Crispin Blunt

Conservative Party | Reigate

Defence

This speech was given as part of a debate in the House of Commons.

I do not want to follow the hon. Member for Ogmore (Huw Irranca-Davies) down the road of UN reform; I want to focus rather more directly on British defence police itself. First, I want to commend to the House the excellent speech by my hon. Friend the Member for Faversham and Mid-Kent (Hugh Robertson). I should have liked to make such a speech, and I commend its details to the Minister. He will know, as I do, with what authority my hon. Friend speaks on these matters, and he had some proper and extremely wise advice for the Government on the detail of the application of defence policy, particularly the complementary use of heavy and light capability, as the Secretary of State referred to it.

There is, however, one detail on which I should like to depart from what my hon. Friend said. In fact, it is not really a detail; it is a rather central point in his analysis of what has happened to British defence policy. I disagree with him that the events of 11 September were a fundamental turning point for the United Kingdom. They were a fundamental turning point for the United States, and that has had significant consequences for the United Kingdom, but the reshaping of British defence policy in 1990-91, at the end of the cold war, was the most significant event for us.

Obviously, through the 1990s, when I was a special adviser in the Ministry of Defence, there was a certain amount of settling down in that process and the adding back of a certain number of infantry battalions when it became clear that the cuts at the end of the cold war had gone too far. Then we had the SDR when this Government came to power in 1997, which very largely confirmed the overall direction that defence policy had taken since Tom King's reforms.

Those reforms have stood the test of time in a strategic sense, although not in a tactical sense, where changes have had to be made. The then Government were beginning to address the whole issue of asymmetric threats as part of the policy of being able to deploy forces overseas and having an expeditionary force capability, which was being built up during the 1990s.

The Defence Committee stated in its report on the 1998 SDR that the Government had not paid enough attention to issues such as homeland security and asymmetric threats. Plainly, the Government's reaction in the form of the new chapter of the SDR shows that they have started to make progress in relation to the lessons of the events of 11 September. A wholesale change in British defence policy, however, will not be seen. Our policy was established to enable us to have an expeditionary force capability to intervene around the world to have some influence on those areas of the world from where these threats are emerging. The problem for British defence policy is that the Government accepted the framework that they inherited in 1997 and promptly took £500 million out of the budget in the first year. They have now started to add back a small real growth in the defence budget.

Sitting watching British defence policy and the shape that the armed forces will have to take under those budgetary constraints, however, is like watching a slow-motion train crash. Any serious observer of defence who listened carefully to the Secretary of State's speeches - I am something of an aficionado of such speeches, having had something to do with them previously, and my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Norfolk (Mr. Simpson) will be the same - will have heard between the lines a Secretary of State preparing to administer very serious cuts inside the Ministry of Defence. That is simply because, on the existing budget, it will not be possible to obtain armed forces fully recruited at the establishment at which the Government now say that they aim, combined with providing two aircraft carriers with their aircraft and the full purchase of Typhoon. The equipment programme rolling forward is far too heavily loaded to be sustained by the funds that the House is currently voting and intends to vote for defence under the Government's comprehensive spending review plans.

We can hear the words of the Secretary of State indicating that cuts will come. We have heard the rumours of cuts in Scottish infantry battalions. I went through all that in 1992–93 with the debate about the end of the Gordon Highlanders, with all the pain that that caused before the Highlanders were formed, and we can hear that debate happening again. We can hear in the words of the Secretary of State, if we listen carefully, the defence pips beginning to squeak.

In my brief remarks, I want to warn the non-experts and the people outside the defence establishment - I suspect that the defence establishment knows perfectly well what will happen - that we are about to have another series of defence crises, as the Government, as usual, try to get a quart out of a pint pot. The timing for the Ministry of Defence, of course, is absolutely lousy. As it needs more money, the Government are running out of it. The fiscal position of the Government is heading south in a tearing hurry - we have already heard about the Chief Secretary sending notes round to spending Departments making it clear that the good days are over and that they cannot expect large increases in their budgets. In terms of the Government's fiscal position, the next two or three years look as if they will be extremely tight, which is usually extremely bad news for the Ministry of Defence.

In the end, it will come down to the Prime Minister. He has deployed the armed forces overseas on numerous occasions and has set the tone that the Government have taken in deploying British troops around the world - to Sierra Leone, to the Democratic Republic of the Congo - admittedly only a small force, thank goodness, due to the insistence of the chiefs of staff on avoiding getting anything more than a fingernail into that particular mangle - and to the Balkans and Iraq, which look like endless commitments. In the debate during the next year or so about public expenditure, the Prime Minister must give the Ministry of Defence the funds to sustain the operational capability of the armed forces at the establishment and with the forward equipment programmes that the Government are currently planning. If they do not, we will probably yet again face a round of salami slicing. The danger is that that will happen on the back of all the pressure that has been placed on all the men and women of the armed services. For a long while, they have been able to sustain enormous operational pressure, but that cannot go on for very much longer.

The Chief of the Defence Staff and the other Chiefs of Staff are warning about the degrading of training because of the huge commitment to operations. The armed forces need time and money to recover their capability. If they do not receive that, an institution of which the United Kingdom can properly be enormously proud will waste away under the twin fiscal and operational pressures to which the Government are subjecting them.

I hope that the Secretary of State's words were part of his negotiating position with the Treasury and the Prime Minister. I hope that the Secretary of State and his Department can rely on the Prime Minister's support in the negotiations on expenditure that will take place over the next few months.