Queen's Speech

Lord Burnett Excerpts

Wednesday 26th May 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Burnett]

My Lords, I welcome my noble friend Lord Howell to his deserved place in the Government. He is an acknowledged expert in foreign affairs. It is also a great pleasure to congratulate my noble friend Lord Astor of Hever on his appointment as a Minister in the Ministry of Defence. He served with great distinction as a shadow Minister, and I hope that the House will forgive a short reminiscence.

My noble friend Lord Astor was serving in the Life Guards in Hong Kong in about 1967 when violent rioting broke out with surging unrest. There were not many British forces to cope with this growing crisis. My noble friend first saw me, not on some enchanted evening and not across a crowded room. I was standing on the flight deck of a commando ship steaming into Hong Kong with 650 other members of 40 Commando Royal Marines, all in full fighting order. We had just come back from Aden and we had all our weaponry on the flight deck in full display. Everything from then on went quiet and we all had a wonderful run ashore. In fact, if my memory serves me right, we had a series of wonderful runs ashore.

There are valuable lessons for us from that incident. First, you never know what is going to happen and you have to plan for every eventuality. Secondly, one needs flexible Armed Forces with a strong amphibious capability, including support ships. Thirdly, you sometimes need a resolute and robust show of force that can defuse the most difficult situations. As I said in the defence debate on 6 November 2009, I take the view that defence spending should not shrink—especially now in the light of the dangerous state of the world. We certainly need greater efficiency in defence expenditure, but I hope that expenditure will remain the same and grow with inflation.

In that defence debate, I welcomed the decision to order four replacement submarines for Trident, with appropriate ballistic weapons systems. I welcome balanced multilateral reductions in warheads and we all hope that one day the world will be free of nuclear weapons. However, we live in an era where more unstable regimes are acquiring nuclear weapons. Trident and its replacement have a full strategic range of many thousands of miles and, unlike other alternatives, it is a credible weapon which is exceptionally discreet and almost invulnerable to countermeasures.

We shall shortly be embarking on a Strategic Defence Review. We must decide the level of our national ambition. What does this country want from our Armed Forces in the future? We must look at defence in its widest sense: not just at the teeth arms that serve us so well, but also at the tail. How many personnel, and how much equipment, are needed to fulfil our defence objectives? How many ships, and of what type, do we require, and what personnel do we require for the ships we seek to deploy? How many fighting brigades do we need from the Army and Royal Marines, and how many deployable aircraft from the Royal Air Force? What will provide us with the best value, flexibility and effect? If we decide on our ambitions, we must pay the full cost of implementing them. Ministers must take personal charge of the defence review. If they do not, there will inevitably be unsatisfactory and unworkable compromises.

We must now look ahead to the next one or two decades. We cannot base our plans solely on recent and current conflicts. As I said, we must find out what are the likely future threats and how to meet them. We need aircraft carriers to give us the essential political and military flexibility, given the major problems of securing overflying rights and the huge flexibility that these carriers provide. They can be deployed as troop carriers as well as fixed-wing and helicopter platforms. They can be deployed as support ships for humanitarian operations.

We in this House and country are united in admiration for, and gratitude to, the Armed Forces and their families for their courage, loyalty and stamina. We owe it to our Armed Forces and their families properly to prepare and equip them for all the tasks that we ask them to undertake. The British people will not forgive a Government who cannot provide powerful support for our many nationals overseas, our trade and our allies. The British people demand a Government who will guarantee the safety and security of our country.