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Ministry of Defence

Well, the hon. Gentleman had better get used to tough times. I would have thought that the Committee and Parliament would have preferred hard figures rather than notional ones, on which to base their assessments. My final point on the Committee’s report is that the MOD has this year followed the scrutiny unit’s guidance in producing the estimates memorandums. They were approved by Ministers and the accounting officer before being passed to the Committee. I understand that the document was not signed off, but that does not mean that it was not properly authorised. Paragraph 19 of the report makes a number of assertions that I believe are not based on fact. The Department’s estimates memorandums included details on the summary of changes since the previous estimate, the most significant changes, a detailed explanation of the changes, the net additional cash required and the provisions and contingent liabilities. On the point about end-of-year flexibility made in recommendation 9, my Department drew down end-of-year flexibility of £71.7 million in resource departmental expenditure limits—DEL—and £28.3 million in capital DEL in the winter supplementary estimates, and those figures have not changed. I have gone through some of the detailed changes and I will consider the recommendations to see whether we can proceed in other ways. Probably only two or three people who have participated in the debate have read the report through, although others will claim that that is not the case, and I have tried to answer the detailed points made. I come now to some of the points raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney (Mr. Havard). He was clear in his support for our people in Iraq and Afghanistan. He raised several equipment-related issues and the threat posed to our personnel as a consequence. The balance of risk is always factored in, in terms of force lay down. I appreciate that my hon. Friend has occasionally worn uniform when taking part in the armed forces parliamentary scheme, but on this occasion I shall stick with the advice given to me and the Secretary of State by our senior military planners and the Chiefs of Staff. However, I thank my hon. Friend for his support. I made notes while the right hon. and learned Member for Kensington and Chelsea (Sir Malcolm Rifkind) was speaking, but his hon. Friend the Member for New Forest, East (Dr. Lewis) quietly laid to rest some of the basis on which the right hon. and learned Gentleman advanced his cause. The right hon. and learned Gentleman said that there was no international legitimacy for going to war in Iraq, but he ignores the 17 resolutions that sought to bring Saddam Hussein to book. I think that he ignores the fact that every major country was of the view that Saddam Hussein had the capacity and the intention to develop weapons of mass destruction; not one country, or their intelligence services, took a different view. The right hon. and learned Gentleman also ignores United Nations Security Council resolution 1441, which was unanimously adopted and clearly indicated that there would be consequences for non-compliance. I think he was arguing that members of the UN should have a veto on the course of action that we and other countries should take, but that is a dangerous approach, which would mean that we were constrained by the geo-political interests of our allies—those interests, rather than those we consider important, would be uppermost. I could not work out the logic of the position taken by the hon. Member for Gravesham (Mr. Holloway). Was he saying that we should not encourage or help the Government of Afghanistan in their aim of reducing poppy cultivation? Clearly, we should do so, but the hon. Gentleman offered no solution to the problem. I have set out the amount we are spending on alternative livelihoods and we know that the Afghans are putting in significant effort. There are risks but we have to continue. The hon. Gentleman offered no alternative approach. The hon. Member for Bournemouth, East (Mr. Ellwood) said that it was a mistake to ignore calls for a broader coalition to deal with Saddam Hussein. However, the coalition of the willing was 32 countries-strong at the outset and increased shortly thereafter. There was a broad coalition for taking on Saddam Hussein; not every nation allied itself to it, but there was a significant combination of countries. The hon. Gentleman said that it was right to deal with Saddam Hussein, so in that case what more could have been done than our Prime Minister did? He made extreme efforts to try to ensure that there was unanimous support in the Security Council, but it was not forthcoming. As I pointed out to the right hon. and learned Member for Kensington and Chelsea, there were 17 UN Security Council resolutions over 12 years, and UNSCR 1441 was specific in its analysis of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s regime. The hon. Gentleman called for the managed partition of Iraq, which is territory we have covered before. He alluded to a previous debate in which a similar solution had been proposed for Afghanistan. He recovered himself a bit by saying that it was for the people in those countries to come to that conclusion, but he seemed to be indicating that, in the case of Iraq, we should encourage them to do so. I do not believe that it would be beneficial to fragment Iraq at this juncture, although at some point in the future it may be. As I commented recently when giving evidence to the Select Committee, we are still a United Kingdom, but the people of the country’s constituent parts can determine their future—whether in Northern Ireland, Wales or Scotland. It is a matter for the people to decide.