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Strategic Defence and Security Review

I enjoy giving way to the hon. Gentleman. He made an excellent speech earlier, and I will come to him in a moment; the second part of my speech is on Afghanistan. Although I may not be qualified to say this, the position of successive Governments on Trident is incoherent militarily; it is political argument. Frankly, the idea that someone can simply pop up in an article in The Guardian or as part of the Government and say, ““Let's knock it from four down to three”” is completely mad. Therefore, this turns on a geopolitical argument, which we can discuss, but—guess what?—if it is excluded from a defence review or, indeed, to be fair, a shadow defence review, we cannot discuss it. We simply say, ““That's not going to cut the mustard, so we'll just leave it out. It's a bit embarrassing, so just push it out.”” That is like suggesting that we should exclude Trident when considering how much we spend on defence each year, or not saying that we spend 2.3% of our gross domestic product on defence, but, for those reasons, we should not do that. Trident is not really a military question at all; it is a geopolitical question and one for the Prime Minister. I sometimes think that it is rather odd that we even discuss it in defence debates. It is most peculiar that Trident is excluded, and perhaps any defence review with proper integrity would include it. Such a review may conclude that we need Trident or its successor, that we need something different or that we need nothing, but leaving it out is simply an admission that we cannot stack up the argument. In my last two minutes and four seconds, I shall zoom on to Afghanistan. The same problem exists, because we have an interim situation in the Opposition. The hon. Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis) has ideas that are worth fleshing out. We cannot properly oppose the position at the moment, because politics is as it is. I listened to the hon. Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart) and other Members with very great interest. My instinct is that Government Back Benchers have considerable experience, which creates a sense of not disloyalty but ambivalence, with a generation of different ideas that are not classically conservative but are creative and imaginative. That is not to say that one agrees with them, but a lot more of that is going on among Government Members than can happen among Opposition Members. The difficulty is where we are at the moment politically. That will change at the end of the year, but defence debates can be decidedly dull for correspondents in other places, because we tend to agree, which is a bit boring, is it not? However, quite interesting stuff is going on among Government Back Benchers, and Opposition Back Benchers are a little constrained at the moment. Crucial though issues such as jobs are, I should like to think that future debates in the House would not simply revolve around constituency sectional interests and manufacturing. Our debates need to be about something rather more than that; they need to be much more about the future of foreign and defence policy, what we need to do in this country, whether we pay too much obeisance to the United States and whether we get back in return what we give in geopolitical influence. Those are the key issues that we should be considering, and some of them have been broached tonight.