Strategic Defence and Security Review

Baroness Stuart of Edgbaston Excerpts

Thursday 16th September 2010 Commons Chamber

[Ms Gisela Stuart (Birmingham, Edgbaston) (Lab)]

I, too, congratulate the Backbench Business Committee on selecting this subject for debate. May I observe that I am beginning to get used to a particular quality in the speeches delivered by Liberal Democrat Ministers? There is an almost monastic high moral tone attached to their annunciations. That probably comes from not having had to take any responsibility for the past 100 years, so I do not think it will last very long. They will develop a sense of the reality that whether one is in government or in opposition, things are occasionally more complicated than they appear at first sight.

I congratulate the Chairman of the Select Committee on Defence, the right hon. Member for North East Hampshire (Mr Arbuthnot), whose speech was excellent. As a member of that Committee I know that the report he mentioned is excellent, and I have to say that his speech left little for other members of the Committee to add. I shall simply deepen some of his points.

I wish to focus particularly on public involvement in reaching a consensus on security and defence. In a few weeks’ time, the funding for the Department of Health and the Department for International Development will be ring-fenced but pretty big decisions will have to be made on how much money is spent on defence in the light of other public sector cuts. I am not convinced that either the previous Government or the current one have sufficiently explained in recent years why this country needs the armed forces, what they do and what they are engaged in. Are they there to keep the peace, or to go to war occasionally?

A generational gap is opening up. Knowing that my 25-year-old daughter-in-law was going to start work yesterday, I said to her, “Oh, that is Battle of Britain day”. She looked at me and asked, “What’s that?” Not only did she not know, I had the distinct impression that she was not particularly concerned. There is a generation that is unable to relate not only to world war two, which in many ways still determines our sense of what is needed for defence and the armed forces, but to the cold war. The generation born after the fall of the Berlin wall has a very different sense of nuclear deterrence, which for the pre-1989 generation was an obvious need. We need to do a little more to explain that need.

That change is happening all over Europe. One reason why I cannot stay for the whole debate is that I am going off to the 60th Königswinter conference, which is an annual meeting of German and British politicians. Tomorrow evening, the German Defence Minister, zu Guttenberg, will be speaking. If the press reports today and yesterday are to be believed, he has virtually reached political agreement for Germany to move to a professional army, with a moratorium on conscription. That is a huge shift in the country’s attitude to defence, and such shifts are happening all over Europe.

That, quite apart from the economic circumstances, is why the current defence review is hugely important. It is about how Britain defines its role in the world and its relationship with the rest of Europe, but it is also about how the intergenerational covenant between the armed forces and the Government will be conducted. I believe that there is a change not just because of changing generations but because of our ethnically diverse nation. Increasingly, we like to have an Army not to go to war but to keep the peace, which may occasionally involve going to war.

We need a much more open relationship with people in explaining why we deploy our troops and why we spend money on them. That requires a debate not about the type of aircraft carriers, tanks and equipment we have, but about our national security and defence. That might involve attacks from the air, which is why we need a Royal Air Force, but in the historical context that is probably no longer a key element and is less of a priority. We are a trading nation that needs to keep its trade routes open, so we probably need to explain a little more to the population at large why the Navy is so incredibly important not just for military purposes but for the security of food and energy supplies.

In the case of the Army, we often talk about those who have given their lives in the interests of the country, but we now have an increasing number of young men who, while they have not given their life, have given their limbs. They are severely injured, and we have a huge responsibility to look after them not just today or tomorrow but for decades to come. We cannot flinch from that.

We must also engage the public on a different type of security, which could conveniently be called cyber-security. A NATO unit in Estonia is working on it, and the Estonian people know exactly what it is, because the Russians brought their country to a standstill for three days. Commercial operations also know about it. Much more work needs to be done on cyber-security in the defence review, but may I caution that that work should not be kept within the MOD too much? After world war two a lot of our computer and decoding equipment was kept secure by the MOD at Bletchley, whereas America was much more open in making such equipment available to the industrial sector. The industrial trade-off was not used so early in the UK. Similarly, in cyber-security we have to work much more with industry, in a way that will allow the military to use the technology without confining its commercial exploitation.

My final observation is about the National Security Council. I happen to think that it is a good thing to have set up, but when the Defence Committee took evidence from our witnesses yesterday they made the interesting point that if the word “security” is in a name, other Departments such as DFID and the Foreign Office can sometimes feel that they do not have much buy-in. A strategic defence and security review should involve not just the MOD but those other Departments. If the Treasury is still carrying out bilateral negotiations on where the money will come from, as it appears to be doing, there can be one-on-one combat between Departments instead of their collectively standing up for what they need. I hope that the NSC, by bringing the Departments together at ministerial level under the Prime Minister, will not allow the Treasury to take a divide-and-rule approach.

I look forward to what we will hear at the end of October, and I hope I am correct in the impression that I have gained from the Minister that all the BBC’s reports about Trident today were complete and utter nonsense. Nobody seems to know quite where they came from or to want to take any responsibility for them. [Interruption] Well, those of us who have been around know that whenever Front Benchers become excited about telling us what complete and utter nonsense something is, and that they have no idea where on earth the story came from, it usually means that in a few weeks’ time they will say, “Funny that, you know—the BBC was right after all.” I hope that on this occasion my cynicism is completely unwarranted. I wish the review well and hope that the Defence Committee will be able to return to the House and say that the Government have done the right thing.