Strategic Defence and Security Review

Robert Flello Excerpts

Monday 21st June 2010 Commons Chamber

[Dr Fox]

On this occasion it is rather easier to be a mind-reader. I am well aware of the project to which the hon. Gentleman is referring. We thought about making an interim statement to Parliament just before the summer recess about which programmes were likely to go ahead, but we decided that it might cause more instability than it was worth. We therefore intend to announce all the programmes that we believe give reality to the capabilities that we want when we reach the end of the review.

Having said that, let me tell the hon. Gentleman that we are acutely aware of the fact that it is unavoidable that there will be insecurity during the period of the review. He asked about the speed. The last defence review, in 1998, was an 18-month process. We have brought the process forward partly because, to be frank, most of us in the House who take an interest in such issues have a clear idea of the sort of choices that will need to be made, but also partly because we wanted to minimise that period of insecurity for the defence industry and those who work in it.

[Robert Flello (Stoke-on-Trent South) (Lab)]

rose—

[David Wright (Telford) (Lab)]

rose—

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr David Crausby (Bolton North East) (Lab)]

I am grateful, Mr Deputy Speaker, for the opportunity to speak in this important debate.

These are difficult economic times, with more problems to come, no doubt. The temptation to cut the defence budget is inevitably high. If there are efficiency savings to be made, we should make them, but they must be made in the back office, and not, in these circumstances, in any way that affects the front line.

[Robert Flello]

Does my hon. Friend agree that something that we should look at very carefully is the number of top brass? Indeed, the suggestion has been made that there are more admirals than there are vessels in the surface fleet.

[Mr Crausby]

It is important that we use our helicopters for what we need to use them, and not use them to ferry our top brass to other functions.

If we can make efficiency savings in the back office, I am in favour of doing so, but may I take the opportunity to emphasise the fact that there is nothing more important than the defence of our people and the land in which we live? To cut any further our already stretched resources will put our security and service personnel at even more risk. I do not accept that our forces are overstretched, but only because they demonstrate the absolute reverse through their ability to cope. However, they have certainly been under immense pressure for too long, and that simply must not continue.

I have consistently held the view that the defence budget is too small. To cut it now would be unthinkable. Education and health are vital, and it is right that they should be ring-fenced, but their importance will pale into insignificance if our way of life is threatened by terror or, even worse, if we find ourselves under the heel of a foreign power. The difficult question is, as always, estimating the level of the threat that we face, but we must always err on the side of caution and fear the worst. The justification for defence expenditure should be based primarily on necessity, rather than affordability. In conjunction with the strategic defence review, we must look at our foreign policy commitments, because we must decide what sort of country we want to be before we make up our mind on our strategic defence position. We could, for example, model ourselves on Belgium, Switzerland or Scandinavia, and send the message to the world that we do not intend to do anyone any harm, in the vain hope that they will not do us any.

Alternatively, we could growl fiercely at our would-be aggressors, declaring that if they give us a problem, we will sink our sharp teeth into them. One thing is clear: we would be unwise to flip between the two models. It is sensible not to be too aggressive, but Britain’s history, its place in the world, and our culture define us as a nation. For my part, I confess to feeling much more comfortable with an ability to bite potential invaders, as opposed to begging for forgiveness and pleading for mercy.

George Robertson, in the last defence review in 1998, said that the cold war had been

“replaced by a complex mixture of uncertainty and instability.”

That certainly has not changed. The 1998 review was radical, and it reflected a changing world. The reality is that the Ministry of Defence has reformed, and made considerable progress since 1998. Our forces are much better configured to meet the challenges of the 21st century. Change was essential, and there is room for more, to enable us to meet and to defeat the new threats that we face, but such ambitions do not come cheap, and no defence review is effective if it is used simply to save money.

Government after Government have failed to provide the financial resources needed, which is simply unfair on our Army, our Navy and our Air Force, and it just cannot go on. We are extremely fortunate that Britain’s armed services have dealt with a lack of resources in most ingenious ways—it is what we would expect—but make do and mend cannot last, and time to train, and to recover, is absolutely vital to maintaining the world-class standards of our forces. I therefore urge the Conservative-Liberal coalition not to make the same mistakes as previous Governments by under-resourcing and over-expecting. If we are not prepared to lay out the resources that will increase our forces’ size and complexity, we have a responsibility to downgrade our global role.

I do not think that we should do so, but we cannot have it both ways. As the 1998 review explained, we can decide not to have a significant military capability. What was true in 1998 is even more true today, and we must now add Iraq and Afghanistan to our commitments. We must always be prepared to be able to defend ourselves against threats that we do not expect. For example, the discovery of oil around the Falkland Islands means that we must be ready to defend ourselves against increasing tensions in the south Atlantic. My genuine fear is that coalition government is not exactly the ideal vehicle for the task in hand, especially a coalition as diverse as one including Conservatives and Liberals. I really hope that I am wrong.

An important question is the future of tranche 3 of Eurofighter Typhoon. In the general election campaign, the Liberals said that they would cancel tranche 3, and the Conservatives said that they would retain it—I agree with the Conservatives. It would be interesting to know what the coalition intends to do with Typhoon—and the industry is entitled to know sooner rather than later. The prospects for our new aircraft carriers are another worry, and their acquisition is in the interest of those who will gain useful employment from their construction. Much more importantly, they are vital to Britain’s independent defence capability.

We need two aircraft carriers, and we must have joint strike fighters to fly from them, and indeed the support ships to defend them. The Treasury must be quaking in its boots, because all of that will be expensive, but I return to my earlier point: our defence capability must match our foreign policy expectations. If we are not willing to keep our forces up to speed, we should not expect them continually to perform miracles without resources. In conclusion, the most important job for the coalition is not just delivering an effective strategic defence review, but paying for it.

[Mr Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Bolton North East (Mr Crausby), with whom I served on the Select Committee on Defence in the last Parliament. I always knew that he had a great speech in him that would defend the strains in the Ministry of Defence. We certainly heard it today, and I congratulate him on it.

We all accept that in this Parliament debt reduction must be the coalition’s main effort, but in this dangerous world, the UK needs to be able to protect itself from the threats it may face, now and into the future. The possession of a flexible, deployable military capability remains an indispensible component of any cost-effective defence and security strategy. As the Secretary of State told the Royal United Services Institute last week, defence is as much about deterrence as the actual use of force—and we heard that again today. The strategic defence and security review must be preoccupied not just with the capabilities we deploy during this period of “hot peace”, as opposed to cold war, but with maintaining those capabilities that we hope never to use in anger.

I have no fear of further scrutiny of the Trident deterrent programme, first because Trident is the cheapest option available. Its costs are vastly overstated by its opponents, amounting only to 0.5% of the defence budget over its lifetime. No one knows how expensive the alternatives would be, but they would demand the creation of a whole new weapons systems without the input of allies. Does anyone expect this to be a cheaper option than piggybacking on American technology?

Secondly, the development of an alternative weapons system would also put us in breach of the non-proliferation treaty. What would the international community say about that? Thirdly, Trident is the most effective system. It is safe from first strike, unlike land-based missiles. It is supersonic, unlike cruise missiles, which would be vulnerable to interception, and crucially, it is the least detectable.

I draw the attention of the House to something that Baroness Williams wrote in The Guardian this morning, which she clearly fails to understand. She argues that by having three Trident submarines instead of four, we would not only save, as she terms it,

“several billion pounds a year”,

which is questionable, but could maintain a

“smaller but still effective deterrent”

if we

“keep Trident submarines in port, with at least one on alert status able to sail in a developing crisis situation.”

The suggestion is that the UK should be forced to deploy our nuclear deterrent in the face of the world’s media in the midst of a full-blown international crisis. To plan for such a public escalation is strategically illiterate.

But Trident is simply one part of our deterrence. We need the new smaller surface warships to deter drug smuggling and piracy. We need more drones to protect ground forces on operations. Strike aircraft and cruise missiles help deter aggression by rogue states that threaten to destabilise their regions. How else would we defend the Falkland Islands today? The ability to deploy ground troops at a distance acts as a deterrence and also hugely increases our influence with our key allies, especially the United States.

Astute submarines can deter almost any other navy from putting to sea against us. Flexible, deployable capability gives us broader deterrence effect, and that indefinable and indispensable quality, influence. Such capabilities take decades to create and will take decades to re-create if we give them up now in the face of a one-off fiscal crisis.

But what can we afford? Even if spending is maintained, there will have to be substantial cuts in personnel and equipment. Bernard Gray, the author of the excellent MOD report on procurement last year, said that, if the MOD budget is frozen, the Department will be unable to order any new equipment for the next 10 years. If defence is to come out stronger, as the Secretary of State said it must, following the review, it is very difficult to see how spending can be cut—a point implicitly accepted by the protection of defence spending in the current year.

The Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary have both stated that they have no wish to oversee the decline of the UK as a world power. The task facing the Secretary of State is to ensure that his “policy-led, resource-informed” cross-Government review does not lead to the UK stumbling toward decline as a result. I have set out my own basis for the review in the form of a memorandum which the Prime Minister might well have sent to the Cabinet Secretary in his first week of office—a memorandum which the Royal United Services Institute very kindly published on its website today.

The defence review is about what sort of nation we wish to be in, say, 2020, and it must also explain how we get there. Are we to become just another medium-sized European country, like Spain or Italy, or must we recognise that our historical and geographic inheritance has presented us with a unique global role that we should be prepared to shoulder?

[Robert Flello]

I am thoroughly enjoying listening to the hon. Gentleman’s speech, which is well reasoned and considered. Has he considered—perhaps in his paper, which I have not had an opportunity to read yet—the position of our forces abroad, for example in Germany? He may come to that in his speech.

[Mr Jenkin]

Those forces should certainly be part of the review. It is difficult to imagine how we can hang on to a heavily armoured capability, give up those bases and provide for the expense of bases elsewhere. It is an open question. I do not present solutions or capabilities in the paper; I set out parameters for the discussion.

As I have said in the House before, for British prosperity and security, the UK’s global role is not a lifestyle choice; it is an imperative. It is not merely an expression of our aspirations. It defines who we are as a nation. We have unique capabilities and advantages that other nations do not possess, and it is in the interests of all free nations, and it is our national responsibility, that we use them for our mutual benefit.

In the past, there was nothing inevitable about the abolition of slavery, the defeat of fascism, or the facing down of communism, and in the future there is nothing inevitable about the continued spread of democracy and free trade, yet we depend upon democracy, free trade and the international rule of law utterly for our own prosperity and security. We must play our role in the world, simply because we can. That role reflects and reinforces our values and interests.

If we wish to step back from our global role, we must be frank about the likely consequences of such a move. We must ask which nation will take our role as America’s most influential and enduring ally. Are we to encourage the US to become unilateralist by disengagement? Who would protect our shipping from Somalian pirates? Who will invest in NATO if we choose to disinvest? Which other nation or nations would gain from our retreat? Would they promote freedom and democracy, or their own agenda, not ours?

The world is getting more dangerous and more fluid. We are in an age much more akin to the 19th century than the relative stability of the cold war stand-off. In today’s world overpopulation, competition for food and resources, the risk of environmental catastrophe, mass migration, accelerating technological change, nuclear proliferation, nationalism and extremism are all on the rise, and that is quite a list, aggravated further by the global recession. Is this the moment for us to substitute soft power for hard power? Too often, advocates of soft power are those who have decided that they can take a free ride on the hard power of others.

The Conservatives in 1979 inherited an economic and fiscal mess almost as bad as the one that we now face, yet between 1979 and 1985 defence spending increased by 30% in real terms or by almost 0.9% of GDP. The national interest was put first, and it should be put first now. Defence spending in 2009-10 was £35.3 billion, historically very low as a percentage of GDP. Other programmes, such as social security, are several times larger. While spending will have to be restrained in the long term, with a modest phased spending increase, savings of perhaps £3 billion in procurement and overheads, and a moratorium on discretionary operations, we could maintain a broad spectrum of capabilities and retain the UK’s global role. That would be outstanding value for money for this country and for the world, and would help to create a safer, more secure, and therefore more prosperous world for the next generation.