Defence and Security Review (NATO) — House of Commons, 2015-03-02
Topic: Defense
Keith Robert Simpson (Conservative, Centre-right): I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart) on introducing the debate with such clarity and depth of knowledge. This autumn the Prime Minister, whoever he is—no doubt it will be my right hon. Friend—will revisit the strategic defence and security review. He is on record as saying that he thinks it just needs a light touch. With the greatest respect to my right hon. Friend, I think he is wrong for every reason that my hon. Friend and other colleagues here have pointed out. It is a horribly complex situation I remember, in the early 1970s, going to seminars on military history, defence and international relations at the Institute of Historical Research, where one sat at the feet of Professors A. J. P. Taylor, Donald Cameron Watt, and Sir—as he is now—Michael Howard. A lot of the talk was about rearmament and appeasement in the 1920s and ’30s, and I used to sit there and think how naive and stupid were the chiefs of staff, the politicians and most of the advisers of that time. In the past 20-odd years, I have gained more sympathy for them, because they were faced with financial collapse and a multiplicity of threats. The armed forces had been reduced in number, most Government expenditure had been reduced, and the armed forces themselves could not agree on priorities. In relation to the Ministry of Defence’s budget, the armed forces—I say this with regret—have been log-rolling for decades, often wasting billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money In the few minutes that I have, I want to emphasise the fact that we should have a national security policy. That is of the things that the Government should be addressing this autumn. I hope that the discussion will not just be confined to Government Departments and to Parliament but open to wider outside expertise, as happens in the United States of America, Canada, Australia, and most European countries. That is absolutely crucial. Although this debate has—rightly given the nature of the publication—concentrated on the defence aspects and highlighted the threat from Putin, we all know that in fact we face a multiplicity of threats. If anything, the situation is more challenging for a Government now than it was even for the Governments of the late 1930s In looking at a national security policy, we must think not only of the threats that our country faces and is going to face, which have been outlined by my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border and others, but what the market will bear in terms of the money that is going to be allocated. It is a sobering thought that, looking at the national security budgets in the round, one of the poorest Departments is the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, with £1.72 billion. The Department for Work and Pensions could lose that kind of money in an afternoon, and Government IT budgets have invariably done so. The MOD’s budget is £34.34 billion, and the budget of Department for International Development, which I would include in the national security budget, is £9.89 billion. I will not go into the arguments about whether DFID’s budget should be reduced.