Rearmament and Warfighting Readiness

Debate between Kevin Bonavia and Catherine Fookes

Wednesday 8th July 2026 Commons Chamber

[Kevin Bonavia (Stevenage) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells (Mike Martin) on securing this important debate.

We live at a time when our country is being targeted—not just threatened or tested, but actively targeted. We have already heard from many hon. Members that the reality is that hostile states are seeking to harm us every single day. Cyber-attacks batter our systems, malign actors push relentlessly at the seams of our national security and disinformation campaigns seek to warp our public debates, including in Clacton in the weeks ahead, where Russian bots will have to decide whether it is going to be the current outgoing Member for Clacton or Count Binface—that is the choice they face. More seriously, we know these threats in our day-to-day work as Members. They happen to us and to anybody who wants to speak out in public debate. And why is that? It is to undermine our common security.

We have had discussion today about whose fault it is that our defences have been run down in recent years. Let me be bipartisan: we all lived off the peace dividend from the end of the cold war—that is understandable and we get that—but in that time, we came together as a country and as a House to defend countries in need, not least Ukraine. We have done that, but now we need to look to our home defence, which is under threat in a way that it has never been since at least the second world war.

[Catherine Fookes (Monmouthshire) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that it is incredibly important that the Prime Minister is at NATO right now, working to calmly and strongly ensure that we are right at the heart of that alliance? Will he join me in congratulating the Prime Minister and the rest of the EU on our agreement to invest £37 billion over the next 10 years with 11 other countries on a new long-range missile to protect Europe?

[Kevin Bonavia]

That is fantastic news for the future of NATO. I pay tribute to our Prime Minister for speaking up for NATO. This country has a NATO-first policy, and rightly so. We put our nuclear deterrent and our own taxpayers’ money to the service of NATO. We must come together as an alliance and we must recognise that our country’s contribution has been great, no matter what the debate about how we get to 3.5% of GDP in the years ahead. I thank my own Government—as a Labour MP, I should—for what they have done to support our armed forces by increasing pay and taking housing back into public ownership, so that the armed forces can have the morale that they deserve. But we need to keep doing more.

I thank our defence industry in this country too. I want to mention two defence firms in my constituency of Stevenage. Airbus helps to produce between a quarter and a third of all satellites in space, but the company cannot manufacture the satellites in my town alone; it collaborates with companies in sites across the country, including in Portsmouth—I see my hon. Friend the Member for Portsmouth North (Amanda Martin) is in her place. We need to come together and support our SMEs. Last week, I visited Astute, a defence logistics firm in my constituency that needs our support. This Government are and must do more to support such companies in the armed forces industries, but that is not enough if we are going to truly make our country safe.

My hon. Friend the Member for Dunfermline and Dollar (Graeme Downie) made an excellent point about how we have to face the threats from hostile actors around the world. It is not just about the hardware or about the people we need to recruit to our armed forces. As many hon. Members have said, it is about a whole-of-society approach.

My hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Birmingham Selly Oak (Al Carns) talked about national resilience, and this really has to be a national cause. The excellent strategic defence review finishes with that point and talks about a whole-of-society approach. Can we really do that? Members have said today that the public do not really feel that yet, but many Members and veterans do. The armed forces and our intelligence services see it. There are things that I do not even know about, but I do know—from what I am allowed to know—that this issue is serious and affecting us now. Russia’s grey-zone war is there, and it will not just be Russia in the years ahead—we know that there are others—so how do we take this approach?

Before the second world war, many people thought, “Never again. We cannot rearm; we cannot do all this.” There was a famous debate in the Oxford Union, where they voted not to fight for King or country—and that is said about our young people today, but I do not believe it. I see countries, such as Ukraine, Poland and the Baltic states, that feel and see the urgency. Maybe we do not feel it yet in this country, but it behoves all of us, in this place and beyond, to help people understand what is going on. That will be harder now. In the 1930s, we had the mainstream media, or whatever it was called back then; now, we are going to be dealing with disinformation. When we try to make our case, there will always be somebody out there to talk about poor, maligned Putin. I have that in my patch—only a few days ago, a Russian state broadcaster wanted Stevenage to be attacked with missiles. We must do better, and I am sure that we will.