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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Defence (Mr. John Spellar): Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Key: I shall give way when I have finished the point.
Wives must throw themselves on the mercy of adjudication officers; otherwise, they may lose benefits. I raised the matter with Ministers in the previous
Government earlier this year and on 7 April the then Under-Secretary of State told me that the Ministry of Defence would establish how the system was working in practice. I should be grateful if Ministers would now tell us what progress has been made in respect of a phenomenon that arose after the new system was introduced. Naturally, it is important that Departments work together and accommodate each other's changes. I am not making a party political point, but it would make a real difference if the Ministry of Defence would ensure that Army wives' point of view was heard in that respect.
Those are the everyday problems faced by forces families. We must never forget that those people are not just part of our military community. This is not just a behind-the-wire issue. Pay and conditions, the state of married quarters, problems of the defence medical services and the much improved world of service education focus on the Ministry of Defence. Forces families are, however, also part of all our communities. We are proud of them and grateful to them.
Yesterday, the Secretary of State announced a modest increase in the number of opportunities for women in the Army. That is fine. It is an unsurprising extension of the equal opportunity policies put in place by the Conservative Government. Any hesitation on our part--any caution--is born of practical problems and experience, which the new Ministers lack. As with the issue of homosexuality in the armed forces, it is no good forcing political correctness on the Navy, Army and Air Force if they are not ready for it and if it would impair their front-line effectiveness. Politicians and campaigners alike must recognise that the ethos of service life is different from civvy street. We expect military personnel to live their lives by higher standards and different codes of behaviour. Change is slow because it must take place for the right reasons. The enforced and repeated separation of husbands and wives in the forces leads to great tensions. Many wives will worry about an increase in the number of women in the forces. That is understandable; I hope that it will be groundless.
In July, I wrote to the Minister for the Armed Forces about another problem. Each of our three services has its own codes of conduct, traditions, prejudices and sanctions. The Minister and I know, and there is now wide recognition, that moral or social behaviour that is apparently acceptable in one service is not acceptable in another. He and I know of at least one case where an officer in one service has had his whole life ruined while the other party in a different service remains undisciplined, with his or her career unscathed. More joint service operations and more women close to the front are likely to exacerbate that problem, which can and should be addressed. We must not allow another decade to slip by without consolidating into a single Act the Navy, Army and Air Force discipline Acts.
I also pay tribute to the many thousands of scientific, industrial and administrative civil servants on whom our fighting forces depend. Those dedicated men and women are too often taken for granted until some crisis calls for their years of training and experience. We then know that we can count on them and that they will give their all, too. The first contractorisation of industrial civil servants took place at Boscombe Down in my constituency more than a decade ago. Since then, Ministry of Defence personnel have endured shake ups as great as anything in the private sector. Generally, they have been beneficial.
We shall examine in great detail the Government's proposal for a defence diversification agency. We shall need to see vision and purpose in their plans for a defence evaluation and research agency before agreeing another shake up, but we shall give it positive consideration.
Occasionally, one must draw a firm line in the interests of national security. One such case that we are watching closely is the impact on the work force of Royal Ordnance in Bridgwater as well as the impact on national security of the proposed merger, or joint venture, under consideration between Royal Ordnance's owner, British Aerospace and the French company, SNPE. We understand the concerns of the Royal Ordnance work force and those expressed last night by my right hon. Friend the Member for Bridgwater (Mr. King) about the importance of maintaining a British capability in the manufacture of ammunition explosives.
Have the Government decided whether to allow that joint venture to proceed? As we had no direct answers from the Government yesterday, I should be grateful for some answers later this evening.
Mr. Godman:
The concerns voiced by the right hon. Member for Bridgwater (Mr. King) on behalf of the work force in Bridgwater are shared by the employees of Royal Ordnance in Bishopton in Renfrewshire. I, too, would like some satisfactory answers concerning their continued employment in both establishments.
Mr. Key:
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman. His intervention gives me an opportunity to put on record the fact that the trade unions, who prepared excellent briefings for Conservative Members, are clearly not opposed in principle to the commercial success of their enterprises. Nor are they opposed to the internationalisation of the production process. They rightly fear for their members' jobs, however, and have a commendable concern for the national interest when it comes to defence. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will get the news that he wants tonight.
The Royal Ordnance work force is an important part of the 400,000-strong UK defence industry. We salute our defence industry. The British defence manufacturing industry is not just world class, though it is; it is not just the world's favourite, though it is; it is a world-beating industry. It is probably the most heavily regulated industry in Britain today. Literally every bag of screws--let alone Land Rover--is subject to interminable scrutiny by at least three, sometimes four or even five, Departments of State and to United Nations, European Union and British Government export criteria and conditions.
The Conservative Government had no hesitation in accepting the moral and ethical dimensions of exporting defence equipment. Conservatives believe in article 51 of the United Nations charter--the right to self-defence--with all its implications for the purchase of defence products. The UN charter is indivisible. Some Labour Members want to pick and mix. The question is not whether Britain had an ethical foreign policy before 1 May--of course it did. The question is: how ethical is it for the Government to put at risk the jobs of 400,000 of our citizens to appease their own moral vanity? That
new vanity is interpreted by friendly countries as moral imperialism, and they say so. New Labour--new imperialism.
Mr. Blunt:
My hon. Friend will be interested to know that the first evidence of the cost of that new morality to British interests and jobs has already been made clear by Vosper Thornycroft not winning a substantial contract for Malaysian patrol vessels, which went--in as yet unexplained circumstances--to a German competitor, despite the fact that Vosper thought that it was doing extremely well. The Turkish Government are now warning the British defence firm--
Mr. Deputy Speaker (Mr. Michael J. Martin):
Order. The hon. Gentleman is supposed to be making an intervention. He cannot make such a long intervention. He can make a comment to the Front-Bench spokesman, and that must be the end of that.
Mr. Blunt:
Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker. The point that I wish to make is that the $7.5 billion Turkish market now seems to have gone for a Burton because of Labour's foreign policy.
Mr. Key:
I fear that we shall hear many more stories like that. My hon. Friend is right, and I shall refer to further examples of the changes that have taken place in the past six months or so.
The practical implications of that new vanity intrude in two ways: first, through the strategic defence review, of which my right hon. Friend the Member for North-West Hampshire (Sir G. Young) spoke yesterday; and, secondly, in procurement terms. It has been drawn to my attention that not just hundreds of millions but billions of pounds worth of defence procurement programmes have been destabilised by the incoming Labour Government. My fax has been red hot with tales of disbelief and woe by the bucketload.
When my right hon. Friend the Member for Wealden (Sir G. Johnson Smith) winds up the debate for the Opposition, he will have something to say about restructuring the European defence industry, the importance of this country's relationship with the United States and the dangers of a fortress Europe attitude to procurement.
Mr. Jeremy Corbyn (Islington, North):
While the hon. Gentleman is discussing arms sales abroad, and especially possible arms sales to Turkey, should he not use his position to say something about the systematic abuse of human rights in Turkey, the incursion into neighbouring countries by the Turkish armed forces, and the deaths of thousands of Kurdish people in the war going on in the east of that country? Does he not think that we have a role to play in not providing arms that can be used to kill so many civilians?
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