Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Julian Lewis and Andy Burnham

Wednesday 11th November 2026 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

My right hon. Friend speaks very powerfully on this issue from personal experience. I can also share mine as I saw people from around the world caring for my dad. She is absolutely right that we must celebrate their contribution, as I did in my speech at the party conference. We must take on a politics that seeks to say to those people that they have no place here, because they do.

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

Q10. Whether the level of military threat from Russia faced by the UK is currently as great as that during the cold war years.

[The Prime Minister]

The right hon. Gentleman asks about the Russian threat that we face today compared with the cold war. With rapid changes in technology, including AI, cyber-warfare and autonomous systems, we face new complex threats, which is why we are fully funding the defence investment plan and investing in the modern capabilities needed for the future.

[Sir Julian Lewis]

I think that answer suggests that the Prime Minister accepts that the threat we face today is comparable in dangerous intensity to that we faced during the cold war years. If that is the case, may I urge him to try to persuade his fellow Ministers to stop using the standard line that the Government have made the greatest increase in defence spending “since the end of the cold war”? At the end of the cold war, the threat largely declined, but we have to look at the level of spending during the cold war, which was regularly at 4.5% to 5% or more during the 1980s. As someone who has criticised successive Governments for cuts I am not trying to make a partisan point, but please stop making a comparison between the post-cold war years and now. The threat we face now is similar to that of the cold war years, and our defence investment has to match that level.

[The Prime Minister]

I assure the right hon. Gentleman that there is no complacency here. I understand the seriousness of the points that he is making, but, in the two years that this Government have been in office, we have seen the biggest sustained increase in defence spending since the cold war period. That is important, and that will continue. The Chancellor set out a path to increased defence spending as we go through the next decade to honour our NATO commitments, but we have to recognise that the threat is different; it is multifaceted, and we will address it on every level.

International Update

Debate between Julian Lewis and Andy Burnham

Monday 12th October 2026 Commons Chamber

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

As the Chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee who oversaw the publication of the Russia report as soon as the Committee was reconstituted, may I ask the Prime Minister to explain to the House exactly how he thinks Russia was able to alter the result of the referendum?

[The Prime Minister]

I have great respect for the right hon. Gentleman, but I did not say that. I did not at any point say that it altered the result. I simply come back to what I said earlier: it is a matter of record that Russia has sought to interfere in elections—the 2019 general election—and we think it is inconceivable that this was the first time.

Direction of Government

Debate between Julian Lewis and Andy Burnham

Tuesday 1st September 2026 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

As I said to the right hon. Member for Maldon (Sir John Whittingdale), I believe we need to do more to support the businesses that my hon. Friend talked about, and there will be more to come. The cost of doing business is too high. As I have said this afternoon, energy bills are too high for businesses and households, and we need the determination to bring those bills down and lower the cost of doing business. There will be more to come on that. This will be a pro-business and pro-small-business Government. Nobody should make any mistake about that. The approach that I led in Manchester was all about the public taking control of what they need to do in order to make a place functional for businesses and people. That is Manchesterism, and that is what we will bring nationally. It is all about setting businesses up to succeed. I look forward to working with my hon. Friend to improve that business, and her high streets, too.

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

As someone who was politically active in the Thatcher decade, may I gently remind the Prime Minister that it was the period that she did so well in because the Labour party was in a terrible state? For example, it embraced unilateral nuclear disarmament at the height of the second cold war—mercifully, a position that it has long left behind.

I welcome what the Prime Minister said about wishing to work consensually and across party lines. In that spirit, will he look again at the shameless gerrymandering around the local government reorganisation? At the beginning of the process, the hon. Member for Oldham West, Chadderton and Royton (Jim McMahon) promised us that there would be no unnecessary fragmentation or boundary changes without strong reason for them, yet my constituency is being torn apart, with the Waterside, which has looked towards the New Forest for centuries, being taken over by Southampton. The same is happening elsewhere. That was not in his party’s manifesto. It is a good opportunity for the Prime Minister to show that he means what he says about consensus.

[The Prime Minister]

I will take on that challenge and ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government to consider what the right hon. Gentleman has said this afternoon. These changes do benefit from having the maximum consensus. On the Thatcher Government, we will probably have to agree to disagree, but I make one observation: we have a public housing stock that has 1.5 million fewer homes than in the ’80s and ’90s, and we now have 1.5 million people on housing waiting lists up and down the country. I would put it to him that that is a cause of further public cost, in terms of the number of people who are in a crisis situation. I think we can do better. I have been prepared to criticise the Government that I was in; maybe one day he might criticise the one that he was in, and then we will be able to find some solutions.