I thank all colleagues for their contributions to the debate. As ever over the past four or five months, it has been defined by gentle disagreement politely put by well-informed contributors to the debate around defence and security in the Euro-Atlantic.
NATO is inescapably the foundation on which Euro-Atlantic security is based. It is, always was and has proven itself over the past three months still to be the most enormous deterrent, even against Putin at his most belligerent. Other multinational fora, many of which have been mentioned today—the UN, the European Union, the G7, the coalition of donors that sit outside NATO and the coalition of those who have imposed sanctions on Russia—have all been able confidently to make interventions to try to resolve the conflict, safe in the knowledge that NATO’s overwhelming firepower keeps the conflict contained within Ukraine. That has enabled many international fora to take measures to impose cost on Russia and try to persuade it to change course.
Not only does NATO have an enormous technological and numerical advantage but, as my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis) and my hon. Friend the Member for Basildon and Billericay (Mr Baron) made clear, the nuclear deterrent is inescapably important to the deterrence that NATO provides. That is why the SNP’s positions on nuclear and on NATO are so contradictory. Scotland’s geography is the gatepost on the southern side of the Greenland-Iceland-UK gap. That is the most strategic gateway to the north Atlantic and is essential to all NATO’s plans. Right now, at the very tip of Scotland, some of the most advanced anti-submarine warfare capabilities are based at RAF Lossiemouth. They are there because one of Europe’s best-funded and biggest air forces is able to have those capabilities alongside the fast air that polices threats in the Norwegian and northern seas and beyond.
Of course, Scotland hosts the nuclear deterrent on which so many countries around NATO depend, because it is the only nuclear deterrent that is assigned to NATO. It therefore seems to me more than a little contradictory that a party that wants to expel the UK’s nuclear deterrent from Scotland wants to apply to join an alliance that is ultimately underpinned by that very same deterrent.