Tom Tugendhat
Main Page: Tom Tugendhat (Conservative - Tonbridge)Department Debates - View all Tom Tugendhat's debates with the Ministry of Defence
(2 days, 7 hours ago)
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Luke Pollard
My hon. Friend is absolutely right that the difficult decision made to move 0.2% of GNI spent on international aid to defence spending was an important one. It showed that, in this new era of hard power, we need to increase spending on defence and to increase capabilities, which is precisely the decision taken in the past. We are very proud to be increasing defence funding. Compared with the Conservatives, who cut defence spending in their first Budget, we increased defence spending in the first Labour Budget.
Tom Tugendhat (Tonbridge) (Con)
It is pretty extraordinary to see the partisan way in which the Minister has approached every single question. He has been completely incapable of giving this House, or indeed Mr Speaker, the assurance asked for on multiple occasions, and that only leads us to assume that he is hiding the untruth, which he wishes he did not have to say: he will not be bringing the defence investment plan to this House.
That is pretty extraordinary, and it is not just one year, but 14 years. This Government claim we had 14 years in which we made errors, and they may be right about many of them—in fact, I have criticised some of them myself—but they had 14 years to plan and have now had two years in government, and we are nowhere. We are still seeing defence capability fall. In fact, NATO puts us at No. 31 out of 32 of those that have failed to meet their capability targets, and last is Iceland, which does not even have a military.
Luke Pollard
I have a lot of time for the right hon. Gentleman, and I enjoy listening to his clips on social media, on which I am sure this will appear very shortly. [Interruption.] I have to say to him politely—[Interruption.] I have to say to him politely—[Interruption.]