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Foreign Affairs and Defence

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Stockton, North (Frank Cook), who I know has done a tremendous amount of work on Afghanistan, which I shall deal with in a moment. He and I have discussed the matter before and I fear that he might not agree with everything that I have to say. I want to start off by dealing with two defence matters that relate specifically to my constituency, although they both involve enormous amounts of defence expenditure. The first is the AirTanker project, for which a company in my constituency—Cobham Air Refuelling and Auxiliary Mission Equipment—provides all the gizmos that enable those tankers to refuel aircraft in flight. The company, which has, essentially, almost a world monopoly, developed the system in the 1930s and has gone on to produce a piece of equipment that is second to none anywhere in the world. My concern, and that of my constituents, is that we have been almost at the signature point of the contract, which is allegedly worth about £13 billion over 27 years —it is a private sector partnership—but we are still not there. That is giving some cause for concern. What is the delay in the Ministry of Defence in signing off the contract? There are international implications, too. The configuration of aircraft—the A330 Airbus, with Rolls-Royce engines and other pieces of equipment—has already been bought by and is flying in the Australian force. The United Arab Emirates has already signed up for that configuration. A similar configuration is flying in the German air force. We are on the verge of reaching a bidding round for that equipment for the United States—not the 15 aircraft that the RAF is talking about, but hundreds. The configuration is in with a good chance, but if the British Government have not even signed it off, will not the United States Government question whether it is as good as we claim it is? The Government have a duty to act quickly to sign off that contract and to get those aircraft flying in the RAF. The other constituency matter that I want to mention is the defence training review. It is another major public-private partnership, which essentially involves the privatisation of six defence colleges, one of which is in my constituency—the Defence College of Communications and Information Systems. I do not want to reopen the argument about whether it should be privatised, or whether all six defence colleges should be moved to one site at St. Athan in Wales. However, I want to flag up that in the Blandford area of Dorset, where the camp has an economic footprint of nearly £300 million a year according to the regional development agency, we are anxious that we should keep the high-tech presence. If it remains a military establishment, as the Government have made the commitment that it will, it is essential that it should remain the home of the signals. It should be the centre of signals activity, with the signals officer in chief based there, and other signals regiments should be brought on to that site so that it maintains that part of the knowledge economy that is essential to the local Dorset economy. I said earlier that I wanted to talk about Afghanistan and I want to consider the question of who pays. We all know that the international security assistance force and NATO forces are paid for by the Government and by our taxpayers and those of the other countries that are part of that international force. Obviously, a major contribution is made by the United States. However, have we ever asked ourselves who is paying for the other side? Who is financing the Taliban and the insurgents? We are paying them, too. They are getting their money from the heroin on the streets of this country, of other countries of western Europe and of the United States. Some 90 per cent. of the heroin on our streets comes from Afghanistan. Not only the heroin costs—that goes somewhere in the black economy—but we as taxpayers face the costs to the criminal justice system, the health care system and the benefits system. My hon. Friend the Member for Woking (Mr. Malins) wrote a pamphlet earlier this year based on his experience as a distinguished lawyer and district judge. He estimated that the cost of narcotics to the British taxpayer was about £23 billion a year. What is the cost of the heroin? What is the cost of the poppy crop in Afghanistan? I asked questions of the Department for International Development last year, and I was told that the amount collectively made by Afghan farmers from poppies at the farm gate was $600 million. The poppy crop has expanded since then, and it is probably worth an estimated $1 billion. Compared with the £23 billion cost to the United Kingdom—never mind all the other countries that are receiving this poppy product, heroin—that is a drop in the ocean. My contention—I was surprised to see it on the front page of The Guardian coming from the mouth of Lord Malloch-Brown—is that we in Europe have a great deal of expertise in buying crops from farmers that we were simply going to destroy. We called it intervention under the common agricultural policy. We then developed a policy of paying farmers to grow nothing at all; we called it set-aside. Is it beyond the wit of man to apply our great expertise from the common agricultural policy to the Afghan poppy crop? If it costs us $1 billion collectively among all our allied nations, that is probably worth it. If it costs us $1 billion this year, next year and the year after, I would have thought that that was a price worth paying.