Rarely in debates in this Chamber can the fourth speaker have been faced with such a major challenge as mine in following three such well informed, all-encompassing, brilliant speeches as those of the hon. Member for Gedling (Vernon Coaker), my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis) and now the hon. Member for Barnsley Central (Dan Jarvis), who knows what he is
talking about. It is quite a challenge to think of something new to say after those three outstanding speeches. I agree with all of them, and I agree very strongly with the motion. However, you and I have known each other for 25 years, Madam Deputy Speaker, so you will be aware that it would none the less be entirely uncharacteristic of me simply to say “I agree,” and then sit down; that would not be in keeping at all.
I welcome the fact that the hon. Member for Gedling has secured the debate, but I regret the fact that it had to be called under the rules of the Backbench Business Committee. When I—and many of us in this Chamber—first arrived here, we had five such debates a year: one each for the RAF, the Army and the Royal Navy and then two further debates on spending matters. That was changed after the 1998 SDSR into five set-piece, major, full-scale debates in Government time on a variety of subjects: defence policy, defence of the UK, defence of the world, and one on personnel and one on procurement. They were serious debates opened by the Secretary of State, with a packed House and vast numbers of people watching; they were an important part of the body politic’s discussions on defence.
That system has now been replaced, however, and in fact for two or three years there were no debates on defence at all under the Backbench Business Committee. There are now one or two debates a year if we are lucky, secured by a Back Bencher choosing to do so. That is wrong; the Government should return to the way we were when the Backbench Business Committee was invented and say to it that we expect to have at least five substantive defence debates during the course of the year. It must find time in its programme for that. Allocating such debates to compete with such important matters as live animals in circuses is wrong and downplays the importance of the defence of the nation.
That situation might none the less be symptomatic of something that concerns me, and to which one or two Members have alluded: we as a nation are downplaying defence and the threat to us. There is a degree of war-weariness after Iraq and Afghanistan and so forth, and people would like our troops to come home and there to be no more wars anywhere in the world. But that will not happen, of course, because the world is an extraordinarily dangerous place.
We in this House are guilty of a degree of complacency over the threats to the nation, and that is then spread around the nation, and our voters do not realise what a dangerous place we live in. If we conducted a survey and asked voters on their doorsteps whether we should spend money on defence or health or education, defence would, sadly, come fairly low down their list of priorities. We in this place need to change that by having serious debates on the subject and highlighting the huge threats facing us today.
I will not repeat what others have said about the threats from an expansionist Russia, North Korea, events in the South China sea, and terrorism throughout the middle east, but those threats have not gone away and are worse now than they were before. I personally am extremely concerned about Russian ambitions in the high north and the Arctic and north Atlantic, and I am grateful that the hon. Member for Bridgend (Mrs Moon) has taken up the cudgels of the Defence Sub-Committee, looking into what the Russians are planning to do in the high north. At the moment, however, NATO is, to some
degree at least, ignoring that, and it is right that we should remind people that the Russians have just spent billions of pounds on building eight new military stations along the Arctic coast, that they have very substantially increased submarine activity in the north Atlantic, and that they are threatening our lines of supply to the United States of America—and all of this is happening under our noses and we are not doing anything about it. It is right that we in this place should remind our colleagues and the nation that these very real threats are happening on our doorstep.
Part of the reason for that failure to address these real threats comes from what might sound like a rather technical, machinery of government matter, and which my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East touched on. The last truly proper defence review was in 1998, and I pay tribute to the then Defence Ministers, one of whom, the right hon. Member for Warley (John Spellar), is sitting on the Opposition back row. It was a first-class defence review: it was foreign policy led; it was the MOD sitting down and saying, “Given that these are the foreign policy threats to our nation, here’s what we in the MOD must now do to protect the country from them.” Since then, as my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East said, the whole process has become ever more muddled, obscured and complicated. Nobody now quite understands who decides what the threats to this nation are, nobody quite knows who decides what we must do about them, and nobody quite knows where we are going to get the money to do that.
For example, the SDSR used to happen at the same time as the national spending review, and that was extremely important. As the hon. Member for Barnsley Central said, what is the point of having a defence review if we know that, no matter what it concludes, there will be no money to change things? Let us imagine that such a review concluded that there was a vast cyber-threat or Russian threat against us and decided that we must significantly increase our Army, Navy or Air Force. The Treasury would turn round and say, “Well, we’re very glad you have had that review and we’re very interested to read it. You have made some important points and we will be reviewing the Ministry of Defence budget two years from now. So, no matter what you have said in your review, we can do nothing about it.” It seems extremely odd to be mixing the strategic defence review with the security review.
Sir Mark Sedwill, a very distinguished fellow who does an awful lot of good stuff, has said that we need to spend more money on cyber, and he is right, but every single penny that we spend on cyber comes out of other budgets. If we were to double our cyber budget, which might well be a very good thing to do, it might have to be paid for by cuts in the amphibious capability that the hon. Member for Barnsley Central mentioned. If it is any comfort to the hon. Gentleman, I can tell him that if any such cuts were to take place—if HMS Bulwark were to go, for example, or if 1,000 people were to be cut from the Royal Marines—he can be certain that I and many others on the side of the House would not support any Government who proposed to do that. I want to make it plain that we would not go along with any such proposals from the Government. I think that
many of my friends in the Ministry of Defence would agree with that and are fighting that battle very firmly at the moment.
It would seem perfectly logical and sensible, when carrying out a review, to start with the Foreign Office assessing the risk. The Cabinet Office should follow that by determining how much of that risk is to do with us—with policing or with cyber, for example. Those conclusions should then go to the Ministry of Defence, which would identify the threats to the nation and decide what to do about them. Subsequently, the Treasury should say, “Fine, that is what you want to do about the threat. Here is how we are going to find the money for it.” But to have a national security review mixed in with a strategic defence review, and happening at a time that is not contingent with the national spending review, seems to be absolutely pointless and, indeed, substantially misleading. We are misleading ourselves that somehow we are looking into these things properly. I would like to see the defence part of the review separated out. It ought to be happening in the autumn of this year, at the same time as the Budget, in case we need more money to do what the Foreign Office says we ought to be doing.
That is all I want to add to what others have said. We are facing incredibly dangerous and worrying times, and this nation is under threat. There are very real threats to our people’s security and safety. If we in this place do not address that fact strategically, and if we do not find a way of increasing our defence spending towards the 3% that many of us in the Chamber want, I fear that we will not be doing our duty. We will not be doing what our people send us here to do, and we will not be putting in place the correct way to defend our nation.
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