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Defence Policy

I begin by paying tribute to the brave men and women of our armed forces, who risk their lives every day to keep us safe and secure. My constituency is the home of the Royal Navy and Portsmouth ships have defended our country in many famous sea battles. Portsmouth itself suffered badly from bombing during the second world war and we who live there are aware that our city still remains a military target. My constituents and I owe a great debt to the men and women who have defended and continue to defend the city and our country. Up until fairly recently, our defence policy was centred on keeping our borders and those of our allies safe from attack by potential enemy states by preparing our stand-by forces for traditional combat operations. However, things have shifted dramatically since 9/11, and our country now faces threats from not so much states, or even organisations with which we can negotiate, but shadowy individuals who are not allied to any one state. Such individuals can cross international borders and operate within our borders. They have unprecedented access to technology and weaponry that can cause destruction on a massive scale. They also operate without a thought for preserving their own lives. The accepted conventions under which defence policy was formulated for many years have thus changed. We can no longer adopt a mentality of sitting on top of a hill and fending away the attackers and sheer force of numbers does not help much against a chemical or biological attack. We must have a smarter and more agile position in which we use the best equipment that technological advances can give us. Such equipment must be able to move in quickly and perform a multi-functional role, and the men and women who operate that equipment need to be professionals who can exercise judgment. They must be treated with the respect that they deserve, given the danger in which we ask them to put themselves. The Ministry of Defence must prepare for all eventualities when it makes policy. We owe it to the men and women of our armed forces to ensure that they are trained for all types of conflict. We do not want them to have to be put in a situation that has not been foreseen and for which they have not been properly prepared. Of course, we cannot foresee every eventuality, but we need to think outside the box and prepare for as many scenarios as we can possibly envisage, no matter how unlikely they might seem at the time. We need to consider not just conflict. Often the work of the armed forces is not armed combat, but peacekeeping, peace enforcing and disaster relief. The role of peacekeeping and peace enforcing becomes intertwined with the international objective of sustainable economic development in unstable countries. The role of the troop deployment in Afghanistan is as much to curb the narcotics trade as it is to bring security and stability to the area. That is a delicate role for our troops to undertake. The more successful we are at curbing the traffic in narcotics, the more danger our troops are likely to be in. How do we win the hearts and minds of local people if we are viewed as removing their livelihood? That must be balanced against the fact that Afghanistan will not have security and stability in the long term while the narcotics trade flourishes. We need to ensure that our troops are fully trained for such a role and that we have troops who can exercise their judgment and act professionally in such delicate situations. I spoke earlier about treating our troops with the respect they deserve. They need to be treated with respect by not just the MOD and their commanding officers, but politicians, the public and the media. A few months ago, I had the opportunity to visit Iraq. I spoke to the men and women who are doing a superb job helping the Iraqis to rebuild their lives and helping to train the Iraqi security forces so that they can take control of their own safety and security. They face danger every day, but they keep their cool and behave professionally against extreme provocation. However, one would not know that from the media coverage. The only stories that are widely reported in the British press are the negative ones, which are then relayed across the rest of the world. That gives the armed insurgents the ammunition with which to arm their followers, which thus puts our troops in even more danger. I spoke to many serving soldiers who told me about circumstances in which they have faced insurgents who have known only too well the rules of engagement under which our troops operate and goaded them to a point at which they hoped that our troops would break. However, such is the professionalism of our troops that they invariably do not do that. Nevertheless, accusations are still made, and they are duly investigated by our service police, contrary to what my hon. Friend the Member for Leyton and Wanstead (Harry Cohen) said. I heard of instances of the security services being hampered in their investigations by the unwillingness of alleged victims to give evidence because they had been approached by agents of predatory lawyers who told them not to co-operate with an inquiry, but to sue through the courts for compensation. The Army investigators then stand accused of failing to investigate properly, or covering up, when they are in fact doing their best to investigate properly, but being prevented from doing so. None of that gets properly reported by the British media. It obviously has not reached the ears of my hon. Friend the Member for Leyton and Wanstead. Is it any wonder that some people ask why we are still in Iraq, when all they hear are the negative and unsubstantiated rumours? The men and women on the ground whom I met felt that they were still part of the solution in Iraq, not part of the problem, but we all recognise that there is a fine line that needs to be kept continually under review. We have a job to do at the request of the elected Iraqi Government and we need to stay until the job is done or the Iraqi Government wish us to leave. There is an important task to do in training and helping the Iraqis to take responsibility for their own security. From my own observations, I believe that they have the training, experience and expertise to perform that task well. It is not just the Army, the Marines or the RAF. The Navy, too, is doing its bit. Representing, as I do, the constituency that is the home of the Royal Navy, no one will be surprised that I am speaking up for it, as it was a bone of contention among sailors whom I met on HMS Bulwark in the Arabian Gulf that there was never any recognition in the media back home of the important work that the Navy was doing in Iraq, working with the Iraqi navy to protect the oil terminals that are the lifeblood of Iraq and the economic key to its reconstruction. I saw the professionalism and diplomacy of our modus operandi when boarding unknown craft that had strayed into the exclusion zone. I was shown the basket of gifts that the captain of the patrol vessel carries with him, which are handed out to the crew while the marines search the craft. That is how we win hearts and minds and how we gain the valuable intelligence that we need in the fight against international terrorism, not by going in with all guns blazing, although of course there may be times when that is the appropriate response. When we look at defence policy, we must make sure that we consider how our troops are viewed here at home and in other countries, because that has an impact not only on our ability to defend ourselves, but on our ability to recruit and retain high-quality professionals. We want to make the armed services attractive to young people, to ensure that we recruit people of the highest calibre. We also need to ensure that our armed services are representative of our population. That means encouraging recruitment of men and women from all ethnic backgrounds and reaching out to the gay and lesbian community and encouraging gays and lesbians to join up, rather than the shameful way in which they were treated by the MOD for many years. I was encouraged by my right hon. Friend the Minister of State when he told the House last year that we had recruited our first Muslim, Hindu and Sikh chaplains, and I hope we can continue to work with the Equal Opportunities Commission and the Commission for Racial Equality to ensure greater diversity. For too long, our armed services have been a closed world, hidden behind a cloak of secrecy, because of the fear that operational effectiveness could be compromised. But all too often we have seen that secrecy encouraging a culture of bullying. It goes without saying that junior ranks must obey orders from senior officers without question, because their own lives and those of their colleagues depend on it. However, one thing above all else that came out of my visits to Iraq, Cyprus and Oman is the tremendous team spirit among regiments, air crew and ships companies. They all had a joint commitment to a common goal and they were all fiercely protective of their fellow soldiers, sailors and airmen. Time and again, these young men and women told me that what they appreciated from their armed service was the training that enabled them to operate as a team. Team work is much more likely to be generated by trust, transparency and openness than by operation as a secret closed group. We do not need to bully people into obeying orders and we do not need to break people’s spirit. We no longer operate trench warfare and we do not ask our troops to blindly go over the top in the knowledge that not all of them will survive, but in the hope that some of them will.