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Defence in the World

I welcome the opportunity to have the debate today. I welcome the Defence Secretary back from his recent trip to Baghdad, safe and able to give us an up-to-date account of events there. I quite understand that he has had to keep an important commitment elsewhere, which means that he has left his place. I also welcome the speech from the hon. Member for Woodspring (Dr. Fox), which was thought-provoking and covered a wide canvas in a balanced way. It invited us, in a constructive tone, to debate issues that we must debate now and on future occasions. There is no doubt that our role in the world and the role of our armed forces have moved a great deal in a relatively short time. Although it seems a long time, it is not so long ago that we were still in the atmosphere of the cold war and the Soviet threat. One of the points that the hon. Gentleman made was that in a global era, we are in every sense in a state of interdependency. The solutions to the problems that we face can be arrived at only through our international alliances and by working with others, particularly with NATO, the United Nations and, on occasion, the European Union. All those institutions have major faults and flaws, but the UN it is the only show in town, so it is essential that we all work together to rebuild and develop further the authority of the United Nations and its capacity to help bring and maintain peace in various parts of the world. The 1998 strategic defence review identified the role of Britain’s armed forces as acting as a force for good around the world. In many respects, the Prime Minister’s recent speech in Plymouth updated that commitment and looked forward to Britain continuing to do that. No doubt hon. Members in all parts of the House agree and see that as our role in the future. As the hon. Member for Woodspring said, if we have that lofty ambition for ourselves, there is without doubt a mismatch between the amount of commitments that we are taking on and the amount of resource that we are devoting to them. We need a debate about making more resource available. I am sympathetic to those who suggest that that is necessary, but even if we arrived at a consensus, and even if the Treasury were part of the consensus and we moved in that direction immediately, there would be a time lag between that decision and the additional capability that might result. Whether we put extra resources into manpower or into more and better equipment for the future, each of those would take time to feed through to our fighting capacity. The problems arising from the mismatch, the stretch, the impact on families, the result of acting beyond the defence planning assumptions, and the effect of not adhering to the harmony guidelines are all immediate problems. That is why, in the short term, achieving a better balance between the commitment that we are taking on and the resource that we have at our disposal to carry it out must entail some reduction in our commitment. I therefore welcome the Secretary of State’s further explanations of the ongoing situation in Iraq. I believe that the Prime Minister is right when he says that we would all like to see troops coming back from Iraq as soon as possible and that that can be done only after we have been in a position to hand over responsibility in the provinces that we are continuing to run.