I made my first speech in the Chamber of the House of Commons during the debate on the Queen's Speech yesterday. In the 4 minutes I was alllowed I spoke about the increased threats facing our country and the need to have more than 2 per cent of Gross National Product to be allocated to Defence. Below is the gist of my speech.
The last strategic defence and security review, in 2010, imposed an 8% cut in the overall defence budget, which resulted, arguably, in a 30% reduction in capacity across all three armed forces.
For our military, SDSR 2010 was an excruciating exercise and hurt deeply. For instance, the RAF, shockingly, sacked a quarter of its trainee pilots—many just as they were awarded their flying wings.
In 2010 the SDSR negated two factors: first, the military threat from Russia, which has grown enormously since then and, secondly, the explosion in upheavals in the middle east following the so-called Arab spring, which had not, of course, begun five years ago.
Both those factors must now be placed into the planning assumptions for SDSR 2015, and I will say a few words about each.
In real terms, the Russian defence budget has increased by about 53%. The weekend before last, Dmitry Rogozin, Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister, remarked on television that tanks do not need visas, and he has a point, given that we see Russian T-72 tanks cruising through eastern Ukraine.
According to MI5, the current threat level for the UK is classified as severe. That means that our security services believe an attack is highly likely, partly from supporters of al-Qaeda or Daesh.
I do not want our Army to go abroad to fight and to lose lives again, but it may have to do just that if our enemies pose a sufficient threat to the people of our country.
The most crucial question we have to answer in SDSR 2015 is how much military power we need to generate for operations abroad, whether high-intensity symmetric campaigns, probably as part of a coalition, or asymmetric operations, probably at a lower level.
Our armed forces must still be designed to deter state-on-state conflict, and Russia’s actions in Eastern Europe are signal warning of that. The thought of war between states is not dead—we may hope it is, but we must not count on it.
In the last Parliament, the Defence Committee called for at least 2% of GDP to be allocated to defence. So did I, and I do so again. France is increasing its defence budget by €4 billion, and Germany by €8 billion.
In this SDSR, what we need for defence, and not cost cutting, must be the paramount assumption.