UK Defence Spending

Martin Docherty-Hughes Excerpts

Thursday 24th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[Martin Docherty-Hughes (West Dunbartonshire) (SNP) [V]]

I never thought I would hear the UK armed forces being called “small but perfectly formed”. I look forward to that being on a Conservative party leaflet at the next general election—I do not think it will be a vote winner.

It has been a while since we have had one of these debates and I thank two friends, the right hon. Members for North Durham (Mr Jones) and for New Forest East (Dr Lewis)—one current and one former member of the Defence Committee—for securing it. As we saw from their speeches, we certainly do not agree on everything, but I know and understand where those Members are coming from and they are open to discussing and debating all sorts of ideas. That should be the goal of a liberal democracy. We need to have more of these debates and not only in Backbench Business time.

Let me begin with the recent publication of the integrated review and defence Command Paper. I do not think it is useful just to talk about defence spending as an inherent good. First, we must ensure it is being spent correctly. My friend, the Chair of the Defence Committee, the right hon. Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood), chaired a session yesterday in which we heard from the Secretary of State, who was quite clear that those were the key documents for understanding where this political state was going. I happen to agree with the Secretary of State that there is a level of coherence within and between the documents that we have not seen in a while.

As a member of the Defence Committee, I have been lucky enough to be briefed by the Prime Minister’s foreign policy adviser, who has been responsible for synthesising the many disparate strands of foreign, defence and trade policy that we saw—no mean feat when concepts of global Britain have been so notoriously akin to nailing jelly to a wall. In achieving that feat, you are required to move on to a second-order problem: putting those abstract policy ambitions into concrete national security commitments. That is where we begin to encounter some turbulence.

There is a wonderful example of that on page 66 of the integrated review:

“Our goal:”—

the review thunders; the UK

“will be the European partner with the broadest and most integrated presence in the Indo-Pacific”.

I wish I had had the time to ask the Secretary of State about that yesterday. The consequences of that statement are potentially huge. I have one example—a current one—which makes me wonder about it.

This week, French air force Rafales, to simulate their long-range power projection capabilities, flew 40 hours in one go from France to Tahiti. That is French Polynesia, of course: that French part of the Indo-Pacific that allows that European partner to have a pretty broad, integrated and, given recent developments, sustained presence in the region. Is the UK seriously seeking to go further than that? How long has the carrier strike group tour of the Indo-Pacific been in the planning? This is the only type of thing that could replicate the French capability, and it is certainly not permanent. Do a couple of forward-deployed offshore patrol vessels equal a sustained presence, or a commercial opportunity to have them in the shop window? I am not sure. I have heard about RAF Typhoons planning to deploy into the Indo-Pacific, and the F-35B is famously the model with the shortest range.

Much as I would love to go into a longer debate on that commitment, behind my point lies a larger one: the Government are making national security commitments that are really understood only by a narrow range of policy makers in Whitehall, and not by the public at large, whose taxes will pay for them. Have we had a wider public debate about the UK Government’s commitments to the region and what the Indo-Pacific tilt means? I suspect that the up-and-coming trade negotiations will bring it to wider attention, but can any of us truly say that our constituents know what implications it will have?

This is the key point: the UK is stuck with a winner-takes-all political system where the formulation of foreign and security policy is done by the governing party. While all of us in this debate know that the commitments to the region are paper thin and likely to remain that way, the Government continue to use it as a means of pretending that we have moved on from the very concrete security challenges in our home region here in northern Europe. That is why my Scottish National party colleagues and I continue to bang the drum on multi-year defence agreements, such as the ones across Scandinavia, bringing together all parties interested in making a contribution and agreeing on general principles, and bringing debates to a wider audience so that the public can have confidence on what basis defence spending decisions are being taken, and why their hard-earned tax contributions are being spent in that way.

As we get to notions about an acceptable level of spend—something that I know my friend the right hon. Member for New Forest East has been at the forefront of—I must confess to being left a little cold. Whether we get 2%, 3% or even 8% of GDP, can we be confident that there is broad agreement on the aims and outcomes of that spending, and are we sure that the public would not rather the money be spent elsewhere? The two of course are linked.

Scottish National party MPs are here—it may come as a bit of a shock—to deliver independence for our nation, and I hope that by the time the next integrated review rolls around we will not be part of this conversation, but the affairs of the rest of the United Kingdom will never be abstract to us. It shall remain our most important security partner, so I dearly hope that it can learn to make security policy that is understood and supported by the general public who pay for it.

If we have learned one thing from the pandemic, it is that what we have previously taken for granted in security terms has been washed away. This state and so many others around the world have seen economies and national morale affected in a way that military planners could scarcely have imagined. It has finally brought the idea of the broad concept of security into the mainstream. Health spending is a national security issue. Education spending is a national security issue. Local government spending is a national security issue, and public services and cohesive societies are a national security issue and, rather inconveniently for some, I suppose—in terms of this debate at least—one that voters and taxpayers find easier to understand.

I hope that colleagues can understand that this is not some abstract, possibly peacenik nonsense. Defence spending has no automatic right to be raised just because we say that it should. The right hon. Member for New Forest East is right to characterise it in terms of priorities, and it is our job to demonstrate why defence should be further up the list. Much as I agree with my friend from the Defence Committee, the right hon. Member for Warley (John Spellar), that the world is becoming a more dangerous place, our constituents need to understand that. I therefore hope that we have more of these debates, that they are covered more widely, and that they are used in a way that we can discuss the vital issues at hand. It is the very least that our constituents deserve.