Alec Shelbrooke MP: speeches

Speeches

• 7 Sept 2026 · Dover and Portsmouth: Protests · Hansard source

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  I am grateful that it is the Policing Minister who is making this statement. I have spoken to North Yorkshire police, and there is a proposal for RAF Linton-on-Ouse to be made into an asylum centre. The trouble is that calling it an “asylum centre on a military site” does not paint what it is. It is just a mass hotel, because people are free to come and go, and they will all be men. The Home Secretary said in a statement that she would not allow an asylum hotel anywhere near a primary school or a nursery, but within 300 metres of the entrance to the base is a primary school and a nursery. North Yorkshire police have made it clear that they would find it exceptionally difficult to constantly police protests, and these protests are coming from far and wide. Given the change to the way that protests are happening, the fact that North Yorkshire police would find it very difficult to police them, and the fact that there is a primary school and a nursery close to what would be a mass hotel for 1,500 people, can the Minister confirm that it is still the policy of the Home Secretary that she will not open such hotels near schools and nurseries?

• 15 Jul 2026 · Iran · Hansard source

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  I just wanted to explore the role of our destroyer in the Gulf a little further. The Minister says that it is part of air defence operations. Is it integrated within a system, or is our Royal Navy acting independently?

• 15 Jul 2026 · Iran · Hansard source

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  I am listening carefully to the hon. Gentleman. He makes some powerful points. He talked about people noticing what is going on. Will he explore that in his speech? I know that he is excellent at responding while on his feet. People can and cannot see things; when there was a cyber-attack on M&S, its shelves emptied, so people would have been able to see the direct consequence of a cyber-attack on a supermarket. They did not see it, however, because they just went to the next supermarket. Will he expand on how we make the public see the threat?

• 15 Jul 2026 · Iran · Hansard source

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  It has been a fascinating debate so far this afternoon. There is no doubt about the effects of a lot of what the hon. Member for Argyll, Bute and South Lochaber (Brendan O'Hara) has just said. This debate therefore has to be set into the context of what we are dealing with now. What is going on in Iran is an example of the importance of some of the tough decisions we have to make. Until November, I am one of the vice-presidents of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly. Most of my career in this place has been about dealing with soft power, and that is a soft power body. It has become difficult in recent years to maintain the UK’s reputation among allies, because countries, especially the eastern allies of NATO, are accelerating their spending enormously quickly. They are taking that spending up to serious levels, way beyond what would have been suggested, because they recognise the threat. The hon. Member for Loughborough (Dr Sandher), who is not in his place, spoke about how we make people recognise the threat. I do not believe that we always can; indeed, history has shown that we cannot. The hon. Member for Harlow (Chris Vince) and I have often had a discussion over a cup of tea about what happened in the 1930s, and the Cabinet that Ramsay MacDonald had to form as Prime Minister. The difficulty of getting people to recognise the threat is why Winston Churchill went through years of being detested, while he tried to warn of the coming dangers. Neville Chamberlain, often described as an appeaser, recognised that this country was nowhere near ready for war in 1937, and was having to push things back. There is also what is often described as the phoney war from September 1939; people were saying, “Why are we doing this?”, right up until the bombs started to fall. As I said to the hon. Member for Loughborough, people can see things, but they also cannot see things, so how do we get the message across? We hear people say today, “I am not going to fight for my country. Why should I get involved? Why should I defend the Baltic states?” I remind the House that way back in the 1930s, the Oxford Union had a debate on the motion that “This House would not in any circumstances fight for King and Country”. That debate took place—let me get my maths right—some 90-odd years ago. How people regard the defence of their country has never changed, and that is where tough decisions come in. It is the responsibility of Governments to do things that are not popular. I have debated with the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, the hon. Member for Lincoln (Mr Falconer), many times, and I have a great deal of respect for him. I suspect that tucked away in his notes for his winding-up speech there might be a reference to defence spending in the 14 years of Conservative Government, but I think that line does us a disservice. We have to recognise that from roughly 1989 onwards, defence spending was cut and cut. It hovered between around 2.2% and 2.5% of GDP. The Labour party has said that when it left office, defence spending had risen. In blunt terms, that is true, but Labour MPs do not say just how much was coming out of the reserves to fund the wars. A lot of Labour MPs stare at their feet when that is mentioned now. Defence was cut further under the coalition Government, when Danny Alexander was the Chief Secretary to the Treasury. The Liberal Democrats like to speak about what the Conservatives did to defence spending, but they conveniently overlook who the Chief Secretary to the Treasury was who pushed through those defence cuts. My right hon. Friend the Member for Rayleigh and Wickford (Mr Francois) is, I believe, one of the most experienced men in our party in analysing defence budgets and understanding defence needs. I am sure that when he winds up the debate his words will be worth listening to, as they always are, because he understands, and he understood at the time, that the decisions being made would have a knock-on consequence. I am trying not to make party political comments today. I am making a speech about the threat that is right in front of our nation’s eyes. It is clear that this general debate on Iran, and the cancellation of all the business previously announced, was arranged not because there is an incoming barrage of missiles and we are going to experience a conflagration, but because the Government did not want to call on the right hon. Member for Makerfield (Andy Burnham) to come to the House until six weeks from now. That is obvious, but it does not take away the underlying point that we have to accept in this country. Let me return to the subject of defence spending. I have been in the Chamber when the procurement Minister, the hon. Member for Plymouth Sutton and Devonport (Luke Pollard), and the new Secretary of State for Defence have been at the Dispatch Box to talk about how much funding they are giving to defence. They say that they are spending record amounts on it. Well, I am spending record amounts on diesel for my car, but that does not mean that I am investing more; it means that my revenue costs have gone up—and the former Secretary of State for Defence, the right hon. Member for Rawmarsh and Conisbrough (John Healey), said that the Treasury was not supplying the money, or the Government were not willing to spend it. The hon. and gallant Member for Birmingham Selly Oak (Al Carns), who is no longer in the Chamber, said that there had to be a more hybrid approach to defence, and I think he is right. That does not mean chucking everything else away. I was relieved that the Type 26 and Type 31 programme for the Royal Navy is still in place. However, I am open-minded and, indeed, intrigued: I think there may be a positive outcome to the replacement of the Type 83 with the Type 90s—well, let us just call it a destroyer programme for now, until they have a proper name, but there will be drones attached to them—because we need a flexible workforce. Wars always accelerate innovation. The speed with which drone technology has developed in the Ukraine war is incredible, but we have seen this before. Look at the speed with which we moved from the V1 to the V2 rocket. Look at the speed of our work to develop atomic weapons over the six years of the second world war; we came very close to developing them then, and indeed ultimately did.

• 15 Jul 2026 · Iran · Hansard source

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  Is the hon. Gentleman suggesting that European defence spending is growing only because of the President of the United States, even though several Presidents of the United States have demanded increased defence spending? The current President has actually achieved it, but Europe really does have to increase its defence spending. Since the first Trump presidency, it has been increased by almost €1 trillion, but that had to be done. Can I clarify with the hon. Gentleman whether he is criticising Europe for doing what Donald Trump asked, because Donald Trump is not the first US President to demand more European defence spending?

• 15 Jul 2026 · Iran · Hansard source

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  I do not mean to be speaking for you, but I know that this is something you are passionate about. You have been sanctioned because you have called out the human rights record of the Chinese and the way they have been exploiting the Uyghur population to fund and put forward the energy on which we now rely. What was going to be the second topic of the Opposition Day debate—we were not allowed to debate it today, although this debate is clearly not quite as urgent as the Leader of the House made out—was how we have taken terrible decisions on our energy policy. We are leaving ourselves more and more exposed to other areas. Yes, we cannot control the price of oil and gas, and we all know that it is traded on the international markets, but it would help to secure the supply. All the gas goes directly into our system. I think 3% of our gas comes from LNG. We could start to reduce that risk. Iran has a huge malign influence which has a direct effect on us all and we must ensure we are ready to defend ourselves. The point I really want to get across today is this. We have to make decisions that are really, really unpopular and controversial. We have to slash an out of control welfare bill and we have to spend on defence. People say, “Where would you get the money to pay for defence?” We have been crystal clear about that, no matter how unpopular or popular it is. The point is not just coming from our side; Lord Robertson has also said that such spending is vital. The hon. Member for Birmingham Selly Oak is in his place. I was just saying, and he will be able to look it up in Hansard , that I think he makes some very important points about having a hybrid force. We must ensure that we invest in what is needed, and recognise the projects, such as Ajax, that have just failed and work out how we are going to do things differently.

• 15 Jul 2026 · Iran · Hansard source

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  I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for clarifying that. I have been speaking to officers who command Ajax tanks. When an officer is interviewed, he has another officer stood behind him, to make sure that he says the right things. When an officer is interviewed on the record, he is not going to say a lot. You have to go to the pub and speak there to the officers who command the tanks; you need to have proper conversation with them. They will tell you that this thing will be useless in a war. The fact that the tanks cannot communicate with each other in real time on the battlefield should send a shiver through us all. The point I am driving at builds on the point made by the hon. Member for Glasgow South (Gordon McKee), who talked about Iran supplying technical drones to Russia, how Ukraine has moved ahead of those, how Russia will catch up, and how we have to adapt. We have to accept that some of our programmes are simply not fit for purpose, because we do not have a budget in place for funding the defence investment plan; it is smoke and mirrors. Labour Members will push back on that, but the figures are there. There is £15 billion to be spent, even though the demand was for £28 billion. Some £5 billion has not been identified, and £10 billion comes from savings in the Ministry of Defence, so there is not a penny more for the MOD. The money is just not there, and we should be terrified by that. Those are not my words, but the words of the man who was the Secretary of State for Defence, the right hon. Member for Rawmarsh and Conisbrough. This is not coming from the Opposition; it is coming from a man who was in office, and who has the Labour movement running through him, like the words in a stick of Brighton rock. There is no way that he wanted to criticise his Labour Government, and neither did the noble Lord Robertson, another man who has the Labour party running through his veins, but they have pointed out just how exposed we are. Too many people ask—again, this comes down to education—“Why should we defend the Baltic states if Putin wants to go in?”. I have heard people say, “They’re Russian anyway. They were part of the Russian empire.” I have heard people say, “The Ukrainians started the war with Russia. NATO pushed them into it.” I have heard people say all these things, and do you know what they all have in common? They all started off looking at particular right-wing websites—I do not mean far right; I am not talking about extremism—that push these sorts of things, and the Russians and the Chinese have been watching what they click. They are the ones developing the algorithms, and they feed their lines through algorithms that take people further and further down a particular path. That is about undermining what underpins our society. When sensible people whom I have known for years are parroting back exactly what is coming out of the Kremlin, it is clear that this is having an effect.

• 15 Jul 2026 · Iran · Hansard source

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  I will give way to my colleague on the NATO Parliamentary Assembly.

• 15 Jul 2026 · Iran · Hansard source

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  I am most grateful to the hon. Gentleman, because that is a point that I was moving towards, given that today’s debate is about Iran, and the consequences of what is happening there for the conflict, for our country and for the defence of Europe. It is now clear that the Russians know how to defeat the weapons that remain in our warehouses, because when we use a weapon, they learn how to defeat it. We therefore have to accelerate our innovation and accelerate how we adapt, and a great deal of that involves drone warfare. Nevertheless, there is always a need for traditional weaponry. I look at the plans for the Royal Navy, and they seem to me to constitute a sensible way forward, but my right hon. Friend the Member for Rayleigh and Wickford is in a much stronger position to comment on that. We have to accept that there are instance when the Ministry of Defence gets it really, really wrong. When, for a short period, I was the procurement Minister, Ajax was landing on my desk every day. My right hon. Friend knows as much about Ajax as most people in this House know about what is in their wardrobe—he knows every nut and bolt—and he is right when he says that we must accept at some point that some projects must be scrapped.

• 15 Jul 2026 · Iran · Hansard source

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  I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for that. The point I am driving at—bringing all that together about how this lack of confidence is slowly starting to build in society through what such people are doing—is that that is why we now have to take some really unpopular decisions. The Leader of the Opposition—the leader of the Conservative party—has made it clear that we would cut welfare to fund defence. These are unpopular decisions, but it has to be done because we are not going to convince people about the threat. History shows that people are never convinced until something happens. People do not understand geography, and think that Ukraine is so far in the distance that it does not affect us. However, as has been said by so many Members, it affects all of us through the energy crisis. The hon. Member for Alloa and Grangemouth (Brian Leishman) and I have debated with each other in this Chamber many a time, and I have huge respect for him, because he takes a view, with which I fundamentally disagree, about not spending money on defence but spending it on welfare, meeting societal needs and so on. He is clear and honest about it, and he backs up why he believes it. However, I believe that if we are not ready to go to war, we cannot have a peace, and if we do not have that peace, we are going to go to war. Such a war does not necessarily mean bombs raining down, because it could well mean cyber-attack, when the areas on which he thinks we should be spending would collapse anyway. Our society would collapse, so we have to make that investment, because Ukraine shows the enormous loss of GDP—50% of its GDP has been lost—because of the invasion by another country. Turning to the hon. Member for Argyll, Bute and South Lochaber (Brendan O’Hara), I have always taken issue with SNP Members when they call Trident a nuclear weapon. In my mind, and I think in the minds of many people, Trident is not a nuclear weapon, because it is called the nuclear deterrent. People say they would never use Trident, but we are using it every single day. We have used it continuously at sea every single day for nigh on 60 years. Yes, it is creaking; yes, we are sending people out for too long; and, yes, there has been a ridiculous delay in getting out the Dreadnought class because of the lack of reactors when we needed them. However, it is absolutely vital that we invest in it because it is a deterrent, and it is the best example I can give of why we have to invest in defence. The Iranian conflict shows just how much our world can be affected. I could go on forever about the energy situation, and why I believe that the actions of the Energy Secretary have put this country at enormous risk. I do not want to try the patience of the House or you, Madam Deputy Speaker, after being on my feet for 18 minutes—