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8.9 pm
Mr. John Wilkinson (Ruislip-Northwood): In the 10 minutes that I have, I had thought to address five defence themes for the next term of our Government. However, we have heard speeches of such importance that I cannot fail to respond to one or two points.
I have every sympathy with the argument of the hon. Member for Alyn and Deeside (Mr. Jones) about the Raytheon jets facility. If the 32 Squadron HS125s that are stationed at Northolt in my constituency and have their third-line service elsewhere could be serviced at Hawarden, I should be delighted.
The speech of the hon. Member for Islington, North (Mr. Corbyn) really brought home to the House the fact that the Labour party is not one party on defence. Labour and the Liberal Democrats are as one on defence, as they are on many things these days, but the Labour party is fundamentally divided within itself on the subject. The idea that the hon. Member for Islington, North and some of his hon. Friends are proposing about the merits of vulnerability is belied by all the experience of the past 20 years--the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviets because the Afghans were so weak, the invasion of the Falkland Islands, the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein, and the horrors perpetrated in Bosnia by the essentially Serbian-controlled Yugoslav national army--and yet Labour Members enjoin further vulnerability. The human misery that military weakness has caused should surely behove us to defend ourselves adequately.
The moving speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Ulster (Rev. William McCrea) brought home to us the reality of the situation of the people of Northern Ireland today. We are grateful to him and proud of the
loyal people of Northern Ireland. We also pay a warm tribute of gratitude to the warrant officer who was killed and to the many people who have made the supreme sacrifice in the defence of our country of Ulster.
We must get even further away from the Maginot mentality of static defence, the legacy of the cold war. We have done this to a large extent, but an armoured British division remains stationed in Germany with all the apparatus of a fixed military presence: the married quarters, the schools, the swimming pools, the gardeners, the mess stewards. In all--deliberately excluding the Headquarters Allied Rapid Reaction Corps--the whole apparatus costs the British taxpayer £943 million a year, of which £252 million is paid to locally employed civilians. We should be employing civilians in this country when so many bases are closing and so many facilities are folding.
With the money saved, we should be investing in extra mobility and flexibility, which are what war prevention requires. We have made some good investments: the C-130J, the EH101 medium transport helicopter and the improved Chinook mark 2. I hate to say it to my erstwhile friend--I say friend because we came into the House together, although he sits on the opposite side--the hon. Member for Alyn and Deeside, but what the Royal Air Force requires is not the future large aircraft, which will cost a great deal to develop, but the C-17--a heavy lifter to take a main battle tank over huge ranges so that large loads can be deployed rapidly. I am pleased that the Select Committee, under the stewardship of my hon. Friend the Member for Romsey and Waterside (Mr. Colvin), is examining the issue of heavy lift.
Good investments are also being made for the Royal Marines: the landing platform docks Albion and Bulwark which are to be constructed, in addition to HMS Ocean with its landing platform for helicopters. Mobility is an important capability and we need to invest more in it.
We also need to invest more in training. I shall mention just one subject--the future of staff and officer cadet training. Most armed forces are investing more and more in training while we are doing the opposite. I hope that Her Majesty's Government will think again on Greenwich. The fact that the joint staff training scheme has not worked gives us an opportunity to go back to this old issue and, surely, locate the tri-service staff college at Greenwich. I would also put a tri-service cadet college in that august setting as a lead-in to the individual service academies.
We also need to make better use of our Reserves, as my hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury (Mr. Brazier) said. I would add just one point about the opportunity afforded by the sponsored Reserve--the idea that contractors who are working for the support of the armed services can be mobilised in uniform in time of emergency or war. I hope, too, that the example set by No. 1 maritime headquarters unit of the Royal Auxiliary Air Force--located at RAF Northolt in my constituency--will be better followed. It provides support for the maritime headquarters at Northwood and I hope that it will provide support for the permanent joint headquarters at Northwood also.
My final point concerns procurement. If we are to have such small armed forces, they must be well trained and have an expansion capability with Reserves, but they must
also have the very best equipment. This is crucial for flexibility and mobility. I mentioned some of the programmes. We have seen from the Eurofighter episode how bedevilled with politics some of the European programmes can become. In the case of Eurofighter, the problem was the nefarious ways of economic and monetary union and the fact that the Maastricht criteria appear to be more important to the German Parliament than the modernisation of the Luftwaffe and of the three other air forces which require the Eurofighter 2000. It is a frightening prospect, which is why it is so necessary to retain the balance between European procurement and co-operation with the United States. Without that balance, we shall never have a competitive indigenous industry of our own.
I return to the theme that I touched on briefly in a question to my hon. Friend the Minister of State during his opening remarks about the European armaments agency which is to be developed from the Franco-German agency as a quadripartite agency, to which we are supposedly to sign up. I beg my right hon. and hon. Friends in the Government to think carefully. Do we really need another bureaucracy? Co-operation across frontiers should not be driven by officials in Bonn and Brussels.
In any case, are the new officials to be drawn from NATO or the national defence ministries? How are they to co-operate with the conference of national armaments directors within NATO? The latter is supposedly harmonising operational requirements not just for four European members but right across the alliance to secure proper interoperability and the best use of resources. To whom are the officials to be answerable? Are not our American friends correct in assuming that there must at any rate be a predisposition to favour the European product over an American or other purchase?
Ministers must think very carefully. Is the multi-role armoured utility vehicle the right project to get the agency off the ground? We have good vehicle constructors in this country, including GKN, Alvis and Vickers.
I hope that those five points will be useful to the Government in their next term.
Mr. Andrew Miller (Ellesmere Port and Neston):
This has been an extremely interesting debate. A number of hon. Members started with the point that I intend to make now. It is a matter that is particularly poignant, as I visited Lisburn barracks a couple of weeks ago only to find that a terrible tragedy occurred there just a few days later. It really does bring it firmly home to one, and my heart goes out to Warrant Officer Bradwell's family. It is an appalling tragedy and most regrettable.
I have had contact with people who have been affected by the bombs placed in the north-west of England, in Manchester and Warrington. When it gets that close to home, it makes one think very seriously about the issues involved. The Cheshire Regiment--my county regiment--is currently based in Ballykelly, and I often have discussions with the parents of young men who are part of that regiment and engaged in very important duties on behalf of the nation.
8.19 pm
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