SELECT COMMITTEE ON PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION AND CONSTITUTIONAL AFFAIRS
Debate between Bernard Jenkin and Crispin Blunt(8 years, 9 months ago)
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Mr Jenkin
I agree in part with the hon. Lady, and I am grateful for her remarks.. The McKay commission was as unsatisfactory, in many ways, as the present proposals. It is in the nature of the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly and the Northern Ireland Assembly that English MPs have no say over the laws that they make, so the veto to which she refers is merely a quid pro quo. Interestingly—and I stress this point—the principle behind English votes for English laws seemed to have quite a lot of popular support, even in Scotland, although that view is controversial and not entirely shared by the Scottish National party member of the Committee. As for the constitutional convention, we have not taken evidence on the matter. I do not think that there is an appetite for reopening the entire British constitution to an interminable process that would take years. We need a quicker solution.
Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)
I congratulate my hon. Friend and the Committee on the report. It is plain from the report and what he has just told the House that EVEL is yet another step in the endless and unbalanced process of devolution in the UK that has gone on for some time. Does he really believe that we are now within reach of a settlement that has some chance of holding in the next Parliament? Will it be possible to introduce proposals that command universal consent and put this endless constitutional debate finally to bed?
Mr Jenkin
I do not think that we are within reach of such a settlement. I think we are a very long way from such a settlement, such is the chaos inflicted by these piecemeal and bitty reforms. Many of them, such as the Scottish Parliament, we now accept as permanent parts of the constitution, but we are a long way from a common understanding of how everything should be knitted together again to preserve something like the United Kingdom. We are even a long way from agreeing, with an open mind, on the kind of relationship that the four parts of the United Kingdom should have with each other. We are just starting those conversations. We are talking in terms, and with openness, to people of whom we have been implacable opponents. That fresh approach will lead to renewed trust and understanding, on which we might eventually frame a new settlement of some kind, but I think we are a long way from that.
Trident Renewal
Debate between Bernard Jenkin and Crispin Blunt(9 years, 10 months ago)
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Crispin Blunt (Reigate) (Con)
It is a pleasure to follow the part-polemic by the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart). He was unable to answer a question put to him when he was challenged by Opposition Front Benchers about the extent to which his party, as the head of an independent Scotland, would be prepared to shelter under the American nuclear alliance. That is an important question that his party has to answer.
I say that from the perspective of someone who intends to vote with the hon. Gentleman this evening. It is right that there should be a proper debate about this, and I therefore welcome the debate that his party colleagues have introduced. We should have a cool, calm consideration of the merits of the Trident weapons system. Over the course of a decade, I have been increasingly uncomfortable about the prospect of renewing this weapons system. It is a system, and we are renewing the submarines that make up part of it. Some people have said that the motion is therefore technically in error, but without the submarines the system is pointless and without the missiles it is pointless. That is what the motion means and it is on that basis that I support it. Let me explain why.
The clinching argument for me—although I also want to refer to lots of other issues—is the opportunity cost of spending, let us say, £100 billion on renewing the weapons system over its lifetime. I am wearing the regimental tie of the Light Dragoons and want to make it clear that I spent a long time in defence, professionally and then subsequently as a special adviser in the Ministry of Defence and then in the Foreign Office. I remember trying to plan a scenario, in a political sense, for the circumstances in which the United Kingdom would decide to use nuclear weapons or weapons of similar destructive power, but, frankly, I found it impossible to find such a scenario. I think that that is still the case, and the deterrent effect of that uncertainty has been discussed.
Thirty years on from the decision taken in the 1980s to acquire the Trident system, things have changed significantly and, given the opportunity cost of acquiring the system, I believe that the decision to spend £100 billion should be altered. This weapons system is of much less practical utility than it used to be in deterrence terms and, given the cost-benefit analysis, the time has come to say that this is a business that the United Kingdom should probably get out of. As a nation, given the other potential demands on our defence budget, we can no longer justify the expense.
I listened carefully to the arguments made by my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin)—he made an extremely good speech—and they need to be addressed. First, if we buy this system, will it come at the expense of other parts of the defence budget? My view is that it will. My hon. Friend maintained that if the system is not bought, the Treasury will not give the Ministry of Defence the money. However, we have just made a significant political commitment to maintain defence expenditure at 2% of GDP.
Crispin Blunt
It was a political commitment made by the leaders of NATO at a summit hosted by the United Kingdom, so I believe we have made that commitment. The Government have not made it explicit and the Prime Minister will not do so before the general election, because we have to address serious budget issues and he is, rightly, giving himself room for manoeuvre. Everyone present knows that defence expenditure is already at historically low levels in terms of its share of national wealth. We are making economies in defence and in my view our defence posture is, frankly, incoherent, because we can no longer afford a coherent defence policy for the United Kingdom owing to the amount of resources we are devoting to it.
That is an issue for another debate, but it illustrates the point about the cost of acquiring this system. In the 1980s it cost between 2.5% and 3% of the total defence budget. The cost of renewing the system will be at about the same level of real expenditure, which means that it will cost about 6% of the defence budget. In private conversations with colleagues who share the same background as me, when I ask them whether they would rather have that money spent on the field army or on acquiring this weapons system, their answer is clear: they would rather have it spent on actual deployable defence—soldiers, sailors, airmen and the equipment deployed with them on operations—or even on the deterrence that a decent set of conventional armed forces provides. The names of some of the distinguished former Chiefs of the Defence Staff or those in other roles who have questioned the value for money of taking such a sum out of the defence budget have already been paraded.
I would argue very strongly to the Defence Secretary that if we are committed to this system, we should understand that it is a political weapons system, and that it is of very doubtful military utility. I do not entirely buy the deterrence argument, but that is a qualified position, because all these things are matters of judgment. If we do buy the argument, however, that should not come at the expense of a coherent defence programme. If we need 2% of GDP to provide a coherent conventional defence programme, we should buy this political weapons system not out of that budget, but from a separate source of funding.
In an intervention on the hon. Member for Barrow and Furness (John Woodcock), I asked just how much he would spend on acquiring this weapons system. He represents Barrow, where the submarines will be made, so I understand that his view of their value is rather different from that of other Members. However, we must answer this question, which we have not properly addressed: at what point does the expense become unaffordable for the United Kingdom?
I am perfectly content to continue to shelter under the American nuclear umbrella. I accept that the decision matrix would be profoundly different if the United States of America was not a rock-solid ally, the Atlantic alliance was not extremely important to the Americans or we could not place the same degree of reliability on their support as we now do. If we had good reason to believe that the United States was not going to be intimately tied into the defence of ourselves and Europe, the decision would be different. I happen to believe, however, that our interests are so closely intertwined, as they have been in all sorts of ways, that we can continue to rely on that alliance.
Frankly, I am not sure that the Americans place very much value on a separate source of nuclear deterrence decision making in London. I think that they would prefer us to bring such resources to the table in the form of deployable conventional forces. The United States Government will not of course take a public view that embarrasses the UK Government, but if we scratched them, we would find that they would rather we had more effective conventional forces.
I do not buy the argument of my hon. Friend the Member for Harwich and North Essex that we would lose the money from the defence budget altogether and not be able to spend it on anything else. However, even if the money was lost, it would have value: £100 billion off the debt or spent on other parts of the public service would be valuable.
I therefore ask: what are we buying with the system? There should be a debate about whether we are buying security or, given the laws of unintended consequences, insecurity. The hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire said that he thought we were buying status for our leaders so that they can parade themselves appropriately at conferences. I do not buy that argument—our leaders are perfectly capable of thinking in hard terms about what hard security is affordable—but I am concerned about the political background to this discussion, and about whether we can have a sensible debate on the cost-benefit analysis of acquiring this system.
The problem is the inheritance of the politics of the 1980s. When the decision was made to acquire the Vanguard and Trident system, the then Labour Opposition came out against it in 1983 as part of the “longest suicide note in history” that they presented to the United Kingdom electorate. I think that that policy was wrong and that at the time, because of the cold war, it was right to renew the deterrent. The people of the United Kingdom took the same view in the general election, as they did about the rest of the basket of promises that Michael Foot and his colleagues presented to the country, and they gave that policy, very properly, an extremely large raspberry and possibly the biggest Conservative majority in the history of Parliament—I am sure I will be corrected if that is wrong.
The scarring effect of that event, and the fact that there might be some proper debate, particularly on the Opposition Benches, means that dissent is suppressed. I am proud to stand here as a Conservative and question the efficacy of the decision under discussion, particularly in terms of its opportunity cost. It may be that I have discounted my future career prospects to such an extent that I feel free to make these points, but for the benefit of the Government Whip who is making a note, I say that this is where my judgment lies currently, but it would not prevent me from exercising collective responsibility to support the decision as part of any future Administration. [Laughter.] We should be able to have this debate and ask questions. How much money would we be prepared to spend on this system if its cost was not going to be 6% of the defence budget? What about if it was 10% or 20% of the defence budget? At what point does it cease to be sensible to invest in this system?
Many Members support deterrence in principle, or at least are not against the possession of weapons of this destructive power in principle—that is a perfectly proper position to take, although I do not share it because to a degree I buy the arguments that I grew up with in the 1970s and 1980s about the principle of a defence. I agree that during the cold war these weapons ensured that the world did not elide into direct hot war engagements that had the ability to escalate into catastrophe. The potential for catastrophe at the root of deterrence in a cold war, bipolar world kept us safe, but we are now in a different world and different calculations must be made.
My view is that for the United Kingdom, 6% of the defence budget is not justifiable, and that also relates to my view of Britain’s place in the world. Unlike most of my colleagues, I would be prepared to put our permanent seat on the Security Council up for negotiation and debate in a reform of the UN Security Council, to try to make that institution more effective. I think it is difficult to justify a British veto on the UN Security Council, and because it is so difficult to justify, the veto is hardly ever used by the United Kingdom. We must also think about Britain’s role in the world, and I do not think that we have properly had the debate about exactly what we can bring to the councils of the world, and what Britain’s position in the world should be.
We will be much better equipped to defend our interests if we are a wealthy, successful, entrepreneurial and trading nation that looks out to the entire world, and I am not sure that landing us with a weapons system that we are never going to use is a sensible use of resources, and it therefore might become a burden—