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Sir Archie Hamilton: Indeed. We were told that the strategic defence review was foreign policy led. I am still waiting to hear the Foreign Office advice. The Government claim to be committed to openness and making advice available to everybody, yet we are not allowed to know the contents of an essential document, which was the basis of the strategic defence review. What does that mean in the context of freedom of information? The document is not especially sensitive, and it is extraordinary that we cannot be given the Foreign Office advice on which the review was based.
I presume that the Foreign Office was not especially interested in home defence and that it suggested that defence policy could be skewed in favour of overseas commitments. It overlooked the fact that the purpose of our armed forces is to ensure that this country is properly defended.
The hon. Member for Vale of Glamorgan (Mr. Smith) was a bit cheeky when he suggested that the strategic defence review was good for morale. I do not know to whom he spoke, but clearly he and I talked to different people. The review was supposed to take place over six months. It took much longer because the usual turf war broke out. Morale did not go up; it went down as a consequence of the strategic defence review. Its findings, especially the 3 per cent. in so-called savings, did even more to break morale.
Mr. Brazier: My right hon. Friend mentioned home defence. Asymmetric warfare and the threat it poses to this country received one short mention in the strategic defence review. In contrast, of the 23 conclusions reached in the recent American review, which was published last September, the first was that asymmetric warfare posed a serious threat to mainland America in the next few years.
Sir Archie Hamilton: I referred to that in an earlier debate on the Defence White Paper. Serious worries
derive from my hon. Friend's point. If a massive superpower--arguably the only remaining superpower--takes on some small country, which is rendered incapable of reacting militarily, there are serious questions about that small country's future reaction. It is enormously worrying for the security of the world, especially in the light of the development of weapons of mass destruction, nuclear or otherwise.
Mr. Spellar: I refer the right hon. Gentleman to the Ministry of Defence website, where he can read the speech that I made to the Atlantic Council towards the end of last year. I dealt with that matter at some length.
Sir Archie Hamilton: I am grateful to the Minister for reminding me of that. I shall get back to my personal computer as soon as possible and read his speech on the website. I am sure it is interesting, and I am sorry that it did not receive more publicity, which, I am sure, it deserved.
The only good news for the Ministry of Defence is that we are in a new financial year. My hon. Friend the Member for Salisbury made the point that we already seem to be moving towards a financial crisis. I hoped that there would be few months in which the Ministry of Defence could work on the assumption that it had enough money to cover its problems; I believed that only at the end of the financial year would it begin to experience the problems about which we have heard recently. However, the pressure of commitments and the need to find further so-called savings means that the Ministry of Defence continues to experience difficulties despite the new tranche of money that it should receive.
It is important to remind everyone in this country that the budget will be cut by between 3.8 per cent. between 1999-2000 and 2001-02. That is a substantial cut that follows savings by Conservative Governments. My right hon. Friend the Member for Bridgwater explained the necessity for those savings. However, we have reached the point where we cannot afford to cut the defence budget further.
I am not responsible for our policies in the next manifesto, but I should like us to guarantee that we will maintain the defence budget in real terms in the next Parliament at least. It is important to give that reassurance to our armed forces, which have been salami sliced for so long that they are finding life difficult. The savings are not helping.
The Government have trouble explaining the difference between a 3 per cent. efficiency saving and a cut. There is no satisfactory answer. The Select Committee report made it clear that the Committee was not satisfied.
The services are under strength by 8,700 trained personnel. I presume that the Government budgeted for the strength that the forces were supposed to be at, and that they are saving money by having fewer trained personnel. Is that an efficiency saving? If so, it is rather strange. I suspect that it is lumped in with efficiency savings, which are really cuts.
Like many other Conservative Members, I believe that the cuts in the Territorial Army have been extraordinary. Someone must deal with that problem. The Territorial Army's budget is included in that of the Army. Membership of the Army Board is exclusively taken up
by professional soldiers whose view of the Territorial Army is that if it is not a cheap worthwhile reserve force, it is expensive considering its capabilities. If they are given any choice between retaining a front-line, regular regiment or emasculating the Territorial Army, the latter will always suffer when the heat is on.The only way to tackle the problem is to shift the budget for the Territorial Army, possibly to the Home Office under home defence, with a contract from the Ministry of Defence to organise and train its members. Unless we do that and if it remains a Ministry of Defence responsibility, I can tell the House that it will continue to be cut every time there are pressures on and in the MOD.
I have yet to meet a serving general who has any serious interest in the TA, although that does not prevent them from making massive use of it whenever they are in serious trouble or find themselves going to war without doctors or anyone of that sort. Then it becomes a valuable resource. If given the choice, they will always cut it and maintain regular forces in preference. We shall get away from that only if we separate the funding completely.
When we are so under strength, so grotesquely over-committed and leaning on the TA to such a degree to fill regular posts--many of which are in the infantry and out in the Balkans--it strikes me as extraordinary to cut it back, particularly the infantry, as they are the resource that we are using most. The Government have been extremely ill-advised to allow that to happen and I should have thought that we could take such a stringent view only when regular forces were fully manned and we felt that we did not need such reserves. However, we have needed them badly when we have been cutting them and that is not very clever, in anyone's language.
I am also distressed that the Government still seem to be committed to some form of European defence identity and we always seem to go through the triumph of hope over reality in terms of our European negotiations. There is no doubt that, on the whole, the record of European procurement has been pretty dismal and vast sums have been wasted because there is not the agreement and cohesion of outlook that makes such initiatives possible.
We cannot remind the House too often of our bruising experiences during the Gulf war--the support that we received from our European allies was dismal. Under the presidential constitution, the French at least had a system whereby they could decide to go to war, but, other than the Mirages and the French air force, their contribution was limited. Their light tanks could only be put against an Iraqi infantry division and the aircraft carrier that they sent out did not have the power to enable fixed-wing aircraft to take off from it. Eventually, it broke down and had to go home. The Germans had tremendous problems supporting us at all and the Luftwaffe wing that was sent out to Turkey virtually mutinied so its contribution was minimal. The Italians flew a Tornado sortie, but had one shot down. They did not bother to fly again. We all know about the Belgians, who had extreme difficulty with their coalition Government and would not even sell my right hon. Friend the Member for Bridgwater the 155 mm ammunition he needed.
Now that a certain time has passed and as we all believe in openness, we can reveal a wonderful case. The Belgian Defence Minister sent my right hon. Friend a telegram saying, "I am under a bit of pressure from all these British newspapers, which are slagging the Belgians off for not
being very helpful about the war. Will you send me a telegram saying, 'Thank you very much for all the ammunition.'? If you thank me in advance I shall be extremely grateful. I'll send the ammunition later." My right hon. Friend was not born yesterday, he did not send the telegram and the ammunition never arrived. We must be very careful.I was interested in the views of the right hon. and learned Member for North-East Fife (Mr. Campbell) on European defence. Usually, I find Liberals to be frightfully keen on anything to do with Europe, even if it does not add up to much, but he was so right when he said that European defence needs to be capability led. We cannot do anything to bring European countries together until they increase their defence budgets. As we know, the Europeans cut their defence budgets between 1990 and 1999--France by 23 per cent., Germany by 39 per cent., Italy by 21 per cent. and the United Kingdom by 29 per cent. Declining defence budgets are not the right backdrop for bringing people together to spend additional money to create European structures. We shall face nothing but absolute disaster if we go down that road.
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