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Defence Policy

In fact, we have had several outstanding speeches, including the one by my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Sussex (Mr. Soames). The bulk of the debate has focused, rightly, on Afghanistan, and I want to put on record how incredibly proud the men and women of Canterbury are of the 5th Battalion the Royal Scottish Regiment (Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders), who were recently given the freedom of the city, and of our own Territorial Army unit, the 3rd Battalion Princess of Wales Royal Regiment. In recent deployments, the Argylls had one killed and several wounded, while one Territorial was severely wounded. Many years ago, when I was slimmer and fitter, I was privileged to serve in the Territorial Army for 13 years. Before the debate, I looked for my regimental tie in my palatial second home—over the Elephant and Castle public house—but I seem to have lost it. Nevertheless, I want to focus on the crisis facing the TA as a result of the deeply unwelcome decision that has been made by the Government. At one point during the deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, reservists—most of them Territorials—accounted for one fifth of the force in Iraq and for one eighth of the force in Afghanistan. Given that our reserves are very small—they make up only one fifth of our total manpower—and that they are people with civilian jobs, that is truly astonishing. A total of 15 Territorials and one air reservist have been killed in the operations. These people did not come from nowhere. They did not walk off the street. Most were people with busy civilian jobs, but they chose to spend their evenings and weekends in draughty drill halls and on exercises to prepare for deployment. Often, that choice compromised their civilian careers and their family lives, and the same can be said for the many people involved in training them who did not themselves get the opportunity to deploy. I cannot stress enough how much the TA will be devastated if it really turns out that, for five and a half months, there is no training for anyone apart from those due to go on operations. The essence of any voluntary organisation—be it a charity, a football club, a political party or part of the volunteer forces—is that it has to be led by high-quality people willing to make the sacrifice year in and year out. The Government's proposal sends an appalling message. I have a huge regard for the hon. Member for Harlow (Bill Rammell), who is Minister of State, and for the Secretary of State. They have been generous to my all-party group and given us privileged access. We are just negotiating a date for the Minister to come and address us. For that reason, I very much hope that he will be able to take the edge of that appalling proposal. Earlier, I was one of the people who pointed out that Sir David Richards was a regular. I have never been privileged to meet him, but I know quite a number of people who know him well. Every one of them believes him to be a really outstanding soldier. His command of the operation in Sierra Leone—one of the comparatively few wars that we have participated in to have been swift, successful and extraordinarily well handled—was a model. The fact remains, however, that generals advise, Ministers decide. In 1921, Sir Henry Wilson was an extraordinarily distinguished predecessor of Sir David Richards. He had been Chief of the Imperial General Staff since the final year of the first world war. As Secretary of State for War, Sir Winston Churchill, who then suffered under the considerable disadvantage that he was deeply unpopular because he had been blamed for the Dardanelles campaign, faced down Sir Henry Wilson when he proposed disbanding the Territory Army and flatly told him that he was wrong. Much more recently, we have had two very clear indications of the absolute inability of the Regular Army to handle the TA—one was the catastrophic shambles of the way in which the mobilisation for the Balkans campaign was handled. Just after the decision was taken to make a huge cut in TA numbers, vast numbers of Territorials received the most disorganised call-out notices. Unbelievably, the same thing was repeated in the first stage of the Iraq conflict. That was why the Government took the very wise decision to have a two-star officer who was a Territorial with a civilian job to advise them, so that they got advice directly from the horse's mouth. The Duke of Westminster was the first holder of the post. I should like to make a wider point, although I am conscious of the time. Again and again, we have failed to understand where the next threat will come from. In 1914, the Commons and the country were gripped with a sense of crisis because Ireland seemed to be sliding into war, with arms being raced into both Protestant and Catholic communities. Only at the very last moment, we realised that the real threat to the country came from the continent. A week before the Argentine invasion of the Falklands, most people in this country had no idea that we even had a garrison there. Three months before Saddam Hussein invaded Iraq, we heard restated that there was no question of sending armoured forces out of area. On 10 September 2001, anyone who had said that we would go to war in Afghanistan would have been thought out of his mind. The truth is that we must keep capabilities alive that are not needed on current operations—that is absolutely fundamental—and when we face desperate pressures on the defence budget, reserve forces are the best way of doing so. There is no reason why the Navy's mine clearing capability is all manned by regular naval personnel. Historically, the vast majority of them were reservists. There is no reason why we should not have one or two armoured brigades in the Territorial Army. Do we really believe that we will deploy Regular Army air defence units in the near future against an opponent with a superior air force? We need all those capabilities and they could be provided much more cheaply in the reserve forces, but they need the opportunity to train at evenings and weekends and be paid to do so. I should like to make one last point. Time and again, we hear about the shortage of helicopters—it is one of the most pervading themes of every discussion on Afghanistan—and often it appears that it is mostly about a shortage of pilots and technicians, rather than machines. It is not just astonishing; it is scandalous that we are trying to man our helicopter force almost entirely with regular pilots, when the Americans provide nearly half their air capabilities from reservists. We have a vast number of ex-regular helicopter pilots from all three services in the civilian community, most of whom continue to earn their living by flying helicopters. It is time that Ministers brought their regular advisers to book on that and told them that they must introduce a plan, and if they do not, they should bring in Americans to advise them on how to do it. The fact that one pilot—astonishingly, a RNR officer—is in Afghanistan, manning an Apache, which is far more removed from civilian capabilities than medium lift helicopters, shows that it can be done principle. It is time that it was done. I want to leave room for other colleagues. However, I will say that all of us are proud of what is happening in Afghanistan, but we must never lose sight of the need to keep other capabilities going, and we need our reserve forces for that, too.