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Royal Navy

There will probably come a point in the not-too-distant future when I will be on the Government Benches answering the questions and taking responsibility for policy. In the meantime, it is this Minister and this Government who need to answer for one basic fact. They set out the defence planning assumptions that came from the SDR, and they are responsible for the overstretch. Either they need to reduce those assumptions or increase the resources to match them. What they cannot do is to continue with those assumptions in the light of the current force strength. Doing so produces continual overstretch, the results of which we see daily. As is customary for the Opposition—and as Labour did when in opposition—we will produce our own review of what we believe to be this country’s foreign policy imperatives, and from that we will conduct a full review when we take office, as the Government did in 1998. In the meantime, it is up to the Government to defend their stewardship of our armed forces, which I am afraid has been lacking up to now.