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Defence in the UK

I certainly am, Madam Deputy Speaker, but I think it essential that the defence of the United Kingdom depend on communities’ trust in the police and in the police’s ability to conduct anti-terrorist operations in this country without people being put at risk if they assist the authorities by being exposed in the media. I will move on now, but it is a matter of extreme concern that we are not fighting and winning the battle against terrorism, which, after all, is at the heart of the defence of the United Kingdom. As part of the Prime Minister’s legacy, the Government recently published a policy review entitled ““Building on progress: Britain in the World?. It does contain one feature relating to the defence of the UK of which I thoroughly approve; I wish only that it had been formulated earlier. We read the following on page 30 of this 32-page document:"““As agreed by the Ad Hoc Group on Terrorism, a new cross-government research, information and communications unit is being created to generate the policy analysis and material needed to…counter Al Qaeda ideology and the use of other forms of extremist propaganda by hostile regimes.?" I hope that the unit’s work will not be confined to hostile regimes. We hear time and again that we are engaged in a war of ideas, and such a war can be won only by a proper counter-propaganda strategy. We were good at that during the cold war and the second world war, but it is true to say that we have not even begun to fight that type of war properly, some six years after 11 September. This is a very late development, albeit a welcome one. In the time that remains, I refer finally to methods of maintaining morale in the armed forces. One method is to show a degree of competence in handling the armed forces when they get into difficulties. I find it absolutely astonishing that when the decision was taken to allow Royal Navy personnel to sell their stories to the media, the effect was not considered on morale—on the morale of people whose children had come home in coffins; on the morale of people who had limbs blown off while serving in theatres of war overseas; or on the morale of servicemen and women who might find themselves in extremely dangerous situations and who might have to weigh up the alternatives of fighting to the last bullet or surrendering and selling their stories when eventually they were repatriated. In terms of the propaganda war to which I referred, did no one consider how it would serve the Iranians’ purpose to be able to say that the people who were selling their stories were exaggerating in order to justify the money they were being paid? It is no good having leaks and spin doctors. What is needed is a concerted strategy, properly organised by a counterpart to the political warfare executive or the information research department, if one likes, or the London controlling section that managed to carry out deception strategies, if that is what we are trying to do where our enemies are concerned. Such a strategy has to be organised properly. Splitting the Home Office down the middle makes it hard to see how a cross-Department approach will work. What we actually need is departmental co-ordination and we are not getting that yet. I can only hope that the Minister will be able to reassure us that in future the defence of the UK against an ideological terrorist threat will be far more systematically organised than it has been in the past.