Tom Tugendhat

Tom Tugendhat

Conservative — Tonbridge

Speaking in the House of Commons on 10 June 2026

Debate

Defence Investment Plan

Contribution

It is pretty extraordinary to see the partisan way in which the Minister has approached every single question. He has been completely incapable of giving this House, or indeed Mr Speaker, the assurance asked for on multiple occasions, and that only leads us to assume that he is hiding the untruth, which he wishes he did not have to say: he will not be bringing the defence investment plan to this House. That is pretty extraordinary, and it is not just one year, but 14 years. This Government claim we had 14 years in which we made errors, and they may be right about many of them—in fact, I have criticised some of them myself—but they had 14 years to plan and have now had two years in government, and we are nowhere. We are still seeing defence capability fall. In fact, NATO puts us at No. 31 out of 32 of those that have failed to meet their capability targets, and last is Iceland, which does not even have a military.

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