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Mr. Ingram: It is important to correct the hon. Gentleman's comment about 2,000 part-time soldiers—as they are called in an article that appeared in
The Herald and elsewhere—leaving the Territorial Army. I asked for that to be looked at, and it is important to correct what has been said because other hon. Members have referred to it. General Sir Mike Jackson, the Chief of the General Staff, has replied to The Herald—I hope that other papers pick this up too—saying:
- "There is no evidence in any of the volunteer reserve forces of mass departures from the TA as a result of the call-out and service in Iraq. The drop in TA numbers is seasonal and consistent with previous years. It is largely due to the departure of officer cadets in the University Officer Training Corps",—
- "in their third year, who, on reaching the end of their studies, leave the UOTC. The new university intakes join in October."
Mr. Gray: I very much welcome that reassurance. It is important that we know that, and it will be important to revisit that statement in the months to come. I hope that that will remain the case and that we will not find that TA people are dropping out. I think that I am right in saying there are 38,000 people in the TA, but there should be 45,000 under the SDR.
I understand that we are currently going through the bidding process—to use laymen's terms—where various parts of the Army bid for TA back-up. Those bids will be decided by the end of this year, and I understand that they currently amount to about 95,000 or 100,000 TA soldiers. We currently have 38,000—less than half what the Army is asking for—so the presumption is that there will be some very heavy scaling back on what the Army is requesting and, no doubt, a careful re-examination of the way in which the TA works and what it does. It would be interesting to know the Minister's reaction to that suggestion and his thoughts about how on earth the TA can begin to supply anything like what the Army is asking for; or perhaps he is considering fundamental restructuring in the roles that it plays.
I wish briefly to mention something else on that front. My hon. Friend the Member for North Essex and the Secretary of State referred briefly to a home defence force role for the TA. Of course, it has always had such a role—that is why it is called the Territorial Army—and there has always been an argument for some kind of home defence role. However, I simply wish to say two things. First, giving the TA one week's extra training, which was announced under the new chapter of the SDR, is laughable. That amount of training is absolutely neither here nor there. It is entirely pointless, and the TA might as well not do it.
Secondly, if, as some have suggested, the TA is taken away from a war-fighting role and moved into some kind of home defence role—a key points guarding role of some sort—on an ongoing basis, I guarantee that people will leave the TA. There is no way in the world that the people with whom I served in the TA, who are trained for war-fighting roles, would content themselves with some sort of "Dad's Army" role, guarding key points.
Of course, like the Regular Army, the TA is ready to fulfil such roles, but only if they are taught war fighting. They must be taught war fighting and they may then use those skills in aid of the civilian power. That is a
perfectly normal role of both the Regular Army and the TA. However, if those in the TA only had a home defence force role, they would not stay there. As evidence for that, we need only glance back 10 years, or thereabouts, when we had a huge home defence force, which the then Conservative Government set up. We took a lot of former TA and regular soldiers into the home defence force, but it did not last more than two or three years. It was impossible to recruit or retain soldiers. People will not give up their weekends, two weeks a year or Wednesday nights for training to do a job that they believe the police could easily do. They must be trained for war fighting, albeit using those war-fighting skills for defence of the civil power.One last matter on which I want to touch only in passing relates directly to defence policy, but is none the less extremely important. One of the things that one is required to do at the Royal College of Defence Studies is write a 10,000-word thesis, which I am glad to say I did. I did it on the subject of the use of the royal prerogative to go to war, and I did it largely by examining Hansard dating back to the second world war and examining the way in which we decided to go to war in every war since then, up to and including Afghanistan. The reality, of course, is that in all those wars, two or three of them under this Government, no vote was allowed in this place at any time, nor was there any suggestion that there should be one. In most of those wars, the Secretary of State or the Prime Minister came along to the House of Commons two or three days after the war had started to announce what they had done and to say that the people would judge them in a subsequent general election if they did not get it right.
I know that that runs contrary to what a great many of my hon. Friends and many other Members would think, and that they would ask what is the purpose of having a great House of Commons if we cannot even decide whether to go to war. I would say that the decision to go to war is a great deal too important to leave to this Parliament. It should not be a matter for this Parliament—it should be a matter delegated to the chief executive, the Prime Minister. He should decide on the basis of the secret intelligence available to him what troops he should deploy and what the troops should do when they are in the theatre of war. After all, had the Prime Minister taken that approach, had he not sought to spin and to persuade this House of Commons and the nation that what he was planning to do in Iraq was right, and had he done what he did in relation to Afghanistan—placing a paper in the Library and saying that he had a great deal of secret intelligence that he could not share, but that he must tell the House that he believed that sending in troops was the right thing to do—he would not be in the position he is in today. It is only because he felt the necessity to spin and to persuade people that somehow he landed up in the appalling shambles that we see unfolding in the Hutton inquiry.
Were we in future to have an evenly balanced House of Commons, with perhaps a majority of one or two on either side, and were we required to come to this House for a vote on a war, it seems to me that the Opposition, however noble and distinguished they may be, would take party political advantage of that narrowness of the majority, giving away statesmanship in favour of political expediency. I know that this is a deeply unpopular view in my party, and almost certainly a
deeply unpopular view within the House as a whole, but I believe fundamentally and passionately that we should ask the Government to carry out certain functions for which they should be answerable in retrospect but for which they should not have to justify themselves to the House in advance. There is a place in modern government for the royal prerogative, and the Prime Minister was incorrect in allowing political pressure to force him to come to this House and seek two substantive votes prior to the Iraq conflict. He should have just gone ahead and done it, and if he had got it wrong, we would have told him about it in no uncertain terms in retrospect.
Angus Robertson : Does the hon. Gentleman believe that there are any other policy areas in which Parliament should not take part, or is it only matters of life and death on which Members of Parliament should not decide?
Mr. Gray: There are quite large numbers of Government policies on which the House takes no decision, such as the appointment of ambassadors and bishops. There are all sorts of areas in which the Prime Minister makes use of the royal prerogative that he has inherited to make dozens of decisions that do not come to this place. If we had a vote in the House every time a bishop was appointed, we would be bogged down to say the least. There are large numbers of areas in which we leave it to the Prime Minister to make up his mind. After all, that is part of parliamentary democracy. When a general election comes, we look at what the Prime Minister and the governing party have done and we decide whether it was a good thing. If every decision, no matter how important or unimportant, came to this place for a vote, they would not be accountable for their actions in the same way as they are under the current system of parliamentary democracy. I realise that that is not a popular view, but having just completed that thesis, on which I shall shortly publish an article, I thought that I would take the opportunity of sharing it with some of my parliamentary colleagues.
Leaving that point to one side, I have a real worry about the way in which the Government seem to be committing us to more and more overseas adventures of one sort or another. We seem to be involved in them with fewer and fewer resources. Rather than face up to that, the Government seek to camouflage the imbalance between commitments and resources with new Labour spin and new talk, with all these clever expressions about modernising warfare and all the standard guff that we hear all the time from the Labour party.
I challenge the Minister to be absolutely straightforward in his response. If he has not got the right resources and if the White Paper is about cuts so that the money can be spent on health, education or other things, I challenge him, for heaven's sake, to say that we do not have the resources to do the things that we would like to do. That is what the people of this country would expect him to say.
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