Foreign Affairs and Defence

John Stanley Excerpts

Wednesday 26th May 2010 Commons Chamber

[Sir John Stanley (Tonbridge and Malling) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to follow the maiden speech of the hon. Member for Bolton South East (Yasmin Qureshi). She may be interested to learn that my first parliamentary campaign took place close to her constituency, in Newton. I am sure that the whole House will have noted the important point—this runs contrary to misplaced and prejudiced stereotypes—that she has been most warmly welcomed in her constituency, as has been confirmed and vindicated by her electoral success. She clearly has great knowledge of her constituency and we very much look forward to hearing more from her on future occasions.

May I also say to my hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart) what a great pleasure it was for me to be in the House to hear his speech? When we met in the House shortly after he had been elected, he reminded me that we had met before and that he had come to my office in the Ministry of Defence to be interviewed as my military assistant. With the utmost courtesy and civility, he reminded me that I had failed to select him. He referred to Winston Churchill, who, as we all know, wrote in the front pages of each of the volumes of his great history on the second world war “magnanimity in victory”. My hon. Friend undoubtedly has magnanimity in abundance and I know that he will make a most valued contribution, both in his constituency and in this House.

Like other right hon. and hon. Members, I am delighted that my right hon. Friends the Members for Richmond (Yorks) (Mr Hague) and for North Somerset (Dr Fox) are in their respective posts. Their appointments were widely anticipated, but they are, none the less, very encouraging and reassuring for those on this side of the House; we wish them well in their roles.

My right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary was entirely right to go to the United States on his first overseas visit within a couple of days of taking up his appointment. I do not know whether Secretary Clinton found him as personally captivating as she clearly did the right hon. Member for South Shields (David Miliband), but whether she did or not, my right hon. Friend was entirely correct to make his first port of call overseas our most important and reliable ally.

In this House, I am sure that we do not forget that others talk the talk about being allies but that when it comes to the heavy lifting, the tough operational situations and the risk of casualties, it is again and again our American allies who walk the walk with us. I hope that that will remain the foundation of our foreign policy and defence policy through this Parliament.

That brings me to Afghanistan. I am very glad that the Gracious Speech coupled the references to Afghanistan with those to Pakistan. The two are inseparable. The success of the Pakistan authorities and military in the badlands of Pakistan—in North and South Waziristan, in the federally administered tribal areas or FATAs and in North West Frontier Province—is inextricably related to the degree of success that we can achieve in the remaining badlands controlled by the Taliban in Afghanistan. We, above all, learned in Northern Ireland that one cannot have any real prospect of success in dealing with cross-border counter-terrorism if one deals with only one side of the border.

The previous Government made an important step in the right direction approximately a year ago. The Select Committee on Foreign Affairs was in Afghanistan and Pakistan and the then Prime Minister was in those two countries at the same time. He announced a programme of bilateral assistance to Pakistan to help it to deal with its terrorist problem. In his opening remarks, my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary referred to building on our bilateral relationships with Pakistan and I urge most strongly that our bilateral co-operation with Pakistan should be built on and that additional resources should be provided for it. It is fundamental to the degree of success that we can achieve in Afghanistan.

The further point that I want to make about Afghanistan is that there is one somewhat sobering lesson to be learned from the past 10 years or so, both in Iraq and Afghanistan. Again and again, we have undertaken operational responsibilities and commitments and have been unable to deploy the necessary resources to discharge those commitments fully. In doing so, I believe that we have seriously let down our brave servicemen and women. If anybody was in any doubt about that, I hope that they saw the “Panorama” programme last Tuesday, which showed what enormous and intolerable pressure our counter-IED teams in Afghanistan have been put under as a result of an insufficiency of trained personnel to deal with that threat.

There is much speculation in the press that we might be asked to take on Kandahar, and I want to make the point to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Defence that if we are going to take on that responsibility, I trust that we will do so only if we are absolutely satisfied that we have the resources and equipment that our forces need to take on that area, which is the historic heartland of the Taliban.

Let me turn quickly to the middle east. Governments may change but the policy has not. The wording in the Queen’s Speech on the middle east:

“In the Middle East, my Government will continue to work for a two-state solution that sees a viable Palestinian state existing in peace and security alongside Israel”

is, I am sure, virtually identical to that in Queen’s Speech after Queen’s Speech.

Although a viable Palestinian state remains the goal, and although that policy remains unchanging, what is changing is the situation on the ground. The prospect of a viable Palestinian state is steadily receding because the Palestinian state is now divided into three. There is Gaza, which is effectively a prison, there is East Jerusalem—a semi-prison where there is relentless Israeli pressure to increase the Israeli population and decrease the Palestinian population—and there is the rest of the west bank, where the viability of farms and businesses owned by Palestinians is being jeopardised all the time by Israeli security requirements. I urge my right hon. Friends to do everything they can to try to bring home to the Israeli Government the fact that the policy that they have been pursuing for years of effective de facto annexation of East Jerusalem and the west bank will produce not long-term security for Israel, but long-term insecurity.

On the non-proliferation treaty, I want to cover one aspect that has not been covered so far. In a previous Conservative Government, we achieved what I believe to have been the most significant nuclear arms reduction since nuclear weapons came on the scene—the intermediate-range nuclear forces treaty of 1987, in which the entire class of ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges from 5,500 km down to 500 km was scrapped. That agreement between the United States and Russia meant there were zero such weapons on either side. We now have the possibility of completing that process with shorter-range nuclear weapons, and I ask my right hon. Friends on the Front Bench to put that on their agenda. Those weapons are an anachronism, but they exist by the thousand: there are approximately 5,000 in Russian hands and some 1,100 in United States hands. If we were able to get those numbers down to zero and zero for intermediate-range weapons, we ought to be able to do the same for short-range weapons.

I wish my right hon. Friends the Members for Richmond (Yorks) and for North Somerset and the whole Front Bench well in resolving the very major foreign policy and security issues that we face. Above all, I wish them well in keeping the people of this country safe.