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Defence in the UK

I would rather not at the moment, because I am conscious that we have only a limited time for the debate, and I do not want to speak for too long. Also, the hon. Lady has had one go. Moving on to the defence industry base, I should like to point out that Lord Drayson's welcome return to government would perhaps have been a little more welcome if he had returned to the defence procurement field in which he was doing rather well when he felt it necessary to leave government. One can only speculate as to whether he was not invited back to that position, or whether he decided that he did not want to return to it for the same reasons that he decided to leave in the first place. I do not think that that decision was entirely to do with motor racing. The defence industrial base is of great value to the economy. Of course, there are traditional problems relating to procurement, which I do not have time to go into in any detail today. However, I would like—in a constructive way, I hope—to take one case study as an example of the sort of thing that Ministers should be thinking about in relation to our shipbuilding industry. We know that the Government started out with a commitment to build 12 new destroyers. The number then went down to eight, and it has finally been settled at six. We know that the 1998 strategic defence review lowered the number of frigates and destroyers from 35 to 32. The number then went down to 31, then to 25. It is now down to 22. We also know that Admiral Lord West, when he was chief of the Navy, said over and over again—rather courageously, I thought, as he was still in office—that the Royal Navy needed about 30 frigates and destroyers to discharge its tasks. If we are going to have only six Type 45 destroyers, we are going to need something of the order of 24 new frigates. It will be very hard to persuade the Treasury to finance that. Believe it or not, I think that Defence Ministers—even in a Labour Government—actually want to get the best possible deal for the armed forces, just as defence spokesmen in the Opposition believe in the very same thing. I urge the Ministers to urge the naval designers, the admirals and the Ministry of Defence, when they are designing the future surface combatant, to make the vessels as basic and economical as possible, and to get as many hulls as possible into the water. They should not make the mistake, which has so often been made in the past, of upgrading the specification over and over again, with the result that we end up with half the number of ships that we originally intended to have. It is much more possible to achieve these aims in this day and age than it was in the past. Our naval shipbuilders—and, to some extent, aircraft designers—have now developed techniques that enable them to put a vessel into the water, or an aircraft into service, with spare capacity. Everyone knows that there is a rather large gymnasium on the Type 45 destroyers. Everyone also knows that, as and when the Government can afford it, they will acquire tactical Tomahawk missiles that can be inserted into that spare space in the destroyers. There is another reason why the new frigates should be designed to be as basic and economical as possible, and that as many as possible should be built. It is not only to keep the shipbuilding industry alive, or to maintain the necessary number of hulls that everyone knows the Navy needs for escort vessels, but to give us a chance to export the vessels in their simpler form to other countries. When we build vessels at the top of the range from the outset, they are unsaleable to anyone else. I wish to conclude my remarks as this is a truncated debate. I am well aware that the two conflicts abroad not only place pressure on our domestic situation, but do not exist in isolation. I alluded to the security threat at home, and the fact is that Government machinery has not kept pace with these matters. Last year's debate on defence in the UK took place on 26 April and I welcomed the creation of the research, information and communications unit, which will be taking steps to try to get the message right about the threats to the UK that arise domestically, but which are interconnected with the campaigns we are waging abroad. The trouble is that the machinery is still not properly co-ordinated in the sense that individual Departments are trying to defend the UK in individual stovepipe arrangements. The nearest thing we have to a security Minister is someone at Under-Secretary of State level, with primary emphasis being laid on the Home Office and local government departments. We face integrated and interconnected threats in the UK and abroad, and we need a national security strategy and appropriate machinery to implement it. That is why Baroness Neville-Jones has a seat in the shadow Cabinet as national security adviser. Under an incoming Conservative Prime Minister, she would hold that post and be at the head of an organisation—a national security council—that was truly cross-departmental. I want to say a last word about communications. This is not a debate on defence in the world, but when we read headlines at home that Army chiefs are saying such things as, ““The war cannot be won in Afghanistan,”” it is easy to say that the Army chiefs ought to be more careful about what sort of words they use when they are discussing concepts that are nothing new at all. In reality, however, there is also a responsibility on journalists not to sensationalise things that are simply common sense. Let me give a brief quote from the internal report produced at the conclusion of the 38-year Operation Banner—effectively the counter-insurgency campaign, if I may use that phrase, in Northern Ireland:"““Security forces do not 'win' insurgency campaigns militarily; at best they can contain or suppress the level of violence and achieve a successful end-state. They can thus reduce a situation to an 'acceptable level of violence'…What is required is a level which the population can live with, and with which local police forces can cope.””" I have put it another way when talking about these problems: in counter-insurgency, the enemy has to be identified, isolated and, so far as is possible, neutralised; but at the end of a counter-insurgency operation there always has to be negotiation with part of the enemy—the part that has been forced to recognise that it is not going to win and that is pragmatic enough to reach a settlement. I do not believe that anything that has been said about this by the Army differs in any way from that traditional approach. I also believe that it is important that the media realise their responsibility; when our military chiefs are making perfectly sensible comments, they should not be turned into headlines saying, ““Our efforts are doomed.”” On the contrary, our efforts are not doomed. The purpose of our efforts is to make the enemy see that they cannot win so that, eventually, the more sensible elements of that enemy can be brought into the political process.