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Defence in the UK

I am sorry to show how bipartisan the report was. Therefore, Governments fail. At the beginning of this Government, I remember making what I thought was an amusing speech, which I called the A to Z of Tory procurement—the Clerks advised ““foul-ups? as the final words. I said at the time that the speech had been made too soon, and now is the time to accuse the Labour party of making procurement mistakes. All Governments make mistakes. They should at least have the humility to know when mistakes have been made, and look to history to try to avoid such mistakes in the future. The history of the British armed forces over the past 200 years shows an oscillation between intense effort to meet a sudden threat and—almost in a matter of days after the threat was over and military victory had been achieved—the inevitable descent in expenditure and recruitment. Once again, having bottomed out, a crisis emerges and the situation must be repaired in a short space of time. What are the current dangers? We have all said that we now look back on the cold war almost as the halcyon days. We knew the enemy then: all the Germans looked like Anton Diffring, and the Russians all looked like Russians. Now, however, we live in a different world. The threat is different, but I fear that some of the cold war threats and problems will sneak back. There was a time when the cold war had apparently ended, and we were in our euphoric phase. With Gorbachev, Yeltsin and the beginning of democracy, we were in a loving embrace with Russia—no longer the Soviet Union—with NATO training the Russian military and good words all round. Anyone who thought that that would last in perpetuity had no knowledge of, interest in or wish to gain the experience of history. It is too soon to start getting paranoid about developments, but we need to be aware of them. Russia went through an humiliating period, and is now coming out of it. The British and others helped Russia to develop its oil and gas industry, and now, understandably, it is becoming increasingly wealthy and self-confident. We are beginning to hear phrases which, if not alarming, are cause for concern. The cold war created the need for cold war expenditure and action. Then we entered a period in which people said ““Well, there is only one superpower now. All is going swimmingly. Russia is no longer a threat, and China does not really count.? We are moving into a different era now. We are no longer in a unipolar state; we are in a multipolar state. We are seeing a multiplication of ownership of nuclear weapons, and countries with significant grievances. As I am sure other Members have pointed out, we face a new range of threats. There are environmental threats, and of course there is the growth of terrorism. We are having to deal with those new threats, but we may also face a recurrence of the old threats. It has been said that in an era in which we need forces that can be deployed rapidly, we do not need heavy tanks. People have said ““No one wants the Eurofighter any more, because it is surplus to requirements.? We are going to have to prepare for a traditional, conventional war, such as we fought only three years ago. We must prepare to defend ourselves with the concepts and strategies that were used in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, while having to deal with terrorism at home and a multitude of other pressures that we are beginning to recognise. Can that be done with a defence budget that is falling to a level close to 2.2 or 2.3 per cent., perhaps even closer than we fear? It cannot. As everyone with a sense of history knows, after the Ottoman navy was largely sunk at Lepanto, the Ottomans licked their wounds, sailed home in what ships they had, chopped down every tree in Anatolia and built a new navy in six months, after which they were back winning naval victories. Our protracted procurement process may mean a delay of 10, 15 or 20 years. We must start to anticipate what the dangers may be in 10 or 15 years, or perhaps even sooner. Members may say ““You have criticised the Government. Now may we have a little plug for the Government?? The hon. Member for Mid-Sussex rightly said that the strategic defence review was overdue and that its analysis was correct. Adjustments were made because of succeeding events, but one wonders how long it will be before more adjustments are needed. I am not calling for a new SDR, but five years from now we may be forced to admit that the strategic environment is different from the one that existed when the SDR was drawn up in the late 1990s. I do not wish to be seen as an old cold war warrior who, Rip van Winkle-like, has fallen asleep for a decade and then returned to the world as if nothing had happened. I genuinely believe that we are entering a dangerous period of international relations. I am very pro-America, and always have been. We should support the alliance, and support the United States even when things look pretty stupid over there. Anyone with a sense of history will know the importance of the United States to the security and survival of western Europe. Who was largely responsible for the delivery of eastern and central Europe? It was not the British or the French; it was the United States. Because of the deteriorating economic environment in the United States and the bruising that it, like the British, has received over Iraq, my concern is that the United States might do what it did after 1918-19: retreat into itself and say, ““Well, it’s your problem.? It must not do that. However good our armed forces are, and even with Trident II or Trident III, could we survive? No, we could not. Can we rely on the European Union to defend us? No, we cannot. In the dangerous world in which we now live, there must be an increasingly close relationship between the traditional allies—not only between the English-speaking peoples, but right across the world. The economic, social and demographic threats that we face have to be dealt with, but the primary threat will be the multiplicity of threats that I have been talking about. We can cope with those threats only by means of a solid twin-tracked alliance in which the American part is matched—and not only in terms of the quality of armed forces. We have learned that defence is no longer a matter only for the Ministry of Defence. That brings me on to my main point. The debate is on defence, but the topic is in some respects anachronistic. Defence is a watertight area of Government policy. We know exactly what it is, who makes most of the decisions—the Chancellor—and who makes the decisions consequent upon his decisions. We know the personnel involved. However, 9/11 showed that each Department of State is not watertight. No solid wall can be built around the Foreign Office or the MOD. In fairness to the Executive, they have built up and developed a system of decision making that transcends departmental stovepipes. However, it is far from perfect, and I do not want there to be a crisis of decision making so that there needs to be an inquiry into that failure. I do not want the Government to have to rework constantly their decision-making and policy-making procedures to ensure that, in the event of a crisis—whether a minor crisis involving a relatively minor terrorist attack, or a major crisis—the entire series of edifices of central Government, Cabinet and Cabinet Committees, with the entire range of personnel involved, are so well calibrated in terms of both domestic politics and our relations with our international partners that our response is sufficiently swift and effective. My major concern is an institution that is closer to home: our House of Commons. The Executive have over time acted to create a more cross-cutting decision-making process, but parliamentary structures remain wedded to 19th-century principles. We even call Select Committees ““departmental Select Committees?. However, the Defence Committee, which I was proud to chair, broke the mould. After 9/11, a meeting was held—a couple of Members who are present attended it—of the Defence Committee, the Foreign Affairs Committee and the International Development Committee. It was a substitute for a second recall of Parliament after 9/11. I contacted the Chairmen of those Committees as well as the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, which is not a Select Committee, of course, and said, ““Look, we’re all going to be involved in an inquiry into 9/11. Let’s get the ground rules right so that we do not keep calling the same people.? I asked the Defence Committee staff and others to list from one to 10 the best forms of inquiry. At the top of the list was a joint inquiry across the board: one large committee with inputs from the other Committees. At the bottom was the option of no co-operation whatsoever. What model of co-operation was chosen? The bottom but one, which was a joint briefing from the intelligence services. So the Defence Committee said, ““Sod you—we are doing our own.? A lot of people were angry. One Cabinet Minister was incandescent with rage because we, the Defence Committee, at the instigation of the MOD, were undertaking an inquiry way beyond our competence as a Select Committee. We did it, however, and we covered defence and, to an extent, foreign affairs, home affairs, civil contingencies preparation and response, aviation and maritime security, the response of the health service, regional and local government, policing, and the private sector in a genuinely integrated inquiry, carried out by the Defence Committee on its own. After that we had exhausted our good will with the other Committees, which had progressively joined in, so we sank back again into our stovepipe. I have done a lot of research on this issue. I wrote to the Leader of the House, who was not interested in my proposal. The Chairman of the Modernisation Committee was quite interested, but I got no reply from the Liaison Committee. I said, ““Can we not think of ways of improving the situation and of getting out of our ‘stovepipe-ism’? Can’t we have national security committee, which could be ad hoc and would come into effect only if a crisis occurred that required the Select Committee system to get the Committees together in a combined endeavour to deal with it??