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Defence Procurement

I do not agree with my hon. Friend. I have made the point that war among the people is the way that things are going to go. Of course we have to stay on afterwards. We do not need aircraft carriers to have people hanging around—they can hang around on HMS Ocean. We do not need these vast ships, with all that it takes to keep them at sea and the tremendous amount of escort involved. The Daring class ships are for the purpose of air defence—they are built to defend an aircraft carrier, which is a tremendously limiting factor in their use. I am pleading on the Navy’s behalf, although the Navy always thought I was too hard on it. It must have more ships if it is to be able to do the simply wonderful work that it has always done all over the world. More credit attaches to this country through the work of the Royal Navy down the generations than anyone in this House could possibly imagine. I want to ask the Minister what planning is going on to cover the eventualities that will arise in procurement over the next 20 to 30 years given the different conflicts that are likely to occur. The Government, whoever they are, will have to take a risk by working out what is the most likely type of conflict that we will have to undertake in the next 30 years. If my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth, East (Mr. Ellwood) really believes that Britain is in a position to take part in every level of conflict, he is wrong—we can no longer do that. We will have to make some very difficult decisions about which particular specialities we are going to stick to, pay for and be a big part of. I want to say a few words about Trident. The arguments on Trident are not yet settled. I voted to renew the deterrent because there must be some form of deterrent, but the arguments have not yet been had in public in nearly an adequate enough way to warrant the spending of this nation’s treasure on the scale that will be required. This is not a question of who is a member of CND or who is against CND. It is really difficult in these times to answer the question whether we need to renew the Trident system in some form or another. If the new system were to go ahead and I were a Defence Minister, I would absolutely insist that it came off the Ministry of Defence’s budget and went on to the Prime Minister’s budget—that the MOD paid not one penny towards building it and that it be paid for out of central Government funds and then handed over to be run by the Navy.