Strategic Defence and Security Review

Bob Stewart Excerpts

Thursday 16th September 2010 Commons Chamber

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

Let me begin by associating myself absolutely with the Chairman of the Select Committee, my right hon. Friend the Member for North East Hampshire (Mr Arbuthnot). I thank him for his speech, which was wonderfully delivered.

We do not live in Utopia. It would be great if we did, but life is not like that. We would not need an army, a navy or an air force in Utopia. We would not even need doctors or schools. Everything would be perfect.

[Mr MacShane]

Would we need politicians?

[Bob Stewart]

We certainly would not need politicians.

Everyone is a little wicked, even Opposition Members. We have a problem in this country. We have a £38 million debt in the defence budget at the moment, and we would need an SDSR regardless of which Government were in power. I am not blaming anyone; I am just giving the facts. We also have a big problem because the SDSR—

[Mr Kevan Jones]

rose—

[Bob Stewart]

If the hon. Gentleman wants me to give way, I will give way.

[Mr Kevan Jones]

The hon. Gentleman seems to be reading out the script he has been given by his party’s central office or his Front-Bench colleagues, and it is unusual for him to swallow what they give him, but I must tell him that the £38 billion to which he refers actually relates to the equipment budget over the next 10 years. [Interruption.] Yes, that was admitted: it was in the Gray report. However, it is important to recognise that over that 10-year period there will be slippage and reprogramming. The impression is being given that somehow this £38 billion must be paid for today, but that is not the case.

[Bob Stewart]

I am very glad to hear that, but we would certainly need an SDSR, and it is taking place very quickly—too quickly, perhaps. It is also happening when we are at war, which is extremely sad. We have a choice: we can either go straight to option one, which is to withdraw to fortress England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland and just to look after our territorial waters, or we can go abroad to protect our interests overseas, whatever they may be. I happen to believe that we must go for the latter option.

Defence is a basket-case; it is really difficult. We have got to get to grips with it now, and it is exceedingly difficult to get to grips with. Mountbatten and Heseltine tried to reorganise the MOD, and there have been incremental and experimental changes ever since. The MOD is extremely difficult to reorganise, however. People always talk about the fact that we have two service personnel for every civil servant, but may I remind the House that many civil servants are people who guard bases and substitute for soldiers, sailors and airmen who would otherwise be called upon to do that job, and we do not have enough of them?

[Mr Kevan Jones]

And they may be cheaper.

[Bob Stewart]

Yes, and they may be cheaper.

Procurement is a big problem; it is never easy to procure. In the second world war, within 18 months we managed to design and build Mulberry harbours and then tow them across the channel and put them into position. Like many other Members, I cannot understand why procurement is part of this basket-case—why procurement takes so long and is so expensive—but that is a fact: procurement is a problem.

Everyone wants to have equipment off the shelf. As all ex-soldiers know, we want the best kit we can get, we want it now, and we want it regardless of where it comes from. I remember when I was an infantryman wanting the M16 rifle. It was American, it was light and it weighed 6 lb. I wanted it to replace the self-loading rifle. In the jungles it was much easier to use an M16. Instead, however, we got the SA80, which did not seem to work and was heavy. The reason we had to have it was that we had to protect British jobs. I understand that—it is a fact of life—but it is one of the reasons why procurement remains such a problem.

When we have an SDSR, all three services have a problem because of regimental tradition. I pay great tribute to the Royal Air Force—my biggest hero is Guy Gibson of 617 Squadron—and I pay great tribute to the Royal Navy. Many people do not realise that we have a problem in trying to reorganise the armed forces because each of the armed services seems to have elements of the others within it: the Royal Air Force has the RAF Regiment and some kind of maritime capability; the Royal Navy has the Royal Marines and the Fleet Air Arm; and the Army says it has more aircraft than the RAF. It all seems a bit crazy, but it works and I hope we will not change it because tradition matters so much.

I shall now move on to my favourite hobby-horse: care of the wounded. Up until discharge, care is pretty good for our servicemen and women—it is as good as it can be—but I say to hon. Members that after our servicemen and women are discharged they are cast on to the national health service. I plead with Ministers to look at how we look after our wounded servicemen and women after they leave the forces, not necessarily within the defence budget but as part of an overall package.

[Mr Kevan Jones]

rose—

[Bob Stewart]

If the hon. Gentleman wants me to sit, I will sit.

[Mr Kevan Jones]

The hon. Gentleman may find that what the previous Labour Government and I did on the Army recovery capability is exactly as he describes. I am pleased that the current Government are following through on it.

[Bob Stewart]

That is great, but let us make it better, because I know servicemen who were victims of the Ballykelly bomb 28 years ago who still live in poverty.

Cuts and reviews are extremely difficult. The reason why we have capabilities in our armed forces is that they are required to be effective in battle. Many hon. Members, on both sides of the House, have served. Throughout our service, we all saw salami- slicing, which means cutting down units. When I joined my infantry battalion, it was 750 strong; when I left, it was 530 strong, but it was still called an infantry battalion. That is salami-slicing. No one likes it, but I have a great fear that we will have to do it again, because if we want to take expeditionary opportunities or respond to such needs, we must keep the capabilities that we have. That means that we will have to stomach what I call super salami-slicing in one way or other—I cannot see how we can avoid it.

Defence is, indeed, the first duty of government, as we all know. It is also a very difficult matter. We all understand the difficulties of choosing between a hospital and a squadron of aircraft, but defence is more like insurance, in that no one wants to pay for it until we require it, when the chips are down.

Mindful that Mr Deputy Speaker will tell me to shut up soon—which I will—I want to end with the words of Rudyard Kipling:

“For it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Chuck him out, the brute!”

But it’s “Saviour of ’is country” when the guns begin to shoot;

An’ it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ anything you please;

An’ Tommy ain’t a bloomin’ fool - you bet that Tommy sees!”

You bet that Tommy sees what we do.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Julian Brazier (Canterbury) (Con)]

Let me start by paying tribute to 5th Battalion the Royal Regiment of Scotland, better known as the Argylls, whom we are proud to host in Canterbury—they were given the freedom of the city last year, the first Scottish unit ever to do so—and to 3rd Battalion the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment, our local Territorial Army battalion. They have both had many deployments to Afghanistan and both have taken casualties.

Before I make some rather controversial remarks, let me say that I am deeply conscious of the fact that I have never participated in active service. I was a witness to quite a serious battle once, but I have never been on active service, unlike a small number of Members of the House. Every time I meet people who have been, and especially when I meet those who have been desperately wounded—people who have lost limbs, who have been blinded and so on—I feel deeply humbled.

[Bob Stewart]

When people are wounded, it has an impact on morale. As I am in poetic mood, may I just say what Padre Woodbine Willie said in 1918? He put it perfectly:

“There are many kinds of sorrow

In this world of Love and Hate,

But there is no sterner sorrow

Than a soldier’s for his mate.”

The wounded not being dealt with properly has an impact on morale.

[Mr Brazier]

I thoroughly agree with my hon. and gallant Friend. Over the years, on a number of occasions—including at Prime Minister’s questions—I have raised that issue and been glad to do so. However, my speech today is on quite another subject.

I am emboldened by a pamphlet by two very fine fighting soldiers, General Sir Graeme Lamb and Colonel Richard Williams, both former commanding officers of the regular SAS—it will be published by Policy Exchange and was trailed in The Times today—to say that I have a very specific concern that I have never raised in the House before: I do not think that, for some years now, the quality of military advice in the upper echelons of the MOD has been anything like as good as that deserved by our gallant, brave and highly professional armed forces.

I was sorry to miss the speech made by my right hon. Friend the Member for North East Hampshire (Mr Arbuthnot) and I must apologise to the House for being late, but I had a pressing constituency engagement with the Secretary of State for Health. However, I know that my right hon. Friend set out wider concerns—he is too polite a person to concentrate on particular areas—about the SDSR. I want to cite a couple of examples from the past for which politicians and the previous Labour Government must take the blame, but in which it seems that military advice must have played quite an important role.

The first is the second Iraq war, which is the largest conflict in the past 15 years. Let us put the intelligence, the dodgy dossier and all the rest of it to one side, although there was a military element in that, and ask how that conflict, in which we started so professionally and so well, could have led to such mistakes in operations, equipment and so on that it ended with a substantial British force sheltering on Basra airbase—I am saying no more than the American media have said again and again—subject to mortar fire, with men being killed and wounded, and unable to locate the mortars that were shooting at them until the US marines arrived to rescue them and effectively to clear the area.

Let me give a second example. There is probably no Labour politician for whom I have more respect than John Reid, who is an exceptional man. When he made that—in retrospect profoundly silly—remark about it being quite possible that we could go into Afghanistan without a single shot being fired, and when we deployed a force without even such basic equipment as adequate amounts of body armour, I cannot believe that he did so without first having conversed with his senior military advisers. I say that only because a number of Members, including my hon. Friends the Members for North Warwickshire (Dan Byles) and for Beckenham (Bob Stewart), have already said that the MOD will need some shaking up. I believe passionately that the defence of the realm is the first priority of a Government. I stepped down as a Parliamentary Private Secretary—I quietly retired rather than resigning—during the “Options for Change” programme. I believe that we have to be a lot cleverer and that we cannot continue as we are now.

Let me address two of the themes from the pamphlet I mentioned. First, we have to move on from the industrial age to the information age, just as we moved from the horse-drawn age to the age of the tank. The pamphlet points out that, in practical terms, although we have lots of drones and other information-gathering systems in Afghanistan, our troops do not have the technology with the bandwidth to make much use of it. We are losing more than twice as many people per thousand in each engagement as the Americans, because although we have some of the information-gathering machines, we do not have the means by which to get the information to where it is needed in a timely fashion. On a more strategic level, the pamphlet makes the strong point that, in extremis and out-and-out war, a force that has the edge over the other side in information terms will ensure that the other side is never able to deliver a single shot. We are already that far behind the Americans in some areas. The really terrifying point is that, by working with little bits of civilian technology from the mobile phone and several other areas, the Taliban have in some areas got inside our information loop.

A second point that the pamphlet makes concerns a subject on which the House has heard from me many times. It discusses the reserve forces and the regular forces and makes the point, absolutely convincingly, that we must keep a full range of capabilities, but it is absolutely impossible for us to do so and at the same time afford to modernise our armed forces given the current costs of manpower. We could achieve it by doing what the Americans and the Israelis have done—by transferring most of the heavy stuff such as armour and heavy artillery not into storage in so-called reserves but into proper, trained volunteer reserve units.

We have just had the anniversary of the battle of Britain. My great-uncle served in that battle merely by driving a desk, but as an under-age enlistment in the first world war, he was one of the founding members of the Royal Flying Corps and served gallantly in the air. I am intensely proud to represent a Kentish constituency in which much of that battle took place. As the pamphlet that was published this morning reminds us, a quarter of those units were volunteer reserve units from the Royal Auxiliary Air Force and a third of the pilots in the regular squadrons were from the RAF Volunteer Reserve and were also volunteer reservists with civilian jobs who trained to fly for the Air Force in their spare time. The pamphlet asks something that we should all be asking about why the continental air defence of the United States is carried out almost entirely by the air national guard, with F-16s manned by people who fly for a living in their civilian jobs—the same applies in Israel—while in Britain we have the absurdity of paying the huge cost of training and retaining regular pilots to fly for just 12.5 hours a month. It must be possible to move some of those pilots across to volunteer units, as the pamphlet suggests.

I want to end by spending a couple of minutes on what makes volunteer reserves tick. If the outcome of the review is that the Government say that we have run out of money and that they intend to put various things on to the reserves, and that means pools of tanks and artillery equipment, aircraft in hangars and lists of people who very occasionally turn out to train, or worse still paper lists like those for the regular reserves of all three forces, the review will have failed and the volunteer reserves will wither and disappear.

We have to think about how we make the offer and the job sufficiently attractive that a high-calibre man or woman with a busy civilian job who is tired at the end of the week will be willing to climb into a car and drive to their training centre, aerodrome or vessel and undergo challenging and interesting training. There are three ways to do that. First, units must be led by volunteer reservists with real civilian jobs, not commanded by full-time people. Secondly, there must be a range of training and opportunities for command on operations that make commanders at the junior and middle-ranking officer level and the senior and junior NCO level feel that they are valued and have a real job to do. The Americans do it. When we sent a squadron of 21 SAS —my old regiment—last year, three out of fewer than 70 were awarded MCs in six months, so it can be done. Thirdly, we talk about barracks and accommodation, but the volunteer reservists must have decent centres. As Field Marshall Montgomery said, “They must be the best clubs in town.” These things cost money, but it is about a fifth of the price of their regular counterparts.

We face a difficult and dangerous world; we face an intensely difficult financial crisis. We must be more imaginative in finding a way forward.