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Strategic Defence and Security Review

The right hon. and learned Gentleman may not be paying for it personally, but I think that his party may well do so. The right hon. and learned Gentleman made a good point in saying that foreign policy clearly underpinned the review. He also made a good point about finance. One thing that I think the Government Front-Bench team will soon recognise is that the enemy is not in the Ministry of Defence or in its own parties, but across the road in the Treasury. It was remiss of me not to welcome members of the Front-Bench team to their new positions. Let me also say that I am sad that the hon. Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis) and the hon. Member for South West Wiltshire (Dr Murrison), who were collateral damage in the reshuffle, are no longer in that team. They worked very hard in opposition, and always dealt with me courteously when I was a Minister. I think that we have taken a simplistic approach to finance in the context of the review. When we were in government, we fell into the habit of assuming that the civil service was bad and the military were good. I had the privilege and the great honour of being a Minister in the MOD, and I want to record my thanks to the civil servants and the military personnel with whom I worked. The MOD comes in for a great deal of criticism, but one thing that I would not question is the commitment and dedication of the individuals in that Department. It is true that we reduced expenditure on civil servants by cutting their number by 45,000, but savings will now have to be made across the board, and it would be wrong to make them in such a simplistic way. An important question that has emerged today relates to the parameters of the debate that is to take place. We need to ask whether decisions have already been made, and whether some areas will be ring-fenced. In opposition, the Conservative Front-Bench team made it clear that they wanted to increase the size of the Army. My hon. Friend the Member for Falkirk (Eric Joyce) said earlier that he would not quote things back at them. I am sorry, but I cannot help doing so. In opposition, the then hon. Member for Woodspring—now the Secretary of State—was keen to ensure that we had a bigger Army. On 18 February 2008, he was asked by Adam Boulton of Sky News:"““So are you saying that you want… a bigger army?””" He replied:"““We want to see a bigger army.””" That rather contradicts what he is saying now, and what he was quoted as saying the other week in The Sunday Times—that"““nothing had been ruled out—even cuts to the numbers of uniformed personnel.””" Are we to believe that what the Conservatives said before the last election was just the rhetoric of opposition? Was it not, in fact, a cynical ploy to give the impression that they were the party that was standing up for the armed forces?