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Defence

If that is an absolute guarantee, I am pleased that the hon. Gentleman was able to give it, and I hope that it will be given prominence in Conservative thinking on defence policy. I did not expect the Conservative party to come up with an all-embracing outline of what an SDR should eventually produce today, but I did expect some thrust about where it saw the threat coming from in the future. Apart from those threats that I have mentioned so far, does it see a threat from cyber warfare? Does the Conservative party think that there is a threat from the impact of climate change on, for example, food prices or the availability of food or water? If the Conservative party thinks that those are threats, surely we should have heard something about that from the Conservative Front-Bench spokesman, but there was nothing about that at all. My view is that cyber terrorism is a real threat and could be a major part of any war front in future. It has to be countered, and the resources have to be found to do that. I return to the point that I made in my intervention on the hon. Member for Woodspring (Dr. Fox). Does the Conservative party accept that there are choices? Opposition parties do not really have to identify choices, but in the run-up to the general election, the public want to know what the different parties are saying about the nation's defence. They want to know whether the parties have accepted that, in the real world, there are choices. We cannot have everything: that is the nature of things. Expenditure has to be allocated. Therefore, the starting point is the threat. Once the threat has been identified, then the question is: how much of the nation's resources are we prepared to spend on it? We still spend more, I think, than nearly every other European Union country.