| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
Mr. Canavan: We do not doubt colleges' enthusiasm, but it would be greater if they received sufficient resources to do the job. The figures that I quoted were given to me by the Association of Scottish Colleges, which in turn were extracted from the Scottish Office's plans. Taking revenue and capital expenditure into account, in real terms, there will be a 12.5 per cent. reduction in the amount that the Scottish Office gives colleges from 1994-95 to the financial year 1998-99. How on earth can the Minister justify such a massive decrease in assistance to colleges?
Mr. Robertson: Unfortunately, the hon. Gentleman has not been listening to me. I am glad that he accepts that colleges are enthusiastic about the private finance initiative.
Two projects--a new campus for Falkirk college in Stirling and a new campus for West Lothian college in Livingston--are at an advanced stage. The PFI is not the only public and private partnership that is under way. By operating more efficiently, colleges are freeing resources to improve their buildings and equipment, both directly and through the freedom to borrow. There are examples all over Scotland.
Among the best is the new multi-million-pound campus at James Watt college at the waterfront development in Greenock. Perth college has attracted £2 million of support from the Gannochy trust for a new library and study centre, which will put it at the forefront of the use of new technology.
I was pleased to inaugurate the construction of that building, where I announced a grant of £200,000 to assist with equipment. The policy document "Training for the Future" announced an allocation of £500,000 to equip colleges generally with new technological equipment. We have also invested substantially in upgrading college buildings since incorporation, with capital grants of £46 million. Hon. Members who visit colleges will see the transformation for themselves.
The list of achievements is long: the multi-million-pound project at Edinburgh's Telford college, whose refurbished north campus opened on Monday; Cardonald college, where investment of £4 million has been made; and Langside college's business school, which I recently opened.
If we are to face future challenges, a partnership approach is important. I should like briefly to identify what they will be. We must strive to provide better guidance, raise participation and improve success in achieving qualifications. We are working with colleges in these areas.
The "Higher Still" reforms, which will be implemented in academic session 1998-99, will provide a unified programme of academic and vocational learning, leading to certificates on a subject or group basis.
Mr. John Wilkinson (Ruislip-Northwood):
I am grateful for the opportunity to raise the subject of Britain's role in Europe's defence and security policy and to address issues of the utmost topicality and importance.
The outcome of the first round of the Russian presidential elections last weekend has demonstrated how finely balanced are the political forces in the Russian federation. The emergence of General Lebed, with his background as former commander of the Russian 14th army in Moldova and of operational experience in Afghanistan, as national security adviser to President Yeltsin has more than domestic significance.
At the European summit in Florence on Friday, it is possible--if the beef crisis permits--that there will be discussion of Europe's common foreign and security policy. It is certainly a theme for the intergovernmental conference, and Britain's views should be more influential than most. The United Kingdom is, with France, one of only two nuclear powers in Europe, so the UK's strategic weight is disproportionate to its military manpower. We are the sole nation within NATO, apart from the United States of America, to have troops permanently stationed outside its national territory in Europe, and beyond--for example, in the Falklands and Hong Kong. Also, with principal NATO subordinate commands--Allied Forces North West at High Wycombe and Headquarters Eastern Atlantic at Northwood--Britain is the cornerstone of Europe's defence and security architecture.
With major US military facilities still located in Britain, the UK is crucial for the projection of American power to Europe and the maintenance of a balance of forces and security on the continent. In defence terms, the UK has long been at the heart of Europe. It would be even more so if it had persuaded the rest of the Western European Union to allow the other organs of the institution to join the council located in London, by offering County hall as the headquarters for the whole organisation, instead of succumbing to the European impetus towards Brussels, which seems so fundamental these days.
Mr. Jim Marshall (Leicester, South):
I hesitate to interrupt the hon. Gentleman so early in his speech, but does he not realise that if the WEU is to be an effective European pillar for NATO, it is essential that liaison and co-operation between those organisations has practical and real significance? That prospect will be enhanced if the WEU is situated in Brussels, where there can be regular personal and other forms of contact.
Mr. Wilkinson:
I totally understand the point, but I was thinking about Britain's influence in defence affairs. As ours is an Atlantic nation, that influence should be important. The concomitant risk of locating the WEU in Brussels is that it could be over-influenced by the European Union and its aspirations to take over much of the WEU's role, but I do not dispute that there is considerable validity in the hon. Gentleman's argument.
From 1945 to the end of the 1980s, the artificial division of Europe by Soviet force of arms dominated defence debates in the House, and the necessity for deterrence of potentially aggressive Warsaw pact forces through the doctrine of flexible response determined the
character and scale of the military dispositions of the western alliance and its nuclear-based strategy. Paradoxically, the division of our continent remains the greatest challenge for Europe's security policy and overall strategy.
In the days of the cold war, the imperative was the perpetuation of the artificial division of Europe through the containment of the potentially aggressive Warsaw pact along the iron curtain. Today, inclusive initiatives are emerging to hasten the end of the political divisions that plagued our continent for so long. Those initiatives are crucial in extending to fellow European nations which were denied democracy for four decades after world war two the fruits of political and economic liberty, underpinned by collective security arrangements that offer genuine defence guarantees and no provocation to any neighbouring state.
NATO's post-cold war adaptation has been rapid and remarkable. The rationalisation and reorganisation of its integrated command structure to reflect the lower level of its assigned forces have been impressive. NATO's continuation as a defensive alliance after the former Soviet forces had gone home from central Europe was fully justified by the organisation's decisive role in bringing the Bosnian war to a halt when the United Nations, WEU and European Union had between them failed. NATO's implementation force in Bosnia, which even contains contingents of non-NATO countries, has kept the peace in that country and provides the security necessary for economic reconstruction and, hopefully before too long, for successful democratic elections.
In the Gulf war, the coalition of western and Arab nations that successfully defended Saudi Arabia and liberated Kuwait was made possible by the long experience of the western allies' armed forces and military commanders of working together in NATO's integrated military structure. NATO has, through the North Atlantic Co-operation Council and the partnership for peace programme, shown commendable initiative in adapting to the realities of contemporary Europe, which is mercifully no longer imperilled by hostile ideology or aggressively configured forces.
Instability in the Russian federation, as in Chechnya and the sovereign republics on its southern flanks, provides risks and unpredictable contingencies. NATO's new Balkan involvement is supposedly limited to the end of this year, but could prove longer lasting. The impact of militant and fundamentalist Islam from Turkey to Morocco poses a new orientation to Europe's security arrangements and a real danger in the Mediterranean basin. Nuclear and chemical proliferation allied to ballistic missile transfers to aggressive regimes challenges the processes of arms control and demonstrates the need for NATO in Europe to acquire its own ballistic missile defence.
NATO's defensive credentials are impeccable, and the democratic nature of its member states unquestionable. There is no reasonable cause for delaying NATO's expansion to the east. By what justification should the genuine democracies of central Europe and the Baltic states be denied the security guarantees previously extended by NATO to Turkey, Greece and Portugal when those countries, for a time, did not have democratic Governments?
Why should Russia have a veto on the purely defensive security arrangements of sovereign democratic states? This is particularly so when the example of Norway showed that it could be--throughout the cold war, as a full NATO member--a good neighbour of Russia, with a common border and a sensitivity to the Nordic balance, which made it wholly appropriate that neither NATO nuclear weapons nor NATO foreign troops should be stationed on Norway's soil in time of peace.
Today, the Norwegian model has relevance for the full and early NATO membership of the Baltic states. The cost of Russia's interventions in Afghanistan and Chechnya have shown the Russian people and the Russian military how bloody was their denial of legitimate self-determinations and how high was the cost to the Russian armed forces--a lesson that General Lebed has never forgotten.
There has never been a qualifying contribution for NATO membership. Luxembourg has been a welcome member with only one battalion of troops, no air force and, certainly, no navy. Iceland has no armed forces at all. Importantly, through the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, there is now--there was not previously--an over-arching instrument for crisis management and for better understanding across the European continent. Through the partnership for peace there is also, of course, an experience of military dialogue upon which to build.
In the cold war, the European Community--which in those days was a purely economic organisation--never offered security guarantees or kept the peace. It was an example of free enterprise principles jointly applied for the common good. Today, the European Community--I use the word advisedly--could, as a community, be a unifying force for the new Europe rather than a potential source of division, which it promises to be as a political entity.
The objective of ever closer union via the chosen path of economic and monetary union, as laid down in the Maastricht treaty--to which the Government fatally subscribed in the fullest sense, committing themselves not only to the end of Union, but to the financial means of bringing the European Union about through the ever larger budgetary contributions agreed at the Edinburgh summit in 1992--is incompatible with the much more important goal of swift enlargement to include all the democracies of eastern and central Europe, and not only the Visegrad three.
Our deliberations in the European Standing Committee have revealed the huge additional cost of extending the common agricultural policy, on enlargement of the European Union, to the acceding countries to the east, especially to Hungary and to Poland. It is small wonder that the European Commission is now talking of admitting only the Visegrad three in 2002, with no firm date for equally eligible states such as Estonia. Why should those countries be in only the second division of applicant countries?
Applicant nations regard their accession to the European Union as an element in their overall security policy. Are western-oriented democracies to be left out in the cold? Procrastination over their entry will feed resentment among their people and their political classes, especially since the European Union is denying them access, through its tariffs, to its market for their cheap
agricultural produce and, in some instances, dumping on them surplus food over-produced by European Union farmers through the munificent operations of CAP subsidies.
It is a similar tale with the Western European Union, to full membership of which central and eastern European countries reasonably aspire. If one takes contemporary rhetoric at its face value, the WEU is either the European defence identity or the European pillar of NATO. The recent NATO council in Berlin enhanced further this apparent status by affirming the assignment to WEU of combined NATO joint task forces. Those NATO formations are, in the first instance, for performing the St. Petersburg tasks of peacekeeping and humanitarian relief, but conceivably--by implication--they are ultimately for military operations when the United States does not want to invoke its security guarantee, including a nuclear option, or when it might not wish to imperil its good bilateral relations with the Russian Federation.
My hon. Friend the Minister knows that the House of Commons Select Committee on Defence was very sceptical about the efficacy of the WEU as a military organisation. However, the ministerial council of the WEU--in its Birmingham communique in May, to which the Government subscribed--called the WEU
There are two elements to Europe's defence and security policy that are of intense interest to the United Kingdom, and upon which Britain has direct influence. The first is the ambition of the European Union to arrogate to itself a military competence through armaments co-operation. The Franco-German armaments agency, which the United Kingdom has recently joined, might be the first stage in that process. If so, I believe that it will be a retrograde step.
If the purpose of the agency is to predispose the participating nations against the procurement of equipment from the United States, it could diminish the operational effectiveness of the British and European armed forces, which need to be able to buy the best equipment, or the most cost-effective equipment, from whatever source. It could have the adverse effect of excluding European industry from lucrative American programmes, recent examples of which include the C130J Hercules, the AH64 Apache, potentially the Orion 2000 and many others.
In my judgment, an imposed and unnecessary bureaucratic and managerial superstructure will not enhance cost-effective European arms procurement. The NATO management agency and the NATO Eurofighter management agency, for the Tornado and the Eurofighter programmes--to provide only two examples--were bad enough. Where would such an agency be located? How would it be staffed? How would its programmes be funded? Would it not merely duplicate the work of NATO's committee of national armaments directors, which is already experienced in seeking to harmonise operational requirements and to maximise equipment standardisation between member states?
The main impetus to collaboration should be commercial rather than political. This is particularly true in a world in which there is a diminishing market for armaments and in which defence equipment exports are crucial for the prosperity of defence companies.
There is a final aspect of Europe's defence and security policy to which Britain can make a key contribution. The Sunday Telegraph of 2 June reported that the Foreign Affairs and Security Committee of the European Parliament had proposed in a draft report that the EU take over the nuclear weapons now owned by Britain and France. The draft report is alleged to say that, without them,
"the defence component of the European Union".
As such, applicant countries take it very seriously. They do not deserve to be disappointed in their desire to join the WEU as full members.
"the European Union will never be able to adopt a common foreign and security policy".
Apparently, the report was adopted, and Marlene Lenz, a German Member of the European Parliament, was reported in The Sunday Telegraph as saying:
"If we have a union, and we need a strong union, there should be a military capability to it--and nuclear weapons would be part of that".
That would circumvent the basic law of the Federal German Republic that forbids nuclear weapons, and as French sources have suggested that the French nuclear deterrent should be held in trust for the European Union, it is important to take those dangerous aspirations seriously--for dangerous they are.
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |