Strategic Defence and Security Review

Gerald Howarth Excerpts

Thursday 26th January 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Leigh]

I accept some of what my hon. Friend says. However, I pray in aid the recent United Kingdom National Defence Association report, “Inconvenient Truths”, which was written by former defence chiefs. It said:

“Our assessment is that current force levels are inadequate to hold off even a small-size invasion”.

Admiral Sir Sandy Woodward wrote in the Daily Mail:

“The truth is we couldn't defend anything further than the other side of the Channel”.

Air Commodore Andrew Lambert was quoted in The Guardian as saying that the

“British public is not aware how thin the ice is…or how bad things could get”

and that the Falkland Islands are

“ripe for the picking.”

I am not saying that I want this to happen or that it will happen, but I am afraid that we in this House must occasionally sound warnings—that is our duty.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Defence (Mr Gerald Howarth)]

My hon. Friend raises concerns that are widespread around the country, particularly in the light of the sabre-rattling by Argentina. However, all the advice that we have received says that the Argentines have neither the capability nor the intention to repeat the folly of 1982 and that the military deterrent we have in place is fully up to the task. I assure my hon. Friend and the House that, in this 30th anniversary year, all of us, as Ministers, are much seized of the matter.

[Mr Leigh]

I am grateful to the Minister. We pay tribute to him and to his colleagues in the Ministry of Defence for the sterling work that they do and the way in which they have defended the defence budget.

The Secretary of State said that part of our strategic defence is to have a balanced budget. We all understand that. However, he is using precisely the arguments that were used time and again in the 1930s when people warned of our military weakness and successive Chancellors of the Exchequer argued that we were well defended, rubbished the figures that were being given to them about our military weakness, and said that the most important thing was that the country had a balanced budget.

We do not blame our right hon. and hon. Friends the Ministers and the Department of State for this. We know that they are fighting their corner; the previous Secretary of State put up a tremendous fight. However, there must be some rebalancing. As my right hon. Friend the Member for North East Hampshire (Mr Arbuthnot) said, we are now spending more on winter fuel allowance than on the entire Foreign Office budget. We must have a reordering of strategic defence capabilities, because there is nothing more important than defence. In 1980, the Army had 160,000 soldiers. That number is set to fall to 100,000, and the Government have announced that they want the total strength of the Army to go down to 84,000 by 2020. The Army will have been cut by 12% since 1997. Air Force personnel are being cut from 90,000 to 40,000. Those figures are deeply worrying.

The previous Government said that 25,000 soldiers, 8,000 sailors and 17,000 airmen were surplus to requirements precisely at the moment when we were fighting two major wars. Sir Richard Dannatt, the former head of the Army, has said that we are facing a situation whereby the Army is massively overstretched and many soldiers are having only one year between operations, with much of that time spent away from home. We must appreciate that we live in an increasingly dangerous world. We must, as a House, be prepared to make tough and difficult decisions and be determined to reorder our priorities and say that our defence forces are essential for all our futures.

I was recently struck by a passage in Martin Gilbert’s book, “Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years”, that quotes Churchill on the night that Eden resigned:

“From midnight to dawn, I lay on my bed, consumed by emotions of sorrow and fear. There seemed one strong young figure standing up against long, dismal, drawling tides of drift and surrender, of wrong measurements and feeble impulses. Now he was gone. I watched the daylight slowly creep in through the windows and saw before me in mental gaze the vision of Death.”

--- Later in debate ---

[Thomas Docherty]

My hon. Friend is right. The Times paints a disturbing picture today. We on the Defence Committee and the wider defence community have for some time had serious concerns about the capability of Lockheed Martin to fulfil the aspirations set out. When the Minister appeared before the Defence Committee, it was disturbing that he adopted a relatively blasé approach to the problem, in direct contradiction to the postures of Secretary Gates, who has already been name-checked, and Secretary Panetta, who have been turning the screws on Lockheed Martin. As the decision has been rushed, we might have to go back and reverse it, and go to the F-35B, which would be not only embarrassing but a vast waste of money. We have only two other options: as my hon. Friend says, the F-18 Super Hornet, a proven air frame, of which the Australians have just ordered additional quantities, and for which Secretary Panetta has announced an additional order, or the French variant, which, to be fair, would at least solve the Charles de Gaulle issue.

On the carriers themselves, it is no secret that I have absolute scorn for the decision that was taken to take the Invincible class out of service. In fact, despite the claim of a minority on the Government Benches that the Libyan operation justifies the decision, the reverse is true, as it demonstrates absolutely the need for carrier capability throughout the decade.

[Mr Gerald Howarth]

indicated dissent.

[Thomas Docherty]

The Minister shakes his head. Perhaps it would help him if I were to quote the commander of the Italian navy, Rear Admiral Treu, who said:

“Libya is really showing that these aircraft”

the Harrier—

“and their carrier are needed. They are five minutes from the operational zone, which reduces fuel consumption and wear and tear. With less reliance on in-flight refuelling, it is easier to do dynamic tasking and shift operation, and they cost less to operate than Tornados and Eurofighters”.

I have the greatest respect for the Minister and I know he cares passionately about the future of aviation. He has been a strong voice in the Government—dare I say, one of the few strong voices for the defence industry in the Government—but what does he know that our First Sea Lord, our commanders in the field and our allies do not?

[Mr Gerald Howarth]

I am most grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his kind tribute, although I am not sure whether it will be career enhancing. Nevertheless I will take it in the spirit in which it was given. Of course carriers would have been advantageous, but they were not necessary in the circumstances of Libya. The Government are going ahead with the Queen Elizabeth and Prince of Wales carriers precisely because we understand the need for carrier strike. We had endless debates about that in the SDSR and we came to that conclusion, which is the right one in my view. In Libya, however, we did not need carriers; HMS Ocean did a great job for the Army Air Corps Apaches.

[Thomas Docherty]

I am most grateful to the Minister. He is obviously very clever, because he has led me straight on to my next point, which is about the replacement for the Invincible class, the Queen Elizabeth class aircraft carrier. He perhaps forgot to mention that, even some time after 2020, when we eventually get a functioning aircraft carrier, it will only be part-time. We will only be able to operate it for perhaps 150 days of the year, so we must be really hopeful that those who seek to attack us only do it on the five or six months a year when we are able to respond. It reminds me of Asterix the Gaul and the scene where he comes to Britain and the British have gone home at 5 o’clock to have their tea. That is pretty much the kind of part-time Navy that we will have if the Minister gets his way.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Murrison]

My hon. Friend is absolutely correct. It may not be by chance that the Germans are chief among those who wish to shelter under a European defence force, because Germany, of all our allies and friends, is the country one can most easily identify as a major economy that does not pay its way in terms of our collective security, which it so obviously enjoys. When the Minister is in Brussels, I very much hope that he will do everything he can to put pressure on the Germans in particular to make a fuller contribution to our collective defence; but it has to be through NATO, not through the European Union. The lesson of the past few years and the difficulty with the European Union in respect of our economic position—the greatest existential threat the UK faces at the moment—is that we cannot rely on Europe for our security. Our cornerstone has always been NATO and it will continue to be.

[Mr Gerald Howarth]

I assure my hon. Friend that whenever I represent Her Majesty’s Government in Brussels I clearly make the point that NATO is a cornerstone of our defence and that other nations should jolly well divvy up in their own defence.

[Dr Murrison]

I thank the Minister. Recent activity in the south Atlantic has shown us that the threat from a Government playing to a national gallery has to be addressed.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

I, too, congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for North East Hampshire (Mr Arbuthnot) on initiating the debate, and the Backbench Business Committee on choosing it as today’s topic. I was particularly pleased that my right hon. Friend started the debate by emphasising the unpredictability of future conflicts, a point re-emphasised in the strongest possible terms by my hon. Friend the Member for North Wiltshire (Mr Gray). Having listened to the Secretary of State for Defence today, I believe that what he is trying to do is create a balanced budget without sacrificing the aim of having the balanced forces that we need. That is a necessary approach, and we should resist the temptation to say that we ought to sacrifice particular capabilities forever, simply because we cannot conceive at this moment of going to war, or entering some lesser conflict, unless we are in coalition with allies.

I was impressed by some of the remarks made by the hon. Member for Bridgend (Mrs Moon), who pointed out the gaps in capability resulting from the cancellation of the Nimrod MRA4. In a later intervention she referred to the problems relating to the loss of fixed-wing aircraft carrier aircraft capability. If we acknowledge the certainty that we will be unable to predict the vast majority of cases in which we shall need to send our armed forces to war, and couple that with a restricted budget, which means that we will often have to choose either what is commonly and derogatorily called salami-slicing, or abandoning certain capabilities permanently, I believe that the salami-slicing approach, unpleasant though it is, is broadly the correct one—because we do not know when, where, against whom or how we will have to go to war. We cannot predict which of the vast range of military capabilities that we currently have we will need to use. Therefore, in straitened economic circumstances when we cannot afford to spend as much on defence as we would like to, and as indeed we feel in our hearts we ought to, we must nevertheless preserve what are called “nucleus” forces, which give us the potential when the need arises to expand on the capabilities that we have retained, even though at any given time those capabilities have seemed to be inadequate.

In that connection, if Ministers are working within an economic envelope—that is not the best terminology to use, but it has been used today so I shall continue with it—in times of peace, we can all understand that, but, whenever we end up in a serious armed conflict, those economic considerations are always relegated to second place, and Ministers simply have to put aside considerations of affordability in favour of the absolute necessity of taking the measures which that conflict situation requires them to take.

It is now just over 30 years since my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Mr Leigh), a gentleman called Councillor Tony Kerpel, a former chief of staff to a former chairman of the Conservative party, and I set up a coalition. It was not quite the sort of coalition that we have today, which, as hon. Members may know, is so close to my heart; it was the Coalition for Peace Through Security, and its purpose was to fight for the changeover from Polaris to the first generation of Trident and for the deployment of cruise missiles in Britain so that eventually we would be able to negotiate a deal, which we did in 1987, to get rid of intermediate nuclear forces on both sides of the iron curtain in Europe.

I am therefore very happy to reassure the hon. Member for Dunfermline and West Fife (Thomas Docherty), in his absence, that I do not feel at all proprietorial about the arguments in favour of the nuclear deterrent. I am absolutely delighted when people such as the hon. Member for Barrow and Furness (John Woodcock), who I know had not intended to speak today, rise to their feet and defend it with such vigour.

I was pleased, but I shall look very closely at Hansard tomorrow to see exactly what the shadow Secretary of State said when I asked him to clarify and confirm his party’s commitment to the renewal of Trident, and in particular to the successor generation of submarines. I invite my hon. Friend the Minister, given that the Secretary of State did not refer to it, to clarify our own position on that very subject.

[Mr Gerald Howarth]

Prompted by my hon. Friend, I am delighted to say, as he will know, that in the SDSR and in our Trident value-for-money review the Government committed to renewing the independent nuclear deterrent: submarine-based, continuously at sea, patrolling. That programme is being taken forward. Initial gate was in May last year, and I assure him that all the work is continuing and in progress. If I may, I also take this opportunity to salute my hon. Friend, my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Mr Leigh), and Tony Kerpel on the then coalition, because I supported it at the time and am delighted to be in government supporting it now.