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Defence

Like my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton (Ann Winterton), I pay tribute to the armed forces and to those who have fallen and those who are injured in the course of operations. I shall not be drawn on my hon. Friend's last-minute foray into European policy, except to remark on the speech of the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne, North (Mr. Henderson). He gave a dire warning that the European Parliament should not meddle in matters of defence, which should remain intergovernmental. I simply point out that plenty of us on the Opposition Benches warned that the Lisbon treaty would lead the European Parliament in exactly that direction, and further. He was warned, so if he did not want that to happen he should not have voted for the Lisbon treaty. I congratulate my hon. Friend on the commendable freshness with which she always approaches such debates. She has a terrier-like determination to advance her argument, which she always does coherently and cogently. Indeed, the degree of detail on specifications and prices that she gives is far beyond what most Members bring to these debates. It is a reminder of what much defence policy is actually about. However, I warn my hon. Friend about the sweeping judgments on the nature of future conflict that I fear she was making. She referred to outdated notions of state-on-state warfare, and said that we must be ready for the much murkier and more complex issues of counter-insurgency warfare, but the joke, as Churchill used to say, is that the War Office is always trying to fight the last war. I hesitate to bracket the Chief of the General Staff within such a mistake, but it is inevitable that the defence chiefs will tend to defend what they are doing and argue for more equipment so that they can do what they do, rather than doing the more difficult horizon scanning about being prepared for things that we do not expect, such as the possibility that the next war might be fought on a coastal area, where we need sea and air power. The two land-locked wars that we have been involved in Iraq and Afghanistan may well prove to be the exception. Incidentally, I point out that we had characteristics of state-on-state warfare in Kosovo and certainly in both Gulf wars and that much of the combat with the Taliban has elements of state-on-state conflict that would be common to both types of warfare. I want to concentrate on the key failures of Government policy since 1997. I commend the Opposition motion, but it tells only of the symptoms of failure, not its root cause—symptoms such as funding shortfalls, a failed procurement process, shrinking manpower assets and endemic overstretch. But the root cause is far more fundamental and relates to the failure of the UK's grand strategy. Bluntly, it seems that the UK no longer does strategy. We no longer seek to influence world events from our own agenda; we have been forced into reacting to them. Foreign and defence policy since the SDR has been characterised by three words—drift, waste and overstretch —and they all stem from the failure of strategy. Yes, as my hon. Friend the Member for Woodspring (Dr. Fox) said, the SDR was based on what we call a foreign policy baseline, but as I shall point out, foreign policy tends to be more about process than about strategy and has proved a deficient basis for defence policy. There is a real danger that the 2010 SDR will be about the confirmation and re-examination of what we have been doing, rather than about being prepared for what we do not expect. The key to a successful 2010 SDR will be a new UK strategic concept, which must embrace the whole panoply of policy—economic stability and trade policy, the future of the EU, NATO and the national security strategy, energy security, climate change and cyber-warfare. It is from those considerations that foreign policy and the SDR must flow. The UK has never institutionalised strategy in that way, but other countries, such as the US, France and Israel do so. It is time that we did so, too. The outcome of 13 years of Labour drift in foreign and defence policy has resulted in the UK's global stock falling, as it did in the 1960s and '70s. Once again, we have to question our whole global role, as the UK is more exposed to external threats and global events than at any time since world war two. It has become a cliché to say that the 1998 SDR was a great piece of work, undermined only by a failure to fund it, but its failures are wider and deeper. In the light of Gulf war one, the theory of "go first, go fast, go home" enshrined in the SDR had some merits, but even by 1998, the experience of the Balkans was showing that such easy wins were the exception, not the rule. The SDR had the right process, but it produced the wrong result. NATO went into Bosnia in December 1995 with 60,000 troops. By the time the NATO mission ended in 2004, there were still 7,000 troops. Even now, 15 years after the original deployment, there are still more than 2,000 EU troops. The SDR did not anticipate 9/11, the rise of militant Islamists or the types of counter-insurgency campaign that we have seen in countries that are much larger, much more hostile and a lot of less developed than Bosnia. We should have moved on further and faster, but the Government remained wedded to the failed strategic assumptions behind the SDR. The new chapter and the 2004 White Paper, to which the Secretary of State referred, merely tinkered at the edges. They shied away from addressing the changed strategic environment, largely for financial reasons. Unless we learn from the mistakes of the SDR, we will be condemned to repeat its failures. One of the key foundations of the SDR was Labour's so-called ethical foreign policy. Actually, the Foreign Office turned that into a foreign policy with an ethical dimension, because it realised that the term "ethical foreign policy" is nonsense. Tony Blair set out this ethical dimension in his Chicago speech in 1999 justifying the intervention in Kosovo on humanitarian grounds. That was, he argued,""a just war, based not on any territorial ambitions but on values"." He concluded:""In the end values and interests merge."" Shortly before leaving office, Mr. Blair argued that his experience of foreign affairs and defence since Kosovo had left him""more persuaded that the distinction between a foreign policy driven by values and one driven by interests is wrong. Globalisation begets interdependence. Interdependence begets the necessity of a common value system to make it work. Idealism becomes realpolitik." " What does that mean? What does it mean for a Prime Minister who has to make a decision in a crisis? Does it mean anything in the real world? Look at how Russia and China approach the question of Iran to see how some countries deal with their values and interests. They do not regard the Iranian bomb as a threat to themselves, so they are happy to use the west's disquiet as a tool to further their own interests, regardless of values. This is the problem for defence with Mr. Blair's""doctrine of the international community"," and with the present Prime Minister's preoccupation with strengthening international institutions. International institutions must not become an end in themselves. They can be only a means to an end. The United Nations is, by definition, less than the sum of its parts. It can only ever act according to the lowest common factor of its members. Where the international community fails to accept our values, must we become a hostage to the interests of the hostile states that are blocking decisions in the UN? If we can only act with a UN resolution, do we not simply give Russia and China a veto over our foreign policy and our defence policy? Would it not have been better for Tony Blair to have worried less about a second resolution on Iraq and more about the challenge of post-invasion planning? What does this mean for defence? The doctrine of internationalism cannot any longer govern our defence policy. It leads to the very incoherence in foreign policy and in military action that we saw played out on the streets of Basra. Why did we stake our reputation on supporting the war in Iraq, but lack the political will to follow through in Basra to prevent the city falling into the hands of the militias? Why did we intervene in Helmand with far too few troops? Four years later, we have ended up with 9,500 troops on a tiny part of the footprint that we originally went in with, and with only the beginnings of a workable strategy. Why did we condemn the illegal election victory of Mr. Ahmadinejad, yet send the British ambassador to attend his inauguration? Labour's foreign policy has ended up compromising values and interests, and our defence as well. Messianic rhetoric has ended in debilitating drift. Domestic policy has been characterised by waste, and we face an economic situation that leads us once again to question whether we can afford our global role. If we are to end defence and foreign policy drift, we must ask the real question: who holds the UK's strategic concept? Where is it written down? Who will redraft it before we embark on the defence review, if we are to make it a success? Before the end of the cold war, the UK's foreign and defence policy objectives had been broadly the same for five centuries: maintain the balance of power in Europe leaving us free to develop our interests as a global trading power. In the post cold war world, what is the modern equivalent of that as the basis for defence policy? Throughout history, we have relied on extraordinary people in extraordinary times to frame UK strategy—men such as the elder and younger Pitt, Wellington, First Sea Lord Jackie Fisher and Winston Churchill. The end of the cold war may not have been the end of history, but it may have been the end of Europe as the principal theatre of global affairs. We have failed to develop a new grand strategy to engage with the new reality, where the stage is no longer one continent, but is the whole world. The Foreign Office's latest strategic assessment is surprisingly old—its new strategic framework of January 2008. It has three elements:""i) Providing a flexible global network serving the Government as a whole.""ii) Delivering essential services to the British public and business.""iii) Shaping and delivering HMG's foreign policy."" The Government's foreign policy is defined in four ways—countering terrorism; reducing and preventing conflict, which are both defensive; promoting a low-carbon, high-growth economy, which is so vague as to be almost meaningless in terms of the activity that it envisages; and developing international institutions, especially the UN and the EU. Yes, that internationalism again. That is not strategy. It is process. Where is trade? Where is energy security? Where are our alliances, particularly NATO, which the Government claim is still the cornerstone of our security? It is remarkable that the advanced research and assessment group at Shrivenham put the danger of a global financial collapse into the draft national security strategy, but were told to take it out, presumably for political reasons, before it occurred.