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Defence in the UK

My right hon. and learned—and, now we discover, gallant—Friend the Member for Kensington and Chelsea (Sir Malcolm Rifkind) has just given an appalling portrayal of the defence of this country clinging on by the skin of its teeth. Twenty-three years ago, just before I became a Member of Parliament, I sat in the Public Gallery and watched a Secretary of State mesmerising the House of Commons. If I thought that I would immediately follow him on the Floor of the House, after the intervening period in which he served as Secretary of State of Defence and Foreign Secretary, I would have been appalled, and I would have been right. However, it is a great honour to follow my right hon. and learned Friend in a debate on defence in the UK. I am afraid, Madam Deputy Speaker, that you may have a little difficulty keeping us in order, because the title of the debate is, at best, not very helpful and, at worst, utterly meaningless. It gives the impression of "Dad's Army." While many of our forces are of course deployed abroad, there is also a plucky home guard ready to fight off the Russians if they turn the wrong way coming out of the northern approaches. As a title, "Defence in the UK" is complete rubbish. The Defence Committee is currently doing an inquiry into our relations with Russia. I shall confide to the House, hoping that it goes no further, that we do not consider ourselves under imminent threat of invasion. We can, of course, in this debate discuss home basing issues, and I intend to say a little about Project Belvedere. We can discuss some of the training issues, in so far as training takes place in the UK, and we have heard from the hon. Member for Vale of Glamorgan (John Smith) about St. Athan, which was a surprise to all of us. But "Defence in the UK"? Modern defence is not a geographical thing. It rests on industry, which is global, on our alliances, which are global, on our interests, which are global, and above all on our people in the armed forces, to whom I pay a very great tribute, and there are now few of them who stay in the UK for very long. Whatever we do has an effect elsewhere. What happens in Pakistan, whether it is an attack by an American drone based in Afghanistan on insurgents in South Waziristan, or the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Pakistan, affects attitudes in the Pakistani community and in other communities in the UK, because the media are global too. Communication is now instant. To distinguish between the UK and Pakistan or Afghanistan is becoming increasingly pointless, since everything that happens there will instantly affect what happens here. And that is what this country does not get. It is what this continent, Europe, does not get. They do not understand that leakage of nuclear weapons technology, as has already happened in Pakistan, thanks to A.Q. Khan, is just as likely to lead to a nuclear bomb going off in London as it is to one going off in Islamabad—in fact, rather more so. The people of this country, of this continent, do not believe and do not understand that if we allow the region of Pakistan and Afghanistan to become even more unstable than it already is, it is not the Islamic countries that will be the targets of the new rulers of those countries. It will be us, here in the UK, so we cannot afford to fail there. But for reasons that my right hon. and learned Friend has just set out so eloquently, it looks as though, in financial terms, we cannot even afford to try to succeed. We are devoting to that particular struggle one twentieth of the number of troops and one fiftieth of the amount of aid that we devoted to the much richer and more stable area of Bosnia. We are using up our kit five times faster than we can replace it. We are fighting a war with a peacetime mentality. That is because nobody is effectively proclaiming in this country or this continent that defence is good, that we have the right to defend our values, and that we have the duty to do so. The Secretary of State for Defence recently came out with a reiteration of the defence planning assumptions that is almost identical to the previous defence planning assumptions. There is a sense of treading water. Afghan operations must not mean that the Ministry of Defence or the armed forces will in a few years be trapped in a time warp. There needs to be new thinking now, thinking ahead for future challenges, because they are not even future challenges—they are challenges that we face now. It is just that we have not recognised how serious they are. To give him his due, I believe that the Secretary of State for Defence believes in defence. I believe that of the whole defence ministerial team. However, the Ministry of Defence team alone does not have the capacity to deliver on the need to inspire and give the country the sort of warnings that Winston Churchill was giving in the 1930s. It needs the whole Government, including the Prime Minister, to pull in the same direction and they need to take the House, which is now nearly empty, with them. This may seem a cheap point, but it happens to be true. To most hon. Members, a defence debate means an opportunity not to discuss matters fundamental to the survival of this country and our values, but to go to their constituencies. Yes, their work there is important, but it is rarely a matter of life and death, as what we are discussing today is. The Government need to take the country with them, but the plain truth is that the absence of Russian hordes in the northern approaches has meant that defence has become something that we have taken for granted and that some people, such as those involved in the Campaign Against Arms Trade, are even uncomfortable with. In the House, there used to be three individual service day debates and two days' debate on the statement on the defence estimate. All that became meaningless as the services did more and more on a joint basis, and it rightly changed in the late 1990s and the early part of this century. However, now there are three debates on policy, procurement and personnel, and two more were added—on defence in the world and defence in the UK—to make up for the defence estimates debate, those last two being particularly unfortunately named. We need a return to two days' debate at a set time each year—perhaps when the MOD's annual report is issued, so that there can be a useful focus. We need five general days' debate on defence, and perhaps more. I said earlier that I would say a little about the basing decision involved in Project Belvedere. For some time, the Ministry of Defence has been considering whether to re-base the Chinook helicopters that are currently at RAF Odiham. In the last debate on defence personnel, I discussed the issue at some length. I shall not do so again today; suffice it to say that the Chinooks should stay where they are. However, I want to say one thing. The Minister said that he was trying to bring the issue to a conclusion as soon as possible and that no decision had yet been made. Today we are having a debate on defence in the UK, and today would be the correct time to announce that the Chinooks will stay where they are. We all know that there is no money and no appetite to move them. The only obstacle in the way of the announcement of the decision, and in the way of some welcome clarity and direction for those who have been abortively slaving away at this ghastly project for years, is chronic indecision. I ask the Minister to make the announcement—just get it over with. He will feel a lot better for doing so, and so will we. Frankly, the design and implementation of the joint personnel administration system, or JPA, has been a disaster. Its failings were broadly responsible for the Comptroller and Auditor General's qualifying the Ministry of Defence's accounts. Neither the Ministry of Defence nor those, such as the Defence Committee, who scrutinise it, can see what is going on. Many personnel data are provisional, projected or uncertain and that has been the case for the past couple of years. In its quarterly reports, the Ministry of Defence cannot even properly report against some of its new departmental strategic objectives, because it does not have the necessary data. Those failings may sound technical, but they have caused profound unhappiness among service personnel. Today I heard about the case of an Army captain who was posted abroad and was not paid for three months. When he got back, he discovered that his credit rating had been severely damaged. The response was: "It's your fault. You should have looked on the internet to see that things were working properly." Well, let us remind our soldiers to take their laptops with them to Musa Qala in future. We cannot treat our soldiers in this way. Unless the JPA is sorted out, there will be more grounds for dissatisfaction within the armed forces than it is comfortable to imagine. We need to treat those people properly—in their housing, in relation to their families, in their medical care, in their pay and conditions, and in their life after they leave the armed forces. That is not just because we need them, although we truly do, and not just because they are courageous and effective, although they really are, but because it should and must be a matter of honour for us to recognise and appreciate that they sacrifice everything for their country and for our values. They give us our freedom, and we owe them more than we can express.