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Defence in the World

I commend my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth, East (Mr. Ellwood) on his remarks about the lack of co-ordination between DFID and the armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is one of the abiding problems that NATO as a whole and even our own Government have failed adequately to address. In a wider context, it has become something of a cliché to say that following the tearing down of the Berlin wall, we now live in an age of uncertainty. Increasingly, however, the Government are becoming lost in a fog of their own making about how to engage in the new world disorder. The central policy of this tired Government has become to abdicate their responsibilities, seeking to subcontract their foreign and defence policy to international institutions. While they waste their political capital on such an unrealistic policy, there is almost complete paralysis in the Ministry of Defence. It is so stretched by the demands that are placed on it by the Government's foreign commitments, it is now living virtually from month to month. The three-year spending round is clearly insufficient to pay for current procurement programmes or to match the stated manning requirement, but the Government seem determined to avoid the consequences of that. There was a meeting in the Ministry of Defence last week to try to resolve the spending difficulties, but substantial decisions still come there none. The Government will do all they can to avoid facing up to the key point that they have not adequately funded the armed forces. While Ministers keep their heads in the sand, the serious point is that the UK is in danger of relegating itself to a third division status among the world powers. The current Government's attitude to foreign affairs appears to involve a further retreat into a reliance on international institutions, such as the UN, the EU, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Here, so the Prime Minister told us recently, can our influence be most effective, reforming those institutions to make them more powerful and more effective for the 21st century. The Prime Minister's foreign policy speech in Boston identified many of the further challenges, but the world's problems will not be solved by committee meetings in New York or Brussels; they will only be solved on the streets of Baghdad, Kabul and other cities in Asia, Africa and the middle east. The Prime Minister says that"““global problems require global solutions; the greatest of global challenges demands of us the boldest of global reforms””." However, such truisms do not seem to grasp the fact that the only real actors in global events are not the international institutions but the nations they represent. Hence, China will not compromise on industrialisation in the face of western fears about climate change; Iran will not give up her desire to obtain nuclear weapons, or stop interfering in the security of her neighbour, Iraq; Russia will not stop pursuing the aggressive, bullying nationalism that has characterised the Putin presidency, such as the threatening of energy supplies to its neighbours. Those very same countries render impotent the international institutions upon which the Prime Minister keeps vesting so much of his political capital. The west is not immune, either. The Government should reflect on the fact that the United States will not recognise the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court because, somewhat justifiably, it wishes to protect its soldiers against malicious legal actions. France will be France; Germany will be Germany. The idea that major international actors such as the US, China and Russia are altruistically going to give up national interest to pursue a so-called global agenda is little more than a cod-Marxist fantasy. If the Prime Minister is to make a real impact on the world stage, he must deal with the world as it now is and not how he wishes it to be, and be prepared to assert our own role on the world stage.