Armed Forces Readiness and Defence Equipment

Debate between Rosie Winterton and George Galloway

Thursday 21st March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for that point of order, which he has used to make his point. Let us return to George Galloway.

[George Galloway]

Pomposity, but not a point of order. The right hon. Gentleman said that we were careful to conceal some of our weakness, and then he adumbrated those weaknesses. If there are more that he concealed, we are in very big trouble. My point is this: we haven’t the men, we haven’t the ships and we haven’t the money, so why are we picking enemies? I have lost count, in the course of the debate, of the number that we are either already fighting or may have to get ready to fight. That is the absurd “Alice in Wonderland” nature of this debate.

We cannot retain even the low numbers of people we recruit. Why? We ought to know why: the lions do not much like the look of the donkeys who lead them into war after war, which they later disown and admit should never have been fought. You know to what I refer, Madam Deputy Speaker. I had a debate at the Oxford Union; the then Defence Secretary ran away and did not turn up. I had to deal with his subordinates, but I made the point there. I was a boy soldier: Royal Artillery Battery 2, Army Cadet Force. I trained with the Royal Marines for weeks in Poole, in Dorset. I am in no sense a pacifist. I want to defend our country. I want our soldiers to be properly paid, properly housed, properly clad, properly trained and properly armed.

I have picked up Tommy Atkins, stricken with addiction, from Piccadilly Gardens in Manchester, just out of Strangeways, addicted to Spice and abandoned by the politicians who gayly sent him off to one needless, pointless, fruitless war after another. Don’t come here and say you’re standing up for Tommy Atkins. The donkeys who sent him to wars that even the donkeys now disavow are the reason that people do not join our armed forces. They do not trust those people over there not to send them to another Iraq or Afghanistan, and they are right not to trust them.

The truth is that our country is in very real danger of falling into the same trap as Mussolini: going around the world, threatening people with Germany’s army. Our politicians go around the world threatening people with America’s army, but there is a big change coming, and they do not like it on either side of the aisle. President Trump is coming back in November, and he does not much fancy their NATO. He does not intend to send American soldiers to die for Kupiansk or for the Zelensky regime in Kyiv. He has no intention whatever of continuing its war in Ukraine.

I heard a senior Member of the House say, “If America withdraws from NATO, we will have to increase our contribution to 5%, 6% or maybe 7% of GDP.” Do these people seriously imagine that they will continue in NATO without the United States of America? What kind of NATO would it be—it really would be Gilbert and Sullivan—unless we devote not £50 billion of our public treasure but hundreds of billions on defence? Have any of these people seen the state of the public realm in Britain? Have they seen the state of the national health service? Have they seen the state of our streets, public buildings and public transport? Have they seen the wage packets earned in this country? Have they seen pensioner poverty and fuel poverty in action? Have they met people who have to choose between eating and heating? These fools want to spend not £50 billion but hundreds of billions on weapons of war, which we will fight with an Army that could fit into Villa Park—70,000 soldiers can fit into a single football stadium.

For some time, I was the Member of Parliament for a naval shipbuilding yard, Yarrow’s on the Clyde—producers of excellence. I wrestled—not physically—with our late and lamented friend Alan Clark when he was the Procurement Minister, and I won. I got all five of the Type 23s procured at that time. I want us to have a good Navy, and a good Army, but not so we can sail it to bombard the natives in the Red sea or send a Gilbert and Sullivan squadron to the South China sea, like a peashooter firing at an elephant—or a whale in the case in the Chinese navy. I do not want us to send our 70,000 soldiers and our aircraft carriers that break down and have to be glued together, or our destroyers that crash into each other in the Solent.

I do not want us to pretend that we are a Rudyard Kipling-era imperial power. That is the key problem. Some of these people still think that we are in the 19th century and can send gunboats up the Yangtze and not have them sunk, and that the natives in Yemen are the natives we used to push around for a century or more. The empire strikes back, and the empire is bigger than us now. We owned India; now the Indians own us. Shall I take that metaphor further? There is an idea that those in this little country of ours—this dear green place, with all its problems and enfeeblement caused by our economic decline and the rapid and massive economic advance of others—are still in a position to stand in this Parliament making dispensations to this battleground or that, or that we can still slice our diminishing national wealth in a way that allows us to pretend to be an imperial power.

I have time only for one last point. I was startled by the hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Dame Meg Hillier), the Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, when she told us that £2 billion of our defence budget is going on foreign exchange costs, meaning that not only are we spending 50 billion of British taxpayers’ pounds, but that we are spending it in foreign countries. We are allowing foreign companies and yards to build our defence infrastructure in a way, as the right hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones) pointed out, that France would never dream of doing. Whatever we are going to spend, spend it in Britain, spend it in British yards, spend it in British factories. You’ll save £2 billion in foreign exchange costs at the very least.