Mr Mark Francois
MP for Rayleigh and Wickford · Conservative · United Kingdom
“Secondly, what actions is he as Defence Secretary, no doubt in consultation with the Chief of the General Staff, taking to push back against these pernicious in-year funding cuts imposed by the Treasury?”
“Taking him at his word, I must press him on some extremely worrying reports—first published in The Times on 3 September, and amplified in the Defence Eye journal on Tuesday—that British Army training is being seriously curtailed in order to provide in-year efficiency savings— “cuts”, in pub English— at the Treasury’s behest.”
“I am sure that I speak for the whole House in paying tribute to the Ukrainians for their fierce and determined resistance. They are fighting for the values of freedom and democracy, which this House has represented for centuries, so when we say, “Slava Ukraini!”, we mean it.”
“On behalf of the shadow Defence team, I would like to take this opportunity to welcome the new Defence Secretary—Labour’s third in three months—to his place and to thank him for advance sight of this important statement.”
“Tragically, a number of innocent civilians were murdered in Kyiv last night. On supporting Ukraine and brave President Zelensky, there has been absolute solidarity between ourselves and the Labour party.”
“On housing numbers, there is no Reform MP present this afternoon, but Reform-led Rochford district council has just published its regulation 19 local plan.”
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“Taken together with the purchase of the Boeing RC-135 Rivet Joint electronic reconnaissance aircraft, for which no workshare figure is publicly available, that represents some $10 billion of business for Boeing from the UK MOD for which the UK workshare has been 10% at best and 2% at worst. Boeing has done incredibly well out of the UK MOD, while UK industry has done incredibly badly out of Boeing.”
“For many years, Boeing as a company has done extremely well in winning major multibillion dollar procurement orders from the MOD, in return for which it has placed very limited amounts of work on those programmes with the defence industry in the UK. To give specific examples, according to the MOD’s recent figures, on the E-7 Wedgetail, the estimated UK content is around 10%; for the AH-64 Apache, it is only 7%; for the P-8 Poseidon anti-submarine aircraft, it is barely 4%; and for the original CH-47 Chinook helicopters, it was just 2%. According to the answer to a written parliamentary question I tabled, the UK content for the new order of CH-47 extended-range Chinooks for our special forces will generate a UK workshare of about 8%.”
“That incident was followed by a number of so-called whistleblowers, involved either at Boeing or in its supply chain, coming forward with very serious allegations about failures in the way the company builds its aircraft. No doubt partly as a result, Mr Dave Calhoun announced that he will step down as chief executive at the end of the year. In the first quarter of this year, Boeing reported a net loss of more than $350 million, and it is still experiencing serious production problems across a range of aircraft, both civilian and military, of which the UK Wedgetail is but one example. The US Air Force also has numerous issues with Boeing, not least in its much-troubled KC-46 air tanker programme.”
“In short, the Boeing E-7 Wedgetail is rapidly becoming the RAF’s equivalent of the Army’s Ajax programme—a procurement disaster that has gone on year after year at vast expense to the taxpayer, without actually entering operational service, as Ajax still has not. The Defence Committee, alarmed by that, has invited the head of Boeing Defence, Space and Security, Mr Ted Colbert, to appear before the Committee at Westminster to provide an explanation, although we are still attempting to finalise a precise date for his personal appearance. Boeing is an organisation in crisis after the sad deaths of more than 300 people caused by the two crashes of its 737 MAX aircraft. We have seen further serious safety incidents, most recently in January when a door flew off an Alaska Boeing 737 MAX 9 in mid-flight.”
“The RAF is clearly embarrassed by this and is attempting to deploy chaff between in-service dates, when the aircraft could take off the runway, and an initial operating capability, when the aircraft might actually be ready to fight. The latest information I have is that the ISD could now be in autumn 2025, whereas the IOC could be in the first or even the second quarter of 2026, which is still two years away. That leaves a critical gap in our air defence capability for which the MOD, and Boeing in particular, must be held robustly to account. Moreover, the initial buy of five Wedgetail aircraft was inexplicably cut to three several years ago by ministerial fiat, even though we were contractually obliged to buy all five radars, which themselves were very expensive.”
“Linked to the vulnerability of our radar stations and the shortage of fighter aircraft are the extremely worrisome delays in airborne early warning. The Royal Navy’s early warning aircraft, Crowsnest, is many years late. It has only recently entered service for the air defence of the fleet. For the Royal Air Force, the Boeing E-3 Sentry AWACS aircraft were withdrawn shortly after the integrated review was published in 2021, leaving us without a mainstream airborne early warning aircraft. The E-3 was meant to be replaced shortly thereafter by the Boeing E-7 Wedgetail, but the programme has been subject to multiple chronic delays and is still not in service.”
“The right hon. Gentleman, a former Armed Forces Minister like me, is absolutely right. Many of them still have half their so-called airframe life remaining. As I have said, they are more than capable of intercepting and shooting down the threat aircraft that they would have to match. That is all the more reason to keep them against a rainy day, rather than flogging them off or breaking them up for parts. Crucially, creating such a war reserve would demonstrate a sign of intent to any potential aggressor that after many years of doing the opposite, the UK is now preparing to fight a sustained conflict with a peer enemy, should that become necessary. Hopefully, in so doing, we will make that eventuality far less likely.”
“I very much hope that with the new integrated procurement model and perhaps a couple of humble suggestions that I have been able to offer this evening, we can put more of that money to good use to ensure that we, our people and our allies remain safe in an increasingly dangerous world. Si vis pacem, para bellum.”
“That is serious for us in the UK, as like it or not, Boeing is one of our major defence suppliers and is responsible for supporting key equipment in service. We do not want that company to fail. Therefore, we can only hope that the incoming management will take a firm grip of the situation and turn it around—the sooner, the better. Lastly, it is very good news that we are reversing the downward trend in defence spending and are now investing more, rather than less, in the defence of the realm. That is very much to be welcomed, but it is a question not just of how much we spend, but of how well it is spent.”
“I therefore suggest to the next Government, of whatever political colour, that if they are reviewing defence, they might want to look at reintroducing the concept of 100% offset for any further major offshore procurements. In some cases, it is operationally the right thing to buy something off the shelf from the US. I would argue that Wedgetail—at least when it was five aircraft, anyway—was the right decision, but I do not think it acceptable that we hand out such handsome contracts to foreign suppliers without UK industry being given its fair share. In conclusion, a cynic might say that Boeing is a company increasingly in crisis, which is falling apart even more rapidly than the aircraft it purports to build.”
“The work could take one of two forms: direct offset, which is work on the aircraft platform itself, such as propellers or undercarriages or logistics support, or indirect offset, which is other high-quality work to be placed with the UK defence industry over the life of the programme, but not necessarily directly related to the platform itself. Under the Blair Government, for whatever reason, the policy was quietly dropped. That has allowed a situation to develop whereby the MOD has bought a number of big-ticket items from the US without receiving any legally binding guarantees of compensating workshare for the UK industry.”
“Indeed, the PAC subsequently reported: “We are…concerned to hear that the MoD awarded the contract for this £515 million programme to a large defence prime contractor without a competitive tendering process.” That is all the more surprising given that in the 1990s, the standard policy of the MOD was to ask for a 100% offset in major off-the-shelf procurements of military equipment from abroad, especially from the US. For instance, in the late 1990s, for the purchase of the C-130J Super Hercules, Lockheed Martin was required to place work to the equivalent of 100% of the multibillion-dollar contract value with UK industry.”
“Another former Armed Forces Minister is right, and he will know that the effect of the dollar exchange rate on buying so many big off-the-shelf items from the US has cropped up time and again at both the Defence Committee and the Public Accounts Committee. The problem does not apply just to air platforms. Boeing had a major logistics contract with the MOD called the future logistics information system, or FLIS, which was due to run until late 2020. However, as was evidenced by the Public Accounts Committee, in late 2020 the MOD signed a five-year contract extension called “Bridging the gap”, worth £515 million to Boeing, which was not even competed. That raises questions about the degree to which the MOD seems to be mesmerised by Boeing as a company, to the detriment of value for money for the UK and for our industrial workshare.”
“I am very critical of Wedgetail, but, just as a fact, on Ajax, the initial operating capability for the first vehicles is at the back end of 2025. That is next year, not in the next decade.”
“Will the Minister assure me that we will never allow the Republic to return those people to Northern Ireland unless and until we can remove illegal cross-channel migrants to France? As for the contemptible remarks of the SNP spokesman, let me say that at least the UK has a Government, which is more than we can say for Scotland this week.”
“I welcome the statement and, in particular, the news that in some categories at least immigration is finally beginning to fall. On asylum specifically, the Irish Foreign Minister and former Taoiseach, Micheál Martin, complained bitterly just a few days ago that large numbers of asylum seekers were moving from Northern Ireland into the Irish Republic. Sky News reported yesterday that the Irish Government are seriously contemplating moving police officers to the border to interdict that flow. In effect, that would create a hard border on the island of Ireland. Some of us were lectured for years, including by today’s Opposition spokesman, that the Irish Government would never contemplate that in any circumstances, so the stench of hypocrisy is strong.”
“I commend the Secretary of State for obtaining this massive £75 billion increase in defence, which theoretically would allow us to buy 20 new Queen Elizabeth class aircraft carriers. At the risk of upsetting our excellent First Sea Lord, we are not likely to do that, but we are putting our defence industry on a war footing. Can we do the concomitant thing and create a war reserve of equipment with older Typhoons, older warships and older armoured vehicles, so that if we had to fight at short notice we would have enough equipment to do it and so that we can tell our adversaries that when we say, “Si vis pacem, para bellum,” we actually mean it?”
“On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. As the House will be aware, very serious events have taken place overnight in the middle east, with Israel apparently striking targets in Iran. That could lead to further, very serious escalation. As a former armed forces Minister and now a member of the Defence Committee, may I take this opportunity to say that it is important, as the House is fortuitously sitting today, that a Minister from either the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office or the Ministry of Defence comes to the House as soon as possible to make a statement on exactly what we know about the attacks and what the Government believe the implications might be? Madam Deputy Speaker, have you or the Speaker’s Office had any indication that the Government intend to make such a statement, and, if so, at what time?”
“Further to that point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. I do not for one moment wish to push my luck, but under the circumstances I believe that a statement is very important. As you know, the Government can interrupt business at any time to make a statement. Such is the importance of these events—and I notified the office of the Leader of the House that I would make this point of order—that I believe, before the House rises this afternoon, a Minister should come to the House to tell us everything that the Government know about what is going on. I will leave it at that.”
“She is turning out to be an incredibly worthy successor to my great friend and she has come up with an incredibly worthy piece of legislation. I and Members across the House wish her Bill godspeed.”
“One of his great skills, as you will know, Madam Deputy Speaker, was working cross-party; it was forming coalitions for the common good. I look up at his plaque and across to that of Jo Cox, who also died in the service of this House. She once said that we had more in common. This is a nation of animal lovers and what my hon. Friend has done brilliantly today is to get cross-party support. She has motivated that sense of having more in common across the House to do something that will make animals safer. They cannot speak for themselves; we must do it in their lieu. She has done brilliantly, and she had another win recently on banning zombie knives. I will, if I may, be presumptuous and say that, if David were still with us and somehow my hon. Friend were still the MP, he would be very proud of what she has done today.”
“I loved that little dog dearly. When I told him that I was taking him out for a walk, he went completely bananas. I have fond memories of Tiger and, if he were still with us, he, too, would be delighted. Unfortunately, he has passed away, so there is no one to send the Hansard to . I also thank the Conservative Animal Welfare Foundation, of which my hon. Friend and I are avid supporters, brilliantly led by Lorraine and Chris Platt and their team, who are absolutely passionate about animal welfare—the clue is in the name. They, too, will be delighted that this legislation is going through. Finally, I know that our great friend Sir David Amess would have been delighted to see this day. David, as the whole House well knew, was passionate about animal welfare.”
“Between them, they have ensured that Essex police are now fully integrated into the national pet taskforce, tackling crime through the review of all investigations, the introduction of a proactive ability to respond to intelligence and joined-up working with partners, including Crimestoppers, the RSPCA and DogWatch. As a practical example, my hon. Friend the Member for Southend West tells me that this proactive approach was put into action earlier this year when police released footage of the dachshund, Twiglet, struggling to get away from a thief. With help from the public, the police were able to return Twiglet safely home to her family. I will allow my hon. Friend to send Twiglet the Hansard . I declare an interest. In my boyhood, I had a pet dachshund called Tiger—my parents had a sense of humour, Madam Deputy Speaker.”
“Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith), who, unfortunately, is detained on other important business today. The issue before us has always been close to his heart. He has had some horror stories from his constituency about pet theft, so I know that he, a former leader of our party, will be delighted at my hon. Friend’s success with this Bill. Next is our very proactive and hard-working police, fire and crime commissioner in Essex, Mr Roger Hirst, who takes this issue very seriously, ably supported by our dynamic chief constable, Mr Harrington—perhaps his dynamism is due in part to the fact that he used to be a paratrooper.”
“While we earnestly await a statement from the Government on the Israeli strikes against Iran last night, I wanted to take the opportunity to pay full tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Southend West (Anna Firth) for her wonderful work on this Bill. It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Darlington (Peter Gibson), who mentioned that he had read the names of his three pets into Hansard . If he is like most of us, he will now have sent each pet a copy of Hansard so that they know they were mentioned, and we hope that went down well with them. I will come on to praise my hon. Friend the Member for Southend West at the end, but perhaps I may briefly tell the House about some other people who I know will be very pleased to see this legislation pass in the House today. Let me begin with a great friend, my right hon.”
“I place it on the record that I have the privilege to serve on the Defence Committee with the right hon. Member for Belfast East. I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate him on being elevated to the King’s Privy Council and to wish him the best of luck with his leadership of the Democratic Unionist party, albeit achieved in very difficult circumstances. A number of people have paid tribute to his tenacity. As many Ministry of Defence witnesses can attest, there is no doubt about that whatever. He is a dog with a bone and he never drops it, so I am delighted that he has been elevated in that way and we wish him and his legislation Godspeed.”
“On air defence, I wholly commend our RAF pilots and their superb Typhoon aircraft, but we have only 137 Typhoons. Because of budget pressures, the MOD plans to retire 30 of them next year and sell them off, which would now be akin to selling Spitfires before the battle of Britain. When the Prime Minister has a moment, will he go back to his office, place that ridiculous decision under immediate review and, at the very least, put those Typhoons in a war reserve, in case one day we need them for ourselves?”
“As I used to do my right hon. Friend’s job, may I join the tributes to the outgoing, outstanding Armed Forces Minister? The “Ready for War?” report just referenced identified problems with recruitment as one issue that impedes our ability to fight. The Defence Secretary himself has called our recruitment system “ludicrous”, and he told The Times earlier this month that “the ‘Amazon’ generation, which is used to getting things instantly, were not prepared to wait a year to join the army.” He is absolutely right, so when will the utterly ludicrous “Crapita” finally be sacked?”
“The answer to my right hon. Friend’s question is yes. Could he explain to the House that one of the things that the Committee thought about very carefully was how candid we should be about the weaknesses in our armed forces? After much careful deliberation, we did not include anything in our “Ready for War?” report that we had reason to believe our potential adversaries did not already know.”
“The integrated review, and its 2023 refresh, are completely lacking in any great sense of urgency in response. Similarly, the MOD defence Command Paper, which was meant to dovetail into the integrated review, also lacked a sense of urgency, even to the point of retiring a number of key frontline systems, such as radar planes and tactical transport aircraft, in favour of new equipment, arriving much later in this decade. Many analysts expected that to change post Ukraine, but no major equipment decisions were altered, despite Putin’s barbaric invasion in February 2023—something that some members of the Defence Committee effectively predicted in a debate in this House some six weeks before the invasion began.”
“However, let us consider what that actually means. The head of the MOD, a senior Cabinet Minister, has said, in effect, that we are now likely to go to war. Although he did not specifically state who with—be it Russia, China, Iran or someone else—that one statement, which I fear may turn out to be true if we do not rapidly improve our conventional deterrence, has incredibly serious implications for our entire defence and security posture. The much-vaunted integrated review has now been completely overtaken by events. In a world with increasing Iranian-inspired violence in the middle east, sulphurous threats over Taiwan emanating from Beijing and now the state-sponsored murder of Alexei Navalny, even the most naive liberals surely have to concede that the Defence Secretary might just be right.”
“May I begin by saying to the Minister for Defence Procurement, for whom I have great regard and who is trying to reform our broken procurement system, that everything I say in the next few minutes is not personally aimed at him? To quote “The Godfather”: “It’s not personal…It’s strictly business.” At his speech at Lancaster House on 15 January, the new Defence Secretary now famously said that we are moving “from a post-war to a pre-war world”. His words clearly resonated, both nationally and internationally. For example, when I was on a visit to Washington recently, those words were played back to us by Pentagon officials. Shortly after, in an unclassified letter to all Conservative MPs, the Defence Secretary stressed the need for industrial improvements and to rearm, in terms reminiscent of the 1930s.”
“Given that the Secretary of State, the man who runs the Department, has told us that we are in a pre-war world, surely we had better start preparing for it, if we are to have any chance whatsoever of preventing it, and we should now do that in earnest, before it is too late.”
“Ultimately, this is about whether our grandchildren are going to grow up in someone else’s re-education camp, but we might not know that if we walked into the current MOD. We can try to blame the military, for instance, for so frequently over-specifying new military equipment, such as Ajax, that it enters service many years late, but in the end the responsibility lies with the politicians who, theoretically at least, are supposed to be in charge. The Romans had a famous saying about military matters: “Si vis pacem, para bellum”—he who desires peace should prepare for war.”
“Moreover, as the Red Book clearly shows in tables 2.1 and 2.2, we are cutting the core UK defence budget next year by £2.5 billion and playing “smoke and mirrors” with the donations to Ukraine and with addressing an overspend on the nuclear enterprise from the Treasury reserve in order to pretend otherwise. This act of what the Russians call “maskirovka”, or strategic deception, is wholly unworthy of a Conservative Government. If Members happen to believe, as I do, that the role of our armed forces is determinedly to save lives by convincing any potential aggressor that, were they to attack us, we would defeat them, then we are palpably failing. This is not an intellectual parlour game.”
“Bluntly, it is because we now have a Ministry of Defence that has become in recent years a gigantic, sclerotic bureaucracy; constantly hidebound by needless, self-generated red tape; obsessed with process rather than outcomes; in which some senior civil servants are now more interested in wokery than weaponry, endlessly ripped off by some of their own major contractors, such as Boeing, to name but one; and in which key elements of our fighting equipment are so old—and the procurement system for replacing them so broken—that we now cannot fight a major war with Russia for more than a few weeks, as it well knows.”
“Capita limps on as the Army bleeds out—with, in some parts of the Army, three soldiers now leaving for every one that Capita somehow, painfully, manages to recruit. If we think we are going to deter the likes of Vladimir Putin in this manner, we are living on a different planet, in a parallel universe, in a fantasy dimension. Given that we now spend the thick end of £50 billion a year on defence, the British taxpaying public are quite entitled to ask why so little of our defence capability works properly. Why are some of the Army’s fighting vehicles 60 years old? Why do we have hardly any battle tanks that actually work? Why do we have hardly any submarines that are now regularly put to sea? Why do we have aircraft carriers that perennially break down whenever they try to leave port?”
“One perfect example of how dysfunctional the MOD has now become in relation to people is the saga of Capita—or, forgive me, “Crapita”, as it is now affectionally known to the Defence Committee. It has totally messed up the recruitment system for the British Army. A few years ago, its share price topped £4; today, it is barely 13 pence. Everyone in Defence knows that the outsourced contract has been a disaster, yet absolutely no one in the upper echelons of the Department has the moral courage to sack the company. The Defence Secretary recently described the situation in The Times as “ludicrous”. He is absolutely right. Indeed, no doubt he has made a note of his own comments on his own famous spreadsheet, but still nothing actually happens.”
“As the Public Accounts Committee’s report on the 10-year equipment plan illustrates starkly, the difference between what the MOD aspires to buy and the funding it is likely to have available is £17 billion. However, it is worse because the three services account for the plan on a different basis. Without going into all the technicalities, an apples and apples comparison across the three services shows that the gap is £29 billion. Even beyond gaps in capability of our kit, our greatest weakness is now the lack of skilled personnel to operate and maintain the equipment that we do have. Without them—and far too many of them are leaving, as the Chair of the Defence Committee said—even multi-billion dollar aircraft systems simply remain in the hangar.”
“” In plainer English, and as the subsequent detail in the report starkly points out, despite a considerable outlay of taxpayer’s cash, we could not fight a sustained war with Putin’s Russia for more than a couple of months before we ran out of ammunition and fighting equipment, not least as we have very few tanks, ships or combat aircraft in reserve. The full report can be found online. Given that it takes years to build a modern warship—a totally ridiculous 11 years in the case of the new Type 26 frigate—and four years to build a Typhoon fighter, if we had to fight what the strategists sometimes describe as a “come as you are war”, one with little further warning, we would have to rely on whatever equipment we had to hand or could rapidly remobilise. We simply do not have enough war-winning kit to win as it is.”
“The Chair of the PAC is entirely right, although in the MOD context, if it is groundhog day, “groundhog” sounds like a vehicle that has slipped to the right. More recently, after a detailed inquiry, the Defence Committee, on which I serve, published a damning report on 4 February 2024, entitled simply “Ready for War?”. I have served on the Committee since 2017 and this is one of the punchiest reports we have ever produced. In answer to the question in the title, the all-party Committee, which includes six former MOD Ministers, concluded: “Despite the United Kingdom spending approximately £50 billion a year on defence (plus more for Ukraine) the UK’s Armed Forces require sustained ongoing investment to be able to fight a sustained, high-intensity war, alongside our allies, against a peer adversary.”
“The first duty of Government, above all others, is the defence of the realm, and we forget that at our peril. Si vis pacem, para bellum.”
“In summary, I may not be my father’s contemporary, that famously courageous MP, Leo Amery, so I cannot claim to “speak for England” on this matter, but I was elected to speak for the people of Rayleigh and Wickford, and so, on their behalf, I issue this stark warning today. The skies are darkening. Brutal dictators with powerful weapons at their disposal are on the rise. The democracies are on the backfoot rather than the front. History tells us time and again, and indeed ad nauseam, that the appeasement of dictators—be they called Adolf Hitler or Vladimir Putin—does not work. We should be increasing the defence budget to at least 3% of GDP—what my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Sir Julian Lewis) used to call “at least three to keep us free”—not cutting it, as we now are, and pretending that we are not.”
“My father made me take a solemn vow that, as his son, I would never take living in a free country for granted, because, as he said, too many good men had died to achieve it. Two years after we had that conversation, he was dead. That is why I am here this afternoon. That is why I came into politics in the first place. As a wartime serviceman, my father was a great admirer of Winston Churchill, our greatest ever Prime Minister, who led this country through a war of national survival and then lost a general election for his trouble. When I walked into the Chamber earlier this afternoon, I could still see the damage caused when the Chamber was bombed in 1941. Churchill insisted that it not be repaired, lest we forget, and he was right.”
“Stoker 1st Class Reginald Francois died when I was 14 years of age. He told me one night of the carnage—his word—that he witnessed that day, albeit from offshore, on a minesweeper named HMS Bressay. In the afternoon, they were opposite Omaha beach. Let me quote Shakespeare’s famous phrase: “This story shall the good man teach his son.” My father was a good man. The story that he told me was of a country that eventually, reluctantly, had to go to war against the evil of Nazi tyranny because for years its politicians had been so parsimonious—he actually said “tight”—and so naive that when Nazism emerged, we completely failed to deter it. That is the lesson of the 1930s, but it was also his lesson to me.”
“I agree with every word my right hon. Friend, the former eminent Chairman of the Defence Committee, just said. My one caveat is that the MOD’s excuse for these capability gaps is that we can rely on allies to fight with us. But they will be relying on us, and if we are unable to support them or they are on wartime tasks elsewhere, things might go horribly wrong. I say all of this not just as someone who served proudly as a Territorial Army infantry officer in my local Royal Anglian Regiment during the cold war; not just as someone who is still very proud to carry the late Queen’s commission; not just as a former veterans and then Armed Forces Minister in the Ministry of Defence, albeit almost a decade ago; but most of all, as I said at Prime Minister’s questions last week, as the devoted son of a D-day veteran.”
“We are giving £2.5 billion in the next financial year to Ukraine, and it is money well spent, but we cannot spend the same pound twice, so does the right hon. Gentleman agree that if we rightly give that money to Ukraine, we cannot then spend it on Army salaries, British shells or submarine maintenance? In other words, it is for the Ukrainians; it is not part of the UK defence budget, is it?”
“I hope this does not come across as nit-picking—it is important. The 10-year rule, which was a rolling 10 years, was not just a Treasury policy: it was the policy of the entire Government, and it was not rescinded by the incoming Labour Government in the 1920s. It was the policy of the whole Government, and it was only rescinded in the mid-1930s, a few years after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. It is important to get that right.”
“According to the MOD’s own figures in the latest supplementary estimates, the amount we are spending on what it calls the defence nuclear enterprise is now gusting towards 20%. Everything my hon. Friend says about the risk of that gradually eating everything else is entirely correct.”
“On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. I will keep this brief. For the record, the gentleman has traduced me. He has said directly the opposite of what I actually said, as Hansard will show.”