Defence Supplementary Estimate 2021-22

(2) the resources authorised for capital purposes be reduced by £67,644,000 as so set out.—(Jeremy Quin.)

I rise to speak as Deputy Chairman of the Select Committee on Defence. I thank the Backbench Business Committee for agreeing to this debate. May I pass on the apologies of the Chair of the Defence Committee, the right hon. Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood), who has had a minor operation this week? As we know, he has very strong views on our defence capacity and would probably have wished to express them fairly vociferously in this debate. The defence estimates cover a vast range of work, but I will need to compress my remarks to 10 to 15 minutes to allow other contributions.

This is a dramatic time for defence issues. The agony of Ukraine intensifies, as President Zelensky’s powerful address to us yesterday made clear. The crisis has, of course, been building for a number of years, as Russia has launched successive cyber-attack warfare in the Baltic states and kinetic warfare in Georgia, Crimea and the Donbas. It has now exploded dramatically and tragically in Ukraine. We declare our solidarity with the country, the people and the military forces of Ukraine.

How are we in the UK to react to the dramatic shift in international security relations? Clearly, our Government and Parliament now have to give an urgent and positive response to the long-standing demands of our Defence Committee that we must move towards 3% of GDP for defence spending. The Budget in just over two weeks’ time has to respond positively to that imperative. Colleagues on both sides of the House will speak about detailed aspects of the consequential changes to personnel and to equipment, not least reversing the proposed reduction in numbers of the Army. To leave them sufficient time, I will focus on the broader context.

I thank the right hon. Member, my friend, for giving way. Surely one of the lessons of what we have seen in Ukraine is that a small group of utterly determined trained, or indeed untrained, men and women can use small arms and anti-tank weapons and stop a hugely bigger force. We are therefore just in time to reverse some of the decisions in the integrated review, such as scrapping 2nd Battalion the Mercian Regiment, an infantry battalion that proved its worth in 2009 hugely gallantly.

I thank the right hon. Member for his intervention—I think he should have declared an interest. He is absolutely right; the defence estimates and the Budget need to reflect the new reality.

I want to concentrate on the broader context: the ideological battle that is taking place, and the institutional shake-up that is consequently required. Most crucially, we have to recognise the full-spectrum approach of our opponents. Commentators in the west often gabble glibly about hybrid warfare, but in the framework of cyber war as an alternative to kinetic capability, and often in a mechanistic way, rather than understanding the political context and the need for whole-of-society resilience.

The Soviet mindset, of which we are now seeing a resurgence, is quite different. For these people, politics—politik—is everything. All agencies of the state are engaged. For too long we have ignored the multidimensional attack on our society, but that is a luxury we can no longer afford. This also means that the integrated defence review has, to an extent, disintegrated, and requires a major revamp which should start immediately. This necessary intellectual rethink must now focus primarily on state-on-state conflict.

Over many years, I have posed a question a number of times to military figures, defence officials and academics. During the cold war, we based our defence and security posture on our assessment of “the Threat”, with a capital T, and I have asked what the Threat is today. Invariably, I receive the answer that we face a variety of threats, but that is not the right answer, because the question is “What is the existential threat to our nation and society?” It is not terrorism, Islamist or otherwise, ugly and vile though that is. Today we—the people of Ukraine, the people of Europe, and indeed the west more widely—know the answer. It is a revanchist Russia and its desire to re-establish the Soviet territory, although I accept that in the longer term, as the defence review states, a revisionist China may be a more significant challenge. That means that today’s estimates are fundamentally an historical document, as, indeed, is the review.

But this has been happening for many years. These are political decisions that have been taken, and nearly 30% of our procurement is now bought off the shelf from the United States, with no commitment from companies such as Boeing to reinvest to ensure that not only jobs but technology stay in the UK.

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. It is vital to have a well-established industry to be able to respond to a crisis. The Ministry of Defence and the Treasury need to break out of the ideological straitjacket that states that domestic industry does not matter and we can buy from anywhere in the world. That is a hugely important change.

In fairness, I must draw the right hon. Gentleman’s attention back to the DSIS—the defence security industrial strategy—in which we fundamentally changed our process of procurement. We have a new partnership with British industry, and in discussions with them over the last few days they have been extremely forward looking, as I know he would wish.

I would welcome a bit more detail from the Minister as to the nature and engagement of those discussions. I was talking to a representative from the industry only yesterday, and they are seeing precious little coming through. It is not happening in any way on the same scale or intensity as in Germany. We could argue that Germany is doing some catch-up, but it is really engaging with its industry. As my right hon. Friend the Member for North Durham (Mr Jones) has said, we give away huge orders and get little or nothing in return. Even now, the Minister’s own Department refuses to commit to building the fleet solid support ships in the UK, and his colleagues in the Home Office are giving an order for new Border Force vessels to a shipyard in Holland.

It is worse than that. The Department used to hide behind European regulations, but now we are out of the European Union, we should be free to procure in the UK. I challenged the Minister before Christmas as to whether his Department was going to give a £10 million contract to Damen in the Netherlands for a special naval vehicle, and he said we should wait for the competition. Lo and behold, this week it has been announced that Damen has won that contract for a vessel that could have been built in this country.

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right, and we look forward to the Minister trying to give an explanation for that. My right hon. Friend mentions EU regulations. The reality was that no other country in Europe behaved like that, but that was one of the drivers for the British public thinking that the EU was not working in their interests. Had we actually behaved like every other European country, there would have been less anger in this country. Now the Government are claiming that they are bound by World Trade Organisation regulations, but the United States is a long-standing member—indeed, a founder—of the WTO, and it has a “buy American” policy. There is a deep ideology in the civil service, and unfortunately Ministers are afraid to confront it.

The right hon. Gentleman is making a most interesting speech. He refers to countries that are thinking about joining NATO, such as Finland and Sweden, and there has been a sea change, as he says, in those countries and in Germany. I am a great believer in the British public, and I bet that every single Member here today is getting the same message that I have been getting way up at the top of the UK, which is that we need to defend ourselves against the bear, and against the threat. I believe that the public would warmly support us if we decided to reverse the dreadful cut in the size of the British Army. I think that that would give a great deal of strength to the Government’s elbow.

The hon. Gentleman will see that come through in my speech.

I hope this will, if not eliminate, at least reduce the facile attacks on our defence industry and its skilled, unionised workforce. Can we have no more ill-informed pressure on the City and pension funds to disinvest in defence firms, and no more blockades of their factories?

Likewise, the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence cannot be mere observers. They have to engage, and the Treasury has to provide the funding to enable that engagement to be meaningful. They should follow the example of the great Ernie Bevin, who coincidentally was born on this day in 1881. He had the strategic genius to create not only the biggest trade union in the country, if not the world, but the NATO alliance. Furthermore, when American Secretary of State George Marshall gave his speech at Harvard in 1947, Bevin seized on a single sentence:

“The initiative, I think, must come from Europe.”

Through his energy and persuasion, Bevin generated a European response of sufficient weight and urgency to Marshall’s implied offer of American support, and the reconstruction of Europe followed thereafter.

Incidentally, Bevin also saw the need to create the Foreign Office’s Information Research Department to engage in the battle of ideas and the battle to counter disinformation—that is a crucial part of the spectrum—not only in the UK but across Europe. Also engaged in that struggle of democracy versus totalitarianism were leading Labour figures in the IRD Denis Healey and Richard Crossman, who had of course also played a prominent role in the wartime Political Warfare Executive. This cause is currently being championed in the NATO Parliamentary Assembly by its president, US Congressman Gerry Connolly, to put at its heart the democratic values on which NATO was founded.

Now we have to make our defence and security architecture fit for purpose for this existential struggle. Some of that is about recreating past capability and restoring our vandalised capacity for watching and understanding the dynamics of the Russian regime and, indeed, of Ukraine —the neglect of that after the fall of the Berlin wall was a scandal—and some of it is about recognising the relentless political nature of this struggle and funding organisations with multiple skills to wage it, while fully integrating our capacity.

The right hon. Gentleman and I are both former Armed Forces Ministers. I have sat on the Defence Committee for five years, and he has served far longer than me and is now our excellent vice-Chairman. He can attest to the fact that the Committee has been warning about the increasing Russian threat for several years. Some of us were derided as hawks who always said the Russians were coming. Well, the Russians have now well and truly turned up, so the Committee was basically right. Does he agree that we must now review the entire integrated review, because what happened two weeks ago was a complete game changer in security terms?

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his interventions not just in the Chamber but in the Defence Committee on these important issues. This is pertinent to a debate on the estimates, because resources and finances are obviously crucial, but it is the doctrine, the mindset and the organisation that decide the outcome. It is the same in Ukraine, where the morale of the Ukrainian forces, who are fighting for their homeland, is crucial when facing a conscript army who are not sure where they are or why they are there. That is why we have to get this right. We need an increase in the Budget in a couple of weeks’ time, but we also need a reset in our thinking.

When I tabled a written question asking whether there needed to be such a review, I received a complacent answer from the Minister for Defence People and Veterans, the hon. Member for Aldershot (Leo Docherty), saying that everything is all right and that we are meeting the current requirements. That answer came on 4 March, after this conflict had begun. There needs to be a review of our mindset to build up the security of our country, rather than just defending the Government’s position.

I thank my hon. Friend for that. This very much shows that a week in politics can be a very long time, but it also reveals, as she rightly says, a complacency about our situation and about the international situation, which was not justified by events.

In conclusion, what we have to question today is: is there the necessary understanding in the Government of the tasks and indeed the opportunities confronting them? Are they willing to rethink and provide the funds to implement urgent and necessary charge? Bevin understood this and seized the moment, and Prime Minister Attlee backed him to the hilt. So the fundamental question today is: are this Prime Minister, the current crop of Ministers and our dysfunctional civil service up for the challenge or even up to the job?