Asking any Defence Secretary in history if he would like to support an increase in his budget is usually going to get only one response. The reality is that I am dealing with a budget that is incredibly generous compared with my colleagues in other Departments in the middle of this pandemic. Indeed, many people object to the increase in the defence budget. It is a defence budget big enough to allow me to fix the issues of the past and to invest in modernisation.
I understand my right hon. Friend’s concerns, and my answer to him would be about ambition. How ambitious and how global do we wish to be? I do not believe that our security is at threat from this document. I think it provides a very good foundation for our homeland security. What comes next is how much we help our friends around the world and what ambition we have for them. I can give him and the right hon. Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey) the assurance that our defence priority No. 1 is our commitment to membership of NATO, because that coalition and that part of the world—western Europe and the Atlantic—is key to our own security. That comes first, as does, for those on the Government Benches, our nuclear deterrent as our guarantor for security from aggressive states. That is maybe where my right hon. Friend and I will disagree, and we will no doubt explore that, and the extent to which our ambitions are matched, during the Defence Committee meetings.
Where we are today, we can match our ambitions with this defence paper but, as I have always said in this House, if the threat changes, we should always be prepared to change with it. I cannot say what will happen in 2035. I cannot say what will happen even further out from there, and that is why I think that at the heart of this paper is something on which my hon. Friend and I do strongly agree, which is that our approach should, for once, be threat-driven. That should drive what we buy. That should drive how we equip our people. That should drive what we do. We are determined to do it, and as Defence Secretary, it is my job to provide the rest of Government—the Prime Minister and the National Security Council—with the range of options and range of tools to allow them to follow those ambitions.