Armed Forces Readiness and Defence Equipment

Rosie Winterton Excerpts

Thursday 21st March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

Order. I am getting concerned because although I do not have a problem with interventions, some of the speeches have been not 13 minutes but 16 minutes, and that means we then have pressure for the Front-Bench speeches to be shorter than we hope them to be. If colleagues take interventions, I ask them to please still try to keep within the limit. Another debate is due to start at 3 o’clock, and I must get as near to that as I possibly can.

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[Mr Francois]

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. I will keep this brief. For the record, the gentleman has traduced me. He has said directly the opposite of what I actually said, as Hansard will show.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for that point of order, which he has used to make his point. Let us return to George Galloway.

[George Galloway]

Pomposity, but not a point of order. The right hon. Gentleman said that we were careful to conceal some of our weakness, and then he adumbrated those weaknesses. If there are more that he concealed, we are in very big trouble. My point is this: we haven’t the men, we haven’t the ships and we haven’t the money, so why are we picking enemies? I have lost count, in the course of the debate, of the number that we are either already fighting or may have to get ready to fight. That is the absurd “Alice in Wonderland” nature of this debate.

We cannot retain even the low numbers of people we recruit. Why? We ought to know why: the lions do not much like the look of the donkeys who lead them into war after war, which they later disown and admit should never have been fought. You know to what I refer, Madam Deputy Speaker. I had a debate at the Oxford Union; the then Defence Secretary ran away and did not turn up. I had to deal with his subordinates, but I made the point there. I was a boy soldier: Royal Artillery Battery 2, Army Cadet Force. I trained with the Royal Marines for weeks in Poole, in Dorset. I am in no sense a pacifist. I want to defend our country. I want our soldiers to be properly paid, properly housed, properly clad, properly trained and properly armed.

I have picked up Tommy Atkins, stricken with addiction, from Piccadilly Gardens in Manchester, just out of Strangeways, addicted to Spice and abandoned by the politicians who gayly sent him off to one needless, pointless, fruitless war after another. Don’t come here and say you’re standing up for Tommy Atkins. The donkeys who sent him to wars that even the donkeys now disavow are the reason that people do not join our armed forces. They do not trust those people over there not to send them to another Iraq or Afghanistan, and they are right not to trust them.

The truth is that our country is in very real danger of falling into the same trap as Mussolini: going around the world, threatening people with Germany’s army. Our politicians go around the world threatening people with America’s army, but there is a big change coming, and they do not like it on either side of the aisle. President Trump is coming back in November, and he does not much fancy their NATO. He does not intend to send American soldiers to die for Kupiansk or for the Zelensky regime in Kyiv. He has no intention whatever of continuing its war in Ukraine.

I heard a senior Member of the House say, “If America withdraws from NATO, we will have to increase our contribution to 5%, 6% or maybe 7% of GDP.” Do these people seriously imagine that they will continue in NATO without the United States of America? What kind of NATO would it be—it really would be Gilbert and Sullivan—unless we devote not £50 billion of our public treasure but hundreds of billions on defence? Have any of these people seen the state of the public realm in Britain? Have they seen the state of the national health service? Have they seen the state of our streets, public buildings and public transport? Have they seen the wage packets earned in this country? Have they seen pensioner poverty and fuel poverty in action? Have they met people who have to choose between eating and heating? These fools want to spend not £50 billion but hundreds of billions on weapons of war, which we will fight with an Army that could fit into Villa Park—70,000 soldiers can fit into a single football stadium.

For some time, I was the Member of Parliament for a naval shipbuilding yard, Yarrow’s on the Clyde—producers of excellence. I wrestled—not physically—with our late and lamented friend Alan Clark when he was the Procurement Minister, and I won. I got all five of the Type 23s procured at that time. I want us to have a good Navy, and a good Army, but not so we can sail it to bombard the natives in the Red sea or send a Gilbert and Sullivan squadron to the South China sea, like a peashooter firing at an elephant—or a whale in the case in the Chinese navy. I do not want us to send our 70,000 soldiers and our aircraft carriers that break down and have to be glued together, or our destroyers that crash into each other in the Solent.

I do not want us to pretend that we are a Rudyard Kipling-era imperial power. That is the key problem. Some of these people still think that we are in the 19th century and can send gunboats up the Yangtze and not have them sunk, and that the natives in Yemen are the natives we used to push around for a century or more. The empire strikes back, and the empire is bigger than us now. We owned India; now the Indians own us. Shall I take that metaphor further? There is an idea that those in this little country of ours—this dear green place, with all its problems and enfeeblement caused by our economic decline and the rapid and massive economic advance of others—are still in a position to stand in this Parliament making dispensations to this battleground or that, or that we can still slice our diminishing national wealth in a way that allows us to pretend to be an imperial power.

I have time only for one last point. I was startled by the hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Dame Meg Hillier), the Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, when she told us that £2 billion of our defence budget is going on foreign exchange costs, meaning that not only are we spending 50 billion of British taxpayers’ pounds, but that we are spending it in foreign countries. We are allowing foreign companies and yards to build our defence infrastructure in a way, as the right hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones) pointed out, that France would never dream of doing. Whatever we are going to spend, spend it in Britain, spend it in British yards, spend it in British factories. You’ll save £2 billion in foreign exchange costs at the very least.

[Mrs Emma Lewell-Buck (South Shields) (Lab)]

I genuinely will not take 13 minutes for my contribution, Madam Deputy Speaker.

Our armed forces give it their all every single day for our protection. Their level of commitment and courage is, sadly, not matched by this Government. Worse, as our Defence Committee report and the reports from the Public Accounts Committee chaired by my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Dame Meg Hillier) show, the Government have presided over reductions in personnel, depletion of kit and delays in new capabilities. When it comes to the biggest threat of all, war, there is not a single service that is fully ready. This did not happen overnight. This is a culmination of, to use the words of the former Defence Secretary, the right hon. Member for Wyre and Preston North (Mr Wallace), the “hollowing out” of our forces over the last 14 years. The new Defence Secretary rightly said that we are in a pre-war world. But to acknowledge that and then do nothing about it is negligent.

The world is in turmoil: war in Ukraine, conflict in the middle east, fear of conflict in the Indo-Pacific, an aggressive Russia and an unpredictable China, as well as our armed forces responding to humanitarian missions and MACA—military aid to the civil authorities—requests, as they did throughout the pandemic. This all makes a pre-war footing all the more urgent. This is not an exhaustive list, but when it comes to our Royal Navy there are delays to the Type 26 frigates, issues with the availability of SSNs, delays to Dreadnought and an over-reliance on RFA Fort Victoria. Our Royal Air Force has a shortfall in fixed-wing transport aircraft numbers, insufficient numbers of maritime patrol aircraft and Wedgetail airborne early warning systems, a lack of air-to-air refuelling, and a lack of ground-based air defence systems or an anti-ballistic missile capability. Our Army lacks infantry fighting vehicles, multiple launch rocket systems, Challenger tanks and armoured fighting vehicles.

We have rightly committed ammunition to Ukraine, but the £1.95 billion announced to replenish stockpiles was not ringfenced. We have heard that the Ministry of Defence is potentially using it to help offset funding shortfalls, instead of using it to restore our warfighting ability. Our lack of industrial capacity is also causing problems with replenishment in particular, as many companies, both at prime and sub-prime level, are facing challenges in scaling up. A failure to address supply chain issues represents a significant risk to production. As the PAC report from my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch on the MOD’s equipment plan found, there is no credible Government plan to deliver the desired military capabilities.

As for our personnel, the Haythornthwaite review in 2022 found a net outflow of 4,660 per year from our armed forces. There are significant pinch points in cyber, digital and AI skills. Those who serve in our forces are exceptional people, but they are constantly being asked to do more with less. The result has been significantly lower morale, with recruitment and retention issues across our services and across the reserves. Our Defence Committee report notes:

“Either the Ministry of Defence must be fully funded to engage in operations whilst also developing warfighting readiness; or the Government must reduce the operational burden on the Armed Forces.”

These are difficult decisions to make, but it is obvious that the Government are not going to make them as they are limping towards electoral oblivion. Frustratingly, the Government hindered our inquiry considerably by not sharing with us the information they hold on readiness—information that used to be available. Worse still, they were unable to explain to us why this information has become classified. Bearing in mind that our allies and countries at greater risk than us share theirs, it is fair to conclude that the reason the information is not being shared is because readiness levels are far worse than even we conclude in our report.

Our conclusion, bluntly speaking, is that we are not ready for war. The recent Budget saw no increase for defence, and that is after the cuts referred to by my right hon. Friend the Member for North Durham (Mr Jones). Just this week, ex-defence and security chiefs said we must prepare genuinely for war. But we do not have the personnel or the kit to be ready for war. Far worse than that, we do not have the right Government in place to be ready for it either.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

Before I call the SNP Front-Bench spokesperson, let me just say that the Front-Bench contributions in this debate are longer than normal, but we will be able to finish the debate by 3 o’clock as I had indicated. The SNP will have 10 minutes, the Opposition 15 minutes and the Government 15 minutes.

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[Martin Docherty-Hughes]

I agree with the right hon. Gentleman, and I am glad that his party has joined mine—I think; I am not sure whether this is still a Labour manifesto commitment—in recommending the introduction of an armed forces representative body. However, a critical issue is how the skills that already exist can be utilised. I cannot believe that I am going to use the word “emulate” when speaking of the United States, but that flexibility is emulated by the United States and also by many of our other NATO allies.

When it comes to readiness and having people on the frontline in the physical armed forces, I am not going to play the numbers game, because this is a political and philosophical issue. It is about how we retain and recruit. I think that fundamental rights for members of the armed forces should be enshrined in law. They should not need to go to those very well-meaning charitable organisations to receive assistance with housing, with their mental health, and even with their physical health. Members of the Danish armed forces who have suffered an injury do not go to a special unit; they go to a Danish national hospital like every other Danish citizen, because there they will benefit from the delivery of a robust public service.

That, in turn, brings me to the way in which the armed forces and, critically, the Army in particular have been challenged during the pandemic. Some former members of the Defence Committee who are not present today kept going on about the need for the Army to step up to the plate in dealing with resilience. The right hon. Member for North Durham has heard me talk about resilience in Committee. It is not, in my view, the role of the Army to pick up civilian action. During the pandemic, the Army in England and Wales had to do that in respect of the Nightingale hospitals, not just in terms of logistics and design but in terms of the actual physical infrastructure. Why was that? It was because most parts of the NHS procurement processes to build the Nightingale hospitals had been privatised years ago. We had taken a very physical state ownership of that civil structure of resilience and readiness out of the hands of the Government and the NHS and given it to private contractors, who have made billions on the back of it.

Let me give a Scottish example, the Louisa Jordan Hospital. The Army stepped up to the plate in helping with the logistics, but they were not required to build the internal structure of the Louisa Jordan. Most of it was in the Scottish conference centre. That internal structure was built through NHS Scotland procurement, because it was fit for purpose and ready to play its part. When we are talking about people, we should bear in mind that readiness is not just about members of the armed forces; it is also about the larger civilian infrastructure.

The right hon. Member for Warley is not present now, but he and I—along with, I think, the right hon. Member for New Forest East—travelled to Washington some years ago with the Defence Committee. Part of our purpose was to understand where our infrastructure was. How, for example, do we transfer, through partnerships between states—critically, within the continent of Europe —a division, or tanks, across bridges and roads which, since the end of the cold war, are no longer equal in terms of weight or infrastructure? How difficult is it to move a tank from a port to, say, technically, the eastern front if that is required? Partnerships of that kind have been allowed to disappear in the post-cold war era.

However, there are other important partnerships, such as the United Nations with its peacekeeping role. It was disappointing that not only the United Kingdom but other countries have had to pull out of Mali, at the instigation of the Malian Government, in the last couple of years. That peacekeeping role is a crucial part of the infrastructure of maintaining international order grounded in the rule-based system. I was also disappointed by the Government’s decision to postpone, or put into abeyance, their investment and funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in Palestine on the basis of a very small amount of information, or accusation, from the Government of the state of Israel in respect of the conflict in Gaza. I hope that the Government recognise the value and worth of that partnership in trying to quell some of the many big problems that are faced in that part of the world.

I think I have had my 10 minutes, but let me end by saying a little about the European Union in relation to partnership and position. I was glad to hear that the official Opposition may now be considering an improved relationship with the EU. We in the Scottish National party believe it is important to have a mutual defence agreement with the EU. As for the question of position, I am a Euro-Atlanticist, and I think it important for us to reposition ourselves, away from the issues of the Indo-Pacific.

I agree with the hon. Member for Devizes (Danny Kruger) about the nuclear proposition. I think that the hon. Member for Rochdale and I are the only Members present who oppose nuclear weapons, but I think there is general agreement on the need to take the deterrent into another budget heading so that we have a full understanding of what that two-point-whatever percentage of GDP is. I hope that the Government will be able to respond to that in the debate today.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

I call the shadow Secretary of State.