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Mr. Blunt: Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Cook: No, I cannot give way as I have only 10 minutes in which to speak. If the hon. Gentleman wishes, I will engage in public debate with him--he can book the hall and I will pay for it.
A relationship between organisations such as Euromil--which exists for our NATO allies--and the Ministry of Defence could solve many difficulties. The Government have seen fit to reinstate the trade union rights at GCHQ. I hope--although I see that the Government Front Bench is empty of major Ministers--that they might consider the establishment of a similar sort of relationship in this area.
I hope that the review that is being afforded to the Gulf war veterans will also be extended to include the British Nuclear Test Veterans Association, which has, for many more years, suffered similar problems in terms of representation.
The Labour Government have taken firm action in Bosnia. I represent the Westminster Parliament in the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe and in the North Atlantic Assembly. Their attitude towards the British in connection with war crimes prisoners has changed dramatically because of the resolution that we showed.
On 2 July, I sent a memo to Ronald Lehman, the director of the Centre for Global Security Research at the Livermore laboratory in California. I also sent a copy of the memo to my right hon. Friends the Foreign Secretary, the Secretary of State for Defence and the Secretary of State for International Development. The memo stated:
On 21 July, I received an answer from my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Defence who said that he had read my letter with interest. I am pleased to see that the initiatives taken by the Labour party in its five-point plan go some way towards meeting the call that I made in my memo, but I do not think that they are sufficient. We need to go further and the Government need to enlist non-governmental organisations to complement and augment the clear programme that has been set out and which I welcome.
This morning, I went to a seminar on land mines at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies. I heard a lot about the difficulties experienced by researchers developing censors that can detect a pimple on a pebble half a metre below the surface 60 yd from an aircraft at 300 ft. The researchers are concentrating on detecting the land mine, which is important and needs to
be done, but the papers of General Sir Hugh Beach tell of the censors to which I referred earlier--censors that can detect human movement, and direct either indirect or direct fire on whoever is making the incursion.
Mr. Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (Cotswold):
I am privileged to have caught your eye, Mr. Deputy Speaker, and to be able to speak in this two-day defence debate. I am pleased to follow the hon. Member for Stockton, North (Mr. Cook).
There is no doubt that our armed forces are among the most professional, if not the most professional, in the world. It would therefore ill behove the Government to stretch their conditions of service too far--a point to which I shall return later.
The strategic defence review is the sixth such review undertaken since the second world war and it takes place in a 15-year time frame. It is therefore important that we get it right. We must focus on our world role. In a brief intervention on the Minister for the Armed Forces I tried to elicit what the foreign policy base line actually is, and he gave me the answer I expected--one that was somewhat wide of the point and gave us no detail on which to hang a coat. Our armed forces are there to give us the choice as to whether we wish to take part in any of the world forums that we support so rigorously. I hope that no strategic defence review will ever take away that choice from the Government of this country.
With that choice available to us, we have taken part with honour in world conflicts and in world forums. We been able to participate so successfully because we have been able to equip our armed forces with some of the best equipment in the world. Whatever the previous Government did--I accept that, over the past 10 years or so, we cut the manpower of the combined services from 315,000 to 215,000--we always ensured that our armed forces had the best equipment in the world. I hope that that will continue under the strategic defence review and that we shall have the ability to procure the latest equipment.
I echo other hon. Members' comments about the Technology Foresight programme. There is no doubt that as we move into the next millennium the electronic revolution will gather pace. Every day, microchips become smaller, which means, for example, that rockets will be able to carry computers with increasing amounts of memory and that minor powers will be able to develop such strategic equipment far more easily. We have to be fast on our feet in our procurement programmes--we have to look at the latest equipment, but we must also look over the horizon to see what is coming along. That is
part of the problem with procurement costswe look at a piece of equipment for procurement, but then find that technology has advanced, so we have to change the specification. We have to acknowledge that problem and consider counter-measures.
In the short time available, I wish to deal with one or two of the personnel issues. First, there is Gulf war illness, as my hon. Friend the Member for Salisbury (Mr. Key) called it. I welcome the open way in which the Minister for the Armed Forces is dealing with this matter and I ask him to determine whether or not there is such a syndrome. Constituents have written to me on the subject and there is no doubt that people have become ill as a result of the cocktail of medicines administered to them during the Gulf war. Of course, the cocktail was administered during wartime and in a rapidly changing situation, so I am not necessarily attaching any blame, but if genuine mistakes were made, I look to the Minister for the Armed Forces to come clean, and compensation should be paid to families who have been inconvenienced.
I shall refer briefly to our territorial armed forces. An easy path to take in the strategic defence review would be to cut our volunteer forces, but they are absolutely essential. They do valuable work in signals units and, in this age of electronics, signals and communications will become ever more important. It is, therefore, incumbent on us to draw on our brightest graduates and recruit the best people from our universities so that they can provide the skills of tomorrow that our armed forces need.
The Minister for the Armed Forces does not appear to be paying attention, but I hope that he will listen for a minute. The strategic defence review is giving rise to uncertainty in the armed forces. The sooner it is completed, the sooner the armed forces will know where they are going and the easier it will be to implement a realistic recruitment programme, especially in the Army where personnel are desperately needed. I hope that the Minister will get on with the review and complete it as quickly as possible.
I return to the subject of our world role and re-emphasise the primacy of NATO in our defence planning. The Americans are prepared to deploy 100,000 troops outside their own territory in Europe and elsewhere under the NATO umbrella. We would be crazy to do anything to jeopardise that. Some of the anti-American noises coming from some of our European partners are astonishing at a time when they are all cutting their defence budgets as a proportion of gross domestic product. We should be encouraging and thanking the Americans for their contribution.
I warmly welcome any expansion of NATO to the east through peaceful means--through "Partnership for Peace", not through annexation into NATO. That is the way to go: we do not want all those future NATO powers to gear themselves up with military expenditure, but we want them to come under the NATO umbrella so that we can control their thinking on strategic military affairs.
"This simple courtesy note is to alert you to recent exchanges between myself and Dr. David Eimerl of the Center for Global Security Research at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory when I outlined to him my ideas on the proposal to create an international organization to promote and accelerate measures to reduce levels of UXO pollution generally and APM contamination particularly, so facilitating the faster return of potentially available land to gainful use."
I went on to outline how the organisation could put to good use serving officers, retirees and volunteers who want to train personnel in the 67 countries that have been polluted with the filth.
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