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Defence Procurement

I thoroughly endorse the overall concept that we should work together closely with Europe. Is the hon. Gentleman as concerned as I am that individual countries still want to maintain their independent sovereign operations? It is silly that we are all reinventing the wheel by producing our own arms for our own personal consumption to maintain employment in our own countries. It is much better done on a cross-European basis. However, if, for example, we were considering landing French planes on our aircraft carriers, we would realise that their carriers sometimes have completely different decks and the French planes would shoot across our decks and fall off the other end, as we do not have restraint barriers in place because we have vertical take-off and landing aircraft. That is the sort of difficulty that we have to struggle with.