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9.34 pm
The Secretary of State for Defence (Mr. Geoffrey Hoon): I am grateful to have the opportunity to come before the House this evening to make my first speech as Secretary of State for Defence. I have listened with great interest to the various contributions of right hon. and hon. Members from both sides of the House during today's debate.
The Government are engaged in carrying out the ambitious and radical plans that my predecessor set out last year in the strategic defence review. It is a significant modernisation that affects every aspect of the armed forces as well as those who support them. It is not a quick fix for financial or political reasons, nor is it change for change's sake. It is a far-reaching programme of modernisation that is designed to improve our ability to carry out operations successfully. That is, of course, the test by which everything we do will be judged.
At the same time, we have been committed to operations as never before. Earlier this year we were heavily involved in Kosovo. I look forward next year to reporting to the House on the results of the various studies currently under way into the lessons that we can learn from that campaign.
Mr. Dalyell:
Will my right hon. Friend give way?
Mr. Hoon:
If my hon. Friend will allow me to make a little more progress, I shall give way to him.
The right hon. and learned Member for North-East Fife (Mr. Campbell) raised the question of the defence White Paper, which I hope will be published before Christmas.
I wish to pay tribute to George Robertson, who carried out his duties as Defence Secretary during a difficult time with great authority, clarity of purpose and unswerving commitment to the achievement of a successful outcome. Members who have read the account that he published in October setting out the background to the conflict will realise the extent of what was achieved under his
leadership. As my hon. Friend the Member for Dunfermline, West (Ms Squire) said, he is now in a role where he can continue to contribute to these enormously important matters. I am sure that the House joins me in wishing him well.
A number of right hon. and hon. Members have concentrated on European defence. It is important that the House understand what we are proposing, and crucially what we are not proposing. We are not proposing a European army. We are not proposing a standing force with a European badge under European command and exclusively earmarked for tasks agreed within the European Union. That has never been part of our thinking. Only national Governments and national Parliaments have the right to take decisions on how and where national armed forces are deployed. Moreover, we have no intention of carving up security tasks between the European Union and NATO. That would break the link between Europe and north America which is at the heart of the NATO alliance.
We are proposing that European forces--the forces of fully sovereign nation states acting in co-operation--should make a greater contribution to NATO, and that we should be in a position, where NATO as a whole is not engaged, to carry out European crisis management operations, drawing on NATO's assets and capabilities when necessary. What was set out at St. Malo was the need for Europe to make its voice heard in world affairs while contributing to the vitality of a modernised Atlantic alliance.
Mr. Soames:
Will the right hon. Gentleman tell me how in particular the structure that he describes will be different from the already extremely efficient and effective structure of the Allied Command Europe Rapid Reaction Corps, which has done very well on the past two occasions it has been called upon?
Mr. Hoon:
I can deal with that when I deal with the institutional matters in a moment.
The Kosovo campaign brought home to us clearly the limits of our existing capability. Our airmen performed with their customary skill and bravery. But the United States provided most of the aircraft and flew most of the missions. On the ground, too, while more than 40 per cent. of the force that first entered Kosovo was British, Europe as a whole was hard pressed to deploy a force amounting to only about 2 per cent. of the 2.5 million troops theoretically available on paper. A number of hon. Members have emphasised that point.
Mr. Dalyell:
Will my right hon. Friend give way?
We have found that, with all too few exceptions, Europe's armed forces are still structured to meet the predictable requirements of the cold war rather than the complex challenges of the next century. They are hampered by their reliance on national fixed infrastructure, when their forces need instead to be sustainable for long periods in a range of different theatres of operations. In short, they need to be more flexible. It was clear to us even before Kosovo that fundamental change was necessary. We needed to enhance our capability to decide, and enhance our capability to act.
Our ambition is that the European nations should be able to make foreign and security policy decisions underpinned by credible military capability, and that they should be able to take control of European crisis management operations. To do this, we need new machinery that supports competent defence decision making inside the European Union.
Mr. Dalyell:
The British Army went to war, supposedly, to stop ethnic cleansing. How is it that, as we understand it, 40,000 NATO troops are palpably unable to stop the most brutal ethnic cleansing of the Serbs and the destruction of 70 of their monasteries? Is it true, as I previously asked, that only the Irish Guards do night patrol?
Mr. Hoon:
I am sorry, but I do not recognise the picture portrayed by my hon. Friend. I was in Kosovo in August and I have examined, for example, the crime rates and particularly the murder rates, which have been steadily falling since that time. The murder rate in Kosovo and particularly in Pristina is lower than in certain European capitals, so I do not recognise the picture that my hon. Friend describes.
I return to the structures for decision making and defence in the European Union. At Berlin in 1996, the North Atlantic Council said that European allies should
We have heard a great deal of what I can describe only as alarmist nonsense from the Opposition on the subject of European defence. If they are right that the European security and defence identity threatens the very existence of NATO, why did all 19 members of NATO, including the United States, sign a statement at the Washington summit welcoming it?
If the European security and defence identity threatens the very existence of NATO, why did the US deputy Secretary of State, Strobe Talbott, say in his speech at Chatham house on 7 October that
Mr. Howard:
As I pointed out to the Secretary of State earlier, the speech that Mr. Talbott made drew a distinction between what had been said at Washington and what was said at Cologne. Cologne came after Washington, and what Strobe Talbott said in his speech was that the signals that came out from St. Malo and the signals that came out from Cologne were different from the signals that came out from Washington and Berlin.
Mr. Hoon:
Because senior representatives of the United States Administration continue to make fairly basic statements, such as
Mr. Deputy Speaker (Mr. Michael J. Martin):
Order. We cannot have hon. Gentlemen shouting across the Chamber. It has been a quiet night up till now, so let us continue to have one.
Mr. Hoon:
No prizes for guessing who was Defence Secretary at the time.
Hon. Members have kept shouting from a sedentary position that that refers to NATO, not the EU. They should remember what they signed up to in the Maastricht treaty. They called for the framing of a common defence policy in the context of the European Union. Right hon. and hon. Members who were part of the Government who signed up for that should remember what they were doing.
Mr. Duncan Smith:
If what the Secretary of State says was so critical to the formation of policy subsequently, why did the Prime Minister come back from Amsterdam crowing about the fact that he had stopped the plans to wind the Western European Union into the European Union, only to allow that to happen at Cologne?
"make a more coherent and effective contribution to the mission and activities of the Alliance as an expression of our shared responsibilities; to act themselves as required and reinforce the trans-Atlantic partnership."
The alliance further endorsed the concept, and the need to strengthen Europe's contribution, at the Washington summit in April this year.
"the US is for ESDI. It's in our interest for Europe to be able to deal effectively with challenges for European security"?
I was grateful for what was described as the fair reading of that speech by the right hon. and learned Member for North-East Fife. I have tried hard to put on it the construction for which the hon. Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Mr. Maples) and the right hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard) argued, but so far the phrase
"the US is for ESDI"
defies any interpretation other than the obvious one.
"The US is for ESDI".
It was the previous Conservative Government who signed up to the idea of a European security and defence identity--[Interruption.] That was at Berlin in 1996.
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