Defence Reform Bill

Julian Lewis Excerpts

Wednesday 20th November 2013 Commons Chamber

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

In support of what my hon. Friend has just said, which is the single most important observation anyone can ever make about defence planning, namely the unpredictability of future crises, may I remind him—that is not to say that he needs reminding—that only a few years ago the constant predictions were that it would be all about boots on the ground for the next 30 or 40 years? Let us therefore not make the mistake of doing something too rigid when we need maximum flexibility.

[Sir Gerald Howarth]

Naturally, I agree with my hon. Friend.

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[Dr Julian Lewis]

It is a pleasure to be able to say that, unlike the traveller who fell among thieves, I feel like one who has fallen among friends. On these issues, I have friends on both sides of the House, including, first and foremost, my hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury (Mr Brazier), who has been a wonderful advocate for the reserve forces for many years. I say to him and to those on the Front Bench that if this matter had simply been put forward in isolation, I would not have contemplated voting for the new clause tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Basildon and Billericay (Mr Baron). I am thinking of doing that for two reasons but, before I go into detail, I shall mention a couple more of my friends.

It is a pleasure to welcome to the Opposition Front Bench another friend, the new shadow Secretary of State for Defence, the hon. Member for Gedling (Vernon Coaker). My experience of his activities and positions on security issues has been wholly positive, and he has lived up to that by making his first trip as shadow Secretary of State a visit to the Barrow shipyards. I am sure that we can rely on him to maintain the firm position in support of the successor generation of submarines for the nuclear deterrent that both Front Benches adhere to, and which only one small party has sought to obstruct.

Another friend to whom I would like to refer—he has just slipped out of the Chamber for a moment—is the Secretary of State for Defence, my right hon. Friend the Member for Runnymede and Weybridge (Mr Hammond). Most people would agree that he was a very fine Treasury Minister indeed. I cannot think of anyone who was better at tackling complex financial problems and explaining them in terms so crystal clear that, from time to time, I even thought that I understood them myself. In reality, I could not think of any person, when presented with a limited budget—whether for defence or any other portfolio—who would make a better fist than my right hon. Friend of adjusting the workings of the Department concerned to fit a budget that he had perhaps rather arbitrarily been allocated.

That has a direct bearing on the two reasons for my putting my name down in support of my hon. Friend the Member for Basildon and Billericay’s new clause and amendments. The first relates to the size of the defence budget; the second is the question of whether the scheme for the reserves is or was linked to the proposed reduction in the size of the Army. Those are the two things that worry me. Even if my hon. Friend’s new clause and amendments are not ideally drafted—I am not saying that they are not—they present me, and other hon. Members whose main purpose of being in Parliament, apart from representing our constituents, is to maximise the defence of this country against threats, with one of the few opportunities that we have to register our concerns when we think that defence has fallen too far down the list of priorities.

I listened carefully to my hon. Friend the Member for North Wiltshire (Mr Gray) saying that the defence budget was a given. I am afraid that I do not accept that. I do not accept that more money could not have been found from within the defence budget and outside it. There could have been more money. We did not need to spend £1.4 billion extending the life of four Vanguard-class submarines just to satisfy the Liberal Democrats, so they could put off the decision to sign the main-gate contracts for the successor submarines until the next Parliament. We did not need to spend a whole shedload of money reversing the plan for two aircraft carriers and to adopt a preposterous plan for one functional and one non-functional aircraft carrier, and then spend another shedload of money reverting to the original position. Nor do we need to spend £40 billion or £50 billion on a high-speed train service to the north of England—[Interruption.] It has a great deal to do with it.

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[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Dr Julian Lewis.

[Dr Lewis]

If the hon. Gentleman had not been absent, he would have heard the great deal of discussion that took place about the priority of defence in the nation’s schedule of priorities. If he had made that bogus, so-called point of order having been here, I would have had some time for him, but given that he did not even have the courtesy to listen to the debate before making it, it was unworthy.

The reality is that a nation gets the defence forces it is prepared to pay for and it can decide what level of services it will fund—whether that involves cuts in the Army, the Royal Navy or the Royal Air Force that could be avoided.

The next question is whether this scheme for the reserves was linked to the proposed cut in the size of the Army. As I said, if this scheme had been put forward on its own, I could have wholeheartedly supported it, but it was not. It was specifically put forward as a compensating factor for the Army’s regular strength being reduced by 20,000. We were told that that reduction would be compensated for by the 30,000 increase in reserves. Now we are told that that linkage no longer exists. My hon. Friend the Member for North Wiltshire asked what we will do if we find that in fact the reserve scheme is not working. If I understood him correctly—I think I did—he said that, by the time we discovered that we were not going to get the 30,000 reservists, it would be too late to regenerate any of the loss in the 20,000 regulars. [Interruption.] He seems to be indicating that I have understood him correctly. If that is the case, I take great exception to the fact that this linkage was ever made in the first place.

If we are to be told that we have to accept cuts in this country’s defence capability, we should be told that honestly. We should not constantly be confronted with shifting goalposts. If the recruitment of 30,000 reservists may or may not be achieved, and if the 20,000 cut in regulars will happen nevertheless and is irreversible, we should have been told that at the outset. [Interruption.] Somebody says, “We were.” Who said that?

[Mr Gray]

Allow me to be the person who says that we were indeed told that. I very much regret that that has occurred. None the less, my point is not that I endorse this, but that it has happened: by 10 January, the British Army will be 82,767. That is the case and cannot be reversed.

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[Dr Lewis]

Yes, but if so, that was always going to be the case, and we should not have been sold the package of a cut in regular numbers of 20,000 on the basis that at least we could look forward to 30,000 reservists being added. That is no way to treat a mature Parliament or to show respect for the judgment of parliamentarians who are doing their best to supply the best level of defence that we can within the budget available.

A very simple principle is at stake here. Let us suppose that someone comes to a sovereign Parliament and says, “We are going to make a significant cut in the size of the Army, but don’t worry about it because we are going to compensate for it by building up the reserves to the tune of 30,000 people.” If there are any significant or reasonable doubts at all about whether the 30,000 target will be achieved, it is reasonable to say, “Hang on a minute, what happens if the 30,000 is not achieved?” If the answer is that the 20,000 cuts will take place in any case, it is absolutely unacceptable to have promised the 30,000 in the first place, especially as it was explicitly stated to the House that the cuts in the regulars would not be fully or irreversibly implemented until we knew that the reserves were going to be forthcoming. I do not want us to have this debate again in a few months’ time or in a few years’ time over the fact that we have neither the number of regulars we need nor the number of extra reserves that were promised. That is why, whatever the intricacies of the wording of new clause 3, I intend to support it.

[Rory Stewart]

I wish to speak briefly, because I am aware that many others wish to contribute, in strong defence of new clause 1 and against new clause 3. Both relate to the central issue, which has been raised by almost everyone in this debate: recruitment into the Territorial Army. New clause 1 will encourage recruitment, because it will show that we are taking the reserves seriously, whereas new clause 3 will discourage recruitment by introducing an unnecessary delay. The most important thing, which lies behind this entire debate, is defining what the reserves are for—what the function of the military is about. The best way to guarantee that we have a well-supported, well-recruited reserve is if we in this House can agree what the future shape of the Army is supposed to be and what we are supposed to be doing with it.

The central issue, which perhaps has not been touched on enough today and which I would like to touch on briefly, is whether we have or have not learned the lessons of the past 10 years. Do we have the shape of reserves or of the Regular Army required to meet the threats of the future? In essence, events of the past 10 years have completely exploded, or should have done in this Chamber, the entire consensus on nation building and counter-insurgency. For 10 years, the entire shape of our military has been arranged around those two principles, both of which I suggest, modestly, have been discredited. The experience of Iraq and Afghanistan should have taught us by now that we have designed the wrong kind of Army for the wrong kind of campaign. Those two central slogans, “nation building” and “counter-insurgency”, have not worked. We do not have time to talk through why they have not worked—if we had a long debate, we could do so—but we have to design reserve forces that meet that problem and that challenge.

Why has nation building not worked? In essence, it was because it was an over-ambitious fantasy. The jargon of “the rule of law”, “governance” and “civil society” turned out to be impossible to deliver. We never had the tour lengths, the linguistic knowledge or the deep area expertise to deliver things that require an understanding of culture and history. Counter-insurgency did not work for even deeper reasons, which the military predicted—in the United States and the United Kingdom—before we deployed. We never had the requisite number of troops, nor were we ever likely to. We never had the tour lengths we required. We never had a credible, effective, legitimate Government in Baghdad or Kabul to back us. We never had full control of the borders. In the absence of such structures, those missions turned out to be impossible.

Unless the reserves and the Regular Army take on those lessons, we will have the wrong kind of forces in the future. That does not mean that our military does not have a deep function in intervention, but that deep function needs to look at the model of Bosnia, and not that of Iraq or Afghanistan. We need to remember that in Bosnia our military proved exactly what an intervention can do. It went into a country with 110,000 people under arms. It went into a country when a million refugees had been displaced and when there were internal borders dividing it up in 25 different ways. By the time we had finished that intervention, the internal borders had gone, the militia had been reduced to 5,000 and the crime rate in Bosnia had dropped; it is now lower than that of Sweden. That is the kind of success for which we should be preparing our military.

The final thing—this really goes to the heart of what my hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury (Mr Brazier) has raised—is the question of how the knowledge, the imagination and the skills and the local links of the reserves should be adjusted to a new world. There are small ingredients that we should insert, and I plead with the Secretary of State to look very hard at reintroducing the short-service limited commission, or the gap-year commission. My hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury, I and a number of other Members of Parliament are proud to claim that we have been in the military. Our standing there was very brief, but it was an incredibly deep and important experience for us and for many other people. It is a relatively cheap programme, and it is one that can develop the links between the military and the local population.

On imagination and skills, the biggest prize for which we should be aiming is to fill in the gap that the Foreign Office, the Department for International Development and the current military are unable to fill in. I am talking about deep area expertise and deep linguistic expertise, which the right kind of reserve forces should be able to produce. We need to recruit, promote and incentivise the right kind of people. We want people with other lives, other jobs and other experiences, who should be able to develop what we have been sadly lacking for 20 years, which is a sensitivity to other cultures and an understanding of other environments, other local business and other political structures. If we can get those things right, we have exactly what we need for new clause 1, which is a template, a model or a bar to which to hold the Government accountable on how the reserve forces should function. We will also have a reason not to proceed with new clause 3, which delays the most important part of rebuilding the reserves.

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[Mr Ellwood]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. That is a long-term aspiration in helping Afghanistan.

My concern is whether this House will ever again entertain putting boots on the ground. I would like us to have a large standing Army, as others have mentioned, and to be that leader in the world, carrying that big stick. I ask that question because of my concern about the vote this place had on Syria. It was a very simple action that we would have been participating in, yet this House voted against the Government. Others say that perhaps that is not a yardstick for potential future interventions, and I quite understand that, but it could be that, because of the ghosts of Afghanistan and Iraq, interventions in future will have a light footprint and will be very different. I simply pose a question as to what our armed forces need to look like: do they need to look like what we have had in the past, or should they adapt to the type of footprint we will need in the future?

[Dr Julian Lewis]

The vote on Syria was absolutely different from any other vote, because it was not just about humanitarian assistance; it was about helping al-Qaeda take over another country, and many of us who support humanitarian assistance would not support that.

[Mr Ellwood]

I totally agree with my hon. Friend, who I know has spent a lot of time looking at the issues. The point I am trying to address is whether that situation will be repeated in the future. Will this House have an appetite to commit troops with boots on the ground or will it say, “What has it got to do with us? We cannot guarantee that we will vote on it”? We have to be prepared and ask ourselves what it is that our armed forces—[Interruption.] If hon. Members want to intervene, they may do so.