Strategic Defence and Security Review

Joan Ruddock Excerpts

Tuesday 19th October 2010 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

My hon. Friend, who has served in Afghanistan and has expertise in bomb disposal—we should give him credit for that—makes a good point. The whole point of taking the reserves out of the review and of having a separate, longer and more thoughtful look is precisely to answer the sort of question that he puts. When it comes to what is called “hot stabilisation”, I think it is right to try to develop units where we bring the military and civilians together. Then, in that vital golden hour when we have gone into a community, we can start to get things done so that the population is on our side rather than against us. If we are to have more of what have been called “wars among the people”, we must make sure that we are properly equipped to deal with them.

[Joan Ruddock (Lewisham, Deptford) (Lab)]

I have always supported the case for greater conflict prevention, but conflict prevention needs to be understood and practised by the military themselves. How will the Prime Minister guarantee the continuing and proper focus of the Department for International Development on women, children and achieving the millennium development goals if a third of its budget should be reallocated to conflict prevention, which is something quite different?

[The Prime Minister]

I would say that conflict affects women and children and that broken states have the worst records on poverty and development. Far be it from me to recommend a reading list to the right hon. Lady, but Paul Collier’s work on the bottom billion and broken states backs up the case for how we should use our DFID budget—yes, for meeting the millennium development goals; yes, for vaccination and malaria reduction and all those extremely worthwhile things; but I think we are mad if we do not put money into mending broken states, where so many of the problems of poverty arise.