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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“This is what he wrote in 1973: “The trouble with disarmament was (and still is) that the problem of war is tackled upside-down and at the wrong end… Nations don’t distrust each other because they are armed; they are armed because they distrust each other. And therefore to want disarmament before a minimum of common agreement on fundamentals is as absurd as to want people to go undressed in winter.” I must point out that the hon. Member for Islington North, being typically objective about the matter, quoted article VI of the non-proliferation treaty in full. That is very important, because often it is quoted only in part. I wish to focus my remaining couple of minutes on article VI.”
“I am not sure that we want to start discussing the foreign policy dimension of this now. The only reason I brought Ukraine into this particular debate was in order to focus on the impact on its future of its one-sided disarmament in return for unreliable and undeliverable guarantees from other countries. There are two ways of looking at the state of defence, armaments, security and peace in the world. The way to which I subscribe was summarised by an inter-war chairman of the League of Nations disarmament commission, Salvador de Madariaga. He was writing about disarmament, which was very much in vogue in the early 1970s.”
“I entirely agree with the thrust of the Minister’s argument, but may I urge on him a change in terminology? I would prefer it if he would talk about “firing” nuclear weapons when he is referring to “using” them, because on our side of the argument we believe that they are used every day to keep the peace and prevent other nuclear powers from blackmailing us.”
“The director of ExxonMobil Chemical, in my constituency, has written to the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills about a threat to the industry caused by the Danish Environmental Protection Agency’s decision to seek a further assessment of a plasticiser, a key product that has just been given a relatively clean bill of health by the appropriate European body. The director has yet to receive a reply, but the House needs an urgent statement from the Secretary of State about this threat to such an important industry in Hampshire.”
“Does the Home Secretary agree that it is quite right that when the identity of some brainwashed, narcissistic psychopathic killer is exposed there should be wide media coverage of it? But does she also agree that a degree of self-restraint at some point should be necessary if we are not to build up these bogey men in precisely the way that they intend us to do?”
“I thank the Chairman of the Committee for giving way so early in his speech. One of the reasons that he has had to consider only two aspects—namely, conventional and unconventional warfare—is that our strategic nuclear deterrent is still in place, and if either the Opposition or the Conservative party has anything to do with it, that will remain the case. Does my hon. Friend agree that it would be madness to think about disposing of our deterrent and ending our continuous at-sea deterrence? Is it not strange that there is not a single Member present who represents the party that proposes that we should abandon that continuous at-sea deterrence—namely, the Liberal Democrat party? [ Interruption. ] Oh, the hon. Member for Colchester (Sir Bob Russell) has just appeared. I hope that he disagrees with his party on that matter.”
“In his last few words, the hon. Gentleman said something that contradicted my memory of events. The point I wanted to make to him was it was often said, particularly by Tony Blair on leaving, that under the previous Labour Government spending had remained roughly constant at 2.5%, if the costs of Afghanistan and Iraq were included. In opposition, we used to criticise that, as we said that it was sleight of hand, so the hon. Gentleman can imagine my embarrassment now that we are in government to find that there is no sign of our sticking to the pledge when we criticised the Labour party in government for massaging the figures.”
“The hon. Gentleman knows that he and I are as one on the question of the future of the deterrent. He also knows that if there were a Labour Government pure and simple, or a Conservative Government pure and simple, the future of the nuclear deterrent would be assured. How confident is he that if the Scottish nationalists held the balance of power and offered the keys of No. 10 to the leader of his party, his party would say no rather than abandon the nuclear deterrent?”
“May I say to my hon. and gallant Friend that it is no good contrasting the building of the Successor-class submarines with the Astute-class submarines, because if we do not build the Successor submarines—I am not saying that that is a reason to have a deterrent when we otherwise would not have one—there will be a huge gap between the ending of the Astute hunter-killer programme and the next hunter-killer programme, in which all skill in building submarines will be lost?”
“There was nobody with something worth contributing to the process that led to the review who was not given an opportunity to do so, and we should do that next time too.”
“First, on the question of process in relation to the strategic defence and security review that is due in 2015, why should it be in 2015, how long should it take and who should do it? We have two recent examples of strategic defence reviews: one in 1998 and one in 2010. The one in 1998 was strategic but unfunded. The one in 2010 was funded but unstrategic. We do not need another unstrategic review, but that is what we will get if we rush the process. Something that the Labour Government were very right to do when they came into office in 1997 —I am delighted to see my right hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Mid Sussex (Sir Nicholas Soames), a former Defence Minister, agreeing with this point—was to take about 18 months to draw up the strategic defence review, as it was then called; and they did it comprehensively and inclusively.”
“It is always the peril for the last ship in the convoy that it is the most likely to be torpedoed. As the last ship in the Back-Bench convoy in this debate, I shall resist the temptation to be diverted from holding on to my strategic aim—even though I am sorely tempted by the contribution of my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Reigate (Crispin Blunt) to use up the entire remaining eight-and-a-half minutes talking about Trident. Instead, as an effort in intellectual discipline I shall keep that subject to last to see whether I can get through the other items on the agenda, which are three: the question of process; the question of resources; and the question of content.”
“[Interruption.] I am delighted, again, to have that sedentary endorsement from my right hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Mid Sussex. On resources, I am thrilled that there has been such unanimity about recommending us to put forward the NATO minimum contribution of 2% of GDP for defence. Can hon. Members imagine anything worse than signalling to a powerful adversary that we are going to send 75 military personnel as advisers into a non-NATO country which we are not able and not obliged to defend, much as we sympathise with it, but for the first time since the 2% formula was set, we are in danger of not meeting it ourselves?”
“It is headed “Our armed forces must have a voice in how to defend us” and it states: “strategy in its proper sense—a doctrine for the prevention and prosecution of war—has been allowed to atrophy. Very few people in uniform or out of it, within the Ministry of Defence or beyond it, devote intellect and energy to anything much beyond saving money and getting through today. And those who do so are firmly discouraged from allowing any hint of their ruminations to escape into the public domain, to fuel an intelligent debate.” Given that the entire strategic role is now devolved on to the shoulders of just the Chief of Defence Staff, it was disturbing to me to read—I do not know whether it is true—that the CDS was instructed by his political masters not to deliver a lecture. If that is true, it is appalling.”
“We can find ourselves, as I do on the Defence Committee, facing a permanent Under-Secretary of State, the head of the Ministry of Defence, with next to no background in defence himself, and hearing him tell us with great pride that the new head of the Army is pleased to look on himself as a chief executive officer for his service. We are not going to get sufficient military input from that sort of configuration. We are getting non-specialist civil servants, we are getting the military insufficiently included in the process, and we are getting politicians flying by the seat of their pants. It is not good enough. In his own excellent speech, my right hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Mid Sussex did not have time, I am delighted to say, to refer to an article by Max Hastings which appeared in The Guardian on 8 November 2005.”
“We appear to have dismantled the collective giving of military advice on strategy to politicians by the chiefs of staff, along with the healthy tension between them and the politicians that contributed so much to the outcome of successful campaigns in decades gone by. I am not impressed when we find that the whole burden of giving military advice on strategy to the Government falls on the shoulders of the Chief of the Defence Staff and the immediate chain of people below him, when in fact that used to be the collective responsibility of the heads of the armed services. I am not impressed when we find that the civil service has done away with what has been termed “domain competence” at the highest levels.”
“I did not see much in it other than a ranking of tiered threats, most of which were fairly obvious, and those that were not may well turn out, in relation to state-against-state conflict being ranked in the third tier, to be absolutely wrong. I am concerned about the decision-making process in defence. I will not go into that too much now because, as the Chairman of the Defence Committee, which I have recently had the privilege of joining, is well aware, we are about to produce a report on that very subject. Yet I would like to flag up something that I hope will appear in his draft in due course, and it is this: when we are trying to work out a sensible, comprehensive, coherent and well-informed strategy, it is useful to have substantive contributions from Ministers and civil servants, but we also need contributions from the military.”
“I am doubly grateful to the hon. Gentleman for asking a question that I cannot possibly answer, having been in opposition at the time, because it gives me extra time and allows me to direct him to the shadow Minister, who I am sure will be able to answer it when he sums up. The next question is who should do the strategic defence and security review? I must say that I disagree with my hon. and very learned Friend the Member for Broadland (Mr Simpson)—“learned” in the academic sense of that word—when he paints a picture of how wonderful the process of the National Security Council and the national security strategy is. Frankly, I am not impressed with it. I thought that the strategy document itself was apple pie and motherhood.”
“So I’ll ask him a helpful question.” I asked, “Will the Prime Minister then give an undertaking that, as long as he remains Prime Minister, that 2% target will be met?” To my dismay, I found that that was not a helpful question at all. It was an unhelpful question, so I have been asking it time and again ever since. I will now be unable to get on to the content of the next strategic defence and security review, which will have to wait for other debates. I will not even be able to rebut in more detail what my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Reigate said about Trident, but I am glad that the House did not agree with him. I simply point out that this 2% issue is not going away. We will have another debate on 12 March, and I hope that everyone who has spoken today will come back then to continue the argument.”
“Allies whose current proportion of GDP spent on defence is below this level will halt any decline in defence expenditure; aim to increase defence expenditure in real terms as GDP grows; and aim to move towards the 2% guidelines within a decade with a view to meeting their NATO Capability Targets and filling NATO’s capability shortfalls.” When the Prime Minister came back from that NATO conference in Wales, he made a statement from the Dispatch Box, speaking very much along those lines. So I thought, “I have not always been as immensely helpful to the Prime Minister as I might have been, because he has done some things I really couldn’t stand, such as putting off the decision to sign the Trident main-gate contracts till 2016, when they should have been decided in this Parliament.”
“The Government replied on 27 October 2014: “NATO Allies have also collectively agreed to reverse the trend of declining defence budgets and aim to increase defence expenditure in real terms as GDP grows and direct defence budgets to be as efficient and effective as possible. Allies currently meeting the NATO guidelines to spend a minimum of 2% of their Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on defence will aim to continue to do so. . .”
“I entirely agree with the thrust of that intervention, although as I stated in an intervention on the hon. Gentleman, I well remember Tony Blair saying in, I think, 2007 that over the 10-year period that he had been in office, the defence budget had remained fairly constant at 2.5% of GDP, if the cost of the military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan was included. The situation is therefore even worse than the hon. Gentleman thinks, because in effect core defence expenditure also declined under his Government. Nevertheless, the thrust of what he says is on the right lines. I shall quote very briefly from the Government’s response to the report that the Defence Committee produced before I joined it.”
“I am puzzled that the instructions that came with the medication did not include a warning that if someone had those sorts of side effects, they should cease taking it.”
“I recently had the advantage of an intensive briefing on oesophageal cancer from Professor Tim Underwood, a specialist at Southampton general. My hon. Friend may be interested to know that it is developing a technique that would enable the discovery of the cancer cells earlier and without an endoscopy being carried out. Research is constantly going on to try to remedy the very problem that he has identified so clearly.”
“If Libya and Syria are anything to go by, some of the lessons we should have learned from Afghanistan have yet to be taken on board.”
“The result was to replace yet another Arab dictator with another aggressive, potentially lethal Islamist state. Secondly, in Syria in 2013, Parliament prevented something similar from happening. If the Government had had their way at that time, we would have done exactly the same thing in Syria as we did in Libya. Now people are coming to the view, albeit reluctantly, that Assad’s downfall would not necessarily have improved the situation. On the contrary, it would have given our deadly enemies, who have now morphed from al-Qaeda into ISIL, opportunities to take the offensive. To conclude, there are lessons to be learned, and my hon. Friend has done us a great service by giving us the opportunity to outline a few. I join him in regretting the fact that no serious study is being made of the lessons to be learned.”
“I finish by saying that unless we get back to a situation in which there are solid, consistent and tri-service forums in which strategic plans can be properly evolved, politicians will tend to take campaigns in directions that sensible strategic thought would not have them go. I shall give just two brief examples. First, there was the decision that we took to bomb Libya in 2011. That was a classic case of not having learned the lesson of sticking to the task that was originally set out, because we thought we were voting on having a no-fly zone imposed over Libya. If a no-fly zone had been imposed over Libya, the result would probably have been a stalemate, but the moment Parliament voted for a no-fly zone to be imposed, we got something very different: an all-out aerial offensive on behalf of one side in a civil war.”
“I was particularly struck by what my hon. Friend said about whether one particular Chief of the Defence Staff from one service could fully appreciate the strategic concerns that somebody from another service might better have grasped. That leads me back to another theme I have been trying to pursue in recent months: the mistake of allowing the chiefs of the armed forces, who used to be central to strategic planning, instead to become the managers of the Royal Navy, the Army and the Royal Air Force is likely to have further consequences of this sort. If one is going to get joint advice on military campaigns, the top representatives of each of the services should be involved in debating and agreeing the military advice that should be given to the political leaders.”
“The method that I have always recommended is one of strategic bases or garrisons and bridgehead areas. One does not have to swing from one extreme, of having no involvement in a country and allowing it to become ungoverned space, to the other extreme, of trying to govern the whole country, manage it at the most basic level and build the whole nation and carry the governance of that country on one’s shoulders. One can have regional centres of power from which one can exercise military power periodically and through methods that suit our purposes rather than our enemies’, yet without having to take on the burden of governance of the whole territory concerned, thus making ourselves an irritant and a target for the indigenous people. That leads, fourthly, to the failure to maintain dedicated decision-making machinery.”
“It was a method of combating the enemies that we had mobilised against us in Afghanistan—quite apart from al-Qaeda, who had been expelled from the country—and it was a method by which we sought to fight them at ground level. The effect was that with every patrol that we sent out, we supplied the Taliban with targets to be shot at and blown up at will. As my hon. Friend the Member for Broadland set out in his survey of the scene, every casualty we incurred was an individual tragedy played out in the living rooms of the whole nation, even though, as he rightly said in relation to the sort of casualties taken in a war of survival such as the second world war, the casualties of a single day in that war were often greater than the casualties of the entire campaign in Afghanistan. What method should we have adopted?”
“The pendulum swung from leaving the country completely ungoverned to total management, reform and burden-carrying by the western countries for the whole nature of Afghan society. Then, when that did not work and when there was a change of Government in this country, we overreacted again, and the pendulum swung back from micro-management of the whole society to setting an arbitrary date for withdrawal, four years from the announcement in late 2010. The third failure that I mentioned was the failure to fight according to our strengths. That is where the doctrine of war “down among the people” came in. We do not hear too many people talking about war down among the people these days, but at the time it was very much in vogue.”
“Of course it could not be expected to operate in that way, and with our ally having been attacked, it was right and appropriate that we participated in the campaign in response to that attack. The mistake was trying to take over and micro-manage the whole country. The second question—that of overreaction against former campaigns—leads us to the question of why the mistake of trying to micro-manage the whole country and rebuild it from the grass roots upwards was made. I am sure that it was in response to the way in which Afghanistan had been left entirely to its own devices after the Russians had withdrawn. It was felt, therefore, that by allowing ungoverned space to exist in that way, the opportunity had been created—as it had—for the pestilence of an organisation such as al-Qaeda to take root and flourish.”
“As for the second objective—of being able to assist Pakistan, should the need ever arise, to protect its nuclear arsenal from falling into the wrong hands—that remains as far from being fulfilled today as it was at the outset of the campaign. However, I do not go along with critics who say that taking a military campaign to Afghanistan was wrong in principle, even if it was badly handled in practice. What was the United States meant to do after an attack had been launched on its homeland, killing nearly 3,000 of its citizens, many of whom were Muslim American citizens? Was it simply supposed to sit back and take no action by way of punishment, retribution and, as an example for the future to other countries, a determined policy to make sure that no such attack could be repeated?”
“Even if we had been able to succeed in carrying out that objective, what would we have done if al-Qaeda, having been driven from Afghanistan in the first few days or weeks—as it was—had then re-established itself in another state that was vulnerable to acting as its host and base for operations? Would we have invaded that country too and built it from the ground up, all over again, while our enemies, fleet of foot, went to one bolthole after another? We did not concentrate on the key objective, which was to deny Afghanistan to al-Qaeda as a future terrorist training ground and launch pad for its operations.”
“Let me deal briefly with each of those lessons in turn. In my opinion, there were only two relevant strategic objectives in going into Afghanistan: first, to prevent it from again being used as a base, a training ground or a launch pad for further terrorist attacks against the west; and, secondly, to assist its neighbour, Pakistan, in preventing its nuclear weapons from falling into the hands of al-Qaeda or its imitators. We did not stick to those objectives, as my hon. Friend said and as my hon. Friend the Member for Basildon and Billericay (Mr Baron) emphasised in an intervention. We allowed the campaign to change into one that effectively committed us to transforming Afghan society and building up the Afghan nation on the lines of a modern democratic state.”
“I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Broadland (Mr Simpson) on his tour d’horizon. I am sure that, given his wealth of experience and knowledge, he could have used up the entire hour and a half with an analysis from which we would have derived nothing but benefit. As he has been generous enough not to do that, the rest of us can make brief contributions to the debate. I would like to focus on four lessons from the campaign in Afghanistan. First, we failed to focus on the key objectives. Secondly, we overreacted against former campaigns. Thirdly, we failed to fight on the ground where we are stronger and our enemy is weaker. Fourthly—and, importantly, my hon. Friend concluded by drawing attention to this issue—we failed to maintain dedicated decision-making machinery for controlling and constructing campaigns of this sort.”
“I strongly agree with the hon. Gentleman’s last point, about the 1,000-year conflict between those groups. He may remember that I was one of the 39 rebels whose votes were decisive in preventing the attack on Assad. However, could I ask him not to overstate the case, in this sense? Even he admitted that it would have been right to take military action to expel al-Qaeda. Surely the key point is how and why the campaign changed its nature after al-Qaeda was expelled.”
“NATO was formed originally so that no aggressor could try to pick off one country after another without knowing that he would immediately be at war with the major powers. Is it not vital that we maintain the distinction between NATO countries and non-NATO countries? Is not the best way to reinforce the impression of the strength of NATO to give an open-ended commitment in future, as we have in the past, that we will spend 2% of GDP—the NATO recommended minimum on defence?”
“It is encouraging that the review of the formula will bear in mind the need to ensure that more efficient police forces, such as those in Hampshire, are not penalised for their efficiency. What does my right hon. Friend think about the recent survey carried out in Hampshire which showed that more than 70% of respondents would be willing to pay more and see an increase in the council tax precept to 1.99% because they value the services they get from the constabulary?”
“Unfortunately, the right hon. Lady is stepping down as a Member of this House very soon and I only hope that her voice will not be stilled on such topics in other arenas. Does she agree that although there has been a welcome change in that Ministers from the Prime Minister downwards are now talking about the underlying perverted ideology at the root of radicalisation, we need to back up that new rhetoric with arrangements to counter that perverted ideology?”
“I appreciate the passion with which the hon. Lady is making her point and I agree with a lot of what she says about the fact that the people who commit those terrible crimes are unbalanced and unstable. That was true of the criminals who killed Lee Rigby, but it is precisely because they were unbalanced and unstable that they were susceptible to a particular extreme interpretation of a religious ideology. Therefore the two things interact. It is not quite as simple as she says.”
“It reads as follows: “That this House believes that the UK faces a growing and ever more complex range of current and future threats…and supports the UK devoting at least 20% of its gross domestic product to defence.” When I signed the early-day motion, I was under the impression that I was supporting 2%. It is beyond even my wildest dreams to have 20%, but a figure in between would not be unacceptable.”
“On a point of order, Mr Speaker. May I inquire whether there is any way within the rules of order that I can draw attention to a possible misprint on the Order Paper to the House of Commons relating to the cross-party early-day motion 757 on defence spending, which was tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Worcestershire (Sir Peter Luff), along with the right hon. and learned Member for North East Fife (Sir Menzies Campbell), the right hon. Member for Coventry North East (Mr Ainsworth) and my right hon. Friend the Member for North East Hampshire (Mr Arbuthnot) and about a dozen others including me?”
“Does the Minister accept that this is a matter not only of funding but of philosophy? Does he agree that part of the problem is that certain primary care trusts have adopted a philosophy of cutting in-patient beds generally? For example, adult beds have been cut by 35% in areas as far apart as my constituency and that of my hon. Friend the Member for Burton (Andrew Griffiths). Does he detect any rowing back from that rather extreme philosophy in the near future?”
“As a member of the Committee when Nicola was interviewed, may I say that I was deeply impressed by the way she stood up, with good humour and resilience, to some tough questioning? Does my hon. Friend agree that what is particularly important about this Bill, given some people’s fears that the chain of command system could be subverted or clogged up, is that proposed new section 340I(1) to the Armed Forces Act 2006 states that the ombudsman has complete discretion “to determine whether to begin, continue or discontinue an investigation”? Does she agree that that is an important safeguard?”
“I pay tribute to the hard work of the hon. Member for Bridgend (Mrs Moon), who has been a champion of the Bill. In order to reassure my hon. Friend the Member for South Dorset (Richard Drax), I would share his concerns if I thought there was any danger of the system becoming clogged up with complaints that were designed to paralyse it. That is why I think that the provision in the Bill to which I referred in my intervention on the Minister is so important. The complaints commissioner has the right to investigate or not to investigate a given complaint, which avoids the danger that I think my hon. Friend would otherwise be rightly concerned about.”
“As the hon. Gentleman will know, I have only recently rejoined the Defence Select Committee after a long absence, so I am not as well sighted on the Bill as perhaps I ought to be. However, given that so much of the concern that led to this sort of legislation was about deaths, will he comment on the role of the ombudsman in relation to complaints brought by families of people who have died?”
“My right hon. Friend, being as long in the tooth as I am, will recall that during the cold war years this country spent between 4% and 5% on defence. Therefore, is not 2% a pretty modest aim for us to have in the present international climate?”
“The hon. Gentleman is being very courteous in giving way, but may I appeal to him, on behalf of my constituents, to try to leave these procedural matters behind and deal with the substantive issues about which they and other Members’ constituents are concerned?”
“Will the Minister reassure my constituents in public, as the Minister of State, Department for Transport, my right hon. Friend the Member for South Holland and The Deepings (Mr Hayes), has tried to do for me in private, that given a proposal such as the massive port development at Dibden bay, on the edge of the New Forest, which was stopped by a year-long public inquiry, the forest would be no less protected as a result of the Bill?”