Contribution
My hon. Friend has remarkable foresight, because I will be coming to the Chagos issue.
This is the key point: had the Prime Minister held his nerve and reformed the benefits system, toughening the rules for working-age benefits and keeping the two-child limit, as was his previous position, he could have found the billions to fund defence rather than entrenching welfare dependency even further. Given this total failure of nerve from the Prime Minister, he had some brass neck to use his response to the King’s Speech last Wednesday to accuse us of “defence austerity”. Let me remind the House that last year the Government insisted on £2.6 billion-worth of reductions to the Ministry of Defence budget. This year, they are insisting on a further £3.5 billion of cuts. They will say that they were the last Government to spend 2.5% of GDP on defence, in 2010, but they always omit the caveat that when that same Labour Government came to power in 1997, they inherited defence spending from us at 3%.
Indeed, in talking about so-called austerity, this Government also conveniently forget that the Institute for Fiscal Studies found that, had Labour won the election in 2010, it was planning to cut 25% from the defence budget. At least their Chief Secretary to the Treasury at the time had the good grace to leave a note confessing that there was no money left, once again relying on us to clear up the mess of a Labour Government who had run out of other people’s money, not for the first time in history.
The worst thing about Labour’s resorting to history is that it is completely irrelevant. I have repeatedly accepted that defence spending fell under successive Governments since the end of the cold war. That is irrefutable, but it was because the world we lived in was one where we thought peace would last. Today, however, the threat is completely transformed and, instead of looking back, the public want us to confront the challenges we face right now, to be ready for battle and above all to be honest about the choices needed to find the cash for defence. That is why we have started to set out fully funded steps towards spending 3% of GDP on defence, as was last achieved under a Conservative Government.
Let us take the example of Chagos, as my hon. Friend the Member for Hinckley and Bosworth (Dr Evans) did in his very good intervention. Labour Members may delude themselves that, like the parrot in the Monty Python sketch, their Chagos deal is merely resting, and pining for the archipelago, but we know that the deal is dead. It is an ex-treaty. Even if they disagree, with no treaty legislation in the King’s Speech, it must be clear even to them that the hundreds of millions of pounds due to be sent to Mauritius during this Parliament, primarily from the Ministry of Defence budget, must now be available to be spent elsewhere.
That is why, earlier this month in Portsmouth, the Leader of the Opposition and I set out that we would use Labour’s Chagos cash for a better purpose: accelerating the construction of the 13 frigates being made in Scotland that we ordered when we were in government. The fact is, there is no other way to address the serious shortage of surface ships in the short term than by accelerating the build of those 13 fantastic new warships. Indeed, just a few days after we set out our policy to do exactly that, lo and behold, HMS Iron Duke was withdrawn from service, confirming the urgent need to act on defence readiness and to be willing to divert cash from elsewhere.