Penny Mordaunt has said Britain’s national interests are at risk unless the Royal Navy keeps pace with nations like Russia and China – as Grant Shapps failed to set a date for hitting military spending targets.
Ms Mordaunt, the Leader of the Commons and a former defence secretary and Tory leadership candidate, tweeted her warning above an image of a press article chronicling the decline in the size of the UK navy to a fraction of what it was in the last century.
It comes amid a recruitment crisis in the navy that is so severe that the Ministry of Defence (MoD) is planning to decommission two ships to free up sailors for a new fleet of frigates.
The size of the Royal Navy fleet has fallen from 232 ships including eight aircraft carriers in 1960 to 30 in 2022 including two new aircraft carriers.
Ms Mordaunt’s intervention suggests growing Cabinet tensions over defence spending ahead of Chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s Budget in March.
Mr Shapps has previously called for defence spending to be increased to 3 per cent of GDP but on Sunday morning the Defence Secretary could not say when the UK defence spending will hit 2.5 per cent of GDP, the target the Government has set itself “when economic conditions allow”.
China and Russia
Ms Mordaunt, an honorary captain in the Royal Navy Reserve and MP for Portsmouth North, tweeted: “The Royal Navy and its partners must keep pace with the growing capabilities of other nations. If not, Britain’s interests cannot be secured.”
In the article in The Sunday Times, she added: “We must not just ask ourselves by how much Russia and China are increasing their fleets, but why.
“The future Royal Navy must be able to continue to secure our interests, which are entirely predicated on being able to thwart attempts to deny us access to the seas of certain parts of the world.”
Mr Shapps had been challenged about defence spending on the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg and urged to set a date for the 2.5 per cent target to be hit at a time when he has warned about rising global threats.
He said it was “comfortably” above 2 per cent of GDP – the Nato benchmark – but not at 2.5 per cent yet. “There is a trajectory upwards. I can’t give you the exact date because we’ve always said it’s as the economic conditions allow. But the point is we’re working to a plan,” he added.
Responding to Ms Mordaunt’s comments, Mr Shapps said: “I’m in a post where there are a lot of people with opinions and a lot of people who’ve been in the military and armed forces will often express them.”
He defended the Chancellor’s focus on tax cuts rather than increasing defence spending, arguing “people do want to see more of the money that they earn kept”.
Facing a ‘pre-war world’
Last week Mr Shapps made the case for increased Western defence spending, saying the UK was facing a “pre-war world”. In a speech last Monday, he set out the risks posed by countries including China, Russia, Iran and North Korea as well as terrorist groups in an increasingly dangerous world.
The speech was seen as a pitch by Mr Shapps for extra defence spending. Before taking on the defence brief, Mr Shapps had backed a level of spending in excess of the Government’s goal, arguing it should rise to 3 per cent.
Last week, Lord Dannatt, a former chief of the general staff, hit out at the shrinking size of the army which he said had fallen from 102,000 in 2006 to 74,000 today “and falling fast”.
He drew parallels with the 1930s when the “woeful” state of the UK’s armed forces failed to deter Hitler, saying there was “a serious danger of history repeating itself”.
But Mr Shapps insisted the size of the army would not dip below 73,000 under the Tories. He said: “It’s not projected to go down to 50,000. It’s actually, specifically, to 73,000 plus the reserves.”
