This is a follow-up to my oral question on Ukraine of 9th September, which I have previously circulated. It is a telling example of the ‘war-mongering’ mood of official Britain. For a full view of the debate see link: https://hansard.parliament.uk/lords/2025-09-10/debates/5FF5CC28-E0EF-4D17-8C8C-8999CA2A4154/DefenceIndustrialStrategy
Main points of Government Statement on ‘Defence Industrial Strategy’, House of Commons 9 September (Luke Pollard, The Minister of State, Ministry of Defence):
‘Today we fulfil another manifesto commitment by publishing our plan to strengthen our security and grow our economy.’
‘This is a plan supported by £773 millions of investment – a plan to make defence an engine for economic growth…’
‘We know from Ukraine, when a country is forced to fight, its armed forces are only as strong as the industry which stands behind them’.
‘Our strategic defence review sets out our vision to make Britain safer, secure at home and strong abroad. Through our defence industrial strategy, we will ensure that we have an industry to deliver that vision.’
‘The defence industry is a source of not only prosperity, but pride, it proves we are still a nation of makers’.
‘Today we know that whoever gets technology to its front line first, wins. We have proved that we can do it for Ukraine; now we must do it for Britain.’
‘We have created the role of national armaments director.’
Excerpt: Lady Goldie (Front Bench spokesperson for the Conservatives in the House of Lords:
‘A strong industrial base is vital for our Armed Forces and our defensive resilience as a whole. The need has never been more evident than today, when we have seen a Russian incursion into a Nato ally’s airspace and the largest attack in Ukraine by Russia to date. This escalation…underlines the importance of putting Britain into war-fighting readiness’.
Excerpt: Lord Fox (Front Bench spokesman for the Liberal Democrats in the House of Lords):
‘We, on these benches, also welcome the Government’s announcement of this new defence industrial strategy. We support the objectives of both boosting defence capability and increasing economic activity…’
Lord Skidelsky (Cross Benches) (I bracket the parts of my speech which I had to cut to stick to the allotted time for backbench questions:
(CB)
I would like to offer a dissenting opinion, but some noble Lords will be used to that. I strongly support industrial policy, but the coupling of defence and industrial strategy …. suggests that industrial policy is driven by military needs, whereas in fact the case for industrial policy needs to be made apart from that.
[I understand the attraction of coupling defence with industrial policy for a government which, as the newspapers never stop telling us, faces a huge fiscal black hole and rising interest rates on a growing public debt.]
[Surely patriotic bondholders will respond to the call to lend cheaply to the government for an overwhelming national purpose. We will no doubt see the issue of war bonds in the not distant future].
To a student of economic history, it is reminiscent of ‘ military Keynesianism, which was born in the Second World War, continued in the Cold War and dropped only with the end of the Cold War.
[In this connection, you will recall Eisenhower’s valedictory warning about the ‘military-industrial complex’]
[Now we have a glorious opportunity to revive the complex and with it all the benefits of public investment in the real economy, which in the UK has sunk to an all-time modern low.]
Is the Minister entirely comfortable with basing the case for industrial policy on the need to rearm, as developed in the Strategic Defence Review? I support industrial policy, but I would not want to hinge my whole argument on the need to rearm. That itself is something that needs to be discussed quite independently of the case for industrial policy.
[I hope the House will have the opportunity to debate it properly following the Autumn Statement]
Lord Coaker (Minister of State, Ministry of Defence):
(Lab)
I know that the noble Lord has an opinion that not many people agree with, including me, but I appreciate that he puts it forward time and again in a respectful, calm and intellectual way. He is to be congratulated on that.
My argument to him would be this. There is a need to rearm and a defence industrial policy has to be geared towards the rearmament that needs to take. I will give him one example, with which I know he will disagree. My premise is that it is a good thing that we are supporting Ukraine. Despite what we have been doing, with the defence industry as it was, we—not only us but other European countries—were not able to deliver the equipment necessary for Ukraine to do all that it wanted to do as easily as it could. That is a difficult, if not dangerous, position for us and our allies to be in.
I made this point at DSEI yesterday. I said that, as a Minister of State for the UK MoD, I do not want to be in a position where I believe in supporting Ukraine but read in the paper—as I did, going back probably a year—that Ukraine had had to withdraw because it did not have the necessary military equipment to continue the fight. That is not a situation we should be in. Part of dealing with that is to develop our defence industry and improve its capability and capacity, so we are not in a position where we cannot support those we would wish to support.
Robert Skidelsky 