Sir Julian Lewis
MP for New Forest East · Conservative · United Kingdom
“I will share with the House one particular case that is representative of many. My constituent, Mrs Gillian Pothecary, lost her husband almost a year ago. She wrote to me in July about her valiant but so far unavailing quest to obtain a civil service widow’s pension.”
“She said: “Mrs Pothecary’s…case falls under the commitment to be fully resolved by early September at the absolute latest. Capita has assured me that her case is on their escalation log and has been flagged for priority handling.” I rang up Gill just before coming into this debate and—you’ve guessed it, Dame Siobhain—she has not yet recei…”
“As the Minister seems to have run out of supportive Back Benchers, I shall endeavour to ask him a helpful and easy question. Accepting that it will be some years, to put it mildly, before we can eliminate our dependency on oil and gas, does he accept in principle that we are more secure if we exploit our own domestic oil and gas resources…”
“I warmly endorse almost everything the Secretary of State has said today, and I genuinely congratulate him on his appointment. In my first speech in this House almost 30 years ago, I promised to support Labour Governments as long as they supported the nuclear deterrent, the conventional armed forces and NATO.”
“On Monday, just as campaigners from the New Forest and Waterside were handing into Downing Street a 32,000-signature petition against the appalling and unfair outcome of local government reorganisation affecting our area, the welcome announcement was made by the Government that the local government reform proposals for Hampshire and three…”
“We are now in a situation that is worse than that at the height of the cold war, so the comparison we have to make is between what we are spending now and what we spent during the cold war, which was, in modern calculating methods, between 4.5% and 5.1% on defence. So let us not talk about increases to 2.7%.”
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“I warmly commend everything that the Minister, wearing his DFID hat, has been doing to help Jordan in particular. The King and the Government are our close friends and allies, and they have been truly heroic in this situation. I have a little concern about the Minister’s position wearing his Foreign Office hat. Does the Foreign Office accept that President Assad and his regime, brutal though they are, have won the Syrian civil war? If they were to show a greater willingness to behave in a more humane way to returning refugees, would the Foreign Office and DFID be prepared to offer aid to those returning to Syria under the Assad regime’s control?”
“Given that the transition from colonial status to independence is often extremely difficult and sometimes downright dangerous, should we not pay tribute to all the parliamentarians and diplomats who had the vision to create the modern Commonwealth system, and should we not take some satisfaction from the fact that so many former colonies are happy to participate—with the United Kingdom—in that system, which has been so successful for so many decades?”
“Of course, we very nearly had no carriers for the Falklands conflict. We only had them, as I say, because of a bit of subterfuge on the part of the admiralty. When it came to the Libya conflict—a disastrously misconceived conflict, as it happens—we had no carrier capability at all. I recall that when the decision was taken to have a gap between the phasing out of the Invincible-class carriers and HMS Queen Elizabeth’s coming into service, we did not anticipate any role for a carrier for 10 years or so. I believe that the Libyan scenario arose after something like 10 months, rather than 10 years. Guess which warship our French allies in that conflict immediately moved to the theatre? It was their one and only aircraft carrier.”
“Friend the Member for Witney (Robert Courts), in his magisterial opening speech, referred to the fact that those carriers were termed through-deck cruisers, and he was rather critical of that. This is the only minor point of correction I would make to his exemplary exposition. Those ships were from the outset aircraft carriers capable of enabling the Harrier still to offer fixed-wing coverage from the sea to the land. They were called through-deck cruisers to defeat the adversary—the Treasury. If they had been called carriers from the outset, they would never have been built. [ Interruption. ] I am glad to see that my hon. Friend accepts that. Once they were safely in commission, and after a respectable number of years, it became possible to reclassify them as aircraft carriers, which is what they were always intended to be.”
“When I talk about adversaries, I am really talking about one overwhelming adversary: the Treasury. We heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Anne-Marie Trevelyan) that, after bringing in one of the two largest vessels ever built for the Royal Navy, the Treasury might be thinking of mothballing it. I suppose that is a little better than the proposal that I heard from one George Osborne in the run-up to the 2010 election, which was to scrap the project for building the carriers completely. It is amazing how many times we have almost lost the ability to project air power from the sea. In one case, we did lose it. We lost it when we lost the Invincible class of carriers. My hon.”
“I congratulate all four Members who have spoken so far. Only one of them is a member of the Defence Committee, which I have the honour to chair. Given their depth of knowledge and enormous enthusiasm, the Defence Committee will not be short of worthy members in the future. I encourage those who are not yet on it to redouble their efforts to be so at the first opportunity. The beneficiaries of their enthusiasm and breadth of knowledge will be the House and the country as a whole. The previous speeches have not left me with as much to say as I might otherwise have said. That is an additional benefit to anybody watching the debate. I will pick and choose a few points here and there from what has been said already, and try to develop them into a theme of strategy and adversaries.”
“The trouble with 2010 was that it was a funded defence review that was totally unstrategic. People say that the 1998 defence review was the reverse: it was very strategic, but almost totally unfunded. Our problem is that we are unable in times of peace to persuade the people in charge of the national purse strings that the best investment they can make in the long term is to have strong armed forces. If our armed forces are strong enough, we will not have to spend all that treasure, let alone all those lives, in fighting conflicts that arise as a result of our perceived weakness.”
“It is very difficult to persuade budget-conscious Treasury officials not to take a chance with the nation’s security. That is why the Defence Select Committee comes back time and again to the same point, which is that defence has fallen too far down our scale of national priorities. When we compare it with other high spending Departments we can see that because in the 1980s, at the stage when we faced an aggressive Soviet Union and a major terrorist threat in the form of Northern Ireland and the IRA insurgency, we spent approximately the same on defence as we spent on health and education. Now we spend four times on health and two and a half times on education as we spend on defence. We can get away with that as long as things do not go wrong, but if they do we live to regret it bitterly.”
“I will go some way towards acknowledging that, with this one caveat: our strategic goals cannot be defined more tightly than the ability to have a full range of military capability to meet whatever threats may reasonably be regarded as likely to arise. I am afraid that all speeches that I make about defence policy and military strategy come back to the same three basic concepts: deterrence, containment and the unpredictability of future conflict. Libya and the Falklands were unpredictable. The only thing we can predict is that the vast majority of conflicts in which we will be engaged in in the future, as in the vast majority of conflicts in the past, will arise with little or no warning significantly in advance, and that is why we have to have a comprehensive range of military capabilities.”
“We need to understand that if there is something so sensitive about the idea that a ship of the Royal Navy could even dream of going into the Pacific ocean that a major trade trip from the Chancellor of the Exchequer of the United Kingdom to China has to be called off, there is something terribly wrong both with the attitude of the Communist Chinese in calling off the trip, as it were, and the attitude of the Treasury in wanting the Chancellor to undertake it. I will leave the point at that at the moment, unless I get some in-flight refuelling from the hon. Gentleman.”
“That was the overall title of the report that we produced, but in reality it was all about Huawei and the way in which that giant Chinese Communist telecommunications firm had penetrated British telecom and been brought into the system without Ministers having even been alerted until it had happened. I remember being somewhat fazed when, within a matter of a few weeks of the publication of that report, with all its dire warnings about the need for it to never happen again, I saw a picture of the then Prime Minster David Cameron shaking hands with the chief executive of Huawei on the doorstep of No. 10 on the basis of some great new deal that was being proposed.”
“] I hoped to get a laugh at that point, but behind that is a serious point that relates to what was said by my hon. Friend the Member for Witney a moment ago in an intervention: the Government need to have an overall strategy. All too often they look both ways with regard to countries that do not mean us a lot of good. Let us take the example of China. Before I come to the more recent issue of its behaviour in the South China sea, let us go back to 2013 when I served on the Intelligence and Security Committee, which devoted a great deal of time to a study of foreign penetration of British critical national infrastructure.”
“I wondered whether I should make a reference to that terrible event in December 1941 when the Prince of Wales and the Repulse were sunk by Japanese air power. One of the main problems was that they were sent out with inadequate protection and inadequate escorts, and, as I recall from my history books, no air cover whatever. Having said that, we can say that HMS Queen Elizabeth has already claimed one victory. Given that, as I said earlier, the Treasury can be regarded as the main adversary, I think the Treasury has probably sunk more ships in the Royal Navy than any other enemy we have faced. It was gratifying to see a bit of advance retaliation in that HMS Queen Elizabeth appears to have sunk the Chancellor’s visit to the Communist Chinese without even having embarked on its first operational voyage. [ Laughter.”
“Friend the Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed referred to, there was a way in which it posed a risk to the future of our armed forces. The way in which the defence theory for the future was being amalgamated in the national security capability review with newer threats, such as those from cyberspace and disinformation, was conceptually sound but economically dangerous. I shall explain after taking an intervention from my hon. Friend.”
“It was widely reported in January last year that the core ships—HMS Albion and HMS Bulwark of the amphibious taskforce—were going to be pensioned off 15 years before their due date. I can honestly say that the most influential report of the 27 so far produced by the Defence Committee since I have been chairing it was the one that we brought out in February 2018, which described the proposal to lose our ability to exert land power from the sea as militarily illiterate. I absolutely welcome the intervention of the Secretary of State for Defence, who could see the risk and what was going to happen. Some people have criticised the modernising defence programme for not being been quite as substantial as they expected. However, that is to miss the point, because although I welcome the concept of the fusion doctrine, which my hon.”
“Given that we no longer are a global imperial power with a network of strategic bases around the world from which to intervene, it follows that we need a concept that enables us to have a movable strategic base. At the heart of that strategic defence review of 1998 was the concept of the sea base, which had two central pillars. One was carrier strike and the other was the amphibious taskforce. Carrier strike was to enable us to exert air power to the land from the sea, and the amphibious taskforce was to enable us to insert land forces on to territory likewise from the sea, taking the whole strategic concept into a way in which we could travel to the theatre where the need to intervene militarily applied. Only a year ago we faced yet another major potential crisis.”
“I want to bring my remarks to a conclusion by talking about the 1998 Labour Government strategic defence review, which I described as unfunded but highly strategic. It was a very good review. If the funds had been made available for it, it would have been an outstanding success. At that time in 1998 the threat from the Soviet Union had gone away and it was hoped that we would not have to consider a major confrontation in Europe. So the thinking behind that review went something like this: given that we do not anticipate our armed forces having to be engaged in the European theatre in future, it follows that if they are to be engaged on a significant scale anywhere, it will be at some considerable distance from Europe.”
“I think that is a very perceptive suggestion. When it comes to the issue of keeping the country safe from threats to our way of life, which now take on new forms that are much more difficult to recognise because they do not operate at a level that would automatically trigger the same sort of alarm bells as traditional military threats, the support that I find as chairman of the Defence Committee from Members of all four parties represented on it is absolutely outstanding. The House should acknowledge more than it does the high degree of consensus among defence-minded people in all the major parties, irrespective of occasional disagreements on specific aspects of defence now and again.”
“That was amphibious capability, without which we would not have a rounded overall capability to intervene strategically in whatever theatre of the world a threat might arise unpredictably. Believe me, when a threat arises in the future, it will be unpredictable and we will be lucky if we are sufficiently equipped to meet it. That luck depends on the advocacy of people such as those we have heard from this afternoon, in every party represented in the debate. I hope that my hon. Friend who speaks for the Scottish National Party, the hon. Member for West Dunbartonshire (Martin Docherty-Hughes), will presently make a speech and keep up the tradition.”
“That is why there were leaks— clearly authoritative—about potential cuts in each service, including about the loss of HMS Albion and HMS Bulwark, which would have happened if the Secretary of State for Defence had not fought and won the political battle to strip out the defence elements from the national security capability review and have a separate modernising defence programme. That meant that he was no longer caught in that fiscal or financial ambush. Let us not be too complacent in congratulating ourselves on the advent of such marvellous vessels, because they very nearly did not happen, first because of the Treasury, back in 2009-10, and secondly because even as we brought in half the concept of the sea base—carrier strike—we were in danger, right up to a few months ago, of losing the other half of the concept.”
“I am delighted with that intervention, which has saved me at least the next two paragraphs of what I was going to say. That was precisely the danger. The defence budget was being wrapped up inside an overall defence and security budget and we were being told that that national security capability review would have to be fiscally neutral. So effectively, if £56 billion was going to be put together overall, and if more money was to be spent to meet the new sorts of threats we are constantly told about—threats in space or cyberspace, or threats of disinformation that are not really new but are moving into new dimensions—every £1 received for those threats would mean £1 less for the Army, the Royal Navy or the Royal Air Force.”
“On fleet solid support ships, we on the Defence Committee are a little bit worried that it is being presented to us and to the country that the Government have no choice but to run a competition. However, other countries, such as France, have built such ships without running competitions, and have classed them as warships. We worry about what, for example, Rosyth dockyard will do between the completion of the Prince of Wales and the first refit of the Queen Elizabeth. Building such ships would be a perfect way of maintaining that capability. We hope these wider considerations are being taken into account.”
“May I welcome what the Minister said about the upcoming 75th anniversary of D-day? Are he and right hon. and hon. Members aware that the Royal British Legion is looking for veterans to make a trip to the Normandy beaches in honour of that anniversary? I hope right hon. and hon. Members will alert veterans whom they know to that opportunity. May I ask the Minister what sort of financial model he anticipates for the development of some of these bases? Questions have rightly been raised in the past about the adequacy of the private finance initiative model. The legendarily close relationship between the Treasury and the MOD should be bringing forth something typically productive, and I wonder how we are doing in that respect.”
“Thank you, Mr Speaker, for that warm-hearted introduction. There may be a special place in hell for those of us who want a clean break with the European Union, but does my right hon. Friend agree that there will be the devil to pay for any party that tries to hold a second referendum to reverse the result of the first one?”
“Until now, the approach even of the more responsible internet companies has been that somebody else has to report something first, and then they will consider taking it down. Surely they should be proactive. If people can search for vile material and find it, why can the companies not search for it proactively and then take it down?”
“I am afraid that the Secretary of State did not quite answer the question from my right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh). I agree with most of this, but I remember Edward Timpson categorically saying that parents would have the right to withdraw their children if they wanted to. The Secretary of State has made a very strong case for the three terms before the age of 16 exception, but he keeps adding the words, “unless there are exceptional circumstances”. Why have those words been added? In what circumstances would a headteacher overrule a parent? Is not the likely effect of this going to be that in some cases, instead of children getting necessary sex education in schools, more parents are going to keep their children out of school?”
“However, given that not everyone can have their citizenship withdrawn and not everyone who has been out there can be successfully prosecuted because of the lack of evidence of what goes on in a place like that, does the solution not have to be a change in the law so that the act of giving support, aid and comfort to terrorist groups is itself a prosecutable offence?”
“May I draw the attention of the Home Secretary and the House to an important article just published online in The Independent by the self-described liberal journalist Ahmed Aboudouh, who says that Egypt paid a terrible price in taking back jihadists who begged to be allowed home after the Afghan and Chechen campaigns? He points out that in November 1997, 58 western tourists were slaughtered in Luxor by returned jihadists who only a year earlier had been begging to come back. Clearly, there is a danger in letting radicalised people come back.”
“May I add to the tributes to Paul Flynn by noting the remarkable physical courage he showed in battling crippling arthritis over many years? In relation to the Phalanx systems on the aircraft carriers, I agree that, if nothing goes wrong, the fitting of three will offer 360° coverage and protection, but, given that there is a fourth station on each aircraft carrier that could take a fourth system, and given that there are spare systems in storage following withdrawal from operational theatres, would it not be sensible to give some extra insurance by fitting a fourth system, so that if one is lost, there will still be total coverage and protection for these vital naval assets?”
“When will this matter be dealt with? What is holding it up?”
“The Secretary of State is far too modest: I was sure he was going to tell us about his dip in the icy Norwegian waters. On a very much more serious issue, the Secretary of State knows that there are between 200 and 300 war widows who lost their war widows pension on remarriage and who, if they were to divorce or lose their husbands now would have it restored and it could not then be taken away, but who have not had it restored and are therefore in the perverse situation that if they want to get quite a few thousand pounds a year more, they should divorce and remarry their husbands. Everyone agrees that that is an absurd and indeed disgraceful situation, and I know that the Secretary of State wants to do something about it. The war widows have been to see the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, and she has expressed sympathy.”
“Although the law on treason is antiquated, the act of treason most certainly is not. From what the Secretary of State has been saying, it is quite obvious that there will be many people coming back for whom it will not be possible to establish by normal standards in a court of law that they committed crimes while volunteering and spending time in the so-called caliphate. I draw his attention to the recommendation by Professor Richard Ekins of Oxford University, published yesterday in The Sunday Telegraph , that Parliament should “restore the law of treason, specifying that it is treason to support a group that one knows intends to attack the UK or is fighting UK forces.” Will he seriously address that point?”
“May I draw the Minister’s attention to a disturbing report in yesterday’s edition of The Mail on Sunday about the ability of a 16-year-old “test” youngster used by the newspaper to buy an oversized Rambo-style knife online in about two minutes flat? How will the legislation stop knives being delivered at home?”
“In his memoirs, Mr Gorbachev makes it absolutely clear that the reason he signed the treaty was that NATO deployed cruise and, especially, Pershing II missiles, which he greatly feared. Given that this was the most successful example in history of multinational disarmament, as opposed to one-sided gestures, it would be a shame to lose the treaty if there were any chance of saving it. Will the Minister use his best endeavours to persuade the Americans to take to an international forum, such as the United Nations, the evidence they have for Russian non-compliance so that the world as a whole can be convinced, if the treaty is being broken, that the Russians are responsible for doing it?”
“My constituent Rachael King told me that one area in which there has been understanding is in schools, saying that Noadswood School and Brockenhurst College in my constituency are very understanding indeed. However, she says that her 15-year-old daughter Larissa is one of the luckier ones in that respect, because so many people are not believed, as we have heard today. If they were not depressed by the condition, they will be depressed as a consequence. However, ME is not depression; it is a serious illness in its own right.”
“Will Ministers use the United Nations as a forum where the United States can expose the Russian violation of the intermediate-range nuclear forces treaty so that if America does withdraw, responsibility will lie where it should?”
“That is the reason why we would be cutting our own throats as Back Benchers if we were simply prepared to press a button and leave it at that. Let us do this for the categories that need it, but preserve the rights of Back Benchers to be able to nobble Ministers in the Lobbies, because that is what they need.”
“May I perhaps surprise you, Mr Speaker, by suggesting that I think this does not go far enough? I think that if this pilot scheme succeeds, as I hope and believe it will, it will probably pretty soon be extended to people who are unwell, because there are very strong arguments that people who are ill should be able to have a proxy for the same sort of reasoning that correctly underlies this one. However, does the Leader of the House agree that any move to something like electronic voting would be a retrograde step? The reason why we vote in person—there are many reasons why, but one of the principal ones—is that we can get hold of a lot of colleagues, principally Ministers or shadow Ministers, at the same time in the same place every day.”
“As today is blue Monday, the gloomiest day of the year, will the Prime Minister cheer up at least 17.4 million people, and probably many more, by confirming that beyond a shadow of doubt this country will have left the European Union by 30 March?”
“I appreciate the Secretary of State’s remark that it only takes a very small number of terrorists to have a disproportionate effect, and I appreciate the significance and sensitivities of ongoing investigations, but can she tell the House whether any arrests have been made—the BBC has already reported that they have been—and, if so, whether any of those arrested are connected with identified Irish republican groups?”
“How does my hon. Friend interpret what the Prime Minister said last night about reaching out to the other side of the House? If we are to take both sides of the House with us and bearing in mind that a majority of right hon. and hon. Members in this House are for remain and not for leave, does that not mean that the Prime Minister will end up with an even softer Brexit than the one she has proposed?”
“The Ministry of Defence is evidently well prepared to respond very quickly to drone threats, once it is asked for assistance, but can the Minister explain the policy whereby installations are not already in place and a crisis has to arise before that assistance is deployed to the airports?”
“The Minister has done more than most to flag up the need for more investment in defence. Can he assure us that, where contraction takes place for the reasons that he has explained, contingency plans are in place so that, if this country should regrettably ever find itself involved in a major conflict, expansion could equally easily occur?”
“According to that invaluable website TheyWorkForYou, the Prime Minister has assured the House on no fewer than 74 previous occasions that we will be leaving the EU on 29 March. Will she categorically confirm today that there is absolutely no question at all of delaying that date?”
“I pay tribute to the hon. Gentleman for his work on saving our amphibious capability; I think he would acknowledge the work the Select Committee on Defence did, too. Does he agree that we all should acknowledge the contribution of my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Moor View (Johnny Mercer), who is another local MP, and the willingness of the Defence Secretary to take on board the message we were trying to relay? He even announced his decision ahead of the modernising defence programme announcement—at the Conservative party conference, no less.”
“According to that excellent website TheyWorkForYou, the Prime Minister has assured the House on no fewer than 74 occasions that we will be leaving the EU on 29 March. Will the Secretary of State confirm that in no circumstances will that date be postponed?”
“The Iranian regime has employed the taking and tormenting of hostages right from the outset. Surely, at some point, one reaches a stage at which one has to say that sweet reason and appeals to compassion are not working and severe sanctions must be considered. What sanctions are at our disposal, and what consideration has been given to imposing them?”
“I fully accept what the Secretary of State says about the adequacy of the laws and the deterrent effect of potential sentences. However, it is possible for anybody to go on the internet and buy a simple but substantial device that they could use not to try and close an airport, as in this case, but to fly into the engine intakes of a plane that was landing or taking off. What can he tell us about not only registration but, more importantly, the capability to prevent such an attack maliciously being mounted by someone who might well belong to a jihadist organisation and who will not be deterred by death, let alone by long prison sentences?”
“Very briefly in that case, Mr Speaker, does the Secretary of State accept that as we have not seen the actual document it would be useful to have a debate at an early stage? Will he accept the thanks, I think, of the whole House for having saved the amphibious capability of the Royal Marines? Does he feel, in this era of slightly looser Cabinet joint collective responsibility or whatever they care to call it, that he might accept the fact that the Defence Committee’s target ultimately of a return to 3% of GDP is what is really needed in terms of defence expenditure?”
“Does the Prime Minister recall telling the House on 3 December that the £3 billion to £4 billion set aside in the Budget for contingency no-deal planning was about to be allocated in the next few days to relevant Departments? Has that allocation has been made and is the money now available for essential contingency planning?”