Mark Francois is the MP for Rayleigh and Wickford and was Minister of State for the Armed Forces from 2013 to 2015.
Philip Hammond, a former Defence Secretary, once famously opined that “there are no votes in Defence.” Over a decade later, Grant Shapps has stated that “we are moving from a post-war to a pre-war era“. If that be so, are there votes in Defence now?
With a worsening international situation, the latest opinion polls now strongly suggest that there are. Most strikingly, a Redfield and Wilton Strategies poll revealed that more voters now trust Labour on defence than they do the Conservatives (by a margin of 34 per cent to 23 per cent).
Years of constantly reducing the British Army (now down to 73,000, the smallest number since the Napoleonic Wars) and endless equipment procurement disasters – from Ajax to Crowsnest – have finally taken their toll. The “Hammond thesis” also comes in for a battering, as a whopping 70 per cent of respondents stated that the competing parties policies on defence were either extremely important (35 per cent) or fairly important (35 per cent) in determining which party to vote for.
Just for good measure, 53 per cent of respondents wanted defence spending to increase – even at the expense of other expenditure programmes. Only 27 per cent wanted the opposite.
What about within the Tories? Pretty strongly if ConservativeHome‘s survey is to be believed. This site’s panel revealed that three-quarters of Conservative members would be prepared to forgo tax cuts for more defence spending.
Moreover, the Parliamentary Party cannot pretend it doesn’t understand the issue. It is often under-appreciated fact that over 40 Conservative MPs have served in the armed forces, as either Regulars or Reservists.
This list includes at least five members of the Cabinet (James Cleverly, Penny Mordaunt, Johnny Mercer, Andrew Mitchell, and Tom Tugenhadt). There are also other former Regulars on the backbenches including four former Guardsmen (Ben Wallace, Iain Duncan Smith, Richard Drax, and Mike Penning) and a string of other former officers, from James Heappey through to James Sunderland.
Behind these stand former Territorial Army members and reservists such as David Davis, Andrew Selous, myself, and James Gray, who served in the Honourable Artillery Company and who now also ably oversees the Armed Forces Parliamentary Scheme (AFPS) by which numerous MPs, without original service backgrounds, have been exposed to military life, up to and including a stint at the Royal College of Defence Studies.
Collectively, we are difficult to bluff on Defence. Grant Shapps was recently confronted with the hard evidence from the Treasury Red Book which showed that not only have we failed to provide any new money for Defence in the Budget, but that we have reduced the core UK defence budget next year by £2.5 billion.
Although the Secretary of State attempted to obfuscate, our cross-party grouping was having none of it. The Secretary of State’s valiant defence of the indefensible was finally shot away when his Department’s own ‘Strategic Finance Director’ admitted, under heavy fire that Defence had been cut in real terms, after allowing for inflation.
During the same hearing, Rob McGowan, the Deputy Chief of the Defence Staff, admitted that the UK could not sustain a major war with Russia for more than a couple of months, because of shortages of stockpiles of munitions and the lack of reserve equipment. Given that we still spend around £50 billion on Defence, how can this have happened on our watch?
As the skies continue to darken in Europe, it reassures me to know that we still have a strong cadre of MPs with military backgrounds who instinctively understand what is at stake. When the widely-respected James Heappey, the former Armed Forces Minister, had his last outing at Defence Questions recently, he was wearing his regimental tie.
As if we needed any further warning, the ambassadors to Britain of the three Baltic States have issued this prophetic warning:
“We are acutely aware that Russia’s war economy and battle-hardened military can pivot quickly from South to West. We agree with intelligence assessments that that a sharp strategic challenge to our defence and deterrence could come in as little as three years or less.”
As for the politics, in the 1980s, Defence was a major election issue. The 1987 poster entitled ‘Labour Policy on Arms’ (depicting a British soldier, with both hands held high, in surrender) was still one of the most effective we ever produced. Against a Labour dominated by human rights lawyers and, in which Lisa Nandy, as Shadow Foreign Secretary, once called for the replacement of our Armed Forces by a “gender-balanced human security force”, we are surely missing a trick.
If we don’t want to make Defence an electoral issue, Nigel Farage is a keen student of military history. You can bet that Reform candidates, several of whom will likely be ex-forces, will too.
Surely, if the Conservatives, of all parties, do not demonstrably stand up for Defence, then what is the point of us? Our members are telling us they care deeply about it – even to the point of forgoing much-desired tax cuts to fund it. The public are telling pollsters they trust Labour more on Defence than us.
In response, we have a Chancellor who once called for us to spend over 3 per cent of GDP on Defence but who will now only allow us to spend 2.5 per cent of GDP “when economic circumstances allow” – by which time the Russians could be having lunch in the Baltic States.
Labour have not even firmly committed to spending 2 per cent of GDP on Defence and are vulnerable. But we cannot counterattack them without ammunition. The lessons of the 1930s have not changed- and neither have those from the 1980s.
The post Mark Francois: If the Conservatives won’t stand up for our Armed Forces, who will? appeared first on Conservative Home.
Click this link for the original source of this article.
Author: Mark Francois MP
This content is courtesy of, and owned and copyrighted by, http://www.conservativehome.com and its author. This content is made available by use of the public RSS feed offered by the host site and is used for educational purposes only. If you are the author or represent the host site and would like this content removed now and in the future, please contact USSANews.com using the email address in the Contact page found in the website menu.