Defence

Julian Lewis Excerpts

Tuesday 24th March 2026 Commons Chamber

[Sir Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

rose—

[James Cartlidge]

I give way to my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Sir Bernard Jenkin).

[James Cartlidge]

I am extremely grateful to my hon. Friend and constituency neighbour, who ran rings around the Prime Minister yesterday so expertly. He is absolutely right. The Red Book details to the penny how much this Government will spend on their U-turn to abolish the two-child benefit cap by 2031. There is no line on what will be spent on defence in those years, so how on earth is the MOD meant to change? The key is that the Government are not going to go to 3% in this Parliament. I am going to conclude by setting out five steps, but before I do that, I will give way to my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Sir Julian Lewis).

[Sir Julian Lewis]

It is very kind of my hon. Friend to give way on the point of making his peroration. He mentioned the tension between the MOD and its Ministers, and the Treasury. We could sympathise with the MOD Ministers if they did not keep adopting a line that is self-defeating. They keep coming out with this propaganda line that they have increased defence spending by a greater amount than at any time since the end of the cold war, and each time, I boringly point out to them—and I am going to do it again today—that they should not be comparing what we are spending now, in a much deteriorated situation, with the peace dividend years that followed the cold war; they should compare it with what we used to spend on defence during the cold war, which was regularly between 4.5% and 5%. If that seems a lot, just remember that when a country is involved in a full-scale war, we are talking not about 4% but about 40%.

[James Cartlidge]

My right hon. Friend is never boring in his interventions; on the contrary, he is one of the most knowledgeable people on defence in this House.

I will conclude with five steps that could be taken right now to galvanise our war readiness—positive suggestions from the Conservative Benches. First, we should rearm immediately. As I wrote in my letter to the Defence Secretary last week, instead of waiting on the defence investment plan, he should use the reserve funding agreed for the middle east operations to place orders for urgent operational requirements, in particular advanced short-range air-to-air missiles for our fighter planes, and Aster air defence missiles for our Type 45s. Secondly, we should deliver drone tech at scale and pace across the armed forces, as we set out in our sovereign defence fund last December. Thirdly, to fund that we would set a path to 3% this Parliament, not the next, including turning the National Wealth Fund into a defence and resilience bank, ringfencing £11 billion for defence, repurposing £6 billion of research and development funding for drone tech, and restoring the two-child benefit cap to fund a bigger Army.

Fourthly, to save more money for defence, and following Iran’s missile strike on Diego Garcia, we would stand up for that critical sovereign territory by scrapping Labour’s crazy Chagos plan. Finally, to boost immediately the morale of our veterans and all who serve our country, we would defend those who defended us by scrapping Labour’s plans to put our former soldiers back in the dock, simply for the crime of serving their country. It is not enough for Ministers simply to say, month after month, that they are working “flat out” to deliver the defence investment plan. In the national interest this country needs to rearm rapidly. That means the Prime Minister ditching the dither and delay, summoning the courage to reverse the spiralling welfare bill, and finally committing to 3% on defence this Parliament.

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[Al Carns]

I thank my hon. Friend for her contribution. We need three levels of understanding before ever putting someone in harm’s way: a legal mandate, a plan and think-through to the finish.

[Sir Julian Lewis]

Will the Minister give way?

[Al Carns]

I am going to make a bit of ground, and then I will come back to the right hon. Gentleman in due course.

Morale is built on leadership, clarity and trust, and the facts matter. Recruitment is up by 13%, and outflow is down by 8%. For the first time in over a decade, more people are joining the armed forces than leaving—that is the reality. Let us be clear about our responsibility to our veterans: there is no equivalence between those who served to protect life and those who sought to destroy it. This Government are putting in place proper protections for veterans following the legal uncertainty that was left behind, and we are backing that with action.

Actions talks. Op Valour is putting £50 million into our veterans programme—more than ever before. Op Ascend is helping veterans into meaningful employment, with funding to tackle veterans’ homelessness and to deliver real improvements in housing and pay. We have delivered the largest pay rise in two decades, including a 35% increase for new recruits. We have bought back 36,000 military homes and are investing £9 billion to improve them. We have funded 30 hours of free childcare for under-threes across Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, saving forces families up to £6,000 a year. That is the difference that practical support makes, and it is why we are seeing a change in morale. If the Conservatives want a debate about who is delivering for our service personnel, I am more than happy to stand on our record and to compare theirs with ours.

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[James MacCleary]

I thank my hon. Friend for his valuable contribution, and I support the point he makes. All the cuts he mentions were damaging. Probably the most damaging thing of all was how the Conservatives failed our serving troops, in particular with their accommodation and the deal they gave our veterans over some time.

[Sir Julian Lewis]

Can I share a little secret with the House? For slightly longer than the duration of the second world war, I was a shadow Defence Minister, but in 2010, I found myself back on the Back Benches because the Liberal Defence spokesman was appointed Minister for the Armed Forces. I was told that the reason for this was that the powers that be knew that I would never have gone along with the cuts that were made in October 2010 by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition. I think the hon. Gentlemen’s amnesia is therefore somewhat selective.

[James MacCleary]

I thank the right hon. Member for his intervention; that was very informative.

We saw our surface fleet reduced to its smallest size since the English civil war while the Conservatives were at the helm, and a crisis of recruitment, retention and morale across the armed forces ushered in by their incompetence. We should not be surprised by the disastrous impact that years of Conservative mismanagement have had on our military. What is the Conservatives’ answer now? After hollowing out our armed forces in government, their motion shows that they have learned nothing. They want struggling families to foot the bill. It is the same old Tory formula: break the country first, then ask the most vulnerable to pay for the repairs. What is needed now is a serious plan to reverse their damage

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[Sir Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

I listened to the Minister’s remarks with great care. Many of the things that he says, he says with great sincerity, but some of the things he says, I do not believe that he quite so fervently believes. I ask him, being the hon. and gallant Gentleman that he is, to consider whether criticising those who criticise Government policy on the basis of the question “How dare you criticise the Government at such a serious time?” reflects the same kind of attack made by supporters of Neville Chamberlain against Winston Churchill and his supporters even as late as 1940. As they went through the Division Lobbies in May that year, they taunted those coming through voting against the Adjournment of the House: “Quislings”, they said.

To implicitly brand my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition as some kind of warmonger who is out of control—that is what the Government are basically saying—reflects exactly the gibe thrown at Winston Churchill: that he loved war so much, he was not objective. Yet he was the one who appreciated the dire emergency of the situation being faced, even as the British Expeditionary Force was losing in France and the Norway campaign was proving such a disaster.

I appreciate that it is perhaps obligatory for the Minister to say these things about the two-child benefit cap for the satisfaction of many of his Back Benchers, but we are now spending so much on welfare and so little on defence. Maybe the two problems have something to do with each other. If we could just spend the same on in-work or out-of-work benefits for people of working age as we were spending before covid, we could save £50 billion a year, but that does not seem to matter to the Government at all.

The Minister talked, I am sure with great sincerity, about how important it is to have a system that works “for them”—I think I am quoting his very words; he said that we need a social system in this country that works for the poorest people in our society. Well, the system over which the Government are presiding is failing. We now have a rising and terrifying number of young people who are not in education, employment, or training—the so-called NEETs. Even those operating on the frontline of food banks—I visited a food bank recently—understand that if we keep indexing benefits with inflation, but do not index tax allowances, that means that people pay more tax at lower rates of pay, and if we increase benefits, such as by removing the two-child benefit cap, and do not uprate the tapers to protect the better-off who are receiving universal credit, we create a disincentive to work.

When I first visited food banks, which I think was under Tony Blair’s Government—they were not originated under the Conservatives—there used to be a tiny number of people who were permanent beneficiaries of food banks; the vast majority were in a state of transition, and that persisted until quite recently. At the food bank I visited at the weekend, 80% of beneficiaries are now permanent clients, because they say there is no point in them trying to take work, as it does not pay. The system is not working for them, because we are spending too much on welfare and we have not cut taxes enough.

The next question is: are we at peace or at war? Much of the discussion in the Liaison Committee was about that. I cannot find a Minister who denies that we are at war, and I am afraid that makes the question of whether we choose to get involved rather redundant. We are involved, and we cannot help being involved. Our sovereign territory is involved, because it is being attacked. Indeed, we have been involved in a war in defence of the west, NATO and Ukraine probably since as far back as the original invasion of Georgia and Abkhazia, because the nature of Putin’s regime had become apparent by then. They are quite explicit: Lavrov has said that Russia is at war with NATO, so that war is already here.

What kind of war is it? Well, it reflects all kinds of conflicts, including hybrid conflict, which has often been discussed and is of such a varied nature, and what one might call cognitive conflict, which is the capacity and determination of Russia and China, and probably Iran, not just to interfere in our democratic processes, but to corrupt the truth. This is aimed at reshaping the societal, economic and informational environment, at undermining people’s faith in democracy and democratic values, and at destroying the faith of our voters in our democratic system.

The question now is: what are we doing to fight back? Well, what are we doing? I know that in bits of Government, many small parts of the Government are at war. There are some wonderful people in the Ministry of Defence who are sweating the night hours to do things that are of crucial importance.

[Sir Julian Lewis]

I am concerned about one problem that may arise. We have now got to a stage where the Government have given permission for the Americans to strike back against, for example, missile batteries launching at targets that might include our own bases. I am not clear what would happen—and I hope it never has to come to this—if our bases were successfully attacked and damaged. Are the Government still saying that only the Americans should retaliate against those batteries, or should the RAF have a role as well? I am not anxious to escalate, but I do not see where the logic lies in America being able to retaliate, when our own armed forces cannot, following an attack that has successfully damaged one of our own bases.

[Sir Bernard Jenkin]

The fact is that the whole of the deterrent stance of all the NATO nations is very substantially—I will not say hopelessly—dependent on the good will that the United States shows towards us. That was the basis on which the SDR was written. George Robertson—the noble Lord Robertson of Port Ellen—has said in public that one of the constraints of writing the defence review was to assume that the United States was our closest ally and could be relied upon. Whether that will be true in the future, we do not know. Some things that have happened have very much shaken our faith in that, but the idea that the Government should choose this moment—this very moment, when we are begging for American support in Ukraine to hold back the tide of possible Russian aggression across the whole European front—to further alienate President Trump from NATO seems to me like a bit of a tactical error.

Going back to the second world war, when Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary, complained to Winston Churchill that the United Kingdom did not seem to have an independent foreign policy, Churchill said, “No, we don’t. We’ve got to do what the Americans want us to do in order to get them to come into the war.” I am afraid that we are not in a great position of strength to dictate to the Americans, and pontificating about their moral judgments or their interpretation of international law seems to me totally counterproductive for the security of the United Kingdom and our European allies. To answer my right hon. Friend’s question, we need a deterrent stance.

But what is the Government’s response? Well, we are waiting for a plan, but that plan is a long time coming. Drones have transformed the last few months, but the Government have not kept up with the change. We are still waiting for a plan, and it is not enough.