Sir Julian Lewis: The hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell) has such a sunny personality that I always feel cheered up after listening to her contributions, even when she is the bearer of somewhat disappointing news about the economy. I was also impressed by the speech of the former Secretary of State for Health, the right hon. Member for Ilford North (Wes Streeting), who is just about to escape from the Chamber. However, it did leave me wondering what my headline would be if I were a parliamentary sketch writer. I think it would be, “Why on earth did he resign?” It sounded much more like a manifesto in a leadership campaign than a trigger for calling one, but there we are – we all have our own motives.
The right hon. Gentleman made a point that is of great relevance to this debate, which I promise I had already written down before I heard him make it: the comparison between the terrible experience of the pandemic and the terrible experience of a country involved in a full-scale war. There were, of course, casualties during the pandemic, and there was the determination to learn from it. The outcome is that we are a lot better prepared for the future, should another deadly virus attack us. As a result of the lessons learned during the pandemic, we will be in a much better position to develop effective vaccines far more quickly.
However, I am afraid the real parallel is not a very happy one. It is a fact that if someone had said before we knew we were going to have the pandemic, “You need to invest a considerable sum of money in developing a system that enables you to develop vaccines quickly in response to the emergence of a new deadly virus,” we probably would not have done it. That is where the parallel lies with wartime situations, because for many years, defence-minded Members on both sides of the House have been urging successive Governments to spend a lot more on defence.
If those warnings go unheeded and this country ends up in a full-scale armed conflict with a peer adversary, we will not be talking about spending 3% or 4% of GDP on defence; we will have to spend 30% or 40% of GDP on defence. We do not wish to get to that situation, because it would lead to not only economic loss – think of the human cost. If, by investing in defence in peacetime, we can deter a potential enemy from starting a war, we not only save the treasure; we save the blood that is otherwise shed so copiously.
As we know, Russia is spending something of the order of between a third and a half of its gross domestic product on military power. In the past, the Defence Committee has looked at the question of what this country has spent historically. In a report entitled “Shifting the goalposts?”, and a second report entitled “Shifting the goalposts: an update”, the figures show that my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) was completely correct. He said that in the mid-1980s, when he was serving, we were spending something of the order of 5% of GDP on defence. In fact, the figure given in 1983-84 was 4.4%, and in 1984-85 the figure was 4.5%. In reality, however, that was because we had higher criteria than the other NATO powers for what counted as defence expenditure, and we adopted their lower standards later. Looking back, we can see that the figures were actually 5.3% in 1983-84 and 5.5% in 1984-85. Those are very big figures.
People talk about the way in which the peace dividend was taken, but as the shadow Secretary of State for Defence, my hon. Friend the Member for South Suffolk (James Cartlidge), pointed out, 1996-97 – the year in which Tony Blair took over from the Conservative Government – was already at least half a dozen years after the end of the cold war, if we understand that to have taken place in 1991 rather than in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin wall. At that time, we were still spending 3%.
That was the figure then, so as the current Chair of the Defence Committee, the hon. Member for Slough (Mr Dhesi), rightly said in an admirably objective speech, given that Russia is preparing for conflict now, we are responding too slowly and “time is short”, given the urgency of the situation. When we talk about achieving figures of 3% in a few years’ time and 5% in a few more years’ time, I would ask the House: does the killer in the Kremlin intend to give us that time? If we want to deter him from taking a step that would be to the detriment of the world, we need to invest now and, as in the case of the pandemic, find the money now. If a war broke out tomorrow, we would find the money at once, so let us find it today and diminish the chance of that terrible conflict happening the day after.