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Strategic Defence and Security Review

It is a pleasure to follow the excellent speech of the hon. Member for South Thanet (Laura Sandys). She rightly widened the debate beyond the defence part of the defence and security review to include other aspects of global policy that affect the security of our country. That is what I intend to do in the brief time available, and I shall try to follow her example in not taking up all my allocation. The hon. Member for Rutherglen and Hamilton West (Tom Greatrex) correctly predicted that I am here not to increase my knowledge of defence, although if I had wanted to spend four hours listening to the country's experts on defence, this would be the place to be. It has been a fascinating debate. As the Chairman of the Defence Committee said, we have in this House people who know a huge amount about the subject. I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for East Renfrewshire (Mr Murphy) on his appointment as shadow Secretary of State, and all the Front Bench team. In the time available, I want to raise three aspects of the review, the first of which is security and the importance of recognising the counter-terrorism agenda within the wider defence and security strategy. I shall probably make a loyalist speech as far as the Government are concerned, certainly compared with some of the speeches from Conservative Members, because I fully support the Government's counter-terrorism strategy in the security review. The third and fourth parts of the review document deal with counter-terrorism and acknowledge this country's success over several years in joining up various aspects of government. I am delighted that the hon. Member for Colchester (Bob Russell) is here, because he was co-author of the Home Affairs Committee report that strongly recommended the establishment of the National Security Council, which the previous Government strongly resisted, although I never discovered why. As soon as the new Government took office, they accepted the Committee's recommendation, and we now have a Committee that spans all Departments and all the experts who sit under the chairmanship of the Home Secretary or the Prime Minister and can draw all the strands together to look at the security of the country as a whole. My second point is about the counter-terrorism budget, and I believe that the review document preserves that budget. From what I have read of it, there is a commitment to ensuring that the previous Government's initiatives and the new initiatives proposed in the strategy are pursued. That means—I hope—that the fears of people such as John Yates, the head of counter-terrorism in the Metropolitan police, will not be realised. The House will recall that in a closed session of the Association of Chief Police Officers conference earlier this year, Mr Yates raised the possibility that the counter-terrorism budget would be cut. I think that the review preserves that budget. Indeed, from the opportunities that I and others have had to probe the Government on the issue, I think that that aspect of the home affairs budget is to be preserved, although perhaps the Minister will confirm that when he replies to this debate. My final point concerns Yemen. I should declare my interest: I was born in Yemen and I spent the first 11 years of my life there. I have led parliamentary delegations to Yemen over my 23 years in this House, and the only reason we have not visited this year is the security situation. However, I plan to go in the next few months with other Members of Parliament, and if anyone would like to come—including you, Mr Deputy Speaker—we would be delighted to take them. My concern is that people outside this House have talked about Yemen as though it were a failed state. It is not a failed state; in fact, it is probably the most democratic of all the states in the middle east, with the exception of Israel. It is, however, a country that is capable of failing, which is why we need to give it enormous support. We need to engage with the Yemeni Government and the Yemeni people. We need to ensure that our international development budget is increased, and not kept to its current levels, because even though Yemen is one of the most beautiful countries on earth, it is also one of the poorest. Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula—as the branch of al-Qaeda in Yemen is called—is determined to feed on the poverty of the Yemeni people and make the case to them that nobody is interested in what happens in Yemen. The hon. Member for North West Leicestershire (Andrew Bridgen) paid tribute to the security services and the authorities at East Midlands airport when the Home Secretary made her statement on Monday. As the constituency MP for the airport, he will know of the concern—indeed, the shock—of local people that a package that started off in Yemen should have gone through Germany and ended up at East Midlands airport. While we have been sitting here over the past four hours of this debate—I am not saying that I have been sitting here for that time; rather, the House itself has been sitting—the French Interior Minister has made a statement. He has said that it is thought that one of the bombs—we do not know whether it was the one on its way to Dubai or the one going to East Midlands airport—was going to be denoted within 17 minutes of its being found. There is a serious problem, but what do we do to help Yemen? We do not cut off all its freight, and we certainly do not want to stop people coming here from Yemen. Instead, we need to give Yemen the security equipment that we promised at the London conference in January. Prime Minister Gordon Brown called a conference of the Friends of Yemen, who were given certain assurances, one of which was that equipment would be sent to San'a and Aden. [Interruption.] The Minister shakes his head, but the answer is yes, and other Ministers have confirmed that to me. There was an assurance that security equipment would be given to Yemen, so that it could perform the task that is being performed at our airports in this country, thereby preventing packages of that kind and any passengers carrying such devices from leaving Yemen. My message to the Government is that if we are talking about the security of our country, we have to remember that security does not stop at our borders. The hon. Member for South Thanet talked about piracy off Somalia, another country that is in great difficulties. What do we do? We do not leave those countries on their own; we engage with them and ensure that they have support. As part of the review, I hope that we will understand that issue. If we do, not only will the people of Yemen and the world be safer; more importantly, the people of our country will be, too.