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Defence Policy

It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Vale of Glamorgan (John Smith) who, as always, made an excellent speech. I welcome this debate. Although it can seem to some that such debates come along like buses—three at a time—this is in fact a perfect time as we have a new ministerial team. Earlier, I welcomed the arrival of the two new Under-Secretaries of State for Defence, the hon. Members for Grantham and Stamford (Mr. Davies) and for North Durham (Mr. Jones), but I did not welcome the Secretary of State's arrival, which was an oversight. His arrival has been welcomed by the armed forces, because of his defence knowledge and constituency interest. His appointment is a very good thing. I also pay tribute to the Secretary of State's predecessor, the right hon. Member for Kilmarnock and Loudoun (Des Browne). From the beginning, when he was faced with the Lynx crash in Basra, which he handled with huge sensitivity, understanding and assiduity, he proved himself to be a good Secretary of State for Defence. We will miss him. Several hon. Members wish to speak, and I have been treated with great indulgence by your calling me, Madam Deputy Speaker—because of my position, rather than my quality, I think—so I shall make only one point. I shall take a little time to make it, but probably not as much as half of the 12 minutes available to each of us. In the United Kingdom, the defence world and Europe as a whole, there is a crisis of understanding about defence. People are talking from different viewpoints without listening to each other, or understanding or hearing what other people say. The armed forces say, ““We need this piece of equipment. Other armed forces have it. For example, the Americans have had explosive suppressant foam in the wings of their aircraft since the 1960s. If you send us into battle without such equipment, you will put us at an unacceptable risk. We will therefore be faced with the choice of going in under-equipped or of saying no to the Armed Forces Minister. It is against our ethos and training to do that, so faced with the choice of being put at risk, or saying no, we are leaving the armed forces.”” That is the position that our armed forces say that they find themselves in. The Treasury says, ““Well, what do you want? Do you want a completely unlimited budget? There is nobody—no individual, no Department—that has an unlimited budget. Do you want us, the Treasury, to make your choices for you? Obviously not, and frankly we would feel more accommodating towards you—you would be more persuasive—if you spent the money better that we do give you. We do not understand what the armed forces are asking for in this case.”” The industry says, ““We would like to understand what the Ministry of Defence is doing, but for the last year at least there has been no real discussion between the Ministry of Defence and industry about what the Ministry is going to do. The Ministry of Defence has been told, first, that there is to be no bad news and, secondly, that there is to be no more money. Those two things are incompatible.”” The people of this country say, ““We do not understand what you are doing in Afghanistan or Iraq. Although we think that on the whole the armed forces are badly treated, we do not want to pay more money to them if they are carrying out projects that we do not understand or support, particularly if that money is to come from our schools and hospitals in order to prop up a corrupt Government in some country that we have never been to. We do not understand what they are doing.”” That crisis of understanding has to be addressed, and it has to be addressed by the new ministerial team. There are people who are to blame for having failed to inspire the public by what we are doing. There are Treasury people who are to blame for treating matters to do with the armed forces as financial, when they are inspirational. A military band cannot be treated as something that can be reduced to pounds, shillings or pence or that can be described in figures. It is a matter of inspiration, and for each band that is cut the military understands that fact but the Treasury does not. The people are to blame, too, because they have forgotten what Pericles said in the Peloponnesian war—if they ever knew. He said that one cannot have happiness without freedom, and one cannot have freedom without courage. He probably said that in some language other than English, but it is crucial and necessary for the people to remember it as they look forward to demanding that a higher proportion of our gross domestic product should go to defence. It is quite wrong that we spend the lowest proportion of our GDP on defence that we have spent since the early 1930s. If we reduce defence spending to such a level, we invite war. It invites the contempt of our enemies and invites them to believe that we no longer believe in our own values. That is where we are. It is for the ministerial team to inspire the country with a vision of what we are doing in Afghanistan and Iraq, of why we are there and of why we need to support our armed forces. At the moment, that is not happening.