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Armed Forces Personnel

It is a great pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for North East Hampshire (Mr Arbuthnot), who chairs the Defence Committee with great integrity, honesty and ingenuity and sets the standard that the rest of us aspire to reach, and my hon. Friend the Member for Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney (Mr Havard), my fellow Welsh member of the Select Committee—the Committee has a great tradition of having a large number of Welsh members. The hon. Member for Canterbury (Mr Brazier) is also a member of the Committee, and he always seems to have a downer on the RAF. Last year, I spent Remembrance day not in my constituency but in Warsaw, where I took part in a remembrance parade there as a member of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, which was gathered in that city. As we stood there and looked across at the veterans from the Polish army and the Polish resistance, we really understood what Remembrance day was about. We never truly experienced, as those people did, the real horrors of war. When we are at war, defence is not the responsibility of our armed forces alone. Let us not forget others who gave their lives: our firefighters; the merchant navy, which lost more people than all three services; the munitions workers; the agricultural workers; the Bevin boys; the home guard; and the ARP workers. Defence is a whole community responsibility. We are here today to talk about our armed forces personnel. It was with particular delight that this week I hosted an event here in the Commons for the RAF presentation team. In the very first words of introduction, we spoke about the team's need to talk to local communities about why they fund their armed forces and why that funding is essential for the defence of the country. We then went on to host people who had taken part in NATO's Operation Ellamy and Operation Unified Protector. They talked about the commitment, creativity and, in these days of defence cuts, the increasing needs of our armed forces personnel, as well as the huge capacity that our people have. They talked with great passion about the partnerships within NATO. I know that Italy is going through a period where there is a certain amount of humour about its financial difficulties, but they spoke with great passion about the help and the support that they had received from our Italian NATO allies. For example, they described having arrived at a base in Italy where the accommodation they were given was ill equipped and had poor facilities—the equipment and services that we would have offered on many of our bases would have been similar. The Italians sent their people in and they worked 24/7 to bring it up to the standard that they knew that a NATO ally deserved. We should honour that commitment from a NATO ally to our forces, because it is about their recognition that that NATO partnership is important and that our service personnel, wherever they come from, respect each other. Those service personnel also talked about the partnership that is essential to all armed forces personnel when they go into theatre, including the partnership with their families, who support them in going and send them messages of support. The support and safety of their families is integral to their ability to do their job well.