For those of our readers who don't know, where do you and your party fit into the U.K. political landscape?

We are the liberal party in the U.K., and we had our best election results last July for over a hundred years. We've got 72 MPs; in the most recent set of local elections, we beat both the Labour and Conservative parties, which we've never done before. And we remain the most pro-European party in Britain as well. It's lovely to come because they have liberal parties in government and we like that.

Why are you here on this flying visit to Estonia?

The immediate and main reason is to go and visit the British troops who are here on the front line, working with Estonian colleagues and other NATO allies, securing the western border. With Ukraine in such a mess, and with the threat from Putin's Russia as great as it's ever been, we need to be here, sending a very strong message.

What lessons do you think the U.K. could draw from the Estonian approach to civil defense and societal resilience?

First of all, I'm looking forward to seeing the British troops tomorrow and I'm going to be asking them questions, listening to them about the lessons that we've learned are there on the ground. They're the experts. And I'd like to know from them. They're working with the Estonians, and the Estonians are full of praise for them.

What struck me in my last meeting, I won't name them, but a very, very senior person in the defense and foreign establishment here not only welcomed the presence of British troops and the fact that we're the largest contingent of any NATO troops here, but also our attitude that we are here for a purpose and we're 100 percent bought into that. So I will listen to them because the Estonians clearly see them as the real deal.

What I am impressed with, what I've read about the Estonian approach to civil defense, is we've got a lot to learn from them. I think the population here, inevitably, given the history and the proximity, are really aware of the scale of it and the immediacy of the threat. You can get to Russia in three hours drive or less than that from Tallinn, and I think we need to raise awareness amongst the British population that the world has changed significantly. And that's going to mean not just changing the defense budget, but changes that will affect a lot of our lives.

How quickly do you think the U.K. should get to 2.5 percent of GDP defense spend per year?

The government has said it's going to do it by 2027. We welcome that announcement. If it could be done sooner, fantastic, but you need to have the money. You've actually got to be able to have troops to recruit, and you've got to have stuff to buy, and that takes a little bit of time. So could they do it any earlier? I don't know, but it couldn't happen soon enough. We've got to get there. And we can't rest there. We talked about getting to 3 percent earlier than they're proposing. They're talking about 3 percent by sort of middle of the next decade or so.

We've called for a cross-party discussion about how we can get 3 percent as soon as possible, looking at how you would spend that money wisely, but we have to do it. Estonia is putting us to shame in many ways. They're getting to 5 percent next fiscal year, over 5 percent. They understand the scale of the threat and they're putting their money where their mouth is.

But to do that we'll need a degree of cross-party consensus. Because if you're going to say to the defense industry and military planners, this is where we're going to go, you need a proper cross-party agreement on that.

What about the recently suggested 5 percent of GDP level?

I think let's get to 3 percent as quickly as possible and then look where else we can go. And I think the key thing for me is not just the number is how you are working with allies. The United Kingdom has a crucial role to play with Estonia, with the Baltics.

But through the Joint Expeditionary Force and obviously in NATO, we have this huge problem and we have this appalling dictator in Russia, and we have the president of the United States being an unreliable ally, and with an imperialist Putin and the person in the White House, and at least for the next three and a half years, being so unpredictable and negative, we have to step up. We have to assume the worst. And that means going as fast as you can. But working with allies in Europe.

With the recent U.K. strategic defense review, does that mean that there should be an even greater U.K. military presence in terms of numbers, deployments etc?

I don't know yet, maybe I'll get more in when I talk to the senior officers tomorrow. But what the defense review has got to do above all is increase the size of the British Army.

We've got to deal with things like the new types of warfare that we've seen in the U.K. and elsewhere whether it's drones, or whether it's long-range missiles and all those other parts of the kit.

And I'm afraid the record of the Conservatives has been disastrous and calamitous, allowing the size of the British Army to shrink so much, with deliberate cuts of over 10,000 personnel, means that the British Army now is smaller than it's been since before the Napoleonic Wars. That is appalling.

With the current U.S. President in office, if that country does scale down their presence or even pull out completely from this part of Europe, will the U.K. boost its commitments to fill in that gap? It's clearly deeply worrying, and we need a well thought-through strategy to try to engage with the Americans, to try to keep them here, even if it's bridging until we've increased the forces.

The worst possible thing for defense of the U.K., defense of Europe, the defense of Estonia, would be an early withdrawal of American troops. And the question is how do you persuade America to continue, for a period at least; not wanting them to go, but if that's what they intend. And the only way you'll do that is to show that you are building up, that you are serious.

And Britain, inevitably, is going to be a very big player. The Brits and the French easily have the largest armed forces and the largest nuclear deterrent, and so clearly, we need to think bigger. We need to work with others who are building up, taken seriously like the Estonians, and put pressure on others. I hope the troops are never used, but they've got to be here to ask about the terrain. And I think we're all grateful for the troops being here. And it certainly secures what is already a strong relationship between the U.K. and Estonia.

Is the U.K. doing enough to combat hybrid attacks, such as the sabotage of infrastructure, targeting dissidents, cyber warfare?

We need to do more; to be fair to governments of all parties, they have invested in GCHQ and our security services, and I think we have some of the best in the world. But we have to recognize that our adversaries, whether they are in Russia or China or elsewhere, are investing huge amounts, and you saw here in Estonia the huge attack that they had back in 2007 and how it registered in their psyche and how they changed strategy in so many ways.

I think we need, again, as a country to recognize that threat exists, and that that type of hybrid war which might even engage with undersea cables, it might be for telecoms, internet, it might be for energy, there's a threat.

And again, to be fair to the government there in their defense review proposals to build 12 more submarines, that's the right sort of response.

With the growth in the defense industry sector here in Estonia, in the U.K. and elsewhere in Europe, are there concerns that this might lead to unethical sales to non-NATO nations which don't have the best human rights records?

Well, I think one of the things we learned is you need quite large stockpiles. Look how our stockpiles support Ukraine. And we had forgotten how quickly we used to use the ordnance and the missiles and the weapons, to get through them. So I think we won't, we can get we absolutely scale up our defenses as a European family.

But I think there won't be such a need to sell abroad because we'll just need to scale up so, so quickly at such scale with far more, um, reinforcements and stockpiles than we probably previously thought was needed.

The Liberal Democrats have always been against selling to regimes with poor human rights records, and we're not changing that. The U.K. generally has pretty good laws on the sale of arms to third countries, but they need to be even tougher, in my view. And they need to be implemented. We have, for example, the call for a much tougher regime with respect to Israel. And I don't think you should send any arms to Israel. So that remains part of our stance.

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