Speeches by Martin.

“I will not list the constituencies of all the hon. and right hon. Members who have contributed; they know who they are and I thank them very much. Three themes came out of this debate that were interesting and bear repeating. First, we are already in a war and it is happening in different ways and it is happening below…”

“This actually speaks to the delay. Had the DIP come out when it was meant to, in 2025, it would have been a 10-year plan, because it would have gone from 2025 to 2035. However, the Government were unable to get their ducks in a row and the DIP was delayed by a year. If we had waited for them to rejig the plan to go up …”

“The original sin is divorcing the strategic defence review from the DIP—divorcing the vision from the resources. For the past year, the Department has been arguing first with itself about whether it can downgrade some of the things in the strategic defence review—there are a couple of instances where that has happened,…”

“Got it. But specifically on my question about taking nine years from PowerPoint to being at sea—”

“If it is nine years, is £1.3 billion over the next four years enough to kick-start that project?”

“For example?”

“I rise to present this petition regarding water supply resilience in Tunbridge Wells. This is further to a local petition on the same matter started by the fantastic students at St John’s primary school, which has gathered 610 signatures—children’s signatures—and has since been shared with 15 other local primary school…”

“Back to the theme that I started with, Lord Robertson, are there any gaps in the DIP in terms of what you expected to see based on the vision of the SDR?”

“That went down—it was £1 billion in the SDR, wasn’t it, and £700-and-something million in the DIP. That is just a factual drop.”

“On that, our current Type 45s are going out of service in 2035, yet we have a new suite with the hybrid navy of the CCVs and Type 9Xs that will cluster around them. Currently, that is a PowerPoint. Does nine years from PowerPoint to power projection on the high seas seem realistic? Does it speak to the SDR?”

“Good morning. I would like to talk about alignment between the SDR and the DIP. I have a couple of specific examples that I will come to, but in general terms, how well do you think the DIP is aligned on delivering the priorities that you articulate in the SDR?”

“The digital targeting web has only £7.5 billion spending before 2030, and a massively backloaded £17 billion after 2030 that is as yet unfunded. Would that be an example of that?”

“My final question is to Lord Robertson. You have done two defence reviews, so you have a really interesting perspective on this. A very common criticism of the way the UK political class, to use your earlier framing, approaches defence, and particularly the reduction that we have seen since the end of the cold war, is …”

“Do they articulate that in the DIP?”

“Which is fanciful, right?”

“Protecting British interests in the High North requires a strong Royal Navy. Under the current DIP, the Type 45s will go out of service in 2035 and be replaced by some CCVs and other uncrewed systems that currently exist only on PowerPoint. The idea that it will be nine years from PowerPoint to power projection stretch…”

“I think I heard the Minister say a few moments ago that he hoped the outcome of the Israeli election would be a policy more amenable to British Government policy. May I just clarify that he, as a Minister of the Crown, is suggesting that the British Government would like Netanyahu to lose that election?”

“This is a tale of two DIPs. The first DIP is covered by the period in the current spending review, up to about 2030, and the second DIP is the bit beyond that, from 2030 to 2035. The first has detailed spending commitments, and the latter has quite vague spending commitments. The former has small investments and the la…”

“Could I draw the Secretary of State’s attention to the Sir Jonathan Michael inquiry and report, which followed on from the David Fuller case at Pembury hospital in my constituency? It dealt with sexual impropriety with cadavers, so there is crossover here. Phase 2 of that report came out in July 2025, and it spoke to t…”

“My question is in a similar vein to that asked by the hon. Member for West Bromwich (Sarah Coombes). I was really concerned to hear of the cuts at the BBC; “The World Tonight” is going, and “Today” is being cut back. This follows on the heels of cuts at “Newsnight”. It seems that the justification for these cuts is tha…”