Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Philip Hollobone and James Heappey(10 months, 3 weeks ago)
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James Heappey
I think air dropping is a very imprecise way of doing business. Our preference is to seek maritime routes.
Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)
Is a feasibility study being undertaken to see whether aid could be delivered directly into Gaza from ship to shore, should the future security situation allow it?
James Heappey
The Defence Secretary has led internationally on exactly such an initiative, working with our friends in the Cypriot Ministry of Defence. There are ideas to do exactly that, but they obviously need to be agreed with all parties before they can happen.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Philip Hollobone and James Heappey(2 years, 8 months ago)
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Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)
The Minister for the Armed Forces (James Heappey)
One pauses because these weapon systems, every time they are effective, kill the entire crew of an armoured vehicle. My hon. Friend will take no pleasure from it, but he will be interested to note that these weapon systems have been prolific in their success. The Ukrainian armed forces value them enormously. They are accurate, reliable and deadly.
Migrant Crossings: Role of the Military
Debate between Philip Hollobone and James Heappey(2 years, 10 months ago)
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James Heappey
The Chief of the Defence Staff has been involved in all the conversations. As I have made clear, we should not be dismissive of the importance of securing our borders, not only from an immigration perspective but from a national security perspective. Migration is being used as a subthreshold weapon of competition elsewhere in Europe, and it cannot endure that our border is not properly secured.
The hon. Gentleman asks what the mindset is of the military. I can tell him that from the nation’s most senior serviceperson downwards, they take great pride in making sure that they play their part in the plan to deliver what the democratically elected Government set as priorities.
Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)
This is not Operation Red Meat; it is Operation Dog’s Dinner. If the mission statement were to reduce illegal people trafficking across the channel, I would support it, but, as far as I understand it, the mission statement is to lower the number of people landing on their own terms on UK beaches.
With the deployment of royal naval vessels, the Minister has effectively announced that asylum seekers need get only halfway across the channel before being intercepted by the Royal Navy, under royal naval command. This will incentivise people traffickers. They will see the Royal Navy ship on the horizon and say, “Point your dinghy in that direction. You only need to get halfway,” and the Royal Navy will pick them up. The only way this will work is if the Royal Navy intercepts asylum seekers and returns them to France. Without the second bit, this simply will not work.
James Heappey
My hon. Friend knows that the last bit would be impossible without French permission, and French permission has not been given. I do not accept his characterisation of what is being spoken about today. The Ministry of Defence mission is to make sure that nobody arrives in the UK on their own terms. [Interruption.] That means that nobody arrives in the UK without having been intercepted at sea or as they land. What happens next is that we will just have to wait a short while, and I am sure all will become clear.
Afghanistan
Debate between Philip Hollobone and James Heappey(3 years, 7 months ago)
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Urgent Questions are proposed each morning by backbench MPs, and up to two may be selected each day by the Speaker. Chosen Urgent Questions are announced 30 minutes before Parliament sits each day.
Each Urgent Question requires a Government Minister to give a response on the debate topic.
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James Heappey
The hon. Gentleman is entirely right to ask what the mechanism is for solidifying the peace within Afghanistan, but I am not sure that I see what the international military presence would do to solidify that peace any further. What needs to happen now, as we have seen in Northern Ireland and many other conflicts in which we have been involved in the past, is this deeply imperfect and—for those of us who have served —uneasy reality that all parties, irrespective of the role they played in the conflict, need to come together and make the politics work. I think that the conditions are right for that to happen now.
I do not mean to sound over-optimistic. My eyes are wide open. I said in my answer that the future for Afghanistan is uncertain—of course it is. But there is a set of Afghan national security forces in place now that are capable of maintaining the peace, and I genuinely believe that there is a political will to achieve that and an expectation within the Afghan public that their politicians will achieve that.
How the lessons are learned from this campaign, as they were with Iraq, is for my right hon. Friends the Prime Minister, the Foreign Secretary and the Defence Secretary to decide in due course. Of course, in everything we do in the Ministry of Defence, we look at what we have done, and where it worked, we reinforce, and where it did not work, we change. Within the integrated review, there is already a recognition that the way we have done our business in the last two decades may not be the way that we do it in the next.
On the hon. Gentleman’s final point about the relationship with the Afghan Government and the need to financially support them, as the Secretary-General of NATO said, this is not the end of our involvement in Afghanistan; it is just the start of a new chapter. That new chapter is one that remains every bit as committed to supporting the Afghan national Government, and this year alone the UK will spend up to £70 million on supporting the Afghan security forces. Such support—both diplomatic and financial—is key to ensuring the future that we envisage for Afghanistan in the absence of a military contribution.
Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)
Alongside its regular colleagues, the Territorial Army has served with distinction in Afghanistan, not least 21 Special Air Service Artists Rifles, which, as a formed unit, demonstrated its extreme gallantry by winning three Military Crosses in the fighting in Nad-e Ali in Helmand in 2008 as well as a Conspicuous Gallantry Cross at a later date. On the back of that highly distinguished record, will my hon. and gallant Friend retain the option to deploy the Army Reserve on live operations abroad, both as attachments to regular forces and in their own formed units?
James Heappey
Within the 150,000-plus service personnel who have served in Afghanistan, there will be many thousands of reservists who have mobilised and answered their nation’s call, and they have done so with great distinction, as my hon. Friend describes. He will be pleased to hear, I am sure, that the design of our armed forces for the next decades recognises absolutely the importance of the role that reservists play both as individuals, with the expertise that they bring to the force, and as formed units. There is every intention of building on their success in Iraq and Afghanistan as we look at how we use the reserves in the future.