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Foreign Affairs and Defence

The Conservatives said that they would make £1.8 billion of efficiency savings, but nobody believed that they could take £1.8 billion out of the Ministry of Defence by saving paper clips and making sure that staff used one pen rather than two per fortnight. At best, they would have frozen defence expenditure, and they would probably have cut it. [Interruption.] No one should be surprised, because that is exactly what they did when they were in government. Let us conduct this argument on the back of a series of empirically based and historically verifiable facts—we have increased defence expenditure in real terms; they cut it by 29 per cent. over a 10-year period. Personnel suffer most when defence expenditure is cut. One can train and educate forces and one can buy aircraft carriers, ships and planes, but the third element of fighting power, people and their morale, which concerns leadership, bonding, traditions, commitment and determination, is at the core of defence. Accordingly, we have made a large investment in welfare. When we deal with great geo-strategic issues in this House, little matters do not seem to bear much discussion, but access to telephones and telephone cards, deliveries of letters, receiving British Forces Broadcasting and Sky and watching the latest films and videos means a lot to people if they are in a camp in the middle of a desert on a dark night. I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Minister of State on his emphasis on welfare, and personnel in Basra, Baghdad and elsewhere made that point to me as recently as 24 hours ago. Welfare services help to make a very difficult life tolerable, which is why the new pension and compensation schemes include greatly improved death benefits and widow’s benefits. The MoD has recently announced that the service group life assurance scheme will offer the armed forces insurance without exclusions at premiums comparable to those offered by civilian schemes. As one supermarket says, ““every little helps””, and all those little things add up to make a huge difference to the welfare of soldiers, sailors and airmen.