It is an honour to follow the hon. Member for North Wiltshire (James Gray), and I pay tribute to him as the chair and lead of the all-party parliamentary group for the armed forces. He hosts lots of highly experienced, very senior strategic thinkers from the armed forces as part of that APPG.
I welcome this opportunity to debate UK defence policy at greater length. I have been struck that so far many of the speeches have been about defence capability and equipment, but I was particularly impressed by the comments about the strategic environment. The most senior military personnel in our kingdom talk about strategy in terms of ends, ways and means. It would be a mistake to spend all our time talking about means when they expect the Government and Parliament also to think about ways and particularly ends—the end state that the UK is seeking to bring about. I will focus my remarks more on the strategic environment and the wider security context, and towards the end I will talk a bit about cuts to the regular Army. I will also comment on the suggestions that have been knocking around recently about a citizens army.
I was impressed by the remarks of the right hon. Member for New Forest East (Sir Julian Lewis) about the strategic environment. I am glad that in the west we seek to take the peace dividend when we think it is available to us. One thing that stands out about democracies is that when the security environment allows, we try to invest in health and education. It is absolutely appropriate to champion that, but we should also be realistic enough to recognise when times do not allow for that.
We have talked today about continuous at-sea deterrents and the role of the coalition Government in having a Trident alternatives review, which is not to be regretted.
In the security context of the time, when Obama was talking about a reset button and we signed a strategic arms reduction treaty with Russia—New START—it was appropriate to be thinking along the same lines as in the 1990s, when the west and the Soviet Union were mutually trying to reduce the threats from our nuclear weapons. As it happens, the events from 2014 onwards plainly proved that we absolutely need to be as strong as possible.
The Prime Minister’s remarks a fortnight ago were interesting. He talked about a new defence partnership between the UK and Germany. I welcomed the fact that he made the announcement in Berlin and the idea that we should have greater interoperability with our allies, but he then fell into this business of talking about putting the defence industry on to a “war footing”. Indeed, that chimed with the Defence Secretary’s statement that we are entering a “pre-war era”. When we throw such remarks around, we need to qualify what we mean, because we know that our adversaries listen carefully to what we say. We do not need belligerent tones and a mismatch between our rhetoric and our capability; instead, we should speak quietly while making ourselves as strong as possible. That is of course what the armed forces are for. “Bello te praepares” was the motto of the Army training regiment when I was there as a platoon commander. We were very much about preparing for war, but we were doing it quietly. It would be sensible for the Defence Secretary to make those preparations as ardently as possible but not in a showy fashion.
If the Defence Secretary’s motivation is genuinely to send a message to Ukraine that we are in this for the long haul and that there is certainty, he will not want to make this a party political issue or suggest that Opposition parties are somehow less supportive of Ukraine. He asked earlier whether we would match the £500 million uplift per year for Ukraine. Yes—we recognise the characterisation of Russia’s westward expansion as a threat to all Europe, so Ukraine can be assured that, regardless of a change of Government later this year, it will continue to receive £3 billion in support from the UK.
The Foreign Secretary said last week, when he was in Ukraine, that Ukraine is free to use long-range Storm Shadow missiles over the border into Russia. I am surprised that that has not come up in our discussion today. That may be because such things should not be done on the Floor of the House, and I very much welcomed the approach of the former Defence Secretary, who would share with Opposition parties, well in advance of the debate, the urgent question or the statement, what he intended to say through his special adviser. That was a way to have such conversations not on the Floor of the House or in such a public fashion. As it is, the strategic communications people in NATO will now have to work all the harder to counter the false narratives and lies that Russia pumps out about Ukraine somehow being a threat to the Russian people, or even Russia being threatened by NATO itself.
From an operational standpoint, that use of missiles makes good sense. Clearly, main supply routes, arms dumps and fuel depots will now be brought within range, but we should remember that the centre of gravity here is the Russian people and their willingness to fight. We know that the USSR withdrew from Afghanistan after 15,000 Soviet soldiers were killed. To encourage Russians
not to sign up, we need to persuade them that the state of Russia is not threatened by Ukraine or, indeed, by NATO.
On the cuts to the regular Army, I was interested by the remarks of the right hon. Member for Hereford and South Herefordshire (Jesse Norman) about recruitment and consent. I would point to the issue of consent when we talk about parliamentary approval of military action. I do not believe that Governments were merely seeking top cover when they had a debate in Parliament on the intervention in Iraq in 2003 or on the intervention in Syria in 2013. Rather, they were genuinely seeking to engage with us as representatives of the people to try to get support.
Finally, I come to a proposal that was leaked to a journalist, David Parsley, at the i a couple of weeks ago about a 20,000-strong volunteer force that could potentially train a 200,000-strong volunteer Army. I do not expect the Minister to comment on that or any other leak, but if that is the response from the Government to the pressure they have been under on cuts to the Army, it would not be a sensible approach. The plan talks about an annual spend of some £500 per recruit in training allowances per year for the initial 20,000 ex-forces personnel during peacetime. That amount would not go very far. Service personnel would suppose that the MOD was once again budgeting to withhold blank rounds in favour of commanders asking trainee soldiers to shout “Bang!” We cannot have an Army on paper that does not exist in reality. We need a regular Army of 82,000. We need to reverse the cuts that we have seen in recent years, and we need to build credible armed forces so that we are strong not only in our rhetoric, but in our capability.
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