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Mr. Viggers: On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. Are the clocks working?
Mr. Deputy Speaker: I think that the hon. Gentleman might be referring to the 10-minute limit on speeches, which does not apply to Front-Bench Members.
Mr. Hancock: I am grateful for that response, Mr. Deputy Speaker, although I am sure that it comes as a disappointment to the hon. Member for Gosport (Mr. Viggers).
Mr. Hancock: I am sure that the hon. Member for Gosport is heartened by the support of the hon. Member for Greenock and Inverclyde (Mr. Godman). I shall do my best to speed up so that other hon. Members have the opportunity to speak.
Let me talk about the courage, dedication and loyalty of the armed forces--their human side. The immediate concern must be the retention and recruitment of Army personnel. Those of us who represent constituencies where the military are based will hear first-hand accounts of the problems that they face almost every day and the issues that confront their families.
Yesterday, we heard some comments about Major Joyce and his role in trying to expose some of those deficiencies. One of my constituents who has two children in the armed forces wrote to the Daily Mail setting out her defence of Major Joyce's position. She did so using some of the very words that he had used. She put them into the context of her family. Her daughter, who wanted to be promoted to sergeant and was subject to a promotion review, became disillusioned when she was told by a senior Army officer in Germany that he did not believe that there was a place in the Army for women. After serving for a considerable time, my constituent's son-in-law recently left the Army because he had become extremely disillusioned and disappointed at the way in which the Army had responded to various needs.
We need to take seriously the sort of suggestions that Major Joyce attempted to make. How wrong the Secretary of State was to say yesterday that whether a court martial was the end of the story was simply an Army matter. That was not a satisfactory response. Major Joyce was making a stand which many of his fellow members of the armed forces would have liked to have made. Ministers have a right and a duty to respond to it.
Mr. Hancock:
Although I am sure that that point comes as a disappointment to the hon. Gentleman, I assure him that, from talking to members of the armed forces in Hampshire, there is a considerable amount of support for the stance that Major Joyce took.
In her maiden speech, the hon. Member for Crawley referred to Gulf war veterans and their problems. I ask the Minister to consider seriously the civilians who went to
the Gulf in the service of the Crown who, unlike in the Falklands war, were not enlisted. They suffered the symptoms of Gulf war syndrome, too.
I have constituents--sadly no longer working--who served on ships in the NAAFI. Service personnel on those ships will benefit from any review and are entitled to other benefits that are already available about which the Minister talked. Many civilians who served the three services are not being given the option of being included. Sadly, many of them have had a very swift brush off from the MoD.
What about the Chinese laundry men who worked on Her Majesty's ships who, with a cavalier sweep, have been dismissed? [Laughter.]
Mr. McWilliam:
I hope that Opposition Members who are laughing have the opportunity to visit the war memorial at Fitzroy in the Falklands to see the names in Chinese of the Chinese laundry men who were killed unnecessarily in that place.
Mr. Hancock:
I represent 40 of the 80 chinese laundry men who currently work for the Royal Navy--and I am proud to do so. Many of them wear three or four medals on their chests in honour of the service that they have given the nation. Many of them feel very bitter about the way in which, sadly, they have been dismissed as if they are no longer important since the MoD has taken on contractors who would rather employ retired Gurkha soldiers or others. If we are to care for our service personnel, we need to care for all the service family.
Asbestos victims--civilian and military--have been talked about many times in the House. Over a long period--I am not directing these comments at current Ministers--cases of human misery and suffering have arisen. Lives have been tragically cut short or ruined in the service of this country. We have heard the case of nuclear test veterans. I hope that in his winding-up speech the Minister will, as promised, comment about the way in which we can address their problems. For how long was their case ignored or treated with disdain in the House?
I cannot conceive that it is possible for senior or middle-ranking officers and NCOs not to know of the bullying that goes on. It is impossible in some close-knit units not to know what is going on. Yet they seem totally amazed when such stories start to emerge. We hear disclaimers that the incident is isolated. There are too many such incidents for that to be so. Bullying is a real problem--as is racism and the apparent distaste among senior officers and others for people who are continuously questioned about their sexual preferences. If we are trying to create an environment in which the public are encouraged to join our armed forces, such behaviour is totally wrong.
It was interesting to read today on the front page of The Times an article entitled:
Mr. Jeremy Corbyn (Islington, North):
I welcome the opportunity to speak in this debate. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Crawley (Laura Moffatt) on her first speech in the House. She graphically outlined the consequences for both sides of the conflict of so-called "clean wars" such as the Gulf war. The onset of Gulf war syndrome is one more product of the use of chemicals in any form in war by either side. Perhaps more consideration should have been given to the arming of Iraq in the early 1980s, which was a major component in the provocation of the Gulf war.
I welcome the fact that the Government are undertaking a review of the country's defence strategy, and particularly welcome the introductory remarks in the Ministry of Defence's paper on the defence review in which it is stated that the review is foreign-policy led. The first statement of the new Foreign Secretary after the election was on the human rights dimension in foreign policy. I hope that that will run through all aspects of our defence policy, including the defence industry and the question of arm sales.
This country spends well over £20 billion a year on armaments of one form or another. We spend considerably more on defence than any other European country--apart from Greece and Turkey--as a proportion of total Government spending. Indeed, if we reduced our defence expenditure to the European average of about 2.2 per cent., there would be an overall saving of £6 billion a year. Although that would not all be realised immediately--it never could be--it could be realised over a longer period.
I was pleased that, in his opening remarks yesterday, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State drew attention to the question of the establishment of a defence diversification agency and pointed out that an announcement is due to be made--presumably when the conclusions of the defence review are put forward. I look forward to that. Clearly, if we are to harness the undoubted skills of people in the defence industry, they should not be thrown on the scrap heap of unemployment. As hon. Members who represent areas with considerable naval, Army, Air Force or defence-related ship-building
interests will know, those highly skilled workers ought to be given something more socially useful to do. That is surely at the heart of the question of cutting defence expenditure: not wasting the skills but putting them to some good use. Goodness knows, there are enough needs around the world to benefit from such good use. I am especially pleased that the Secretary of State announced yesterday that he will publish all the submissions to the defence review, if the contributors wish that to be done. That means that I do not need to send Opposition Members a copy of my lengthy submission, because they will be able to read it in the Library. I am sure that some of them will wish to do so and, in fact, some of them are nodding sagely.
We face issues that confront the entire planet and that is the context in which we should undertake the defence review. We live in a world with an ever-growing gap between the richest and the poorest, with the systematic and constant abuse of human rights in many areas, and with a serious threat of environmental destruction and disaster. The ghastly cloud that has hung over Indonesia, Singapore and other parts of south-east Asia should be a warning to us all that there are limits to growth and to what we can do to the environment. We should recognise that many military conflicts around the world have roots in poverty, human rights abuses and the fight for natural resources. The Gulf war was really about oil, and the background to the Falklands conflict also contained an oil dimension.
We should look to a world in which we can reduce the possibilities of conflict and the amount of the world's resources expended on military matters. We should concentrate on the alleviation of poverty, as the Prime Minister said this afternoon in his report on the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Edinburgh. The defence review could give us the chance to do so.
It is worrying that in the aftermath of the cold war--with all the attendant problems in central Europe and the former Soviet republics, including enormous ethnic tensions and the war in Chechnya--one of the proposals advanced by the western nations, including Britain and the United States, is the expansion of NATO to embrace several central European countries. It is hard to believe that in five years' time the Polish people will be happy to see their defence expenditure double while schools close--because there is no money to keep them open--and welfare and hospital services are cut.
I notice that American arms manufacturers expect to sell many F16s and other aircraft to Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary and to undertake joint military manoeuvres with the Ukraine. If that is not a recipe for future conflict, I do not know what is. To expand NATO to the borders of Russia will create great political pressures in that country to expand military expenditure and research to deal with the perceived threat of NATO expansion.
We should concentrate on disarmament and demilitarisation, instead of the militarisation of the whole of central Europe and the conflicts that will result. Otherwise, a big bill will have to be paid by the people of central Europe and by taxpayers in Britain and the United States to fund rearmament programmes.
As well as thinking seriously about the possible results of NATO expansion, we must address the consequences of the arms sales programme that has been conducted in the past. In the 1980s, many Labour Members criticised the regime in Iraq and the policy of selling arms and equipment that could be used for the manufacturing of arms to the Ba'athist regime. We were told that our criticisms were nonsense and that Britain's economic interests came first. What happened? A super-armed regime systematically abused the human rights of its people and, eventually, provoked an enormous military conflict. That should have been a lesson to us, but the sale of arms to Turkey continues, despite the attack on the Kurdish people, as do arms sales to Indonesia.
I do not have much time left in which to make two further points. This debate gives us another opportunity to reconsider the question of the holding and maintaining of nuclear weapons by Britain. There is a fundamental moral case that we should not hold any nuclear weapons. I have always held that view and I always will. It is inconceivable that we should hold weapons that threaten the very existence of the planet. Nuclear weapons have not brought security or peace: they have meant the abuse of human rights, the invasion of civil rights and untold damage to this planet. Mordecai Vanunu tried to blow the whistle on the Israeli military experiment and he has been in solitary confinement for more than a decade. In his name and those of people like him, who have campaigned systematically for peace, we should reassess our possession of nuclear weapons and their cost.
The real cost of nuclear weapons has been systematically hidden by the Ministry of Defence and I suspect that it is £1.5 billion a year. However, the cost is not the real issue. We should address the principle involved. In a world in which there is no obvious enemy or threat to this country, why on earth do we have those weapons, other than to threaten people who may challenge our economic interests? Public opinion polls suggest that 59 per cent. of the United Kingdom population would feel more secure without nuclear weapons. We should, on this occasion, listen to public opinion.
Oxfam, which has long campaigned for the elimination of poverty in the world, has produced an interesting booklet called "A Safer FutureReducing the Human Cost of War". It lists some of the causes of conflict and I shall mention four:
"Army wants to recruit homeless and jobless".
The Army is going to homeless hostels in the north-east to recruit soldiers. It is already in night clubs. It will not be long, if we are not careful, before the welfare-to-work programme will--possibly--carry an obligation that one has to consider military service. Perhaps we are not too far from new-style press gangs being brought into operation to persuade people to join the armed services. If we really want to encourage people to join the armed
forces, we have to make the services transparent. They have to be seen to be fair and seen to respond to the promotion needs of men and women. We need to be fair to recruits and look after their families, especially when they have problems in the armed forces.
"deep ethnic or religious divisions . . . intense inequality and competition over the means to earn a living . . . no democratic rule of law or institutional framework to allow peaceful change . . . a ready supply of small arms and ammunition."
Conflicts abound around the world, fuelled by inequality and the profiteering of arms manufacturers. The defence review gives us an opportunity to reassess our defence commitment to try to contribute to a safer, more sustainable world. The expansion of NATO and the increase in military expenditure in central Europe and other places can only increase the danger of serious conflict. It is time to reassess those issues and to enter the next century with a more peaceful intent than we have managed to achieve this century.
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