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Defence in the World

I am sure that the entire House will agree that it is absolutely typical of the hon. Member for Thurrock (Andrew Mackinlay) that at the end of a long debate such as this one, he is still supplying something absolutely fresh, absolutely original and—dare one say it, however entertaining his contribution—absolutely serious. Before I begin my winding-up speech, I would like to say this. Twenty years ago, I had the occasion to visit the British Airborne cemetery at Oosterbeek near Arnhem. Among the serried rows of gravestones, I was interested to see a considerable number that were engraved not with the Christian cross, but with the Jewish star of David. I realised then that as far as the services in the second world war were concerned, the people from other religions who fought and died for freedom and democracy did so, from this country’s point of view, irrespective of their religion because they were British and because they were proud of the values that we were all standing up to defend. That has now begun to occur in the case of Muslim members of the armed forces. I pay tribute to the first Muslim soldier who was killed in action. He was a British hero, and if we are to fight and win what is fundamentally a battle of ideas, we will depend on people like him—and on his religious community to stand up for people like him and do what is right when extremists in that community seek to add to the dangers of our brave, patriotic, British Muslim servicemen and women. The hon. Member for Vale of Glamorgan (John Smith) made such an impressive speech, in which he said that there was a danger of the strategic defence review being blown off course, that I dug out a copy of that document from my little portfolio. It was produced in 1998 and broadly welcomed, not least by the Opposition. It set out a basic, strategic realignment, given that the likely threats would arise not on the continent of Europe but in locations much further afield. It followed that, if the armed forces were ever engaged in major war fighting, power would have to be projected at a distance. We are no longer an empire and can thus no longer rely on bases in many countries overseas. We cannot even rely on overflying rights, and it was therefore necessary to devise a power projection concept of a moveable base—a base in the sea from which the armed forces could be taken to the theatre of operations and that could project power from the sea to the air, from the sea to the land and from the air to the land. From that came the essential realisation that we needed to focus on the Royal Navy in general and carrier capacity in particular. That strategic concept has not fundamentally changed. However, the prescriptions set out in the document for what would be necessary to fulfil it have changed. Those changes appeared in two other documents that are cited much less frequently. One is the defence White Paper, which was produced at the end of 2003, and the other is the paper on future capabilities, which was produced as a supplement to the White Paper in July 2004. The problem is that the two documents do not match up. The earlier document admitted that the armed forces were engaged in a much heavier scale of operations than the strategic defence review anticipated. However, the rot set in in the 2004 document because that was when the Government started making the cuts in current capabilities to fund current campaigns. They not only cut current capabilities but made cuts in future capabilities, which the strategic defence review had described as necessary to implement the strategy that everyone accepted. Let me concentrate briefly on the Royal Navy and one aspect of it: the frigate and destroyer fleet. When the strategic defence review was published in 1998, it stated that we would cut the number of frigates and destroyers from 35 to 32. After two wars had broken out and were being fought, we suddenly found that, instead of 32 ships to discharge that function, there had been only 31 and a further six were to go, leaving only 25. The argument was put forward—it was dubbed by me, if nobody else, as the Hoon excuse in honour of the right hon. Member for Ashfield (Mr. Hoon), who was then Secretary of State for Defence—that we did not need so many platforms, as the new platforms were going to be more powerful than the old ones. We always knew, however, that we were going to have those new platforms. Even at the time of the SDR, we knew that they were going to be more powerful than the old ones. The difference was that whereas the Navy chiefs had accepted reluctantly a reduction from 35 to 32 in return for getting the carriers, they were now being expected to do the same job with 25. I am not as sanguine as the hon. Member for Portsmouth, South (Mr. Hancock) that the fleet is not in danger of being cut further, because we all know that it is widely rumoured that a Defence Management Board meeting may mothball another six frigates and destroyers.