Modernising Defence Programme

Keith Simpson Excerpts

Thursday 25th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Gavin Williamson]

I apologise if the right hon. Gentleman did not hear me. There is not the constraint of the programme being fiscally neutral; we are looking at what we can do and how we can deliver it to the best of our ability. I am very grateful to both the Chancellor and the Prime Minister for all they have done to work towards the position where we can put forward this programme and have the opportunity to look at the needs of our defence industry and establishment.

[Mr Keith Simpson (Broadland) (Con)]

I have every sympathy with the Secretary of State: over the last two days when this was going to be announced, it was the old Army motto “knickers on, knickers off”, which many of us are familiar with.

A number of colleagues, including my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Mr Duncan Smith), have pointed to the crucial matter of money. Twenty years ago, the Labour Government carried out an enormous strategic defence review, which on the whole was well received, but it was never funded. Has the Secretary of State any confidence at all that his recommendations will actually be funded by the Treasury?

[Gavin Williamson]

Yes; I very much hope that the recommendations of the programme will be listened to closely by the Prime Minister and the Chancellor. Its whole aim is to give the armed forces the opportunity clearly to set out our case for the resources that we need going forward.

National Security Capability Review

Keith Simpson Excerpts

Monday 15th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Keith Simpson (Broadland) (Con)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that in some ways this is an unfair question for him, because given everything that he has said, he does not decide defence and security policy, as that has now been upped to the National Security Council and the National Security Adviser? At what point does the influence of the chiefs of staff come in? Is he able to veto any proposals being put forward by the Treasury or other Government Departments?

[Gavin Williamson]

The Chief of the Defence Staff acts as the Prime Minister’s principal adviser on all defence issues. We will be putting forward our thoughts as to how best to make sure that our armed forces are best equipped to go forward. This national security capability review touches on 12 strands of work. I am keen to make sure that defence gets the very best deal. I will be very vocal in making sure that the interests of our armed forces are properly represented going forward.

Oral Answers to Questions

Keith Simpson Excerpts

Monday 23rd October 2017 Commons Chamber

[Sir Michael Fallon]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his welcome for an Operation Shader medal, which we hope to start issuing next year. It will rightly recognise the contribution made, over three years now, by our servicemen and women in this very important campaign against the evil of our time. I have already commented publicly about the current criteria, which require both “risk and rigour” to have been undergone before service personnel are eligible for a medal. The nature of warfare is changing, so we are having another look at those criteria.

[Mr Keith Simpson (Broadland) (Con)]

One consequence of the success of the operations against Daesh has been the dispersal of many of its volunteers, including United Kingdom citizens. Yesterday, my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart), who is a Minister of State at the Foreign Office and the Department for International Development, said that, as far as UK citizens who had served in ISIS were concerned, the only thing to do, with one or two exceptions, was to kill them. Is that now Government policy?

[Sir Michael Fallon]

My hon. Friend and I have made it clear that those who travel to fight with Daesh in Iraq or Syria will have been committing a criminal offence. Daesh is a proscribed organisation, and we have to make sure that if these people ever do return from Iraq and Syria, they do not pose a future threat to our national security. However, they have made their choice: they have chosen to fight for an organisation that uses terror and the murder of civilians as a modus operandi.

Trident: Test Firing

Keith Simpson Excerpts

Monday 23rd January 2017 Commons Chamber

[Sir Michael Fallon]

Let me be very clear about this: our Trident nuclear deterrent is completely operationally independent of the United States. In our country, only the Prime Minister can authorise the firing of these weapons, even if they are employed as part of an overall NATO response.

[Mr Keith Simpson (Broadland) (Con)]

May I congratulate my right hon. Friend on the approach he has taken on this issue? The whole area of our independent nuclear deterrent is of crucial importance, and the arguments he has made very strongly about not being as open as he might perhaps at times like to be on the operational side is absolutely correct.

[Sir Michael Fallon]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend. Earlier Governments in different situations—indeed, in more benevolent times—might have taken different decisions about how much information they were prepared to reveal about demonstration and operations. These are not, of course, such benevolent times, and the decision we took was not to release any information about the testing of all the systems and sub-systems involved in the return to the operational cycle of HMS Vengeance.

Commonwealth War Graves Commission: Pension Fund

Keith Simpson Excerpts

Monday 29th February 2016 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Defence (Mark Lancaster)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Glasgow South West (Chris Stephens) on securing the debate. I must confess that I find myself in a slightly difficult position, because I have no direct responsibility for this issue, for reasons that I will explain. However, I am determined, as ever, to help in any way I can. Although the hon. Gentleman has asked a number of detailed questions, some of which I hope to be able to address this evening, I will of course write to him in due course about any that I am unable to answer, having approached the Commonwealth War Graves Commission on his behalf.

[Mr Keith Simpson (Broadland) (Con)]

I declare an interest as a parliamentary commissioner on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. I congratulate the hon. Member for Glasgow South West (Chris Stephens) on securing the debate, which of course was based, quite naturally, largely on submissions from the trade unions. Does my hon. Friend the Minister agree that it is very difficult for him to respond to this debate, because the Commonwealth War Graves Commission is independent and its funding comes not only from Britain but from half a dozen other Commonwealth countries? I have to say that my impression, through my fellow commissioner, the hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones), who has been involved in the negotiations, is that the commission has bent over backwards, and in very difficult financial circumstances.

[Mark Lancaster]

Indeed. That is what I was trying very gently to say. None the less, I am keen to help. In fact, the two parliamentary commissioners, sitting on either side of the House, are in many respects much closer to the issue than I am.

The pension arrangements of the commission’s employees are ultimately a matter for the commission’s senior management and for trustees of the scheme. The concerns of the hon. Member for Glasgow South West should, in the first instance, rightly be directed to the commission, which, it must be emphasised, is not even a UK-run organisation, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Broadland (Mr Simpson) said. None the less, I welcome the opportunity to contribute to the debate, not least so that I can pay tribute to the commission for its work before I get on to the issue of pensions.

I am sure that, like me, many hon. Members will have visited one or more of the cemeteries and memorials that are so well cared for by the commission. It is certainly true to say that the commission provides the gold standard in care and that the sites under its care, wherever they may be, are always as well and as lovingly cared for as possible.

Oral Answers to Questions

Keith Simpson Excerpts

Monday 18th January 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Keith Simpson (Broadland) (Con)]

The Secretary of State will be aware of suggestions that part of the way to constrain Daesh is to use back-door diplomacy. Does he agree with Canon Andrew White of Baghdad, who said in an interview:

“You can’t negotiate with them. I have never said that about another group of people. These are really so different, so extreme, so radical, so evil”?

Does that put into context the suggestion from the Leader of the Opposition?

[Michael Fallon]

Like my hon. Friend, I was surprised to hear the suggestion that somehow one could negotiate with Daesh, or even that Daesh has some “strong points”. The House will recall that those strong points include the beheading of opponents, burning prisoners alive, throwing gays off buildings, enslaving young women, murdering innocent British tourists in Tunisia, and slaughtering young people on a night out in Paris. I fail to see any particular attraction.

Counter-ISIL Coalition Strategy

Keith Simpson Excerpts

Monday 20th July 2015 Commons Chamber

[Michael Fallon]

I hope we are learning some of the principal lessons from Iraq, including that Iraq’s future will be secure only under a moderate Government of all the peoples of Iraq, whether they are Kurd, Shi’a or Sunni, and that it will survive only with the support of its friends and allies within the region. That is why this is an international effort to sustain a legitimate and democratically elected Government, which I hope the hon. Gentleman would welcome.

[Mr Keith Simpson (Broadland) (Con)]

The Secretary of State will be only too well aware that, over the past half an hour, there has been considerable division and difference of opinion with reference to his statement. That also applies to his strategy, which I fully support, of using direct military action against ISIS. The conundrum is that hundreds of young British people believe that what ISIS is doing is right. We are trying to put in place a strategy to deal with that. Does my right hon. Friend have any doubts in his mind that, sadly, direct military action might encourage those young people to want to go out and not only die for ISIS but kill their fellow British citizens?

[Michael Fallon]

I am clear that were we to intervene on the ground with combat troops, we could well help further to radicalise opinion in western Europe and encourage more support. That is exactly why the Prime Minister of Iraq for one has made it very clear that he does not want foreign troops on the ground and that this fight has to be a fight of the Iraqi army, which has to win back the support of the local population. There is therefore no question of our supplying combat troops on the ground in Iraq.

Oral Answers to Questions

Keith Simpson Excerpts

Monday 8th June 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mark Lancaster]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. He will be aware of the Government’s commitment to the cadet forces expansion programme. We increased the number of cadet forces by over 100 during the previous Parliament, and we are committed to increasing it to 500. I am a great fan of the cadet force, having previously been a member of it, and am determined that we should expand it.

[Mr Keith Simpson (Broadland) (Con)]

7. Whether his Department’s budget will meet the NATO target of spending 2% of GDP on defence in each year to 2020.

[The Secretary of State for Defence (Michael Fallon)]

We will be spending 2% of GDP on defence this financial year. Spending beyond that will be determined in the spending review. The Government were elected with a mandate to maintain the size of our regular armed forces, increase the equipment budget in real terms every year and replace our four nuclear ballistic submarines. Those commitments will secure the shape and power of our armed forces throughout this Parliament.

[Mr Simpson]

I thank the Secretary of State for that answer, but I think he is aware from the comments already made that there is deep concern on both sides of the House about the fact that the Prime Minister, having asked other NATO countries to commit themselves to spending 2% of GDP on defence, is unable to commit to that beyond 2015-16. I hope we will all urge the Secretary of State to make certain that the Chancellor of the Exchequer is aware of that concern, given the threats that have been outlined and the fact that our capacity to deal with them is stretched pretty thin.

[Michael Fallon]

Let me assure my hon. Friend that the Chancellor of the Exchequer is fully aware of the commitments that were made at the NATO summit and has been even more fully aware during recent negotiations over the in-year savings, which have not taken us below 2%. It is important to note, though, that seven of the 28 NATO members do not even spend 1% on their defence and 20 of the 28 do not even spend 1.5%.

Defence and Security Review (NATO)

Keith Simpson Excerpts

Monday 2nd March 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Keith Simpson (Broadland) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart) on introducing the debate with such clarity and depth of knowledge.

This autumn the Prime Minister, whoever he is—no doubt it will be my right hon. Friend—will revisit the strategic defence and security review. He is on record as saying that he thinks it just needs a light touch. With the greatest respect to my right hon. Friend, I think he is wrong for every reason that my hon. Friend and other colleagues here have pointed out. It is a horribly complex situation.

I remember, in the early 1970s, going to seminars on military history, defence and international relations at the Institute of Historical Research, where one sat at the feet of Professors A. J. P. Taylor, Donald Cameron Watt, and Sir—as he is now—Michael Howard. A lot of the talk was about rearmament and appeasement in the 1920s and ’30s, and I used to sit there and think how naive and stupid were the chiefs of staff, the politicians and most of the advisers of that time. In the past 20-odd years, I have gained more sympathy for them, because they were faced with financial collapse and a multiplicity of threats. The armed forces had been reduced in number, most Government expenditure had been reduced, and the armed forces themselves could not agree on priorities. In relation to the Ministry of Defence’s budget, the armed forces—I say this with regret—have been log-rolling for decades, often wasting billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money.

In the few minutes that I have, I want to emphasise the fact that we should have a national security policy. That is of the things that the Government should be addressing this autumn. I hope that the discussion will not just be confined to Government Departments and to Parliament but open to wider outside expertise, as happens in the United States of America, Canada, Australia, and most European countries. That is absolutely crucial. Although this debate has—rightly given the nature of the publication—concentrated on the defence aspects and highlighted the threat from Putin, we all know that in fact we face a multiplicity of threats. If anything, the situation is more challenging for a Government now than it was even for the Governments of the late 1930s.

In looking at a national security policy, we must think not only of the threats that our country faces and is going to face, which have been outlined by my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border and others, but what the market will bear in terms of the money that is going to be allocated. It is a sobering thought that, looking at the national security budgets in the round, one of the poorest Departments is the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, with £1.72 billion. The Department for Work and Pensions could lose that kind of money in an afternoon, and Government IT budgets have invariably done so. The MOD’s budget is £34.34 billion, and the budget of Department for International Development, which I would include in the national security budget, is £9.89 billion. I will not go into the arguments about whether DFID’s budget should be reduced.

[Sir Gerald Howarth]

The latest figures I have indicate that the figure is actually £13 billion—it has gone up from £8.5 billion.

[Mr Simpson]

I am using the latest figure provided by the House of Commons Library. There are lies, damn lies, and statistics. The fact is that if we put together the budgets of those three Government Departments, that part of the national security budget is about £45.95 billion. If we throw in, say, another £5 billion to £10 billion for the intelligence services and GCHQ, we have about £55 billion. That is not a vast sum of money, but it is quite large. We need to consider whether we are spending our national security budgets correctly. They are in separate silos, and it would be much better, in the modern world, to look at them in the round.

In outlining the threat of Putin and all the other threats, we need to think about how we get public opinion alerted to this, and whether public opinion is prepared to see more money spent on national security. The latest polling done this weekend by YouGov shows what the public think about the amount of money spent on defence: 49% think it is too little, 20% about right, and 16% too much. Yet if we drill down into the 49% and tell those people that to get the extra money we must either, in simple terms, put up taxes or cut other areas of public expenditure—some will say “Transfer the money from DFID”—they do not much like either alternative.

Another aspect of the poll—this relates directly to what my hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border has been saying—showed that 52% of those asked believed that resources on defence should be focused on dealing with the threats from Islamic terrorism rather than threats from states like Russia: in fact, only 18% thought that we should allocate resources to that. We can play with statistics, and public perception changes. In September 1938, the overwhelming majority of people welcomed the Munich agreement, but by April 1939 they had changed their views completely. Things will always change. The challenge that we all face is in being open in our debate and in getting public opinion to think about this, but also in getting the Government to move away from what can only be seen as cold war thinking in relation to cold war structures of the sort that still exist today.

To be fair to the previous Government, and our own Government, they did, between them, set up the National Security Council. Things are much better co-ordinated than ever before, according to everybody I have spoken to, including Opposition Members. The success of the National Security Council depends on the personality, interest and drive of the Prime Minister. Although one might disagree with some of the decisions that the current Prime Minister has made, he has provided that drive by regularly attending the National Security Council. There is nothing set in concrete to say that another Prime Minister would do that. As with Departments, once we remove a Minister who takes real, direct action, we can see things drift.

This has been an important debate. The national security budget and the strategic defence and security review do not need a light touch, but some serious thinking. We should have a debate not just about whether we spend 2% of GDP on defence but about how much we spend in total on national security and whether we can move any of that money around between Departments.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Jones]

I have made that clear. I will not promise things I cannot deliver, which the hon. Gentleman’s party did at the last election. He will have to stand up in front of his electorate in Stroud in May and say that he disagrees with the Prime Minister and will not sign up to the austerity Budget outlined by the Chancellor in the autumn statement. He needs to be honest with his constituents by saying that, because that is what will happen to the defence budget. He can make all his points about our position, but we have been very clear that we will meet the 2015-16 targets.

The hon. Member for Broadland (Mr Simpson)—I will call my fellow war graves commissioner my hon. Friend—made this point about those in the Ministry of Defence. I think he said that they were rolling the logs along the path, and they have in certain ways. What is needed, and this is part of our zero-based budget review, is to look in detail at exactly how our defence budget is spent. There is an argument for efficiencies that can be made, and they will be made.

The defence review must involve the largest possible number of people; otherwise it cannot be done. If the Treasury is just let loose, as it was in 2010, it will have the same result. I will say something that is perhaps out of character, but when he was Defence Secretary the right hon. Member for North Somerset (Dr Fox) did at least try to keep the Treasury dogs from the door, although he unfortunately failed.

[Mr Keith Simpson]

Does not the hon. Gentleman, as well as my hon. Friends, accept that we can all caricature the Treasury for obvious reasons, such as in 1998 and 2010, but if we sat in the Treasury and looked at the way in which the Ministry of Defence under successive Governments has been totally incompetent—in handling budgets, the overruns and the way in which individual services have competed with each other—to the detriment of national defence, surely we would agree that decisions should be collective? The Treasury does not necessarily have to have a veto, but it has a point of view and should be listened to.

[Mr Jones]

I do not disagree with the hon. Gentleman. When I chaired the value for money group in the MOD during the previous Government, it was certainly my experience that the Treasury can make a contribution. Unfortunately, it sometimes has a very blinkered view of the world, but it has to ensure that every defence pound we spend is actually well spent.

May I turn to the issue of soft power, which was raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford South and by the Chairman of the Select Committee, the hon. Member for Penrith and The Border? I always think “soft power” is a strange use of words because when we look at what is happening in Russia, we can see that its use has been very effective. Soft power is part of the Russian strategy not only in changing the complete news agenda on the invasion of Crimea, but in continuing to do the same. My hon. Friend the Member for Ilford South made his point in relation to the World Service, which is again a case of a short-term saving having long-term consequences. We need to address the issue that what might be seen as public relations or news management is clearly part of the Russian armoury for changing the agenda on Ukraine and other parts of the world. We need a similar type of force to make sure that we not only influence the debate, but can react very quickly to events as they happen.

The hon. Member for Colchester raised issues about the Falkland Islands. The Labour party is certainly committed to ensuring that the people of the Falkland Islands determine their own future, but that must be taken into account in the future defence and security review. Given his long-standing interest in housing, I am surprised that he has not thanked the Labour Government for the investment they put into Colchester and Army housing. It was sad that when this Government came to power they stopped the modernisation programme as well as the scheme that allowed members of the armed forces to buy their houses, although I know that has now been resurrected under a different heading.

The threats we face are numerous. Can we predict the future? No we cannot. We must ensure that the armed forces at our disposal are linked not only to our security networks and to MI5 and MI6, but to our homeland defence. That can be achieved only if a proper security and defence review in 2016 covers all those aspects, so that when we need the brave servicemen and women on whom we rely, we can ensure that they have the equipment and training to carry out that role. We must also deter aggressors who are clearly working to affect the way of life that we have all come to respect and take for granted.

Afghanistan

Keith Simpson Excerpts

Wednesday 11th February 2015 Westminster Hall

[Mr Keith Simpson (Broadland) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Pritchard, and to see an interesting cross-section of colleagues present at what I hope will be a good debate about the lessons from the war in Afghanistan.

Over the past week I have had to put up with a number of colleagues rather facetiously asking, “Lessons from which Afghan war?”—with the assumption that my right hon. Friend the Member for Louth and Horncastle (Sir Peter Tapsell) might come along and talk about the first Afghan war and his own personal experiences. However, there is a serious element to this, because of course we, the British, were directly involved, more or less on our own, in three wars in Afghanistan—the 1839-42 war, the 1878-81 war, and in 1919—and then as part of a wider coalition from 2003 to 2014. That is part of the background for the Afghan people and what they think about the British—even if that is thoughts in the most benign way.

The second point to make is that I do not have military experience. I was a soldier manqué and taught military history at Sandhurst and the Army staff college, as well as for the Royal Air Force and the Royal Navy—a few of my former students who slept through my lectures are sitting here in the Chamber. My point, however, is that we tend to forget—perhaps not colleagues in the Chamber now, but often journalists and many times the public—that if we decide to initiate military action, two things are consequences. First, no military plan normally conforms to immediate contact with the enemy, so it is usually incredibly difficult to see how military action will develop. Secondly, such action will inevitably result in casualties.

We know that, for example, in both Iraq and Afghanistan the British suffered heavy casualties—not as many as the Americans or, indeed, as the Iraqis and the Afghan people. For example, in Iraq between 2003 and 2009, we lost 179 people, with several hundred wounded. In Afghanistan, between 2003—or, if we count Helmand, 2006—to the end of last year, 453 were killed and about 2,000 wounded. Without degrading that loss, that is probably about two days’ casualties suffered by the British Commonwealth armies in the 1944 Normandy campaign. The difference, of course, is that in 1944 it was total war—a war for national existence—so the public, while not welcoming the casualties, were more than prepared to tolerate them. With Iraq and Afghanistan, however, a sizeable proportion of British public opinion never supported either intervention.

Why do I wish to debate the lessons from the war in Afghanistan? I think that to do so is crucial. In a debate we had the other week on the Chilcot inquiry, I said that we are in fact talking about a two-act play. Iraq is the first act and overlapping with it is Afghanistan. In many respects, Afghanistan is as important, if not more so. The Chilcot inquiry is looking into the reasons why we went to war in Iraq and the lessons to be learned. That inquiry will tell us certain things, but Afghanistan is a black hole into which, as far as I can see, the Ministry of Defence, other Departments and the Cabinet Office are not as yet prepared to look for strategic lessons that should be learned.

A vast amount of evidence, ironically, is in the public domain. We have the evidence of many witnesses at the Chilcot inquiry who touched on the war in Afghanistan—the military, the intelligence and the politicians overlap. We also have a whole series of memoirs of one kind or another. The great lacuna is of course the memoirs of politicians and Ministers. Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, spent a considerable amount of time in his memoir on Iraq, but only about a dozen pages on Afghanistan. Perhaps for obvious reasons, we do not have any memoirs of former Foreign or Defence Ministers—perhaps constrained by the Chilcot inquiry—but we have the memoirs of the military, mainly the Army, ranking from non-commissioned officers, through middle-ranking officers to a whole series of senior officers and generals, some of which have said more about their personal ambitions and their desire to get retaliation in first, rather than giving us an overview and an insight into what went on.

I want not only to get down into the weeds, looking at the lessons from the war in Afghanistan, but to address some fundamental points that are crucial to understanding the war and to our foreign policy and security posture.

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing the debate. The good news is that I will not be present for all of it, because I have a union group to attend—which I am sure he would like to be at too. I understand the hon. Gentleman’s point of history and I am fascinated by his historical references, which are important, but does he not also think that there is another narrative: the stories of the ordinary people of Afghanistan who have been through the war, are still going through it and are still living in poverty? Sadly, tens of thousands of them are ending up as refugees well away from Afghanistan. Is that not a failure of the whole operation?

[Mr Simpson]

The hon. Gentleman makes a valid point. That is the law of unintended consequences. I do not think that we, the Americans or our allies wanted things to turn out in that way in either Iraq or Afghanistan, but he is correct: that story is continuing and should concern all of us.

Were the policy and strategy outlined by the British Government at the time correct? Were they well thought through? Was the intervention considered calmly and rationally, taking into account the best advice of Whitehall, the Departments—the Foreign Office, the Ministry of Defence and the Department for International Development —and the intelligence services?

[Graham Stringer (Blackley and Broughton) (Lab)]

I have enjoyed the first eight minutes of the hon. Gentleman’s speech. A thesis gaining ground is that after the British Army’s failure in Basra, the top of the Ministry of Defence wanted to increase our involvement in Afghanistan in order to prevent greater cuts in the Army and to prove itself after not being as successful as it had wished in Basra. Does he agree with that thesis of a direct connection between Iraq and Afghanistan?

[Mr Simpson]

There is a direct connection, although I do not necessarily completely agree with the hon. Gentleman’s logic. If he will bear with me, I shall come on to that.

The basis of British foreign and security policy is twofold: first, absolutely to hang on to and stand by the special relationship with the United States of America; and, secondly, to play a leading role in NATO. Those two elements merge in our participation in the operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan. We need to think seriously about the first, our special relationship with the United States of America. Crucial to it, and part of our mythology, is the way in which Winston Churchill persuaded the Americans to come into the war when we were on our knees. That, however, is of course a myth, because the United States of America eventually came into the war because Hitler declared war on it after the Japanese attack.

The special relationship, in many respects, has been more important to us than to the Americans, because of the decline of empire and because we want to participate with and influence a superpower with which we had much in common. However, by the time of our participation in Iraq in the 1990s, it seems to me that there was a serious problem with the ability of a British Prime Minister to influence the United States of America and make certain that Britain’s national interests were addressed.

At a military level, our problem is increasingly that we cannot will the military resources to the promissory notes we write to the Americans. Sustainability of political and military effort then becomes very crucial indeed, and we are found wanting—not because the military are incompetent or because the men and women in our armed forces are not courageous, but because we are punching above our weight. We need to look seriously at what we can and cannot do as a powerful regional power with global interests and commitments.

[Jack Lopresti (Filton and Bradley Stoke) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this debate. Does he not think that there is a case to be made for saying that the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan were in our national interest, in keeping our streets safe and maintaining our homeland security?

[Mr Simpson]

The problem with our participation in the Iraq campaign and our military commitment in Afghanistan, which then expanded, was that the policy aims changed, and widened out. There is an argument—I do not actually stand by it but there are many who believe it, including perhaps some hon. Members present—that, through our participation in Iraq and Afghanistan, we made our streets less secure. But that comes back to the issue that we and the Government should be considering: the lessons learned.

[Mr John Baron (Basildon and Billericay) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this debate. My point in a way reinforces his key earlier message. Is not the key error that we made in Afghanistan that, on succeeding in our initial objective of ridding the country of al-Qaeda, we allowed the mission to morph into one of nation building—a mission that we have struggled to resource properly?

[Mr Simpson]

I agree with my hon. Friend. That was the problem.

The material in the public domain—official records and the memoirs of civil servants and senior military officers—shows that it is difficult to establish how, for example, our commitment to Helmand came about. Helmand province was irrelevant in terms of the overall security picture in Afghanistan, and we did not want to go there. The logic stated that we should go to Kandahar, but unfortunately the Canadians were already there.

Loose political-military thinking bedevilled our military mission, coupled with the fact that, as my hon. Friend rightly said, we then glued on to our original policy things such as poppy eradication. At the time, many experts said that all we would do with that was drive impoverished farmers into the hands of the Taliban—we now know that was the case. That was a problem not just for the British but for the United States of America and many of our partners as well.

Coming back to the business of willing the means, I should say that there is no doubt in my mind that a crucial element in all this was what was perceived by the Iraqi Government and the Americans as our failure in Basra. It appeared that we had abandoned Basra. I am simplifying—there was a big argument at the time made by successive military commanders on the ground—but there was a sense that we were unable to cope with the situation in southern Iraq. At the same time, there was the feeling—and I have heard contradictory views about this, which is why, in terms of lessons learned, it would be nice to hear the truth—that there were elements in the Ministry of Defence who wanted to get out of Iraq because it was costly and not going anywhere, we had achieved our original objective and it seemed that Afghanistan was going to be an easier policy to explain to the British public. I am open to persuasion on that.

The interventions in both Iraq and Afghanistan were predicated on the idea that they were part of the war against terror, but, as I have said, the objectives kept changing. Many of us who participated in debates on the interventions at the time were horrified by the inability not just of the British and American Governments but of our allies to show any understanding of the history and culture of both those countries—and, indeed, previous military operations in them. There were many voices attempting to explain that the interventions would be more difficult than people thought. Naturally, given a mission, the military were prepared to get stuck in and to think about the consequences later.

There is a real need to look at the policy-making machinery of the Government in Whitehall. To use the words of Lord Reid when he was at the Home Office, I am beginning to wonder whether that machinery is partly dysfunctional when it comes to complex operations such as Iraq and Afghanistan. There was no lead Minister or Department for either Iraq or Afghanistan. Ultimately, decisions were made by the Prime Minister. There was no National Security Council then to at least try to co-ordinate policy. Individual Ministers attempted to take a lead, but I can remember going to briefings with officials in the Foreign Office, laid on in 2004 and 2005 by the Labour Government; after the second one, several of us said, “Perhaps it would be a good idea to have officials from the MOD and DFID along.” It took some time to get them to appear.

[Mr Kevan Jones (North Durham) (Lab)]

I accept that the National Security Council did not come into being until 2010, but I assure the hon. Gentleman that, when I was a Minister, a cross-departmental body, including the MOD, DFID and other Departments, met about Afghanistan on a weekly basis at least.

[Mr Simpson]

As we all know, that kind of co-ordination is helpful, but it is not the same as having a proper machine, with minutes, allocation of clear objectives and a full-time National Security Adviser.

[Alistair Burt (North East Bedfordshire) (Con)]

I am enormously grateful to my hon. Friend for having brought forward this debate and I am listening to him carefully. This is absolutely the sort of thing we should be doing much more frequently. In his research, did he find any evidence of serious conversations with those who know the history of the region even better than us—those who are there?

In my work at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office over recent years, I was struck by how much was known by those in the region, who gave warnings to us about what we might have done, and how little that knowledge seemed to have been fed into the processes. Is that something else that he thinks should be looked at further?

[Mr Simpson]

It is indeed. My right hon. Friend, who is very experienced, has touched on a problem that occurred not only with the Foreign Office but with DFID and the Ministry of Defence. Often in life, there is the feeling that once an overall decision has been made to do something, the phrase, “I hear what you say,” comes out, but people are not prepared to factor in what they have heard because it complicates the situation.

It also seems to me that, under successive Governments, we have stripped out large parts of the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign Office to make savings, to make Government smaller, and the like, and have therefore got rid of a lot of the specialist expertise that was there 20 years ago but is not there now. We have probably reduced the knowledge base in the Foreign Office and we have reduced the size of the armed forces, so that now there is only a limited critical mass that can provide that kind of expertise, or—if we think of the armed forces, for example—sufficient people for the special forces, which are not recruited separately as some people think but are taken from the broad mass of our armed forces. It is increasingly difficult to provide expertise in languages and intelligence. In my opinion, the situation is worse now than it was 10 years ago.

[Sir Gerald Howarth (Aldershot) (Con)]

We are all grateful to my hon. Friend for bringing his expertise here. I am worried that the contraction in our armed forces and everything else he has talked about will diminish Britain’s influence in the world. Earlier, he made a point about the special relationship, which I think is critically important. Does he agree that there are concerns in America, which were expressed today by President Obama—it was in The Daily Telegraph, so it must be true—about the fact that Britain is considering further reducing our spending on defence, which will further diminish our ability to influence a turbulent world?

[Mr Simpson]

There is no doubt that the Americans have viewed with a degree of dismay what they see as the decline in the critical mass of our foreign policy and defence, because they value that. However, they have often been disappointed in our ability to deliver what we promise.

We suffer, and have suffered in the past, from what I call “Montgomery syndrome”—a snobbery, particularly among the armed forces, towards the Americans. Macmillan also had it; he said that we were like Greek slaves in the Roman empire. There has been a view that they were awful, rather vulgar people who did not know how to hold a knife and fork properly and did not have the kind of experience we had. Unfortunately, they had all the money and resources, but we would teach and train them. That view was particularly apparent before the operation in Basra in southern Iraq, when the Americans got the impression that we could teach them about counter-insurgency. They thought that our experience from Malaya, Cyprus and Northern Ireland meant that we knew how to do it. However, not only did we perhaps not know how to do it, but we did not have the resources either. We suffered and have suffered badly since then.

I will make only two or three more points because I am conscious of the time, and other colleagues want to speak. There is a serious issue about the Ministry of Defence’s ability to practise the kind of operations that we saw in Iraq and Afghanistan. Ministers frequently arrive with no experience of the military or the complex jungle of the Ministry of Defence. There has been a high turnover of Ministers under both Governments. There is tension among the Chief of the Defence Staff, the chiefs of staff and the senior civil servants. The Ministry of Defence, as my colleagues know, is both a Department and a command post, and the Permanent Joint Headquarters is out in the sticks. All the things we saw in Iraq and Afghanistan show that there was considerable tension among the forward combat commanders, PJHQ and the Ministry of Defence. Frequently, people did not know who was in charge, which was complicated by the fact that we were also a member of a NATO alliance.

It is often Buggins’s turn to take the post of Chief of the Defence Staff, but the gene pool—I mean this in the nicest possible sense—is getting smaller. One of the Army generals’ criticisms is that when the CDS was from the Air Force or the Navy, he had difficulty understanding the mainly land operations. There are serious questions to ask about that.

The Army is now on a learning curve. I have no doubt that the Minister will say that during these operations the Army learned many lessons from combat analysis. My problem is that, although the Army learned many lessons, the Minister, in an answer to a parliamentary question on 3 February, told the House that at the moment the Ministry of Defence has no plans to study the lessons of the war in Afghanistan. The Cabinet Office also has no plans to look overall at the lessons, and the Prime Minister has made it clear that the strategic defence and security review, which will be carried out in the autumn, needs only a light touch. I am just a humble Back Bencher, but I think he is wrong. I think the strategic defence and security review needs not a light touch but a fundamental reassessment based on all the things that I have set out.

[Sir Gerald Howarth]

My hon. Friend is making an important point. I was a Minister at the Ministry of Defence, and when I had some responsibility for the strategic defence and security review it was Treasury-driven. It had to be so, because of the catastrophic state of the public finances. Strategy took second place. Does my hon. Friend agree that there can now be no excuse—I am looking at the Minister when I say this—for not taking a proper, strategic look at our armed forces, particularly given the extraordinary events that have taken place since 2010?

[Mr Simpson]

None of us is naive enough not to think that the view of the Treasury is paramount, but there has to be a balance. It is not about Ministers versus the military. I would draw into the National Security Council not only the CDS but the chiefs of staff. I would put their fingers in the mangle, because we know that they leak like sieves.

The Times recently ran a front-page story about the fact that the Chief of the General Staff is thinking of cutting senior ranks by a third. It came as a surprise to Ministers, as they did not realise that that policy would be put into the public domain. I do not expect the Minister to comment or even raise an eyebrow about that. That story made no mention of the Navy or the Air Force. The military must be gripped on this, in the best possible sense.

Finally, we in Parliament need a greater say on this issue—and not only for our amour propre. If we are going to persuade the electorate, who do not rate spending on foreign policy and defence as one of their highest priorities, we have to show that we are investigating this issue and have good arguments about why it is necessary for us to continue our close special relationship with the United States of America and why we need to spend money on the armed forces. I hope the Minister will be able to address at least some of the points I have raised.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Francois]

My hon. Friend asks a good question. In simple terms, our normal, standard tour was six months with a two-week break in the middle; the Americans, for instance, tended to go for 12 months. There are advantages and disadvantages with both ways of doing it, and we continue to discuss that with the Americans. We will look at that in future to see whether there are lessons to be learned. They are two different ways of doing it, and they both have pluses and minuses.

We now have around 470 troops contributing to the NATO “train, advise and assist” resolute support mission, our element of which is called Op Toral. The UK is leading international support to the Afghan national army officer academy near Kabul to help to develop the next generation of Afghan military leaders. Just last week, the second graduation of Afghan cadets trained at the academy took place. The United Kingdom has also committed £70 million a year to help sustain Afghan security forces, as well as £178 million a year in development aid.

I have visited Afghanistan twice and have seen for myself the progress that has been made. We have given Afghanistan the best possible chance of a safer future. As part of a coalition of 51 nations, the UK helped to build the Afghan security forces from scratch to an effective force of more than 330,000 personnel. The Afghan security forces now have lead responsibility for delivering security across the country, and they are performing well against a capable and determined enemy. Last year, despite prolonged fighting over the summer, the Taliban failed to take and hold any district centres. Country-wide, Afghan security forces successfully secured the presidential elections last year, with more than 7 million people voting.

The inauguration of President Ghani last September was an historic moment for Afghanistan. It was the first democratic transfer of power from one President to another in the country’s history. We welcome the formation of a Government of national unity, the recent appointment of a number of key Cabinet Ministers and, indeed, the approval of a budget for the country by the Afghan Parliament. In December 2014, the UK worked with the Afghan Government and international partners to deliver the co-hosted London conference on Afghanistan, during which President Ghani and Chief Executive Abdullah set out an ambitious reform programme that focused on addressing corruption and reconnecting Afghan citizens to their Government. President Ghani and Chief Executive Abdullah continue to have the UK’s full support in making those and other important reforms.

[Mr Keith Simpson]

Will my right hon. Friend give way?

[Mr Francois]

Just briefly.

[Mr Simpson]

My right hon. Friend has only six minutes left, but will he address some of the questions that we have all raised?

[Mr Francois]

I will attempt to do that now. I will make a point about the number of children educated in schools and then I will come straight to my hon. Friend’s questions. In 2001, some 1 million children went to school in Afghanistan; now, more than 6 million children, including 2 million girls, are in school. Sixty per cent. of the population is within walking distance of a public health facility. Life expectancy in Afghanistan is at its highest ever level.

Several lessons have been learned. On the medical front, my hon. Friend the Member for Reigate (Crispin Blunt) said that our personnel had done a fantastic job. I did not agree with everything in his speech, but I agreed with that point. The contribution of the role 3 hospital at Camp Bastion was remarkable. It was the busiest military medical facility in Afghanistan, treating in excess of 7,000 UK casualties, with a survival rate of more than 95%, before its closure in September 2014. The hospital was world leading and pioneered new medical treatments and techniques that have led directly to improvements in NHS—