---

Defence in the World

Indeed; the Cabinet is full of them. That was a time when Britain was facing a Soviet Union and an eastern Europe bristling with thousands upon thousands of intercontinental ballistic missiles, all aimed at us. Now that there is no such adversary, those same Members have swapped their badges. I have no doubt that they will comprehensively vote down the motion tabled by the hon. Member for Pendle at the parliamentary Labour party meeting. As he is a gentle soul, I fear for his safety on that occasion if the reports I hear of the PLP are anything like accurate. I have been sitting through the debate feeling not that it is a funny old world but that it is another world. The sort of complacent consensus that has crept by osmosis through the Chamber as the hours have passed is so utterly different from, and in contradiction to, the attitude outside in the country and around the world that I became more persuaded than ever that the House of Commons is out of touch with reality. I am sorry that the hon. Member for Gosport (Peter Viggers) is no longer in his place. He may well be an expert on defence procurement matters but, in his mini discourse on Islam, he reminded us of the universal truth that a little knowledge is dangerous. His ““Reader’s Digest”” analysis of Islam and the people of the Muslim world—more than 1,000 million strong—illustrated the chasm between the east and the powerful here in the west. At least one, perhaps two of the explosions this morning took place in my constituency. Many of those caught up in the events were my constituents, heading to work in the City and the west end. I spent four hours or so this morning at the Royal London hospital in my constituency where the medical staff are toiling, without a break, to deal with the casualties who are being brought in in their scores—perhaps, by now, in their hundreds. I walked among the emergency workers, including the fire brigade staff, in the very stations that have in the past few weeks had fire engines taken away from them as economy measures. I refer to the fire station at Bethnal Green in my constituency and the fire station in the King’s Cross-Euston area—the two places where the fire services are stretched almost to breaking point in dealing with the consequences of this morning’s events. The people of the east end and the emergency workers are going about their business calmly and stoically in the way for which our country is famous. I condemn the act that was committed this morning. I have no need to speculate about its authorship. It is absolutely clear that Islamist extremists, inspired by the al-Qaeda world outlook, are responsible. I condemn it utterly as a despicable act, committed against working people on their way to work, without warning, on tubes and buses. Let there be no equivocation: the primary responsibility for this morning’s bloodshed lies with the perpetrators of those acts. However, it would be crass to do other than what the Secretary of State for Defence in a way invited us to do. We cannot separate the acts from the political backdrop. They did not come out of a clear blue sky, any more than those monstrous mosquitoes that struck the twin towers and other buildings in the United States on 9/11 2001. The Defence Secretary said that we must look at the causal circumstances behind the problems of security and defence in the world. I insist that we do so. If Members examine our debate tomorrow in the cold light of day they will discover a self-evident truth: many Members of Parliament find it easy to feel empathy with people killed in explosions by razor-sharp red-hot steel and splintering flying glass when they are in London, but they can blank out of their mind entirely the fact that a person killed in exactly the same way in Falluja died exactly the same death. When the US armed forces, their backs guarded, as a result of a decision by our politicians, by our armed forces, systematically reduced Falluja, a city the size of Coventry, brick by brick and killed an unknown number of people—probably the number runs to thousands, if not tens of thousands—not a whisper found its way into the Chamber. I have grown used to that. I know that for many people in the House and in power in this country the blood of some people is worth more than the blood of others.