House of Commons

Thursday 1 February 2007

Defence in the World

Robert Key (Salisbury) (Con): The Prime Minister says that he wants a national debate about what sort of defence forces we should have. I welcome that. I suspect that the conclusion will be that we have no choice. Against the current position of overstretch and under funding—in respect of people and procurement—we need to take a long view of how we got to where we are and where our nation and our military want to be in the future.

Our history and our heritage teach us—and economic necessity today demands—that we must sustain and pay for armed services trained and equipped for high-intensity warfare, with global reach and complemented by a strong diplomatic service. Both should be underpinned by increasingly sophisticated security services and intelligence networks.

In the nave of Salisbury cathedral fly the regimental colours of proud Wiltshire units that have served down the centuries all over the world. One is a tattered flag that was carried up the Potomac River in 1814, when our troops sacked the White House in Washington. Today—this very day—sees the sad end of that great military heritage as the Royal Gloucestershire, Berkshire and Wiltshire Light Infantry, like many other regiments, ceases to be, but we welcome the birth of a new regiment: the Rifles. I wish it a great future.

The British have taken our language, ideas, trade and armies across the entire globe. Gone are the days of empire. The legacy is there—but we are not going to stop now. However, defence must start with the homeland. Some people thought that that was all over after the allied victory in the Second World War. The slaughter in Northern Ireland rarely spilled over to us on the mainland. However, 9/11 changed all that. The Conservative party called for a dedicated homeland security Minister some years ago. The Government now look as though they might oblige by splitting the Home Office in two.

British forces are needed to protect the United Kingdom’s global interests in trade and shipping. More than 90 per cent of our imports come by sea. Those trade routes and vessels must be secure from foreign state intervention as well as from terrorism and piracy. That is why our forces must have global reach and power projection by land, sea and air. That must include amphibious capability, unmanned maritime systems, increasing use of unmanned combat air systems and space-based remote sensors. In other words, we must spend more on defence-based research programmes and do more collaborative work with our allies, including Australia.

Keeping the peace is also a legitimate function of Her Majesty’s forces. They are good at it—they are the best. I have seen that for myself in Bosnia and Kosovo. In Afghanistan, they are fighting a war as well as keeping the peace. In Iraq, our forces are in harm’s way, suffering the consequences of little or no post-conflict planning by the Government and our major allies. However, British forces should not be forced to become a gendarmerie, which is a different function from peacekeeping. They are in danger of becoming one because of the disruption of training schedules for high-intensity conflict in the UK and elsewhere. Their skills are being blunted—and it will not do.

I suspect that the British are genetically predisposed to belligerence. However, if we want a gendarmerie, let us create one. The British are brilliant at peacekeeping because of our national temperament. After 1,500 years of fighting each other in these islands we learned the hard way the virtues of tolerance and fairness, liberty and justice—all in the spirit of Magna Carta in 1215. We have been successfully invaded only twice—by the Romans and by the northern French, led by a Norwegian, but we were never subjugated.

I pay tribute to all my constituents who work at the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down and at the Health Protection Agency, which is also based there. They are a vital and increasingly important part of Britain’s defence at home and around the world—they may deploy anywhere at a moment’s notice to defend our people and our interests.

I also salute those at the Defence Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Centre at Winterbourne Gunner in my constituency, who train our servicemen and women, and the staff of the police national chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear centre, which is also in my constituency, who have trained more than 7,000 police officers from every police force in the United Kingdom and other emergency services in the country.

Of course, at Boscombe Down, the Qinetiq team supports the Royal Air Force. It produces remarkable avionics in addition to maintaining the Empire test pilot school, which trains all our fast jet pilots and those of our allies. However, I ask the Minister to press harder for a solution to the problem of the eight Chinook helicopters which were delivered to Boscombe Down in 1982. I was told in October that a deal was being done with Boeing to bring them back into service. I had hoped that it would be completed by the end of November, but we have not heard a word. Will the Minister tell us in his winding-up speech what is happening to those eight Chinook helicopters?

We could not do without the Ministry of Defence police. They were originally founded by Samuel Pepys as royal dockyard police, and their officers now have full constabulary powers and extended jurisdiction in the UK to protect service personnel and their families as well as sensitive units and locations. They are currently deployed in Kosovo, Bosnia, Cyprus, Iraq, Sudan, Sierra Leone and the Pitcairn islands. The Ministry of Defence police, with their special skills, are currently the subject of two reviews into their future—the review of community policing inland and the armed guarding review. Both those reviews impact on my constituency. In winding up, will the Minister say when the reviews will be concluded and the results announced, because the effects on the Ministry of Defence police are serious?

Defence in the world has changed, and we must move on too. The old certainties of the cold war have gone and led to wholesale reappraisals of the role of NATO and co-operation between European nations on defence. In March, the House will debate the proposed replacement of our Trident nuclear deterrent. The Defence Committee is embarking on its third report on that so that we are all better informed before we decide on the issue. I urge the right hon. Member for Oldham, West and Royton (Mr. Meacher) and the hon. Member for Liverpool, Walton (Mr. Kilfoyle) to wait for that report before being so definite about some of the technicalities that they described.

At a time of nuclear proliferation, I would take some convincing that we should not legally—I am sure that it is legal—upgrade our systems and build new submarines. There has been no evidence to suggest that unilateral action by the UK would make the slightest difference to others who are not signatories to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and who are developing new nuclear weapons capabilities. We will continue to need a nuclear deterrent deployed at sea somewhere in the world. Those submarines must have global reach to defend British interests—trade and otherwise.

Britain will have to spend more on defence as a proportion of our gross national product. We must be able to pay our forces more, equip them better and deploy them with the weapons and equipment to do the job. We must also think afresh about why we and other European nations need to define defence in new terms. Homeland security and territorial defence are vital. Increasingly, protection of energy infrastructure, from gas and oil pipelines to wind farms and nuclear power stations, will be seen as important. The politics of energy may dominate, but there are parts of Europe where the politics of water and food are also increasingly important. As the climate change crisis climbs the political agenda, carbon emissions will also threaten peace and stability. Poverty and economic migration already cause great friction between states: even Portugal and Spain have their problems, as do Italy, Greece and Turkey.

My hon. Friend the Member for Woodspring (Dr. Fox) spoke about Turkey, and so will I. Turkey will become an even more important defence ally in future. The Turkish people, descendants of the Ottomans who ran a great European empire, are vital to the interests of peace and stability in their region, and vital to our interests too. I am astonished at the negative attitude to Turkey in Germany and France in particular. I am also gravely disappointed by the antics of some Members of the European Parliament who seek to block Turkey’s logical and welcome membership of the European Union. Turkey is a member of NATO and vital to western interests. We should welcome Turkey and thank her for many years of solidarity, through dark and difficult times in Europe and the west, from her position on our continent.

Given the absolute necessity of increasing financial, trade and manufacturing partnerships with China—a signatory to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty—and India, which is one of several nuclear powers outside the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, we should work hard not just on our diplomatic relations with those great nations, but on our military collaboration. Time after time, we have seen that close military relations and exchanges of service personnel yield huge dividends for Britain and improve our security. I also commend the Australian Government, under Prime Minister Howard, for deploying Australia’s excellent military forces, not only in their natural sphere of influence—the Pacific—but for bearing their share of coalition operations in the middle east and elsewhere.

The challenge for this Government and the next—Conservative—Government will be to convince the British people that our future prosperity depends on matching defence requirements with defence resources. As the fourth largest economy on the planet, we can well afford to reprioritise our national budget in favour of our defence in the world, and we should do so.