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Strategic Defence Review (Green Paper)

I thank the Secretary of State for his statement and for prior sight of it, although we seem to be the last to have seen the Green Paper, since every journalist I have met this week has been telling me about its contents. The Secretary of State deserves genuine praise for his attempts to find a cross-party consensus. When the history of this dreadful Government is written, his will be one of the more honourable mentions. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Sussex (Mr. Soames) for the effort that he put into producing a balanced and open-minded Green Paper. I know that his experience in the Ministry of Defence was very much appreciated in the process. The Green Paper indicates that the Ministry of Defence is coming out of denial, but that the Prime Minister is not. We are used to the Prime Minister briefing against his perceived enemies in the corridors of Westminster, but not normally undermining a Secretary of State on the front page of The Times. How far away from the No. 10 briefing this week is paragraph 9 on page 9 of the Green Paper, which states:""We cannot proceed with all the activities and programmes we currently aspire to, while simultaneously supporting our current operations and investing in the new capabilities we need. We will need to make tough decisions"?" Of course, this week we have seen the truth of the current Prime Minister's approach to defence. The former Defence Secretary, the right hon. Member for Ashfield (Mr. Hoon) has said that there was a strong feeling that the last defence review was not fully funded. The former Chief of the Defence Staff, Lord Walker, told us that the defence chiefs threatened to resign as a result of the savage cuts that the then Chancellor tried to apply to defence in the middle of two wars. Today the former permanent secretary, Sir Kevin Tebbit, talked about having to operate a permanent crisis budget. The Defence Secretary introduced defence cuts in December, but the Prime Minister this week was talking about increasing the defence budget. In his statement the Secretary of State said, "There has been a great deal of interest in, and speculation about, whether any major capabilities will be confirmed in the Green Paper". We all know why. It is because No. 10 has been briefing all week that any project that has any job implications for the Prime Minister's constituency will be spared in any defence review. That is taking a core strategy way too far. There are some things on which we are clearly agreed. We know from bitter historical experience the difficulty of predicting future conflict—either its nature or its location. We cannot base our future security on the assumption that future wars will be like the current ones. That is why we must maintain generic capability and be able to adapt to any changing threats. There is no doubt that in Afghanistan we have been too slow to give the Army, in particular, the agility and flexibility that it needs to maximise its effectiveness. But we must also remember that we are a maritime nation dependent on the sea lanes for 92 per cent. of our trade. A time when the threat of disruption is increasing is no time for Britain to become sea blind. We agree that France and the United States are likely to be our main strategic partners. For us there are two tests: do they invest in defence, and do they fight? Sadly, too few European allies pass both these tests. The Secretary of State talked about a 10 per cent. increase in the defence budget in real terms. He also talks in the Green Paper about the higher level of defence inflation. Can he tell us how much of the increase in the defence budget has gone into pay, allowances and pensions, and what proportion of the increase has been available for equipment and other programmes over the period that he outlined? Can he confirm that the Department's budget for next year will be £36.89 billion, as previously set out? He says that not a penny will be cut, notably from next year's budget. What cuts do the Govt envisage after that? Unlike the Opposition and the House of Commons, the Government have access to all the costs of the contracts and all the penalty clauses for the major programmes. Why will the Government not give honest answers about the implications of the cost overruns in the years ahead? We know that there has been serial mismanagement at the MOD, with the equipment programme being somewhere between £6 billion and £35 billion above what can currently be afforded. How will it be reconciled? After 12 years of indecision, we finally get a Green Paper weeks before a general election, and, despite all its good words and all the good intentions of the Secretary of State, the future defence budget of the United Kingdom will have to be determined against the backdrop of Government debt of £799 billion, which is the equivalent of having borrowed £1.1 million every day since the birth of Christ. That our nation's security should be compromised in this way by Labour's historic economic incompetence is truly a national tragedy.