Armed Forces Bill

Debate between Carol Monaghan and Tobias Ellwood

Consideration of Lords message
Monday 13th December 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mr Tobias Ellwood (Bournemouth East) (Con)]

I am pleased to speak in this important debate. The Armed Forces Act 2006, which the Minister mentioned, needs to be upgraded, so the Bill needs to pass in this House. It was introduced in January and here we are, almost at Christmas. I will stand corrected—perhaps he can clarify—but if we do not pass it, the armed forces are not beholden to Parliament. Given the experience of Parliament and Government in recent weeks, it would be unwise to have an untethered armed forces at this juncture.

Bills often ping-pong backwards and forwards between here and the other place, but we should bear in mind who it was in the other place that actually scrutinised this Bill. They are senior figures in the justice system, but they are also ex-senior military, who understand the very issue in detail. This has not been thrown back to us just to test the will of this House; it has been thrown back, now for a second time, because there is something serious going on here. I think the Government now find themselves in isolation, and on their own compared with all the charity groups, the Opposition and indeed—dare I say it—the Defence Committee. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Wrexham (Sarah Atherton), who has taken through, over the last 18 months, the women in the armed forces inquiry, which reported only last week. The Minister has very kindly responded to that—not least here in this House, but also in a Westminster Hall debate—but we know all the arguments and what is on either side of this.

The Minister mentioned salami slicing, saying that if we were to go down the road of allowing the civilian courts to deal with murder, manslaughter, domestic violence, child abuse, rape and sexual assault, it would somehow dilute our ability to hold the armed forces to account. By their very nature, our armed forces are expeditionary in what they do, but he knows perfectly well that the yellow card, and indeed the rules of engagement, work extremely well overseas. This is to do with what happens here in the UK, and there is a disjunction between those who actually go through the civilian courts and those who go through the military courts. I am afraid that there is an absence of military experience in dealing with such difficult cases, which is why we are seeing such a disconnect between the conviction rates for civilians and those for the military.

I look to the Minister and say thank you for moving this far, but time is running out and we need to get this Bill through. I do hope that he will hear the concerns not just of this House and of the Committee, but of Justice Lyons. He did a service justice review for the armed forces when I was in the Veterans Minister’s shoes. When I was sitting on the Front Bench as Minister for the Armed Forces, I asked Justice Lyons to consider where this should go and what was his conclusion. His recommendation was exactly what we are calling for today. So I ask the Minister to recognise the wealth of encouragement, and also to recognise that this is nothing to do with salami slicing. This is to do with services for our armed forces personnel, and that is what we are calling for today.

[Carol Monaghan (Glasgow North West) (SNP)]

There is a debt of gratitude that we owe to members of the armed forces, and we have seen that acutely over the last few days as they mobilised to help with the vaccine booster campaign. I received my booster on Friday, and there was certainly a large armed forces presence there. As well as thanking members of the NHS, I would like to extend my gratitude to members of the armed forces who are contributing to that campaign over the next few weeks.

As we renew the Armed Forces Act, it would have been great if we had done so with some provisions that delivered a real impact for members of the armed forces. I suppose the litmus test for this is: will members of the armed forces notice any real difference as a result of this legislation? I think that for the majority the answer, sadly, is no, and that is disappointing.

The Lords amendments today are a final attempt by those in the other place to flesh out the provisions of this Bill, and to attempt to improve what had been billed as a great opportunity to improve our offerings to those who serve. It is disappointing that the expertise of Members of the other place, which was mentioned by the Chair of the Defence Committee, the right hon. Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood), has essentially been disregarded. That is not how this should work. I am not a great fan of the other place myself, but I must admit that there is real legal and military expertise there that was not listened to or paid attention to, which is disappointing.

What would we have liked to see? We would have liked to see improvements in service accommodation. As the Bill progressed, the SNP put forward very modest amendments on this, such as asking that the basic standards of accommodation for social housing should also apply to members of the armed forces. That was a reasonable amendment, but it was thrown out. We saw no movement on visa fees for Commonwealth service personnel. There was the idea that they should serve for 12 years before we even consider this, but that is utterly unrealistic; it is not a reasonable position for us to take.

Global Britain

Debate between Carol Monaghan and Tobias Ellwood

Thursday 30th January 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mr Ellwood]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman—who is now my hon. Friend, as we will hopefully work more closely on national defence issues for the United Kingdom. He makes an important point about these being issues that we need to tackle. When it comes to defence, there is an immediate knee-jerk reaction to speak about platforms—have we got enough of them and so forth? That is important, and we do no doubt face some challenges, but it is also about capabilities.

I go back to the fact that the character of war is changing. We are in constant conflict and competition. Why bother invading or, indeed, attacking a country when it is possible to digitally impose problems for any town, city or community from afar, through a laptop? Elections are being interfered with, and there is not even an international organisation that countries can go to and say, “My election has been interfered with by another state. Please can you take action?”

The second issue is to do with the rise of China. It has a President who has got the job for life, and in our lifetime China will become more dominant economically, technologically and militarily than the United States. It is setting its own rules on how it does business, which poses some huge challenges for us. We need to have an adult conversation with China to better understand it and ask, “What are the rules that we should be following?” We talk about the erosion of the rules-based order, but who is willing to step forward and say, “I’m going to challenge that—I’m going to defend the rules-based order or upgrade those rules, because they are out of date”? Let us not forget that many of them were created in the Bretton Woods conversations after the second world war. China was excluded, and it reminds us of that all the time. It needs to be included in a conversation with international organisations, whether it be the UN or the OECD, so that the rules and standards that we follow are observed, because they have not been.

China is doing its own thing, and we see that in the big debate we have just had over Huawei. Whether it is Huawei, Tencent or China Telecom, all those companies are obliged to provide sensitive information to the state. We do not know the relationship between Huawei and the Chinese army. We have no idea what the intelligence services do with that information. That is why concern has been expressed vividly in this House about the relationship that we have chosen for our 5G roll-out.

We were not in the room when that decision was made in the National Security Council. Experts are there to give the Prime Minister advice. My message to the Government is: we have taken that decision, but can we put a time limit on our use of Huawei or, indeed, any Chinese companies? Can we develop our own western capability, so that we can wean ourselves off the use of Chinese operations? We cannot predict the security that we will require in the future, or even today.

[Carol Monaghan (Glasgow North West) (SNP)]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for giving way and congratulate him on his appointment as Chair of the Defence Committee. More and more we are seeing Chinese companies coming in and buying up companies carrying out research here in the UK. Because there is not enough Government funding, even where we are developing our own technology those companies have to seek funding elsewhere, and that is where they are getting it.

[Mr Ellwood]

The hon. Lady is right. There is an uneven playing field that needs to be addressed. Why is it that Facebook, Amazon and eBay cannot operate in China, but Alibaba, Huawei and others can operate here?

The scale of China is simply enormous. Alibaba is the size of eBay and Amazon put together. Huawei sells more mobile phones than Apple. The scale of it and the injection of cash from the Chinese Government is colossal, which is why we need to have a serious conversation. Given the importance that America, Australia and New Zealand place on this, we need a solution. I know that Huawei’s involvement is in the non-core elements of the 5G network and has been capped. But we made the F-35 stealth fighter—that was essentially the Five Eyes community coming together to make state-of-the-art equipment. Let us do the same with 5G. We should not just turn to Cisco, Ericsson or Nokia and say, “Please catch up with Huawei.” They will not be able to do it. We need the Prime Minister to talk with President Trump and say, “Over the next five years, let’s create the 5G and 6G capability that will allow us to have our own identity.”

If we do not, I predict that there will be a splintering of the internet. The rules that China is adopting and enforcing for its own people and for countries that use its technologies mean that there will be two operations and two versions of the economy. We cannot be caught on the wrong side of the argument in history, so we must develop our own western capabilities.