Situation in the Red Sea

Debate between Martin Docherty-Hughes and Julian Lewis

Wednesday 24th January 2024 Commons Chamber

[Martin Docherty-Hughes]

The right hon. Gentleman makes an interesting point. Perhaps he should refer to what was said by his hon. Friend the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee about the diplomatic effort. I thought that her point about Arab-led initiatives was well made. Perhaps the Government should listen to that as a future intention. I think that is more to the point than engaging in military action, which has been ongoing for some time.

My SNP colleagues and I gave the first round of strikes against the Houthi targets qualified support earlier this month, and we do so again in respect of the latest strikes, but as we begin to slide towards what seems almost like an inevitable longer-term commitment, it cannot be said often enough that the “what”, the “how’” and the “why” of UK grand strategy are, at least from my perspective, dangerously out of sync. Let us start with last week’s keynote announcement from the Defence Secretary, who I see is no longer in their place, that

“The era of the peace dividend is over and 2024 will mark an inflection point.”

On the surface, that is a pretty banal observation, but whether we call it the polycrisis or the age of grey-zone conflict, those of us who come to these debates on a regular basis have been talking about the possibilities of this type of thing happening at least since I arrived in 2015. I am not sure how 2024 will be anywhere near the inflection points that 2014 or 2022 were; none the less, that is a bold statement from the Secretary of State. It is important to say that he also backed it up with the announcement of a £405 million investment in so-called drone-killing Sea Viper missiles.

On the surface, it would seem that the Secretary of State has got his why and his what sorted. We just need a how, and that is where I think we begin to run into trouble. For all the high-falutin’ rhetoric from the MOD main building, I am not sure that anyone here really believes we are going to meet the how in the form of an increase in defence spending to meet these new threats, given the disastrous state of the MOD’s finances, as seen in the latest National Audit Office report.

We are in the middle of the cost of living crisis, as we all know well. Inflation seems to be coming under control; it is only worse in the defence sector, and the proliferation of US dollar-dominated contracts is not going to make things easier, especially with a soft pound and the reality that we are now living in one of the poorest countries in western Europe. Any increase in defence spending at this time means a cut elsewhere in the budget; that is simply a reality. Although there are those, particularly on the Opposition Benches, who are brave enough to say that they would like to make cuts elsewhere to do this, I have seen absolutely no indication from the Government that they intend to do so.

I am no economist—hard to believe, I know—but I believe that practitioners of that special art call it a “revealed preference”. An example would be when a potential leadership candidate advocates spending 3% of GDP, only to quietly drop the commitment when they become Chancellor. All our recent Prime Ministers have made all the right noises when it comes to the problems in international security, but none of them, at least from my perspective, has met that challenge with a significant increase. Indeed, I think we can all agree that if that redoubtable and dogged former Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for Wyre and Preston North (Mr Wallace)—I let him know that I was going to mention him in the debate—was only able to secure an increase to 2.5%, and even then only by the end of the decade, I do not think anyone is expecting his successor to be any more successful.

I should point out—I say this as something of a sceptic about increasing the defence budget or even the value in such arbitrary targets—that we judge Governments based on their record, and this is what this one has. Once we start to scratch at the how in the UK strategy, the what and the why also start to come unstuck. Let us take the Sea Viper order: what was presented as an announcement to counter this new and specific threat has actually been on the table since 2012, only to be constantly shifted to the right because of pressures elsewhere on the budget.

[Sir Julian Lewis]

rose—

[Martin Docherty-Hughes]

I will give way to my right hon. Friend.

[Sir Julian Lewis]

I am grateful, and I regard him as my hon. Friend too. Before he leaves the issue of percentages spent on defence, would he not agree with me that, crude though they are, these are indicators of a national priority? The trouble is that if we do not spend enough on defence in peacetime, and then a conflict breaks out—we are now beginning to hear talk of having to be prepared for major conflict in the next decade or two—we will be spending vastly more than 3% or 4% on defence. So how much better is it to spend a bit more in peacetime to prevent the conflict, and how much better than that is it that America should realise that investing in Ukraine’s effort is also helping to raise the deterrence threshold?

[Martin Docherty-Hughes]

I both agree and disagree. Had the Ministry made sustained investment in capability, we might not have found ourselves in this situation. The right hon. Gentleman is welcome to stay for my Adjournment debate on nuclear infrastructure, in which we might go into the number crunching in far more detail—he may try to pass on that.

Far from being a simple drone killer, Sea Viper is a sophisticated ballistic missile defence system that has been in development since the 1980s. Each Aster 30 missile costs £2 million a pop. Whoever in the main building thought it was a good idea to call it a drone killer evidently had not done the cost-benefit analysis on taking out mass-produced Chinese drones, costing £100, with a £2 million missile. That is before we even get to the platforms that deliver the capability.

The Minister might be able to correct me, but the MOD is now officially refusing to publicly disclose the size of its escort fleet, which the Houthis probably already know—maybe it is in one of the TikToks that the hon. Member for Rutland and Melton mentioned. That refusal got a bit of play last week, although we should consider the why of it all.

If we can all agree that we are living in a world of increasingly complicated and interlinked threats, why is the Red sea important to the UK? I consulted two principal documents published since I became an MP—the 2015 strategic defence and security review and the 2021 integrated review—but, alas, there was no mention of the Red sea. Yemen was given a single cursory mention in each, and both in the context of other regional conflicts. The Government’s defence is that both documents were written before the Ever Given accident reminded us that the Suez canal and the Red sea are an important bottleneck for global trade.

Ultimately, neither document, one pre-Brexit and one post-Brexit, tells a compelling story about UK engagement in that part of the world, which makes it harder for me, and certainly for the public, to see why sustained engagement, if it happens, is in our long-term interest. Do not get me wrong: even as a committed north Atlanticist who believes that the primary commitment of Scotland and the UK should be to our northern European neighbourhood, I am open to being convinced. But the mood music throughout that time was on global Britain, without elucidating what that actually meant.

Do not get me started on the Indo-Pacific tilt either. The integrated review made the incredible assertion that the UK wishes to be the European state

“with the broadest and most integrated presence in the Indo-Pacific”.

That claim received very little interrogation at the time. Again, as a committed north Atlanticist, I was perhaps never going to be on board with the idea of an Indo-Pacific tilt, but the more I try to find out about it, the less convinced I become.

The Indo-Pacific is a big place and is home to two of the three largest oceans in the world and three of the five largest states. Any tilt towards it would surely require some sort of prioritisation, but we have never heard any talk of this. The Red sea region could have been part of that, securing the freedom of maritime trade from the Indo-Pacific and bringing in European partners with a presence in the region, along with others, but there was a complete failure to communicate any of that to Members, never mind to the general public.

Forgive those of us who are sceptical about the what. With the strikes against Houthi targets, we can clearly see the how. The Royal Navy, which is doing a commendable job, is in its poorest and most diminished state for many years. The right hon. Member for Rayleigh and Wickford alluded to that, and it is a consequence not only of budgetary pressures but of a complete failure of this and previous Governments to make the case for the why, be that in the Red sea or the North sea.

Instead, we have a manpower and retention crisis caused by over a decade of wage stagnation; the ongoing possibility that the two remaining landing platform docks will be mothballed, calling into question the long-term viability of the Royal Marines; and the admission in November that the entire fleet of SSNs was alongside at the same time. Yet if we were going by the MOD’s spin on things, all is well, because we can still field two carrier strike groups, even though everyone knows we would never have the manpower to do so at the same time; the AUKUS deal will allow Astute-class boats to operate in the Pacific ocean, even though, as we have heard, they sometimes cannot even get to the North sea; and—who can forget, from last week—we now have a space laser, or at least we will in 10 or 15 years’ time. So let me end with a general observation: when it comes to UK grand strategy in the Red sea, denial is not just a river you end up in if you take a wrong turn on your way there.

National Security Bill

Debate between Martin Docherty-Hughes and Julian Lewis

Consideration of Lords message
Monday 26th June 2023 Commons Chamber

[Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker.

Lords amendment 22B, accepted by the upper House last Wednesday, 21 June, requires a UK-registered political party to publish a policy statement ensuring the identification of foreign donations and providing the Electoral Commission with an annual statement showing the foreign donations received. This is the second time that the other place has amended the Bill to include such a clause. On behalf of the ISC, I spoke in favour of the previous version of the amendment when the Bill was last in the Commons, and, as Lord West stated on Wednesday, the ISC’s position remains the same: we firmly support the introduction of this provision. It is deeply concerning that the Government continue to oppose it.

In 2020, the ISC’s long-delayed Russia report highlighted the risk of foreign state-linked financial interference in UK politics. There is clearly a threat that needs to be tackled. The Committee on Standards in Public Life, in a major 2021 report on regulating electoral finance, concluded that

“the current rules are insufficient to guard against foreign interference in UK elections.”

That committee also observed that, since 2018, the Electoral Commission has supported the introduction into electoral finance regulation of risk management principles that are used for anti-money laundering checks conducted by companies. This amendment falls into that same category.

Members from both sides of both Houses have previously spoken strongly in support of the Lords amendment and, together with the evidence provided by the ISC, the Committee on Standards in Public Life and the Electoral Commission, have clearly set out why it is needed and why the current safeguards in our law are insufficient. By refusing to accept the need to update the law, the Government are rejecting the non-partisan conclusions of both Parliament and the Electoral Commission. They are inexplicably rejecting the opportunity significantly to improve the transparency and accountability of our political system by requiring political parties to take modest but important steps to identify and disclose donations received from foreign sources and states.

The Government claim to oppose this Lords amendment on the basis that the existing protections within electoral law are sufficient; that the amendment would not work in practice; and that it would place an undue burden on grassroots political organisations. Almost everyone else disagrees. The Government rely on the fact that existing electoral financing law requires political parties to check that a donor is “permissible”. Yet that misses the central point: the lack of any requirement for a political party to check the source of the funding.

There is currently no rule that political parties must conduct adequate due diligence on donors—not even donors operating in high-risk countries. Citizens domiciled abroad and companies based in the UK can donate to a political party with no questions asked about the source of the money. That applies even to companies that are making no operating profit. Why should a UK charity, or a UK company, have to undertake enhanced due diligence, under money laundering and terrorist financing law, where a donor is linked to a high-risk country, whereas a political party is exempt from that duty? Political parties surely require the highest level of protection.

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

On that point, the hon. Gentleman is clear that even small and medium-sized registered charities, whether they are in Scotland, England, Wales or Northern Ireland, have to do as he says. I am absolutely perplexed as to why the Government cannot agree with him and his Committee on why that should not be extended to political parties.

[Sir Julian Lewis]

I hope he, like us, will persevere and maybe one day that mystery will be solved. In fact, the amendment does not even represent the highest level of protection. It is a very modest measure that would not place undue burdens on political parties. The Electoral Commission says that such rules could be introduced in a way that recognises the need for proportionality, as we have heard, with different requirements depending on the size of an entity’s financial infrastructure and/or the size of the donation. Guidelines would prevent this amendment, which increases transparency and accountability, from becoming disproportionately onerous.

The fact that due diligence measures are used in the charity sector, and not just by commercial entities, demonstrates that it should be entirely possible for similar steps to be taken by political parties. We know that there is both a threat and a vulnerability. We know that current safeguards are inadequate. This is a modest, sensible and proportionate amendment: the Minister should seize the opportunity by accepting it or proposing his own alternative.

Continuous At-Sea Deterrent

Debate between Martin Docherty-Hughes and Julian Lewis

Wednesday 10th April 2019 Commons Chamber

[Dr Lewis]

I am sorry to have to explain to the hon. Lady that the whole point of our ability to retaliate is to ensure that we are not attacked in the first place. One really does not have to have had more than half a century of experience to realise that that is bound to be the case. I was not going to quote Professor Sir Henry Tizard, whom I have quoted in debates many times before, but it looks like it is necessary for me to do so.

Professor Tizard was the leading defence scientist in the second world war at the time when atomic weapons were being created. In 1945, with a committee of leading scientists, including Nobel prize winners, he was supposed to look forward to see what the future nature of warfare might be. His committee was not allowed to explore the atomic bomb project in detail, but he insisted on putting in this primary rationale for nuclear deterrence, which holds as firmly today as it did in June 1945. He explained that the only answer that those senior defence scientists, with all their experience of the second world war, could see to the advent of the atomic bomb was the preparedness to use it in retaliation, thus preventing an attack in the first place. I am sorry to inflict this on the House again, but he said:

“A knowledge that we were prepared, in the last resort, to do this”—

to retaliate—

“might well deter an aggressive nation. Duelling was a recognised method of settling quarrels between men of high social standing so long as the duellists stood twenty paces apart and fired at each other with pistols of a primitive type. If the rule had been that they should stand a yard apart with pistols at each other’s hearts, we doubt whether it would long have remained a recognised method of settling affairs of honour.”

In other words, if someone knows that they are going to die, for a certainty, if they launch an attack against somebody else, they are not going to launch that attack in the first place.

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

I thank the right hon. Gentleman and the Secretary of State for actually taking interventions. Anyone who knows the history of the continuous nuclear deterrent knows that it is heavily reliant upon a relationship with the United States. With the present occupant of the White House being such a transactional individual, and with the United Kingdom about to enter into trade negotiations with the US, how confident is the right hon. Gentleman that his Government’s negotiators will not, say, trade chlorinated chicken and access to the NHS—[Interruption.] I am talking technically. How confident is he that that would be not be traded for the United States role in the nuclear deterrent? Although he knows that I fully oppose it, of course.

NATO

Debate between Martin Docherty-Hughes and Julian Lewis

Wednesday 20th June 2018 Commons Chamber

[Dr Lewis]

That is very generous of you, Madam Deputy Speaker.

If the opening speeches in this debate are anything to go by, I think that the temperature will be very similar to that of the first two debates and show a welcome unanimity on both sides of the House about the importance of defence investment in peacetime to ensure that we minimise the chances of conflict breaking out.

The shadow Secretary of State referred to the importance of investing in the whole range of conventional capabilities. As far as I can see, that is common ground among all the main parties in this House, even though there are differences of opinion about the nuclear dimension. The difficulty that we face is that defence investment costs a lot of money, and defence inflation has been running ahead of defence investment. As a result, we repeatedly hear phrases such as “hollowing out” and “black holes in the budget”. It was useful that she said that she felt that defence investment, in real terms, had fallen by about £10 billion.

I do not think I am giving away anything more than I should by saying that in a few days’ time the Defence Committee will publish a new report entitled, “Indispensable Allies?”, referring to the defence relationship between the United States, the United Kingdom and NATO. In that report, we do some calculations and projections about defence investment. We can see that at every level at which we estimate gross domestic product to grow over the next few years, an extra 0.5% of GDP equates, roughly speaking, to £10 billion. That is why when my hon. Friend the Member for North Wiltshire (James Gray) referred to the need to move towards 2.5% or 3% of GDP, we understood the sorts of figures that we are aiming to achieve.

It was slightly unfortunate that when we published our most recent report, “Beyond 2 per cent”, a few days ago, it coincided with the welcome announcement that £20 billion will be found for investment in the national health service. As I said in an intervention, while we obviously welcome the investment that is made in other high-spending Departments, it is important to remember how defence used to compare with those other calls on our Exchequer. At the time of the cold war in the 1980s, which is in the memory of most of us sitting in this House today, we spent roughly the same on health, on education and on defence. Now we spend multiples more on activities other than defence. Indeed, welfare—on which we used to spend 6% in the 1960s, just as we spent 6% on defence at that time—now takes up six times as much of our national wealth as does defence. So it is fairly easy to see that, by any standard of comparison, defence has fallen down the scale of our national priorities.

We have been very focused on Europe today because of the debate that took place immediately prior to this debate. It is worth reminding ourselves of the steps that led to the foundation of NATO. This may come as a slight surprise to some Members, but it actually goes back to the end of 1941, when three small European countries, Norway, Belgium and the Netherlands—who had all been overrun by Nazi Germany and whose Foreign Ministers were taking shelter in London—made an approach to the British Foreign Office. They said, “We’ve tried being neutral. We’ve tried keeping out of power politics. It has failed. Our countries have been occupied by brutal aggressors. When this terrible war is over, we want Britain to have permanent military bases on our territory so that we can never be caught out like this again.” It was from that invitation given to the United Kingdom to base military forces in countries that had put their trust in pacifism and neutralism, and had that trust betrayed, that NATO ultimately came into existence.

The Secretary of State began by paying tribute to the people who made the ultimate sacrifice in a time of war. It is certainly the case that when a war breaks out, there is no shortage of people willing to make that sacrifice, and what is more, there is no shortage of money to be invested in fighting and winning that conflict. The question that always faces us is what to do in peacetime. There is a paradox of peacetime preparedness, if Members will excuse the alliteration, which is that we prepare by investing in armed forces that we hope will never be used. That is what we have to do, and it is a difficult battle to fight to persuade people in peacetime to invest money in things that we hope we will not have to send into action.

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

In terms of future investment in something that we do not want to have to use, does the right hon. Gentleman appreciate that some of that future investment could be lost through dollar dependency in the equipment plan, meaning that any additional moneys coming from the Government would be lost and have no long-term benefit?

[Dr Lewis]

Yes. The hon. Gentleman, who is a valued member of the Defence Committee, has argued that point consistently on the Committee. The Government certainly need to bear that in mind when placing orders for expensive new equipment, at least during a period of uncertainty when there is doubt that the pound will hold its value against another currency.

In conclusion, we have an opportunity in this NATO summit to show that we are leading by example. It was never the case that we were anywhere near the NATO minimum of defence expenditure. It was always the case that we were second only to the Americans. We must try to restore that situation, and that means raising more money for defence and spending more money on defence. Spending 2.5% of GDP will restore us to where we were a few years ago; 3% of GDP should be our target, because only that way can we be ready for the threats that sadly face us today and show no sign whatever of diminishing.

Select Committee on Defence

Debate between Martin Docherty-Hughes and Julian Lewis

Thursday 7th July 2016 Commons Chamber

[Dr Lewis]

The hon. Gentleman makes an enormous and extremely valuable contribution to the work of the Committee, and I agree with him: the announcement of the creation of this new National Guard, which can muster hundreds of thousands of troops, according to some reports, but which, interestingly enough, also includes special forces, is a cause for concern. As it is directly responsible to the President, one can only wonder whether it has something to do with shoring up his position domestically, as well as with exerting power beyond Russia’s borders. The report says—I mentioned this in my statement—that the creation of the very high readiness joint taskforce is a step in the right direction, but the numbers that can be generated at short notice by the Russian armed forces seem to be substantially in excess of what NATO could generate now or in the immediate future, and we need to be able to do better in the medium and long terms.

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

I welcome the report, but I do get concerned when I hear Russia being spoken of in a certain fashion in the House and, critically, when we do not speak of the communities in Russia, who have to live with the daily experience of the Russian state.

It is now clear that the Russian Federation views the United Kingdom’s global strength as profoundly weakened not only by the issues raised in the Committee’s report, but by Brexit. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that the lack of investigation by the Committee into the consequences of Brexit was an oversight and only gives succour to the idea in the Kremlin that the United Kingdom does not have a Scooby what it is doing when it comes to working with like-minded European nations to deal with the profound threats posed by the Russian Federation?

[Dr Lewis]

What a pleasure it is, after all those very supportive questions, to be able to say that I utterly disagree with the question that has just been asked. When did Brexit occur? It was a matter of days ago, but the Committee is to be coruscated and condemned because it has not already carried out a full-scale investigation of the consequences of something that the hon. Gentleman was hoping would never happen. Some of us hoped that it would happen, although I must say that a majority on the Committee hoped that it would not. The hon. Gentleman can be perfectly sure that the consequences of Brexit feature high up on our future programme of work. Indeed, I am surprised only that he thinks we should have carried out the research into the consequences of Brexit before we even knew that it was going to take place.