I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Horsham (Sir Jeremy Quin) for leading the debate with his report. On the first Thursday back in January 2022, six weeks before Russia further invaded Ukraine, many hon. Members currently in the Chamber were here for a debate about the need to increase defence spending. There was an argument about whether we were in a cold war scenario, which came back to the same thing: it is all very well talking about increasing spending, but where do the threats lie?
The mea culpa from my point of view is that, right up to 22 February 2022, I was saying that I did not believe Putin was going to invade Ukraine. I thought he was testing the borders and seeing where the strengths were. That day, I learned the important lesson that politicians often use the word “think” when they should be using “hope”. Much of the debate is based around what we want to see happen and what we hope will happen.
We may say, “I think perhaps we don’t need to expand the military as much as that. Perhaps the money is better off being spent elsewhere. Are we really going
to go nuclear? Is he really going to do that?” We talk about development in the High North and maritime. Perhaps we need more Navy, because that will become a much more critical area in our security, our trade and our defence, but we hear the same thing: it is highly unlikely that there will be a surface warfare battle. Well, nobody thought there would be a tank battle in Europe. Since the second world war, nobody thought there would be an armoured vehicle and troop battle with trench warfare in Europe again, but that has happened.
I have been asked recently, “Are we going to have world war three?” It is an interesting question. How do we define world war three in the 21st century? Will it be the nuclear armageddon that people think? I do not believe that—I will come back to that. Will it be several instances of wars and armed conflicts in several areas that affect our country directly? Yes, and I believe that is where the world is moving to, especially when we look at the supply chains around the world. That affects not just this country, and it will lead to other investments having to be made.
There is a famine taking place in Sudan because of what is happening in the Red sea, where there is a reduction in supplies getting through. When these events take place, they have consequences in many areas of the world. We can talk about whether there is a world war and whether we will be involved, but we are—we are in the Red sea and we are giving support to Ukraine and other areas, which is building up.
We should not look at Ukraine as an individual thing that Putin is talking about and that ridiculous interview he did with Tucker Carlson in which he said, “Well, I haven’t got any intentions to invade anywhere else.” He literally wrote it down in July 2021. It takes about half an hour to read, and he lays it out line by line—“Not only do we need to rebuild the Russian Empire, but we need to reunite the historic Russian-speaking people”. We heard all of this in another book 100 years earlier, and we all know where that led, so we all know the consequences of us not preparing for it.
Something about NATO has been forgotten and overlooked. Everybody talks about article 5—that an attack on one is an attack on another, and we come to the rescue—but everybody forgets article 3, which says that members must be able to defend their borders first and foremost. There are only 14 articles in the actually very well-written Washington treaty, and article 3 makes it clear that members have to be able to defend their borders and that article 5 is a reinforcement that can take up to three weeks to arrive.
Do we believe that if Putin invades the Baltic states, that is where the effect on NATO will be? That would be tactically daft of Putin. It is more likely, if he decides to invade NATO territory, that he will want to tie all the NATO allies up to start with. There is good news and bad news. There is good news in what China has said to Putin because of their trade with India, South America and southern Africa. The Chinese especially have made it crystal clear that if Putin was even to demonstrate his ability to use a nuclear weapon—say, in the middle of the Black sea—they would say, “That’s it, we’re gone; we are not dealing with you.” That has probably taken the nuclear weapon issue off the table, especially with strategic nuclear weapons.
By the way, I do not want the House to get excited and think I am saying that we do not need to renew Trident, because there are still plenty of places around
the world that are pushing that territory. As we always come back to, Trident is a deterrent weapon; it is not a weapon to be used. If it were to be launched, quite frankly we would not be arguing about it anyway. This does mean that we are in a far weaker position if nuclear is off the table, because we know, and Putin knows—he is doing it right now—that he can outproduce us in shells, tanks and people. Russia is paying €2,000 a month to people coming in from the far-flung areas of the country. People from some of these places do not earn that in a year. They have no shortage of personnel or cash.
Therefore, we have to start being honest with our questions. Do we need to build more capital equipment? Do we need more personnel? Yes, we do need more capital equipment, and we are going down that route, but we also need the revenue budgets to run that. To follow the fiscal rules and say “Look how much money we are putting into defence” is great, but it has to be capital, because they have not given the revenue. It is a case of: “Let’s line up all our shiny ships, but we can’t fuel them, maintain them or crew them.” It is the same in the Army and the Air Force. There must be a fundamental change at the Treasury in how the money is spent.
As the right hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones) said, let us have some honesty in this Chamber. We can sit here and say, “We need to go to 2.5% or 3%, or maybe 4% or 5%.” What Government and which politician will stand up in this House and say, “That 3% reduction in GDP since the end of the cold war has gone into the health service and the Department for Work and Pensions, so we will cut the health service and DWP by 3% to invest in defence”? Who will stand up here and say that? Who will put that in their manifesto? Let us not pretend that that will happen, but the money does need to be spent more efficiently.
My hon. Friend the Minister for Defence Procurement has done an excellent job with the integrated procurement model, which talks about things that he has worked on for a long time, I believe—for example, spiral development. We are very fond of talking about where we were in the 1920s and 1930s, but I want to take us back even further, to the 1910s, when the Dreadnought model was brought out. HMS Dreadnought was the most incredible ship ever built in terms of firepower, but it hit the reset button by making every other ship irrelevant. It could sink all of them, so there was an arms race. Within eight years, HMS Dreadnought was useless. HMS Iron Duke, which was still a Dreadnought class, was a totally different ship, but it had been part of the design process as it went on. Bear in mind that we were still only producing four Dreadnought battleships a year when we were chucking all our efforts in leading up to 1914 and beyond.
I recently spoke at a dinner, and a young person in their early 20s asked me, “What do you think about this comment from General Sanders about conscription? Because there’s no way I would be conscripted to go and fight for this country. Why should I bother? I am not going out to get killed. It’s not worth it. You spend all this money and waste money there. What are you offering me? It’s not worth it.” I said, “Well the problem is that you are looking at this in the society you live in today. If you are going to get conscripted, it is because
our cities will lay in rubble. You only have to look at Kyiv. Forget wanting to sit at home and watch Netflix or play Xbox or do whatever you want, there is no electricity. There’s no water. There’s no gas or heating. There is starvation.” That is happening in Europe today.
How does one stop that happening? The word is deterrent. I have never met senior military personnel who are not at heart pacifists. They understand what warfare means. They understand the death and destruction that it brings and the decades it takes to recover. They do not want to go to war. I have never met anybody in the military who wants to go to war. This all takes investment. The honest fact that we are not going to cut health services or the DWP—some of our biggest spending budgets—and spend the money on defence means that we have to work with what we have. Yes, we can grow the economy and take more tax revenue. We can do all that, but that has not really happened in the 21st century. The 21st century has roughly been 50/50 between the Government and the Opposition. Even when the economy has grown, it has been around the margins. There has to be an honest conversation.
The procurement strategy my hon. Friend the Minister has produced is the right way forward. We are aware of the costs. I will say one more thing, almost directly contradicting myself. The war in Ukraine has shattered its economy. Forget the spending to fight the war; the loss in GDP of being able run an economy and export when at war is significantly bigger than an increase of 2% or 3%. Be under no illusion: if Putin wants to invade NATO territory, it will not be tanks rolling over the line up in the Baltics or maybe in east Poland, and we will have to go out there; it will be a full-scale NATO attack, and we will have to work out what we do.
The best way we can stop that is to make sure we have the deterrent. Our nuclear deterrent has always been valuable because they have no idea when or where we would strike back from. That has made it a useless weapon to use, but we have to have that weapon. If we say that is cancelled out, because of the attitude of China and Russian allies towards Russia were it to use one, then we have to accept that our conventional weapons are not going to counterbalance Russia and what is happening.
Nobody in this Chamber, in the military, at the MOD or in Europe, and probably anywhere in the western world, wants to go to war and see death and destruction on the scale we are seeing in too many areas of the world. We see famine and humanitarian crises taking place. Yes, we are going to have to spend more money, but we need to spend it more efficiently, and we need to make sure that when the increases come they will be used effectively. We need to remember that this is an investment so that we do not have to use the deterrent. If we do not have it, we will have to end up using something we do not actually have.
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