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Defence in the UK

I apologise for missing the opening speeches and two hours of the debate. I was attending a dinner that the Minister for Europe gave for the President of Georgia. The hon. Member for Mid-Sussex (Mr. Soames) is almost Churchillian in his oratory, but he is guilty of missing out a bit of history from the Falklands to 1997, when he was a distinguished Minister, as was my successor as Chairman of the Defence Committee. I still find it difficult to view the work of the Defence Committee with detachment. Leaving it was not voluntary but imposed by a rule for which I did not vote and that I did not appreciate. I remember reading that the hon. Gentleman’s grandfather famously said after the war that history would be kind to him because he would be writing the history. That was prophetic and brilliant and no hon. Member, with the possible exception of the hon. Gentleman, has more admiration for his grandfather than me. However, the hon. Gentleman was a Minister when the defence budget fell from 5.5 per cent. to 2.5 per cent. I recall Ministers appearing before the Defence Committee, and our pleading with them, ““Please don’t think because the cold war is over that the threat to our national security has been dissipated. History shows that crises will return.? I am not trying to be hostile; I want to be constructive in the same way as the hon. Gentleman and others. Governments are always guilty of finding reasons for not increasing expenditure on defence and for cutting defence spending. In 1997, the Defence Committee was Conservative led, and our last report before the general election said something along the lines of, ““Defence expenditure has fallen to such a dramatically low level that, should any further cuts be introduced, we believe it will endanger the defence of the realm.? The Government appear to be following a tradition of doing the bare necessity. I support the Government—if I supported the party under Michael Foot, I will always support it. I cringe about some of the things for which I had to vote in the 1980s, holding my nose every time I went through the Lobby to vote on defence issues. There was one exception: the Falklands, when Michael Foot returned to his ““guilty men? days, and I applauded him. I remember writing a mostly historical book about my local Staffordshire Regiment, which survived the Conservative Government. Thank God for the right hon. and learned Member for Kensington and Chelsea (Sir Malcolm Rifkind), who reversed some of the atrocious cuts that the Government had pushed through. Unfortunately, the new Government got their own back on some of the regiments that survived, and the early options for change policy appears to be in the process of implementation. As we have seen with some of the failures of the previous Government, supporters of this Government will also look back critically in 10, 15 or however many years. When I came to the debate late, I had a sense of déjà vu, because the sale of the Ministry of Defence housing estate—sold by Michael Portillo to Annington Homes, also known as the Nomura corporation of Tokyo, Japan—was again being discussed. In the early 1990s, the Conservative-led Defence Committee said that the cuts to Defence Medical Services, as a result of defence costs study 15, had proceeded at such a pace and intensity that it doubted that it could ever recover. The Labour Government made one of the biggest mistakes—which has been referred to rather approvingly—in flogging off the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency. That was an atrocious decision, even though people now take some pride in it. The hon. Member for Portsmouth, South (Mr. Hancock) was part of our four inquiries’ endeavour—