Defence Spending

Debate between Paul Flynn and John Baron

Thursday 12th March 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Baron]

I completely agree with my hon. Friend. He makes a very valid point, but time is pressing and this is a popular debate, so I will bring my remarks to a conclusion.

At the very least, the British Government should fulfil their NATO commitment to spend 2% of GDP on defence. Having implored fellow NATO members to reach this level at last year’s NATO summit, which we hosted, falling below this level ourselves would be a grave mistake as well as a national embarrassment. Given current levels, it would be a dangerous message to send to the Kremlin.

The past decade of questionable military interventions may have bred a reticence among the political establishment on defence. This must end. We must banish these demons and recognise the greater danger of state-on-state threats, which never really went away. It is essential that we have the capability to protect ourselves, our interests and our allies. Reassessing our defence spending should go hand in hand with a wider reappraisal of how we approach foreign policy generally. Budgets have fallen at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Our key soft power institutions, such as the BBC World Service and the British Council, have suffered accordingly. This has resulted in a dilution of skills that has hindered policy making and reduced our options.

[Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab)]

I am following the hon. Gentleman’s speech with great admiration. He talks about banishing demons. There are 632 demons that we cannot banish: those who will be commemorated tomorrow; those who died as a result of terrible mistakes made in this Chamber that sent them to Helmand and Iraq. Should we not acknowledge the dreadful delusions, under which we have been operating for the past 12 years, which created those disasters, before we repeat them?

Ukraine, Middle East, North Africa and Security

Debate between Paul Flynn and John Baron

Wednesday 10th September 2014 Commons Chamber

[Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Isle of Wight (Mr Turner). We sit together on the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee, which produced an interesting document recently on Magna Carta. One of our proposals was that this country should never go to war without a vote in both Houses of Parliament. That is an interesting proposal. Now that it is a convention, I hope that it will be accepted in statute.

The hon. Gentleman referred to the Iraq war, and of course we do not know the truth of why we went into that war. We know that we were fed lies and all kinds of scares, such as that Britain could be attacked within 45 minutes using weapons of mass destruction that did not in fact exist. We still have yet to get the Chilcot report, which the Public Administration Committee discussed with Jeremy Heywood this week. We asked whether he was the blockage, because the Prime Minister has said that he is not stopping the report. All these years later, we do not know whether Tony Blair made an agreement with Bush that committed us to war, after which the House was forced into war based on a series of untruths. Some 179 British soldiers died in Iraq, and there were huge costs and uncounted Iraqi lives were lost.

I believe that we need to carry out another inquiry into our decision to go into Helmand province, which is arguably the worst military decision that we have taken since the charge of the Light Brigade. At the time, in 2006, we had lost only two British soldiers in combat in Afghanistan. We went into Helmand in the hope that not a shot would be fired, and we ended up with 453 soldiers lost in combat. Why did we do it?

[Mr Baron]

May I suggest that a key reason was mission creep? We allowed the mission to morph, disastrously, from one of taking on and getting rid of al-Qaeda to one of nation building, which was a completely different ball game. That was the fundamental error that we made in Afghanistan.

[Paul Flynn]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. I wrote to Tony Blair in 2003—the letter was on my blog and has been there ever since—saying, “If we go to war in Iraq without attempting to solve the Israel-Palestine problem, we will give a sense of injustice to Muslim communities from my local mosque to the far corners of the world.” At that time, we would not have thought it conceivable that young men and women educated and born here would go to the far east and take part in mediaeval barbarism. How did that happen? It is not about the imams, who have lost touch with the young people. It is about the internet and the flow of information that young people have. The sense of injustice has deepened since 2003. There was not the same division at that time. There were a few fanatics, and al-Qaeda existed, but there was minute support for it. Now it takes support from a huge percentage of the young Muslim population. That is deeply worrying, and we have to see the reason for it.

How we take decisions is an important issue. The most important decision that we have taken recently, of course, was on 29 August last year. Having watched how we go to war, I suggest that we must stop trusting the wisdom of Prime Ministers. They do not behave in a normal fashion on such matters. They are overwhelmed with hubris and talk in a different way, digging out the Churchillian rhetoric. They walk in a different way—they strut like Napoleon. I have seen it here time and again. They are not dealing with petty issues about taxes; here is their great moment. They are writing their page in history, and it is usually a bloody page. They are not rational, as Anthony Eden was not rational when he went into the Suez war. We are far better trusting the pooled wisdom of 650 MPs than listening to and following a hubristic Prime Minister.

We have had an interesting debate, and the two speeches that I have warmed to more than any others were those of the right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr Redwood) and the right hon. and learned Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke). We know that, incredibly, there is a fairly even spread in the House between the peace party and the “give war a chance” party. Even Labour Members have said that we should not be imprisoned by history. Of course we should be imprisoned by history—we should learn from it, because we have nothing else to go on from which to learn lessons.

I am grateful to the Government for holding the NATO summit in Newport, in my constituency. It was possible a grudging and belated acknowledgment of the wisdom of the local MP on foreign affairs matters. It was a great occasion, and I was particularly pleased by the decisions on the Baltic states. In ’89, ’90 and ’91 I had the pleasure of going to the three Baltic states and watching their struggle for independence. It was a great campaign: intelligent, courageous and restrained. It was difficult to win that independence, and they are frightened now—particularly Latvia and Estonia—because they have a large percentage of mother-tongue Russians. We owe it to them to be behind them and guarantee their independence.

Iran

Debate between Paul Flynn and John Baron

Monday 20th February 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Baron]

It is very straightforward. There has to be evidence of nuclear weapons. We were told, for example, that there was no shortage of circumstantial evidence about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but it turned out that there were no WMD there. That shows how careful we need to be and how clear we need to be about the difference between circumstantial evidence and concrete evidence.

[Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab)]

Is the hon. Gentleman aware of any IAEA evidence on Israel’s nuclear weapons programme?

[Mr Baron]

The hon. Gentleman makes a fair point. In certain quarters in the middle east, it is felt that double standards are being applied in that Israel has developed nuclear weapons and the west does not seem to worry about them. [Interruption.] My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kensington (Sir Malcolm Rifkind) suggests that the evidence is circumstantial, and I am willing to grant him that point.

UK Armed Forces in Afghanistan

Debate between Paul Flynn and John Baron

Thursday 9th September 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr John Baron (Basildon and Billericay) (Con)]

I cautioned against our initial deployment in Afghanistan and I have been critical of policy since, so I speak in this debate as a sceptic about our mission generally. There can be no doubt in the Chamber that the preparations for our mission in Afghanistan defied all the lessons of history. We fundamentally underestimated the task at hand and we under-resourced it accordingly. We have been playing catch-up ever since. Having served as a platoon commander in South Armagh during the 1980s, I have no doubt that our troops in Afghanistan suffered from equipment shortages, including helicopters, and from low troop density levels. History will prove that to be the case.

Part of the problem with our involvement in Afghanistan is that we have had a series of over-optimistic assessments, and people have rightly become cynical about what Ministers say at the Dispatch Box. All those assessments have proved to be false dawns. It is incumbent on leadership to assess the situation realistically, and we have failed to do that in the past—but that is the past, so what of the future? I congratulate the coalition Government in that we now at least have a more realistic assessment of the situation, but I still think that it is too optimistic.

The Prime Minister said on 21 June that we had to succeed militarily, economically and politically, but that is not the case. Militarily, we are as far from winning against the Taliban as we ever were. Recent reports suggest that the Taliban has expanded into even more territory. Our involvement ignores the lessons of history on counter-insurgency campaigns. For example, in Malaya and other successful counter-insurgency campaigns, we had control of the borders, a credible Government, the support of the majority of the people and a large number of troops relative to the local population. None of those conditions exists in Afghanistan, but we continue to believe that somehow we will win.

[Paul Flynn]

A further example of the optimism expressed by Government was in the Defence Secretary’s contribution, when he mentioned how well things were going with our allies. However, he could not bring himself to acknowledge that Canada and Holland, which both made great contributions in blood and treasure to this war, have decided to pull out.

[Mr Baron]

I agree, and it reveals a wider problem of differences over strategy.

The second aspect mentioned by the Prime Minister was the economy, but there is scant evidence that progress has been made in that area. The economy is not in a good state. The trouble surrounding the Kabul bank is one illustration of that, and another is the fact that the some 9 million unemployed people in Afghanistan can earn in two months working for the Taliban what it would take them a whole year to earn if they earned the average national wage.

Politically, the situation is even worse. The Kabul Government of President Karzai is completely discredited. The elections were marked by fraud and violence. He is now trying to extend his term of office and local people are increasingly fed up with the high civilian casualty rate, partly caused by aerial bombardments. All that plays into the hands of the Taliban. The US Department of Defence, in its latest report to Congress, made the point that the most powerful weapon that the Taliban have is their propaganda machine. They ruthlessly exploit rising discontent. Kabul is depicted as a puppet Government and the west as an occupying force trying to impose its will. We in the west must better understand this point. High civilian casualty rates exponentially increase hostility. That might not force Afghans actively to support the Taliban, but it will certainly stop them opposing anyone who wants to kill those who have killed their loved ones.

It is interesting to note, looking around the globe and back in history, that communism has survived the longest in those countries that have engaged militarily with the west. One thinks of Cuba, North Korea, China and Vietnam. We are not winning the hearts and minds of local people because we cannot—we are an occupying force killing their brethren.

Perhaps the most worrying aspect of our involvement in Afghanistan is that our mission has suffered from a lack of clarity of purpose. We have had mixed messages. As recently as last year, the then Prime Minister said that we were in Afghanistan to keep the streets of London safe from terrorism, but almost in the next breath he threatened President Karzai with withdrawal should he not clean up his act. Those statements do not stand well next to each other. Even today, there is not that much more clarity.

If we are in Afghanistan to protect the streets of London and of our allies from terrorism, why are we setting a deadline and timetable? It simply does not make sense. Surely, if the mission is as important as is stated, our withdrawal should be dictated by the achievement of the objective, not arbitrary time lines. The Foreign Secretary has confirmed to me in this place and in Committee that we will be withdrawing in 2015 regardless of whether we have achieved our objectives. That simply does not stand up.

At some point, the solution will have to involve an understanding with the Taliban and the tribal warlords. It will have to reflect the reality on the ground and involve a loosely federated state in which power is devolved to the provinces. That does not prevent a small but mobile force of special forces from being on hand to disrupt al-Qaeda activities should it return, but the war, as currently constituted, cannot succeed.

The inconsistency of our strategy perhaps reveals that our presence in Afghanistan is as much about Pakistan as about Afghanistan. However, given the stated objectives and the diminished presence of al-Qaeda, we need to reassess the situation, enter into talks that make for an orderly withdrawal and move on.

I am afraid that, as an ex-soldier, I do not buy the line that by withdrawing, in an orderly fashion, we are somehow letting down our troops and wasting their sacrifice. Our troops have done everything we have asked of them, and we can all be proud of their achievements, but by and large they are a stoic bunch and believe that it is incumbent on the leadership to assess a situation realistically, because by doing so we stand more chance of achieving our objective and perhaps saving lives. Needless effort and sacrifice will be saved over the longer term. We cannot win this war as it is currently constituted, and a leadership that acknowledges that will save lives.

Perhaps this debate will encourage us to rethink fundamentally our foreign policy more generally. For the sake of mankind, I hope that the days are coming to an end when military intervention is seen often as a first option. Military action should always be the last recourse. It is ironic that we went to war in Iraq and even the ex-M15 chief now agrees that it increased the terrorist threat in this county, and yet we are now involved in another war to try to counter that terrorist threat. I will therefore be voting against the motion.