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Defence in the UK

It is obvious from the way in which the hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton (Linda Gilroy) spoke that she does an enormous amount of extraordinarily valuable work both on and outside the Defence Committee, and it is a great pleasure to follow her. I will refer to some of the things that she said a little later in my speech, which will be brief. This is a debate on defence in the UK, but since the strategic defence review our strategy rests on an expeditionary policy, so we try to project our defence way beyond the UK. In some ways, defence in the UK is no longer as much of an issue as it once was. It is not regarded by the public as a particularly high priority because NATO has been a victim of its own success. Because NATO has been so successful over the decades, most people feel reasonably secure in defence terms. The result was that we took the peace dividend at the end of the cold war, which has been a serious mistake. My own view is that we should be spending significantly more on defence, but the trouble is that no Chancellor of the Exchequer, Labour or Conservative, will spend significantly more on defence unless the public demand that they do exactly that. However, that demand is beginning to come about, and one of the people most responsible for that was Sergeant Roberts, who died because he had to give up his armour to somebody else. He did not die in vain, because his death generated a sense of unfairness among the British people about the way in which we were treating our troops. I am delighted that there has been a real increase in support for defence spending in opinion polls across the country. We took the peace dividend, and since then the defences of Europe have never really recovered. America has gone a different and I believe more sensible way, and we in Europe need to go much more along the American defence spending line. I entirely agree with the point made by the Liberal Democrat spokesman, the hon. Member for Colchester (Bob Russell)—not his outrageous attack on my sale to Annington Homes, of course, which was all nonsense, but his point on the need for a bigger military footprint. It is essential that our armed forces should be encouraged more to wear uniforms in the streets and on the trains, to establish that they are part of the ordinary community. It would bring them closer to the community of British people whom they serve so well and so bravely. This is a debate on defence in the UK, but I wish to trespass briefly on your indulgence, Mr. Deputy Speaker, to comment on a visit that the Defence Committee made last week to Afghanistan. The success of our deployment in Afghanistan will have huge importance in the UK, because Afghanistan is the source of the vast majority of heroin in this country. We came away from the visit with a sense of confusion about our role in relation to heroin and the poppy. Are we there to destroy the poppy, to support the destruction of the poppy by the Afghan national army, to destroy some but not all of the poppy, or to leave it be? If we were a little confused about that, the Afghan people, whose hearts and minds we are trying to win, will be very confused about our stance. As ever, we were very impressed by the morale and quality of our British forces in Afghanistan. We must remember that it is our job as politicians to ensure that our British forces are clear about their role and that, as a result, the Afghan people are clear about what we are doing there. One of the purposes of our presence is to prevent Afghanistan again providing a base for terrorist attacks on the UK, but there has been a worrying failure of communication. According to the Secretary of State for International Development, we are no longer to use the term ““war on terror?. I think that he has a good point about that, but we are part of an international struggle and we need a coherent approach across our allies. I worry that we seem to have no campaign plan to combat terrorism, either in this country or in the wider world. It is not surprising that we are losing the information war in the UK and seeing the radicalisation of Muslim youth if we have no joined-up campaign plan that everybody understands and to which everybody subscribes. Either we have a plan that is not being properly explained by this Government and the international community, in which case the Government should begin to explain our plan better very soon, or—more alarmingly—there is no overall strategy to cope with the terrorist threat. Let us suppose for a moment that we do have a plan, but that we are communicating it badly. That is symptomatic of a wider failure to engage in and win the communication war. In Afghanistan and Iraq, the terrorists we face are extraordinarily good at turning everything to their advantage. They have realised that the deaths of Afghans or Iraqis play to their agenda. They have also realised that the deaths of coalition forces play to their agenda. So the more deaths there are in either country, the more the terrorists seem able to take advantage of the media opportunities that they create. We have not worked out, in our rather plodding western way, how to win or even how to fight that information propaganda battle.