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Defence in the UK

I fully take the reproof from my right hon. Friend. He is absolutely right on that point. Of course, we are not sure how many people in that poll did not express an opinion. I hope that a lot fewer than 21 per cent. did not have a positive view of the armed forces. Indeed, a considerable proportion might have had no view at all. There will always be some people who have no view about anything whatever, and I suspect that their views about the armed forces are no exception, strange though it may seem. Resources have been mentioned briefly, but I wish to spend a little more time on them. There are some problems, such as erratic allowance payments, to which I have referred, which are not about resources, but all too many are. I return, as I have on a number of other occasions, to the speech that the former Prime Minister Tony Blair made on HMS Albion in early 2007. He was looking back on his decade in power and talking about the extent to which the Labour Government had invested in defence. He said that defence expenditure had remained roughly constant over that decade, at 2.5 per cent. of gross domestic product, before adding these fateful words: if the costs of Afghanistan and Iraq are included. That means that in that period, in which we embarked on two major counter-insurgency campaigns, we were spending 2.5 per cent. of GDP before we went into Afghanistan and, taking everything together, we were spending 2.5 per cent. afterwards. We were spending 2.5 per cent. of GDP before we went into Iraq and, taking everything together, we were still spending 2.5 per cent. after we went in. We are told time and again that those conflicts are being funded from the Treasury reserve, but that simply sounds to me like a bookkeeping exercise. If we take one pot of money, add it to another pot of money and still come up with the same percentage of GDP being spent on defence as before we went to war, that effectively means that we are fighting two conflicts on a peacetime defence budget. That is why the Conservatives have said that when we take power, we will have a strategic defence review, to get our commitments back into line with our expenditure. I do not know what the conditions will be when that time occurs. However, I do know that we will fully fund the commitments that we undertake or we will not undertake them. That has not been happening, which has lead to something that is dangerous for the defence of the United Kingdom and British interests more widely. That development has led to the services beginning to fight among themselves for inadequate resources. Indeed, it is even leading to a situation in which service chiefs are talking about making unacceptable choices, even within their own service parameters. What I mean by that is that one cannot be involved at a high level in any considerations of what the Army's future role will be without hearing people talk about whether we should spend the money that we have on fighting what are called the wars of the 21st century or on preparing for high intensity state-on-state conflict, which may or may not come about in the years ahead. Those are the sorts of choices that the Army should not have to make. I do not want to stretch the terms of the debate too much, but it is dangerous to be in a situation where we are engaged in campaigns that are making Army chiefs think that they might have to abandon the traditional role of the Army, which is to be able to defend the United Kingdom if ever the international scene darkens closer to home. With recent events involving Russia, that is not nearly as fanciful a prospect now as it might have seemed only a year or two ago.