Defence Supplementary Estimate 2021-22

Robert Syms Excerpts

Wednesday 9th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Johnny Mercer (Plymouth, Moor View) (Con)]

Thank you for calling me early in this debate, Mr Deputy Speaker. I want to start by talking about a couple of the points mentioned by the right hon. Member for Warley (John Spellar), which I completely agree with, on mindset and attitude towards defence. He was nuanced and careful on that. As everybody knows, I have campaigned on defence issues for a long time. I am no expert on procurement and I pay tribute to this Minister, whom I worked alongside when I was a Minister, for his attitude towards it. I have found that there has been a significant step change there. When it comes to finance and investment the figures are undeniable and show that over about 50 years, roughly through to the 2020s, there was a decline in investment in defence, by Governments of all colours—we have seen that across the pitch. As this Prime Minister keeps mentioning, we have seen small increases between 2020 and 2022, and the projected increases as well, but I really want to get across to Members here today and to other Members that these increases are in CDEL—capital departmental expenditure limits. The problem with that is that our RDEL—resource departmental expenditure limits—which is our spending on people, continues either to flatline or decline. That means that the experience of those serving in the military continues to go down. Despite valiant work by lots of people to try to improve it, the reality is that if we continue to ask our people to do more and more with less and less, that affects the experience and the “elastic band” in the middle that is taken up by people who do it because they are patriots and believe in defence, as many Members of this House do. That is fine, but they get worn out and are then pushed into society, and a new group comes in. If we continue to have that mindset—that we can burn these people out because new ones will come in—we will see a degradation of defence capability, which we have seen, and we will end up with an integrated review such as we saw.

I thought some aspects of the IR were good, but I have said, both in public and in private—even though it is not easy to say—that aspects of it were dishonest. I do not think we can truly focus entirely on our capital spend and say that our defence capability has expanded so much because we have all this high-tech weaponry and suddenly have this huge shift to high-tech warfare, while also talking about contributary pensions in our armed forces for the first time in the UK’s history. Again, we need to look at what that means for people who are serving. I remember some painful discussions about that, and it was quite a lonely experience. Although the capital expenditure is exciting, we have to be really careful on our resource spend, which is incredibly important.

[Sir Robert Syms (Poole) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making a very good point. A smaller military would find it more difficult to go to train nations such as Ukraine. We have a very good tradition of having people train other nations to defend their sovereignty.

[Johnny Mercer]

That is a really fair point. That was the whole point of enforcing things such as the Ranger battalions, but it was founded really on something that is not true, which is that mass is irrelevant—it is not. Data, technology and all this stuff is important. But look at what is happening in Ukraine now. Why are the Ukrainians holding out when everybody talked about how they were going to get flattened by the Russians? They are holding out because warfare has fundamentally changed: it has changed from the cold war—this is not the cold war reheated—and it has changed from Iraq and Afghanistan. These are Ukrainians, not Iraqis or Afghans riven by tribal disputes. It is fundamentally different and the technology has changed it. What can be done with an NLAW—a next generation light anti-tank weapon—is so different. When my right hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart) was in the Army, much like when I was, people had to fly an anti-tank weapon—it actually had a wire coming out the back—and basically steer it on to the tank. The chances of doing that in combat were pretty slim—

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[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

Order. Before the right hon. Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis) comes back, I think it is important to let hon. Members know that I will have to impose a time limit when he has finished, otherwise we will simply not get everybody in. The time limit will probably be around six minutes, depending on how long he takes.

[Sir Robert Syms]

rose—

[Dr Lewis]

I will briefly give way, and then I will conclude.

[Sir Robert Syms]

There are one or two other lessons from the current conflict. One is the impact of mobile phone cameras and psychological ops on the way in which a country communicates with itself and the world, and I think we could learn from that. I think we have lost a lot of the skills that we had in the second world war and when we were facing the Soviet Union, and this is one area we need to look at.

[Dr Lewis]

I quite agree with both my right hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart) and my hon. Friend.

Bearing in mind your advice, Madam Deputy Speaker, I will conclude with one point about the budget itself. During the period in which I chaired the Defence Committee, we produced two reports—one in 2016 called “Shifting the goalposts?” and the other an update to that report in 2019—with the purpose of setting very firmly on the record what the proportion of GDP spent on defence had been historically on a like-for-like basis. It is a fact that, in the aftermath of the Korean war, defence spending as a proportion of GDP at one point was as high as 7%. In about 1963, it crossed over with spending on welfare at 6%. That was all a long time ago, but as recently as the 1980s the spending on health, education and defence was roughly the same at just over 4% of GDP.

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[Sir Robert Syms (Poole) (Con)]

It is quite clear that since we ran down our defence establishment following the cold war, events have proved that we need to spend a lot more on defence. One thing about the cold war was that it froze a lot of conflicts in the world, because it involved the two great powers. Since we ran down our defence spending in the 1990s, we have been committed for years and years to several conflicts, firing in some and peacekeeping in others, so there has been a tremendous strain on the military budget over a long period.

The strength and value of our defence establishment is in the leadership, training, tradition and morale of its people. Our services have quite often been deployed with kit that is older or is not that good, but because of the quality of those men and women, they have been able to fulfil their task. What is coming out clearly from this debate is that we need more boots in the military, because that gives us a lot of options.

One thing we know is that while Ukraine has a defence establishment of about 200,000, it has 400,000 veterans in the Donbas, it has militia and volunteers and there are probably several hundred thousand people with Kalashnikovs running around, which is why the Russians are having a terrible problem. Being armed with modern anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles adds a little bit of edge to that.

I think we need to revisit the integrated defence review, and I think we will need to spend more on defence. If Members disagree with that, they should talk to their constituents, because I think most of our constituents realise that this is one area in which we have to get it right. We need only look at a country where, in blocks of flats, schools and hospitals, children are being killed to realise that our own first duty as a country is to defend our realm—within NATO, but we must also have the ability to do this ourselves, because ultimately it is our responsibility to protect our fellow citizens.

This is, I think, a wake-up call for us, and I am sure that the Government will listen to what people are saying. The only question is whether we end up at 3% quickly or slowly, because I think that that will be the direction of travel. We need new kit, but it is it is clear that unless we increase the defence budget, we will not retain the personnel and secure the equipment that we need to remain a substantial military power. There are items in the review that we were going to do without for a while, such as AWACS—the airborne warning and control system—and I think that that is very short-sighted.

Let me say to the Minister that I think the Ministry of Defence will receive substantial support, from some Opposition Members and certainly from many Conservative Back Benchers, for a review of where we are now and where we are going to go. History does repeat itself. Sometimes we think it will not because no one will be stupid enough to do what people have done before, but we need only look at the Soviet-Finnish war of 1939-40 to see many parallels with what is taking place now.

This country has much to be proud of in its support for Ukraine. I would not particularly like us to be fighting tanks at the moment, because I suspect that we are rather short of anti-tank missiles—I hope the Minister is ordering new ones just in case—but the simple truth is that we need air power, we need more power in the form of ships to support our aircraft carriers, and we need more of our Army personnel.

As I said to my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Moor View (Johnny Mercer), people have been training the Ukrainians for seven years, and some 22,000 have now been trained. I am sure they are putting that training to very good use at the moment in fighting for their survival. The British Army, even when it is not fighting, can help our friends by using its skills and abilities to ensure that the military in other countries gain the benefit of our experience. Of course, we have been at the other end of wars, driving along roads when people have shot at us, and we have learned many lessons over the years that we can impart to our friends.

I also think—my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis) understands this—that we should take on the lessons about psychological ops, propaganda and putting one’s own side of the story. Communicating with people is very important, and the Ukrainians, whatever their military skills, have the support of the world because they were quick to do that. The Russians may be just a Soviet tribute act, but they are behaving in exactly the way the Soviets would have behaved, spreading disinformation and not being honest with people. I have been amazed at the bravery of ordinary Russian citizens who, although they do not get the full truth from their media, have been willing to demonstrate and to be arrested and beaten. I wonder how I would behave if, living in Moscow or St Petersburg, I opposed an invasion. Would I be brave enough, or would my family be brave enough, to demonstrate in the same way? People show courage in tremendously different ways. You can be brave on the battlefield, but not quite so brave when you think you are going to be beaten over the head by a policeman or chucked into jail.

I think that the direction of travel in defence has to be more resources. We have to look at the integrated defence review. There will be a great deal of support from Conservative Members for moving from 2%—however the figures were added up—towards 3% or more. As a rich nation we can afford to do that, and I think we would be foolish not to do it, because at the end of the day everything else is trivial if people are in the situation that the Ukrainians are in.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

I want to start the wind-ups at 6.30 pm, and I have four speakers left. That means that I will have to reduce the time limit to five minutes per speaker.