---

Defence Reform Bill

It is a pleasure to be able to say that, unlike the traveller who fell among thieves, I feel like one who has fallen among friends. On these issues, I have friends on both sides of the House, including, first and foremost, my hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury (Mr Brazier), who has been a wonderful advocate for the Reserve forces for many years. I say to him and to those on the Front Bench that if this matter had simply been put forward in isolation, I would not have contemplated voting for the new clause tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Basildon and Billericay (Mr Baron). I am thinking of doing that for two reasons but, before I go into detail, I shall mention a couple more of my friends.

It is a pleasure to welcome to the Opposition Front Bench another friend, the new shadow Secretary of State for Defence, the hon. Member for Gedling (Vernon Coaker). My experience of his activities and positions on security issues has been wholly positive, and he has lived up to that by making his first trip as shadow Secretary of State a visit to the Barrow shipyards. I am sure that we can rely on him to maintain the firm position in support of the successor generation of submarines for the nuclear deterrent that both Front Benches adhere to, and which only one small party has sought to obstruct.

Another friend to whom I would like to refer—he has just slipped out of the Chamber for a moment—is the Secretary of State for Defence, my right hon. Friend the Member for Runnymede and Weybridge (Mr Hammond). Most people would agree that he was a very fine Treasury Minister indeed. I cannot think of anyone who was better at tackling complex financial problems and explaining them in terms so crystal clear that, from time to time, I even thought that I understood them myself. In reality, I could not think of any person, when presented with a limited budget—whether for defence or any other portfolio—who would make a better fist than my right hon. Friend of adjusting the workings of the Department concerned to fit a budget that he had perhaps rather arbitrarily been allocated.

That has a direct bearing on the two reasons for my putting my name down in support of my hon. Friend the Member for Basildon and Billericay’s new clause and amendments. The first relates to the size of the defence budget; the second is the question of whether the scheme for the Reserves is or was linked to the proposed reduction in the size of the Army. Those are the two things that worry me. Even if my hon. Friend’s new clause and amendments are not ideally drafted—I am not saying that they are not—they present me, and other hon. Members whose main purpose of being in Parliament, apart from representing our constituents, is to maximise the defence of this country against threats, with one of the few opportunities that we have to register our concerns when we think that defence has fallen too far down the list of priorities.

I listened carefully to my hon. Friend the Member for North Wiltshire (Mr Gray) saying that the defence budget was a given. I am afraid that I do not accept that. I do not accept that more money could not have been found from within the defence budget and outside it. There could have been more money. We did not need to spend £1.4 billion extending the life of four Vanguard-class submarines just to satisfy the Liberal Democrats, so they could put off the decision to sign the main-gate

contracts for the successor submarines until the next Parliament. We did not need to spend a whole shedload of money reversing the plan for two aircraft carriers and to adopt a preposterous plan for one functional and one non-functional aircraft carrier, and then spend another shedload of money reverting to the original position. Nor do we need to spend £40 billion or £50 billion on a high-speed train service to the north of England—[Interruption.] It has a great deal to do with it.

5 pm