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Mr. Caplin: The hon. Gentleman has made that accusation twice this afternoon. I assure him and the House that plans do not exist to close the Royal Centre for Defence Medicine, as he alleges. We are committed to delivering a military medical centre of excellence at the RCDM in Birmingham, which is our aim and expectation.
Mr. Viggers: The accommodation centre, mess facilities, sporting facilities and offices that would have comprised the centre of the RCDM have been cancelled. Staff in Birmingham have been left in inadequate bed-and-breakfast accommodation, and that point is confirmed in a parliamentary answer from the Under-Secretary. Some staff live in accommodation that was originally intended for people without housing, and a large number of them stay in a Young Women's Christian Association hostel. I challenge the Minister to deny that there are no plans to change the situation.
Mr. Caplin: I do not know the parliamentary answer to which the hon. Gentleman refers, but I refer him to a parliamentary answer that I gave to the hon. Member for Mid-Norfolk (Mr. Simpson):
"We are currently exploring, in consultation with industry, a number of options for the development of domestic accommodation and the move of all remaining medical training and other functions to Birmingham. Planned costs and potential savings remain subject to evaluation of, and final decisions on, the various options."—[Official Report, 22 April 2004; Vol. 420, c. 660W.]
The project has clearly not been cancelled, and it would be helpful for our people who work in Defence Medical Services if the hon. Gentleman were to cease making that allegation.
Mr. Viggers: The project has been cancelled. When the rear-admiral responsible for it resigned, the vice-chief of the defence staff said, "I can understand why you have resigned from the Navy." The allegation is serious, and it has not been answered.
The digital clock is playing amazing games, and I need to rely on the old-fashioned steam clock, which states that I have two minutes rather than the five minutes 36 seconds stated by the new digital clock. I shall shape my remarks accordingly.
In some cases, accommodation for armed forces is below standard, and I was pleased to hear the Minister of State say that that problem is being addressed. I
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readily admit that the problem is long standing, but some unmarried personnel are accommodated in inadequate premises.
The constraint on time is heavy, so I shall simply say this in conclusion: the armed forces offer a range of careers with the training and experience to enable servicemen and women to fulfil their roles. As those skills are also transferable, they equip servicemen and women to face civilian life with confidence.
5.2 pm
Mr. David Borrow (South Ribble) (Lab): I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in this afternoon's debate. I represent South Ribble in Lancashire and I live only a few hundred yards away from the headquarters of both the Queen's Lancashire Regiment at Fulwood barracks and Kimberley barracks, where the Territorial Army regiment is based.
I have a lot of contact and dealings with the Queen's Lancashire Regiment. From speaking to people in the regiment, and to the extended family of people who have served in the past and those whose family members serve in the regiment, I know how upset and annoyed they have been by the recent comments and photographs in the Daily Mirror.
The Queen's Lancashire Regiment has a long and distinguished reputation, which goes back to 1782. In 1970, three regiments—the East Lancashire Regiment, the South Lancashire Regiment and the Loyal Regiment—merged to form the Queen's Lancashire Regiment. Throughout its history, soldiers from the Queen's Lancashire Regiment have been awarded a total of 18 Victoria crosses.
I was in Basra in early June, a few weeks before the change of regiments, when the 1st Battalion the Queen's Lancashire Regiment went out to Basra—it arrived in the middle of June and stayed until the middle of November. About 600 servicemen and women were with the regiment, including 100 members of the Territorial Army. When I met members of the regiment on their return, they were proud of their hard work, the schools and police stations that had been reopened, the number of police officers who had been trained and the improved public services. There is very little hint of anything going wrong during that period.
I am experienced and grown-up enough to realise that, if 600 servicemen and women are put in a dangerous situation thousands of miles from home, not every one of them will behave perfectly and that there will be incidents that require investigation. However, what has upset the people of Lancashire so much is the use on the front page of the Daily Mirror of the fake photographs that have cast doubt on the integrity and honour of everyone who has served in that regiment. As politicians and people in public life, we realise that our media are players in that arena and will manipulate and cherry-pick the news to make a political point and we take it for granted because it is part of the rough and tumble of politics. But ordinary families who have been upset by newspapers cannot understand how they can fabricate stories that hurt and damage their integrity. It is an absolute disgrace that the Daily Mirror has been prepared to besmirch the name of the Queen's Lancashire Regiment to further its own political line and damage the Prime Minister.
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People in Lancashire would like the Daily Mirror to answer several questions. What did the Daily Mirror say when allegations were first made to it about incidents in Iraq? Did it say to those servicemen, or so-called servicemen, "You ought to report these things to officers in the MOD or your regiment so they can be investigated"? When they first made their allegations, did they appear at the door of the Daily Mirror with photographs in hand, or did they, as is rumoured, appear without photographs, then return some days later having mysteriously discovered photographs to support their story? Did the Daily Mirror pay for those photographs? Has the Daily Mirror profited from the sale of those photographs to media outlets across the world? Has the Daily Mirror any idea of the danger in which it has put our troops around the world by the publication of those fabricated pictures?
I spoke to members of the QLR this morning. I could demand the resignation of the editor of the Daily Mirror, but the very minimum that people involved with the regiment want is for the Daily Mirror to apologise, on the whole of its front page, for fabricating a story that has so wilfully damaged and besmirched the name of the Queen's Lancashire Regiment.
5.7 pm
Mr. Bernard Jenkin (North Essex) (Con): I am sure that all hon. Members will have great sympathy with the questions that the hon. Member for South Ribble (Mr. Borrow) wants to put to the Daily Mirror and I hope that the people concerned will read his words in Hansard and act upon them.
Every hon. Member who has spoken today has spoken highly of the armed forces. I regularly meet the men and women of 16 Air Assault Brigade, who are based in Colchester, around which my constituency sits, and whose circumstances, tasks and challenges are inseparable from the situation in Iraq and the general international situation that we face. It is inexcusable that our armed forces should find themselves in a situation whereby they are exposed in conflict apparently without any coherent plan, as in Iraq today. What is the plan? Is there a plan? Nobody can say.
The history of Conservative Members' support for the removal of Saddam Hussein is clearly on the record, but also on the record is our consistent, persistent and continuing questioning of Her Majesty's Government, both before and after the conflict, about the coherence and viability of post-conflict planning. After the conflict, on 4 July, I presented a paper to the shadow Cabinet in which I wrote:
"Post-conflict Iraq is clearly not progressing as well as expected, leaving the UK's overstretched armed forces in an increasingly invidious position."
I pointed out that we needed, "A coherent policy", which,
"would be to adopt a 'road map' based upon the successful implementation of peace and security",
in such theatres as the Balkans. I continued:
"Our main charge against the government is",
"failure to engage with US post-conflict planning before and since the conflict, leaving the UK armed forces in an increasingly invidious position."
"Currently, all the elements for protracted insurgency warfare exist, though there is every opportunity to prevent the situation deteriorating, if clear direction is provided to the",
coalition provisional authority,
"now. Otherwise, it is just a matter of time before an anti-occupation organisation emerges, gains support from a discontented population and starts organising 'resistance' much more effectively."
Sadly, those words, which I wrote on 4 July, have turned out to be all too true. The key question that the Government must now address is this: do they now accept that the coalition is fighting a major counter-insurgency war in Iraq—it is not peacekeeping—which is part of a global counter-insurgency war?
The principles of counter-insurgency warfare are not new. They have been established, discovered and practised by the British armed forces throughout the world for many years. They are to secure one's home base, which is why we have talked so much about homeland security, and to deny the enemy a secure base, which is why we threw out the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq. They are also to plan and generate military activity based on the best human intelligence about the enemy that one can gather and to remove the underlying political grievances through reconstruction and the settlement of disputes. Another principle is to co-ordinate all one's actions to a coherent strategic plan with all one's partners, which underlines the importance of transatlantic co-operation for the future of Iraq, that we cannot let the Americans do it on their own and nor should our European partners seek to leave them to do it on their own. That also underlines the importance of NATO, and raises the question of why NATO is not taking a strategic role in co-ordinating a single, strategic plan. We must also remember that counter-insurgency warfare is a battle for hearts and minds and that the conflict is about the will to win, and the will to succeed, not about the use of physical force. That means that we must remember that actions and words, including the technical, have immeasurable political and strategic consequences. We need to avoid doing things that create propaganda opportunities for the enemy to feed grievances and enmity. That means that a counter-insurgency campaign must stay within the law and only use proportionate force as a last resort.
In Iraq, I fear that we are acting on very limited and poor intelligence. The actions that we have seen publicised on screens around the world recently are fuelling grievances. The disputes and splits in the coalition are disabling any coherence of a plan. There is a clash of military doctrines, a failure to win hearts and minds and too much resort to force—not on the part of our armed forces but certainly on that of others. There is a failure to understand the strategic impact of words and actions. That point relates directly to prisoners and their treatment.
Any mistreatment of prisoners in the hands of the coalition is a matter for the whole coalition. That is why it is inexplicable that the International Committee of the Red Cross report was not a matter of instant concern to Ministers as soon as it became available to the coalition.
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The pictures endanger the entire strategy. They are petrol on the flames of Islamic opinion. They are a propaganda gift to the terrorists. Al-Qaeda could not have planned it more effectively.
In Iraq and in the middle east, we now face the prospect of real strategic failure. For all the success, skill and commitment of our armed forces and other members of the coalition—and the Americans—for all their forbearance in the face of real danger and for all the progress made in political and physical reconstruction in Iraq, we are in danger of throwing it all away through the coalition's failure to understand the fundamental principles required of a counter-insurgency campaign.
This is the question that the Government must face: what is the coalition plan to defeat terrorism and insurgency in Iraq? Are the Government effectively engaged with US policy making? I fear that not only have they made a mess of UK post-war planning for Iraq, but there is a persistent and ongoing failure to engage with the US Administration on the strategic direction of the coalition, in areas in which we have so much more experience and so much more to offer than the Americans currently seem to appreciate.
In a Daily Telegraph interview earlier this week Sir Jeremy Greenstock, formerly the Prime Minister's ambassador to Iraq, mentioned that we have 5 per cent. of the say in what happens in the coalition—although we provided 20 per cent. of combat power on the ground during the conflict. For all the Prime Minister's personal popularity in Washington, it is horribly clear that either his influence there is negligible or that he has failed and continues to fail to understand the true nature of the challenge of what is required to win the peace and good government for the people of Iraq, what is required for our own peace and security in the years ahead and what is required for the safety of those who serve so gallantly in the towns and villages and the streets and fields, of Iraq.
5.16 pm
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