Defence: Budget

Lord Glenarthur Excerpts

Wednesday 17th June 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Glenarthur (Con)]

My Lords, I, too, welcome my noble friend Lord Howe to his new responsibilities at the Ministry of Defence, but I am afraid that this is the only welcome I can give to the Government’s apparent attitude to defence. Do the Government understand that defence, and the strategic and foreign policy imperatives that make it so essential, underpins the security of every other element of their domestic, let alone their wider, ambitions, or are they simply prepared to take the risk that sound defence is a luxury that will never need to be tested?

Strict economic and financial policies cannot be at any price. Taking responsibility for defence, at every level from the Chiefs of Staff down to perhaps the tank crew commander, is not simply a matter of management. It is about command, it is about leadership, and it is about exhortation to operate in ways that are not matched in any other walk of life. Is my noble friend aware of the deep pessimism that so many serving members of the Armed Forces, let alone other commentators, feel about the current reducing state of our defence capabilities, about the provision of adequate equipment for the future and about the difficulty of motivating all ranks to understand that a career in the services is more a calling and a duty than a job, the experience of which will serve well both the country and the individual throughout his or her life? Were the assumptions underlying the previous SDSR correct at the time they were made? If so, were Libya, ISIL, Ukraine and Syria foreseen? Of course they were not. What of further Russian military developments in both the nuclear and conventional fields? What of China’s expanding sphere of influence and military capability? These are stark illustrations of growing global instability.

What is there to give us confidence that the new SDSR is likely to be based on assumptions that are any more realistic than last time? Do the Government agree with the House of Commons Defence Committee report, Towards the Next Security and Defence Review: Part Three, which was published in March, and the committee’s paper, Re-thinking Defence to Meet New Threats? Beyond the need to upgrade the nuclear deterrent, what are the foreign policy objectives that underlie our status as a nation, as part of the EU, as a member of the Commonwealth, within NATO and as a member of the permanent five?

Managing and developing defence capability within an even greater allocation of resources would be difficult enough. But the prospect of further cost reductions, which appear to have started already, with £500 million—perhaps more in reality—being cut before the SDSR is remotely complete, inevitably make it exceedingly difficult to match the 2% of GDP expenditure that the Prime Minister seems to exhort others to do. Not to commit to it or even more—or worse, to fudge the figure—is folly in the extreme. The Government have so far dodged every rational argument to halt, let alone reverse, the reduction in our defence capability and this is the height of irresponsibility. The current SDSR is an opportunity to arrest this perilous decline.