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Royal Navy

No, I will not give way, because I am conscious that we have to make progress. I will take one or two interventions later, but I am not going to be harried in the way that the hon. Gentleman quite likes. He will get the opportunity to make his point later. I want to make a final point about budgets. When the hon. Gentleman’s party is considering what it is going to do about budgets for defence, it should bear in mind the fact that the defence budget today is 20 per cent. higher than it was in 1997 and 7.5 per cent. higher in real terms. That is a considerable investment in the military element of our overall budget approach in this country. I will deal more with that as I go on. A key principle of the strategic defence review was that, in reshaping our forces, we would give them a real utility for dealing with the problems of the future, and not just an appearance of strength. There were arguments in the past that said that if one ship went, one other ship should come in. That was not what the SDR was about. The issue is about meeting the evolving situation and the analysis that was laid out in the strategic defence review. That is precisely what we have done and continue to do in respect of the Royal Navy. We knew that we had moved away from the risk of large-scale maritime warfare. We believed that future tasks would require a mix of capabilities—capabilities that would enable us to conduct tasks ranging from evacuation operations through to major war fighting as part of a joint force. So it has proved to be.