THE world is “challenging as we’ve ever known it” since the end of World War II , according to the new chairman of the House of Commons Defence Select Committee.
Conservative MP Robert Courts told GB News: “We need to make sure that we are aware and living up to the fact that the world is a very dangerous place now, with Russia, Ukraine, with wider geopolitical pressures.
“The world is as challenging as we’ve ever known it since the end of the war and we’re going to have to adjust policy to make sure that we are facing up to that squarely. And we’re going to have to make sure that our support for Ukraine is solid.
“This is about defending the international rules-based order. It’s about defending the world in which we all live in that’s made us comfortable, profitable, and free. And we must continue to make sure that’s the case.”
Asked by Christopher Hope if support for Ukraine was under threat because of the conflict in Israel, he said: “We need to make sure we scrutinise and make sure that our support here is solid for Ukraine and I’ve everything I’ve seen thus far suggests that it is and it’s got cross-party support.
“However, we need to make sure we work very closely with allies and that’s a big theme of the work I want to do as well, to ensure that we’re working with people within NATO and outside NATO who are able to work together to defend the free world that we have.”
He added: “I think we need to be spending on defence. I’m not going to give a figure on that for the simple reason I think you need to look at the threats rather than to give it an arbitrary figure.
“So, I think we need to look seriously at those threats, we need to look at…accommodation, make sure we’re looking at the people – so often we think about kit all the time in defence. We need to understand people and their lived lives in the military to make sure they want to continue to serve in uniform.
“We need to have mass. We need to have enough ships, we need to have enough aircraft, we need to have soldiers, we need to make sure that we have the ability to fight against a peer adversary, not the much different or smaller adversaries we’ve had over the course of the last few years.”
