European Union (Amendment) Bill

The noble Lord, for whom I have great respect, has got this completely wrong. I put to him the answer to the question posed by the noble Lord, Lord Pearson of Rannoch: where do we get the money from? One of the ways that Europe can find the money for the required capabilities, including the heavy airlift planes that are currently so vitally necessary, is to do so collectively and not individually. The United Kingdom is currently the only country in Europe with heavy lift. We have five C17s leased—or maybe partly bought—from the Americans, a decision taken during my time at the MoD. There is literally nothing else in the European arsenal for that, yet we know that it is required. If European countries are willing, through the European Defence Agency—which was, as I said, instigated as a British idea—to get the heavy-lift aeroplanes on a collective basis, then they are available for NATO missions just as much as for any European Union mission. The model is the AWACS fleet. Individual nations, apart from Britain and France, cannot really afford—and could not use—the advanced early-warning aircraft. It therefore made sense for NATO at that time collectively to buy a fleet of AWACS planes. They are literally used all the time. They were used after 9/11 to protect the Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City as part of our Article 5 commitments, and they were used to protect pretty well every European summit and a lot of other summits as well. That is the model. If we can, through another constituency, not just NATO, but through the European Union get collective ownership of some of these scarce capabilities, the money will be well spent. It will move away from the old territorial defence much more to collective defence, and it will be equally available to NATO when it needs it as it is to the European Union. I would have thought that he, especially, and the Opposition, generally, would be applauding the concept of the collective purchase of the equipment that is required. That is basically what the European Defence Agency is about. It is no more sinister than that. It is a device to make sure that European nations get the capabilities so that they are available when the European Union or NATO requires them.