Speeches by Martin.

“This defence review gives us a long shopping list of technological advances—the cyber command, digital backbone, drones, AI—and that is right and proper, but the British military is tiny. Recently, the Select Committee heard that if we had to fight tonight, we could scratch together five ships and 30 planes. The person…”

“rose—”

“Very few issues in politics, particularly international politics, are black or white, but this is one such issue. The Israeli Government are using collective punishment of the civilian Palestinian population, which is illegal under international law and contravenes the Geneva conventions, to which Israel is party. Does…”

“I am grateful to the Minister for giving way; he is being very generous, although I might suggest that he works on his queuing system a little bit. I understand that the timetable issue is a difficult one, and most things seem to be arriving in the spring with this Government, but could we talk about the format? Are we…”

“Will the Minister give way?”

“If the UK had to fight tonight against a peer adversary, what would go out the door and how long would it last?”

“Would that be 30?”

“We are just exploring this, so 2,000 troops, five ships and 30 aircraft. Is there any point in British history at which we ever had such a poor ability to field a fighting force?”

“Looking at those three domains, as well as space and cyber, we do okay in cyber; in space, we significantly underperform; and we have discussed the three physical domains. We have a strategic defence review coming out. Where would you put the balance of investment effort across those five domains?”

“As a final question, you mentioned that we have not been in this situation since the 1790s, when there was something approaching national panic. Why do we not have national panic about this at the moment, and should we?”

“You said something earlier about a wargame and a simulated attack on the United Kingdom. What was the outcome? Did they win?”

“Well, blow me down.”

“I was really struck by your comments on what you called the commercial guy and these conversations that you have with them. I just wonder whether we are recruiting the right kind of person to be the commercial guy. We are bringing in a national armaments director who is the commercial guy or girl in the system. What so…”

“Would you argue that we need to change the fair procurement rules in order to rearm?”

“How do we compare to other European countries or other structures such as the EU or NATO? Do they also have these problems?”

“Have they changed their structures, processes and personnel to facilitate that speeding-up?”

“How are they bringing in SMEs?”

“In that sense, it is primes with SMEs docking into them, a bit like we have now, but you are saying it is working better there than it is here. Why is that?”

“So it is literally just more juice.”

“How many ships—three?”