Speeches by Kruger.

“Q5. I thank the Prime Minister for his service; he is a good man, and I wish him very well for the future. Politics is not a joke. Every other party in this House, except Reform, has put forward as their candidate in the Clacton by-election a comedian with a dustbin on his head—[Interruption.]. It might be—if hon. Memb…”

“The money in the DIP is clearly not enough, but it is welcome that some money has been found for defence, and I particularly welcome the new drone facility that is coming to Swindon in Wiltshire. In a genuinely constructive spirit, can I ask the Minister whether she is content with the model of defence procurement we h…”

“I welcome the statement. I want to follow on from the question from the hon. Member for Mid Bedfordshire (Blake Stephenson). Yes, Ministers must take responsibility for the contracts, but ultimately Whitehall fails to deliver value for money on behalf of the public. It is not enough to say that the Government plan to i…”

“With this new money, the defence budget is due to rise by about £17 billion a year over the next four years. In that same period, the welfare budget is going to rise by about £60 billion. That is almost the whole defence budget just in the increase in welfare spending. General Barrons, who co-authored the Government’s …”

“My point is that arguing loudly for a bigger armed forces, praising our troops, as we all do, or speaking up for our allies, as we should, are not a strategy. Publishing a strategic defence review or even a defence investment plan do not count either.”

“Some 10 years on from the Brexit referendum, the Government want to align more closely with the European Union, but does the Deputy Prime Minister recognise as a statement of fact that in the sectors from which the growth of the future is coming—life sciences, agritech, defence tech and, most of all, artificial intelli…”

“The word “strategy” can be put on all sorts of things. I am talking about what a strategy actually is. It is a plan of action that proceeds from an objective and a doctrine about how to achieve that objective. That is what we lack as a country. We have not done grand strategy in this country for decades.”

“This is a very important Bill—it is constitutionally central. Nevertheless, the passage of it is a formality, and one that I am very glad to support. The discussions we are having on these amendments point to a much more profound debate that we need to have but cannot have—not just because the Government are in turmoil…”

“I will not. Instead, I would like the United Kingdom to lead European defence by leading a partnership of other countries that have a capable military—most obviously France, Germany, Poland and the Baltics—to defend the Euro-Atlantic from Russia, China and Iran. That is the best role we can play in partnership with our…”

“I am conscious that the hon. Gentleman is an academic in this space. The point that I am making is that we need an overall vision for our country, a doctrine of how to achieve it and then a set of actions—working together, which I understand to be a strategy, how we deploy different assets, the different policies we ha…”

“I absolutely do not believe that we should form a European army, and we certainly should not join any sort of chain of command organised within the EU, but we can act with European partners, as we currently do—most obviously with the northern states in the joint expeditionary force, but also with our other allies in Eu…”

“We have the law of armed conflict, and that is the right framework for conduct in operations, not the European convention on human rights. I would like us to leave the convention altogether. That is not going to happen with this Bill, but it would be very good if the Minister could comment on the appropriateness of the…”

“I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for mentioning the SDR, because I was about to do so myself. It is not a strategy. For starters, it is a defence review. The point I was just making is that the strategy we need is upstream of defence. We need a proper national security strategy that considers, in the round, all the …”

“It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Newton Aycliffe and Spennymoor (Alan Strickland). I start by stating, on behalf of my party, our support for this Bill and its important provisions, not simply because it extends the legal basis of our armed forces, but because of the very important new provisions that it …”

“Most of all, we support the amendment, tabled by the official Opposition, that seeks to derogate from the ECHR. It is absolutely right that our armed forces are not constrained. They are facing an enemy in front of them; they should not be worrying about the lawyers behind them. The commanders and, ultimately, Minister…”

“The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. I am taking the opportunity of a defence debate to make the point that defence is downstream of grand strategy, and that is what is fundamentally lacking. Our defences are not going to be as strong as they could be, because they are not necessarily oriented towards the fundamenta…”

“We also support amendment 1, proposed by the hon. and learned Member for North Antrim (Jim Allister), which would extend the armed forces covenant to Northern Ireland. That feels like exactly the right thing to do, and I am very grateful that he has tabled the amendment.”

“We do not support new clause 1, tabled by the right hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn). We do not support that proposal. We believe in parliamentary sovereignty, not in contracting out the conscience of our country to the International Criminal Court.”

“The defence funding is obviously very late and it will clearly be inadequate as well, but an even greater scandal is surely the fact that the spending itself is so poorly conducted. Our procurement system is slow, wasteful and outdated. The Minister praised them earlier, but does he not accept that the bureaucrats who …”

“Rioting is utterly wrong, and the scenes we saw in Belfast yesterday deserve our total condemnation, but law-abiding people across the country are rightly furious about the Government’s failure to stop dangerous and violent men entering our country illegally. One reason that they enter is the pull factor of our asylum …”