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Foreign Affairs and Defence

I will take the hon. Gentleman's intervention in a moment, but before I do so I wish to contrast those figures with the Conservatives' record. Over the last five years under them, defence spending was cut by £500 million a year. I welcome debate on this issue, but it must be debate—rather than just a constant assertion from the Opposition Benches that more needs to be spent, without any conviction that they would be prepared to spend more. I ask the hon. Member for Woodspring (Dr. Fox) to clarify just how much his party would spend on defence. I cannot get an answer from him. Perhaps his party colleague, the hon. Member for Mid-Sussex will be able to do so; the next time we debate this matter he might intervene on his Front-Bench colleague and ask him precisely how much he will spend on defence. The situation is unclear, and I am rapidly coming to the view that the Opposition are deliberately confusing the issue. The hon. Member for Aldershot (Mr. Howarth) said on the BBC ““Newsnight”” programme on 6 September 2007 that his party had made it crystal clear that if they were to take office tomorrow they would spend more on defence. He said that in terms. The problem is that the leader of his party, the right hon. Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron), had already said in April 2007 on Webcameron—the comments are still there for people to see—"““there is no magic pot of money we can dip into to spend a lot more on the Armed Services””." The money is not there according to the hon. Gentleman's leader, but he says he will spend more. That is not the end of the confusion. In the last defence debate, the hon. Member for Woodspring criticised our defence spending but could not come up with a figure for how much defence spending should be, despite the fact that at the beginning of his speech he had suggested he had been ready to go into a general election a week beforehand. He was not in a position to give us a figure despite what he had suggested; he said we would need to wait for an election. Yesterday, when he was pressed on the issue on BBC South West, he also refused to give a straightforward answer. We cannot have such posturing. If the Opposition's policy is to spend more on defence, they must clearly tell us that that is the case; otherwise, we should look at what they do rather than at what they say—which is what they suggest we do in terms of others. What did they do when in government? They cut defence spending.