose for that devastation to be avoided.

Reports suggest that the goalposts on government debt are going to be moved in a few days’ time. I worry that the net result will be that, just when we need to reduce debt and prepare for war—so as not to have to fight one—our economy will become even more vulnerable to global life shocks. I hope sincerely that the extra £50 billion window that is being reported in the press will benefit defence.

I conclude with one further question for the Minister —the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman—to answer when she replies. She 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 repression there is now so much worse and since more than 60% of the components used to prosecute Putin’s illegal war in Ukraine come from China, can she reassure the House that the UK will not seek to deepen trade relations with China? Not only is China making possible the continuation of the conflict in Ukraine but its illegal sanction- busting involvement is making a third world war far more likely.