Debate on the Address

This has been a thoughtful debate. Listening to the contributions from all parts of the House, the thought has gone through my mind more than once today that were the public to see and hear more of the sort of debate that we had today, rather than always being fed the bear pit of Prime Minister’s questions, they might have a much higher regard for the House and the politicians in it. Let me begin by paying tribute to our troops, who have put their safety on the line for our security day in and day out. In particular, I pay tribute, on behalf of all my colleagues, to those who have paid the price in terms of mortality, morbidity and life and limb. Every citizen of this country owes them a very great debt. As has been said in many contributions, there is no doubt that many of our forces are overstretched—a point that was made particularly well by my right hon. Friend the Member for North-East Hampshire (Mr. Arbuthnot). The harmony guidelines are all but disregarded, the Government are regularly breaching their own planning assumptions, and there is now a strong case to revisit them. When we listen to the contributions made here today and when we visit our troops, wherever they happen to be deployed, we realise that, intellectually, no conclusion can be arrived at other than that our Army is now too small for the tasks being asked of it. The debate began with a long section of the Foreign Secretary’s speech, and an emphasis by my right hon. Friend the shadow Foreign Secretary, on the situation in the middle east, particularly in Israel and Palestine. At a volatile time in a volatile area, there is a need to maintain a balanced picture and a sense of proportion. Let us remember that Israel is a democratic state with an independent judiciary and a healthy market economy system. Its right to exist, to protect itself and to maintain its borders is indisputable. So is the right of the Palestinian people to determine their future. We all seem to know where we want to end up in a two-state settlement; the question is how we get there. As my hon. Friend the Member for Reigate (Mr. Blunt) said, it is very important, on the way, not to make the problems more difficult than they originally were. There has been much talk in the debate about Hamas. However, it is worth the House understanding why Hamas came to power. It did not come to power because the citizens of Gaza were more anti-Israeli; it came to power because of the corruption of the Palestinian Authority and the fact that Hamas promised to deliver real changes on the ground in the things that mattered to ordinary people. That must be properly understood. There has been much talk about democracy, but if democracy were simply about the exercise of electoral mechanics, Gaza and not Israel would be the beacon state in the middle east. My hon. Friend the Member for South-West Devon (Mr. Streeter) made a telling speech about the need to see democracy in a wider sense. Democracy is not just putting a cross on a ballot paper once every five years; Britain was liberal long before it was democratic. We had 200 years between Adam Smith and universal suffrage. Our liberal institutions and values, our independent judiciary, our rule of law that applied equally to the governing and the governed, our respect for human rights, our ability to exercise our individual liberty in a market system and our ownership of property all underpinned our democracy. Perhaps, now and again, we might want to remember that it took us a long time to get to where we are now, and that other countries will not make the transition overnight. The more often we can make that point politically, the easier it is for us to hold public opinion with us here, and to hold public opinion in the countries where we are involved. Extending democracy is a laudable and noble ambition, but it cannot be done quickly. That is the message that the United Kingdom should have pressed and should continue to press more and more with our allies in Washington. There is no doubt in my mind that there was—perhaps may still be—a shred of simplicity in some of the views in parts of the State Department that the process could take place more quickly and that democracy could be exported in line with an unrealistic timetable. Part of our robust partnership with the United States is about our ability to question some of the policy pronouncements that it makes. In any partnership, there will have to be give and take, and my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth, East (Mr. Ellwood) made it clear in his comments about the joint strike fighter that if we are to have a meaningful strategic relationship in defence with the United States, it will have to give as well as take. That means that on the software issues, it will have to make sure that the intellectual property transfer comes to a trusted ally. If not, the partnership will be weaker for that. There was much talk about the wider middle east, including north Africa and Turkey. Stability in north Africa is hugely important for security in the Mediterranean, a region of huge strategic importance to the UK. It is worth looking at the difference between NATO’s approach and the EU’s approach to the problem. The NATO-Mediterranean dialogue is producing some real results. It should be further up the NATO agenda, and I would like to see it given greater emphasis at the Riga summit, but it stands in stark contrast to a failure in the Euro-Med process where the free trade area that was promised by 2010 as part of the 2004 treaty of Agadir will not happen. If NATO can push ahead to build relations with some of those north African states so that they can look to the Mediterranean and northwards for their prosperity and security, and not south to the Gulf, that will be of enormous benefit to the United Kingdom and our wider security. That wider security comes into great focus when we consider the question of Turkey, which is a key NATO ally. It is a secular, westernising, liberalising country, moving in all the right directions, sometimes too slowly, but none the less moving in the direction that we would wish to see. It is an important buffer zone between Europe and some of the more militant Islamic states. We in Europe have a simple choice: either we encourage Turkey to move towards us, holding out the hope of membership of the EU, or we risk a Turkish backlash when those in Turkey believe that no matter what changes they make they will never be allowed into the EU, and instead of having a secular, modernising state on the European borders, we find ourselves with a militant Islamic state on the border of Greece. Those French and German politicians who think that playing to their domestic audiences is smart had better start to understand what the strategic consequences of alienating Turkey might be in the longer term. Much of the debate, reasonably and expectedly, focused on Afghanistan. From the very outset, we have agreed the basic aims of the Government’s policy in Afghanistan: that to create a stable, democratic state that does not allow the nurturing of terrorism is in our wider national interest and failure would be strategically disastrous, for reasons that we have often set out in the House. The cohesion and reputation of NATO would be at stake and we would embolden our enemies—and if we abandon the people of Afghanistan half-way through, who would believe us ever again when we said that we would help? We undoubtedly have a moral commitment that must be seen right through to the end. But we need to understand the mission. This is a UN-sanctioned mission, carried out by NATO because it is our common security that is being defended, and it is simply not good enough for some of our NATO allies to fail to pull their weight in this mission. They need to raise their defence expenditure and their political commitment to the whole process. It is simply not good enough to have German, Italian or Spanish troops already deployed, but which cannot be used properly when they are needed by the force commanders. There seems to be a difference in Afghanistan, where British troops understand that they are a single force under NATO command while too many of our European allies seem to believe that they are national forces under a NATO umbrella. There is a crucial difference between the two, and the Government need to invest a great deal of diplomatic effort in convincing them of the need to make some changes. There are two matters that the Government need continually to undertake in Afghanistan. The first is a realistic assessment of where we are and the likely rate of progress that we can make, and the second is to ensure that our troops have all that is necessary to maximise the chance of success of the mission and minimise the risk to our troops themselves. The realistic assessment goes right back to the beginning of the rhetoric that the Government used at the beginning of the deployment in Afghanistan. We were told that our mission was not war fighting but reconstruction, then we sent 16th Air Assault Brigade to do the business—hardly a force for reconstruction and peacekeeping. Only 10 per cent. of the promised reconstruction spending has ever materialised, and we if we cannot produce the basic infrastructure benefits for the ordinary Iraqi citizens that they believed we arrived there to produce, run the risk of finding ourselves much less welcome in the time ahead. There is a problem here with the Department for International Development, because it is not possible to undertake that reconstruction, which is in itself vital to the maintenance of the military mission, in a zero-risk environment, and there seem to be too many in DFID who do not want anything to do with conflict, and therefore do not want to be involved in any risk. That culture is not acceptable, for the long-term potential success of the mission. Finally on that point, there was an interesting intervention by the Secretary of State for Defence on my right hon. Friend the shadow Foreign Secretary on the issue of what Brigadier Lorimer might have asked or may ask for. From the discussion on the Floor of the House I have concluded that the Prime Minister has promised that what our commanders on the ground want, they will get. The Secretary of State for Defence has said that he has not yet been asked for some of the specifics that were mentioned at the weekend. If requests are made for more troops, artillery, armoured vehicles and tanks, I assume that the correct understanding of what we have heard today is that those things will be supplied. If there is no purely military solution in Afghanistan, that is even more true in Iraq. Yes, we can help to train the army and the police and to support the fledgling democratic Iraqi state, but the bottom line is that peace and stability will come only when the various ethnic groups in Iraq realise that they can have either co-existence or co-destruction. There are no easy solutions, although a number have been bandied around the Chamber today. Withdrawal is not an easy solution. As several of my hon. Friends have said, it is likely to lead to an increase in insurgency and loss of life. Setting a timetable is not sensible, because it would invite insurgents to try to disrupt it. Partition is not an easy solution, because Turkey will not take kindly to a separate Kurdish state on its southern border. If we were to adopt that solution, we would run the risk of transferring the conflict from one part of the region to another. It would help if we were to admit some of the mistakes that were made at the outset. Disbanding the Iraqi army, the one institution which commanded public respect, was a mistake; the under-deployment for the reconstruction period was, in retrospect, a mistake; and the length of time taken to give out the contracts for reconstruction was a mistake. That is not to say that the basic decision was wrong, but we need to understand that our mistakes have probably made our involvement in Iraq longer and more difficult than it would otherwise have been. One strong point coming out of today’s debate has been the demand from the House for accountability. As my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr. Clarke) has said, we have the right to debate policy with the Prime Minister, whose policy this primarily is, in a proper debate rather than in the context of a statement, where the dynamic is very different, in front of this House and in front of the country. My hon. Friend the Member for Billericay (Mr. Baron) made that point very powerfully. My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe made another very important point when he said that the Prime Minister no longer has an influence on events. We need to consider whether we have a Prime Minister who no longer has the political weight at home or the longevity to see through some of the things that he is promising and whether, far from being an asset for the country, he is now a strategic liability. My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Kensington and Chelsea (Sir Malcolm Rifkind) said that the regional dominance that Iran is likely to enjoy is the unintended consequence of policy in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he discussed the need for a better carrot and a more credible stick. There is no doubt that bringing Iran to the negotiating table in support of a settlement in Iraq would be a desirable end in the right circumstance, which is Iran understanding that it is in its national interest for there not to be a civil war in Iraq that destabilises the region. However, it is not in our national interest to give anything to Iran, especially in relation to its nuclear programme, to try to bring it to the negotiating table. The proliferation of nuclear weapons, and in particular Iran’s possession of nuclear weapons, cannot be in our national interest, regional interest or global interest, and we must do everything that we can to prevent what happened in North Korea from happening in Iran. I am afraid that that means that we cannot rule out at any point the use of force, if it is ultimately required in some way. That brings me to the extremely important question of the nuclear deterrent. In a world where proliferation seems less controlled, it would be madness for this country to abandon its independent nuclear deterrent. We cannot predict what sort of threats we will face 20 or 30 years down the line, so the onus to make the case is not on those who want to keep the deterrent, but on those who want to scrap it. This party has always known where it stands on the nuclear deterrent question, and we have never changed our minds about protecting the United Kingdom. It is the Prime Minister, the one-time CND campaigner who was a one-sided disarmer during the threat from the Soviets, who has changed his mind. That particularly journey reflects in miniature the journey that he seems to have made with the whole new Labour project. We live in an increasingly dangerous world, with state threats, asymmetric threats and threats to energy security. We have just celebrated Remembrance Sunday, when we commemorated the sacrifices made by previous generations to provide us with freedom and security. It would be the ultimate betrayal to fail to show the same moral resolve in our generation, to maintain those prizes. We need the structures, resources and political commitment to continue that battle. Failure would be unthinkable and inexcusable. Whatever our differences in the House, in that I believe we are united.