Mark Tami - Ministry of Defence debates

Strategic Defence and Security Review

Mark Tami Excerpts

Monday 21st June 2010

(14 years, 5 months ago)

Commons Chamber

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Angus Robertson

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Perhaps the hon. Lady will concede that if we spent our population share on defence, we would have significantly more service personnel; more would be spent on procurement and as part of the defence sector in Scotland than is spent now. I do not know whether she was listening at the start when I said that the UK already has fewer service personnel pro rata in Scotland than the Irish Republic does.

The hon. Lady obviously did not want to listen to the litany of further closures that took place under the Labour Government. HMS Gannet lost 245 service personnel and hundreds of jobs were lost on the Clyde; incidentally, there are fewer shipbuilding jobs on the Clyde now than when Labour came to power. RAF Stornoway was closed, as was the mooring and support depot at Fairlie. The royal naval storage department in Rosyth was closed, while RAF Machrihanish was passed to Defence Estates. The Army depot at Forthside in Stirling was also closed, as was RAF Buchan.

The list goes on and on. I should like those on the Treasury Bench to understand that the strategic defence and security review cannot take place without an understanding of what has happened to the defence footprint across the United Kingdom. If there is not such an understanding, the review will be severely denuded. We had only to open one of Scotland’s best selling quality newspapers this weekend to learn that, apparently, areas slated for closure include RAF Kinloss, RAF Lossiemouth, 45 Commando, Fort George, the Queen Victoria school at Dunblane and the 2nd Division at Craigiehall. There are concerns about procurement projects, including carriers on the Clyde and in Rosyth.

At the start of this debate, I asked the Secretary of State what consideration he would give to the concept of the defence footprint at the end of the review. He said—I paraphrase—“We will be considering these matters as part of the defence industrial strategy.” With the greatest respect, this issue is much bigger than the defence industrial strategy. It is about the location of bases and the companies that produce for the major contracts—about what is left open and what closes. I repeat that, of course, the driver in an SDSR must always be defence and foreign policy considerations. That is understood; everybody understands that.

Mark Tami (Alyn and Deeside) (Lab)

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Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Angus Robertson

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I am running out of time, and I want to conclude by saying this. Unless those issues are considered at the MOD now, they will be lost as the different services interplay and trade off the different things that they will lose as part of the SDSR. Somebody needs to take charge and ask themselves what will come out of the situation and what will be left of the defence footprint around the UK. What will be the impact on the nations and regions? If that does not happen, I predict that there will be big losers and virtually no winners.

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John Woodcock (Barrow and Furness) (Lab/Co-op)

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I congratulate my neighbours, the hon. Members for Fylde (Mark Menzies) and for Lancaster and Fleetwood (Eric Ollerenshaw), on their excellent and persuasive maiden speeches. That sentiment is all the more heartfelt, given that probably more than half my constituents also wish that they were fellow Lancastrians.

No function of Government is more important than the defence of their people and support for those who put themselves in harm’s way. It is therefore absolutely right that in this review, the needs of country and of the front line must come first. Our manufacturing base is critically important. I represent a constituency where 5,000 people are employed in Barrow shipyard alone—the foundation of the whole economy. There is a supply chain that reaches right across the UK, with the Trident successor set to provide work for nearly 400 suppliers stretching from Aberdeen to Portsmouth. Furness would be decimated if production were to cease. Yet I know that it is the contribution that employees in my constituency make to their country’s security that gives them such pride. They include workers at BAE’s Global Combat Systems making the M777 howitzers for troops in Afghanistan, the likes of Oxley and Marl responding to urgent operational requirements such as infrared lighting to support night driving in that difficult terrain, and workers at BAE’s Submarine Solutions building the Astute class boats that will potentially, in future conflicts, lessen the need for front-line troops to put themselves in harm’s way.

My case is not that the strategic defence review should create defence priorities to sustain our prized industrial base; rather, jobs and capacity within the UK must be maintained precisely because they are essential to keeping our nation safe. We must of course be more efficient and make some very difficult choices, but retaining a unique industrial capacity will continue to give us a military edge in key fields in responding quickly to the next urgent operational requirement and producing subs whose maintenance is not reliant on offshore expertise, compromising our sovereignty and security. How we create a capability through a new defence industrial strategy is critically important, but so, of course, is what we create.

I want to devote the rest of my speech to the importance of taking the right decisions on our independent nuclear deterrent.

Mark Tami

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Before my hon. Friend moves on to the nuclear issue, does he agree that many countries have often found that when they simply buy off the shelf from the US, it is a bit like buying a car and finding that there are lots of blanks where all the important gizmos should be, because the Americans keep them for themselves? There are also lots of ongoing costs regarding servicing and the black box technology that the Americans keep for themselves.

John Woodcock

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My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Very difficult decisions are involved in this review, but we must not overlook the advantage that home-grown, home-made kit gives our armed forces out in the field of combat.

Of course, as parliamentarians and as individual human beings, our instinctive feeling towards the ultimate weapons of mass destruction that the deterrent represents is one of deep hostility and revulsion. It is a responsibility on all of us to strive for a world free from nuclear weapons. So for all the thousands of people who depend on it in my constituency, if abandoning the deterrent now would make the world safer from the threat of nuclear holocaust, it would be my duty to embrace that. However, unilaterally scrapping or delaying the renewal of Trident would make our country and the world less safe, not more so. Instead, it is vital that we secure genuine progress on the multilateral non-proliferation talks that are currently under way. While the threat persists, as we know it will for the foreseeable future, it would, as the hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex (Mr Jenkin) argued well, be wrong to jeopardise our country by stalling on renewal.

We must guard against the dangerous spread of woolly thinking on this issue. We must not repeat the costly mistake of the last Conservative Government, who left too long a gap between completing the Vanguards and starting the Astutes; and we must resist opting for a platform that, while still capable of great evil and destruction, is no longer an effective deterrent against a hostile strike. Today, I am afraid, the Secretary of State again refused to say whether the new value-for-money review of Trident is considering only the cost of a new ballistic missile submarine platform, or alternatives to it. As the right hon. and learned Member for North East Fife (Sir Menzies Campbell) said, the surprise decision last week to suspend work on the successor programme suggests that the review may be more significant than we had first thought, because the former approach—driving out unnecessary costs as a programme develops—is what any Government should do all the time. The latter approach, however—considering alternatives to the successor—needlessly reopens a question settled in the 2006 deterrent White Paper. Even if new Ministers end up reaching the same conclusion as the previous ones, this could cause serious delays in a timetable which is already very tight, and ultimately spell a further gap in the order book that could again see skills lost and thousands laid off.

If the Government reach a different conclusion, however, serious consequences would follow for the public finances, jobs and the security of the nation. As far as I can tell, the Secretary of State has said that the Government remain committed to a submarine-based deterrent, so let us consider the alternatives that fit those criteria. On the option of refitting the Vanguard class submarines, we could do that, but relying on a relatively short and very expensive life extension would mean taking a massive punt with our national security.

It is also time to puncture the seductive myths around the second alternative: redesigning the Astute-class submarines so that they could carry nuclear warheads. There is a myth that this option would be cheaper, but it would not. It would not simply be a case of nailing an existing warhead to an existing Tomahawk missile and shoving it aboard one of the seven Astutes that are already slated to be built. We would need to construct many more new warheads from scratch, at vast expense and possibly in contravention of our non-proliferation treaty obligations. We would need to procure a new missile system, again at huge cost. We would need a costly redesign of the sub, as one cannot just slot a nuclear missile into a tube designed to fire a conventional Tomahawk. Finally, we would need many more submarines than we have at present. A fleet of conventional Astutes would still be needed to guard the new ones—they could not just double up—and missile size constraints mean that it could well be necessary to build many more vessels than the four ballistic missile boats they would be replacing.

This would not only cost UK taxpayers more but leave them significantly more vulnerable. The range of cruise missiles is much lower than that of ballistic missiles, and they can be much more easily stopped, so the UK would be left with chilling nuclear weapons, but without the strategic deterrent capacity that ultimately makes the horror of nuclear war less likely. That is truly an option that would deliver less for more.

I suggest that some who argue for a cheaper deterrent really mean that we should not have a deterrent at all. They should just come out and say that. To those who usually dislike American dominance but seem happy to leave the US and the French with the responsibility of protecting the world from nuclear war, I say, fine, but let them make that clear too. It is wrong for our country’s security and our ultimate aim of a nuclear-free world, and yes, it is wrong too for jobs in my constituency and across the country. However, a debate on those terms would at least prevent us from wasting money chasing an unrealistic middle way at a time when there has never been a more pressing need to ensure that every pound of defence spending is invested wisely.

Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)

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It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Barrow and Furness (John Woodcock), and he will not be surprised to hear that I agree with almost every word—no, actually with every word—that he said about the nuclear deterrent. I hope that that does not damn his political career for eternity. He paid generous tribute to my hon. Friends the Members for Fylde (Mark Menzies) and for Lancaster and Fleetwood (Eric Ollerenshaw) for their maiden speeches, which I am happy to endorse.

Perhaps I can cheer the hon. Gentleman up a little by letting him into a secret. When my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister was aspiring to the leadership of our party, he held a series of interviews with his hon. Friends, of whom I was one. When I went in, I asked him only two questions. One need not concern us today, but the other was about his attitude to the nuclear deterrent, and I am delighted to say that he was extremely robust about it. If the hon. Gentleman and other hon. Members care to check the response of our current Prime Minister to the statement of former Prime Minister Tony Blair on the subject in December 2006, they will see that it was once again extremely strong. That was the only occasion when I was ever called in to have anything to do with drafting a response to a Government statement. Our current Prime Minister made two alterations to what his speechwriter and I had drafted between us, both of which were to toughen up his response, not to weaken it. Although our coalition partners may hope to chip away at the edges on this matter, if I know the Prime Minister as well as I think I do, at least on this subject, they will undoubtedly be disappointed.

As hon. Members on both sides of the House will undoubtedly be aware, in the mid-1920s, a glassy-eyed rabble-rouser called Adolf Hitler was incarcerated in Landsberg prison, putting the finishing touches to “Mein Kampf”. At the same time as, sad to say, that man was pre-determining future history unregarded in that cell, the chiefs of staff of the armed forces were trying to decide what they would have to defend Britain against in the future. So incapable were they of predicting the future, understandably, that each of the armed forces prepared its hypothetical contingency plans against an entirely different potential enemy.

The Royal Navy—understandably, because Japan had a large navy—felt that we should prepare against possible Japanese aggression in the far east. The Army—understandably, because Russia had a large army—felt that we should prepare against possible Russian aggression somewhere in the area of the Indian subcontinent. The Royal Air Force was a little bit stuck, but eventually came up with an idea. Because the French had a rather large air force, it decided that we should prepare against a possible war with the French. Not one of the three wise men heading the three services, which had eventually done so well in the final stages of the great war, predicted that the real enemy that would face us, only 15 years later or less, would be a revived Germany led by that man scribbling away in a cell in Landsberg prison.

Mark Tami

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I agree with the hon. Gentleman, and we do not need to go that far back. When I was growing up in the 1970s—I know it does not seem possible, but I am genuinely that old—we were facing what we were sure was the actual threat, which was the Soviet Union pouring across the plains of Germany, massed tank battles and the use of tactical nuclear weapons, and then no doubt some form of nuclear holocaust engulfing the world. Nobody mentioned North Korea or Iran—they were not even on the radar. It is clearly difficult to guess what the future holds.

Dr Lewis

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I am delighted that I gave way to the hon. Gentleman, who is absolutely right. I could add to the examples that he gave the Yom Kippur war, which was not predicted by hypersensitive Israel, the Falklands war, which was not predicted by us, the invasion of Kuwait, which was not predicted by anybody, and the attacks of September 2001, which were not predicted by the world’s then only superpower. I therefore very much welcome the Secretary of State’s acknowledgment that there is an unpredictability factor. We simply do not know what enemies will arise, when, and what sort of threat we will face.

This argument has been had over and again throughout the history of defence, most notoriously between 1919 and 1932, when something called the 10-year rule was in operation. It was felt that we could cut forces, because we could always look ahead a decade and say, “Well, there doesn’t seem to be any threat facing us now.” It is impossible to know significantly in advance, if at all, when we will next find ourselves at war. That means it is a limiting factor when we say that a defence review must be foreign policy-led, or even defence policy-led. At the end of the day, what we are doing in the strategic defence and security review is calculating the premium that we are prepared to pay on the insurance policy against harm befalling this country. With a normal insurance policy, if we knew when an accident would happen or when an injury would be inflicted, we could probably take steps to avoid it and would not need to spend money on the premium in the first place. However, we do not know, and that is why we have to spend the money.

As I indicated in an earlier intervention, I am particularly concerned about a frame of mind that is prevalent in some quarters of the Army, and which asserts that, because we are engaged in a counter-insurgency campaign now, anybody who says that in 20 or 30 years, or even longer, we might need modern aircraft to defend our airspace, modern naval vessels to defend our waters and lines of communication or even modern military vehicles to enable our Army to fight—hopefully alongside others—a foreign aggressor that not just had irregular or guerrilla forces but was possibly a hostile state, is living in the past or still thinking in cold war terms. I think like that, but I am not still thinking in cold war terms. I am thinking of the wars that we might have to face two or three decades hence, not just the conflicts in which we are engaged today.

A few years ago, I heard a senior military officer say that a tipping point might come when we had to choose between fighting the conflicts in which we were currently engaged and fighting a war at some time in the future. In other words, he was trying to contrast the small expectation of a big war in the future with the big expectation of a small war that we might have to fight sooner. I said at the time that I felt that to be a false choice, but if I had to make the choice, I would rather insure against the danger of a big war in the future than that of a small war closer to hand.

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Mark Tami (Alyn and Deeside) (Lab)

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I congratulate you, Madam Deputy Speaker, on taking the Chair. I also congratulate those Members who made their maiden speeches—I almost said “nervous speeches”; I was certainly nervous when I made my maiden speech, but they were not. To talk in military terms, they will be pleased to have got off the runway, and I am sure that they will sail high in the future.

If Iraq and Afghanistan have taught us anything, it is that the challenge is not winning the initial conflict, but securing the peace. Our opponents in both conflicts learned that standing and fighting in the open ended in their defeat, but that if they used the terrain, whether in the countryside or in towns and cities, and used hit-and-run tactics and improvised explosive devices, they could fight us effectively, and that insurgency would spread from province to province and—what we fear most—from country to country. To counter that, we have recognised the need for more mobile forces than we have had in the past—forces that can respond rapidly to ever changing situations. At the heart of meeting that challenge is the availability of more troops and equipment to be put down, often under fire, in difficult situations. Helicopters are only part of the answer to that, and we need large-scale strategic lift to support our forces engaged in ground operations.

Our forces are still reliant on the ageing Hercules, which have been excellent workhorses over many years but are now showing their age. It is becoming increasingly difficult to keep them serviceable for the number of hours that our forces require. Although the C-130J has good tactical performance, it cannot carry outsize loads because its cargo hold is too small. The C-17, which seems to be the transport plane of choice, is a good outsize-load airlifter, but is costly and has limited tactical capability. It is fine if it can land on a proper airfield, but it cannot be used or operated from soft fields—or at least, as someone once advised me, it can land on soft fields, but only once. Not only is our use of leased aircraft expensive, but often they are not available at the time required, and many of the aircraft share the same problems as the C-17.

The decision of the Labour Government—I thank my right hon. and hon. Friends on the Front Bench for this—to commit themselves, confirm and sign up to the Airbus 400M programme was extremely welcome. Derided by its opponents as a paper aircraft that would never take to the air, it has now flown, and by all accounts performed extremely well in its trials. The A400M will be able to carry either the same payload as the stretch C-130J more than twice as far, or double the payload over the same distance. It will be able to operate at high altitude and at high speed and respond to a greater range of mission requirements. Probably most importantly, it can operate from soft and rough fields, and can therefore deliver support to forward positions where it is most needed. To do that, it has advanced protection systems, which compare favourably to the airlifters currently in use. It will be able to carry helicopters and armoured vehicles and—we are currently unable to do this—deliver them directly to where they are needed.

Furthermore, the aircraft will be cost-effective, which we can rarely say about military projects. Compared with the C-130J and C-17 fleets, it will have the highest availability and the lowest life cycle costs. It has been designed and built to meet operational requirements, rather than being modified or shoehorned to meet the task required of it. The export potential of the aircraft is also positive: its rivals are either ageing or unable to meet the full operational requirements; no new aircraft, either in development or on the drawing board, can rival the A400M. It could sell well around the world, and even in the US, although our experience with AirTanker would lead us to believe that the Americans would try to gerrymander any situation to the advantage of Boeing. Our American allies think that it is fine for them to have open access to our markets, but that we should be prevented from competing in theirs. However, that is an argument for another day.

There are those who have always been opposed to UK involvement in the A400M programme, believing instead that we should just buy something off the shelf. The current Secretary of State for Defence has said that on several occasions. Underlying that is the Conservatives’ opposition to European co-operation: they really dislike that aspect of the project. That attitude makes no sense on a number of fronts. It makes us totally reliant on the US—we would have no access to the intellectual property—and undermines the UK aerospace industry. It has a direct impact on jobs not only in the military sector but in the civil sector. For Airbus in the UK, the stakes are even higher: the A400M will be the first aircraft to be built with composite wings. In this country we have long prided ourselves in being at the centre of wing excellence, but that will be at risk if we do not take part in the project. Given how Airbus operates, if we pull out of the project the work share would be divided between the remaining partners, and Spain has long made it clear that it would get the chequebook out and be more than willing to take on that work. That would have a direct impact within the civil programme. Rather than our being the natural builder of the wings for future Airbus aircraft—in particular, the replacement for the A3320—we would find ourselves competing with Spain. If we lost that order, the future of Airbus in the United Kingdom could be at stake.

I plead with the Secretary of State and the Minister to think of the future, not just in terms of a military project but in terms of the effect on the whole of the UK aerospace industry, including both direct and indirect employment. The last Government signed up to this project, which has ramifications far wider than military use. I appeal to the present Government to sign up to the project and ensure that it goes ahead, for the future of the United Kingdom.

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