Strategic Defence and Security Review

My hon. Friend is entirely right; the problem was that the then Chancellor was not naturally enthusiastic about the issue of defence as a whole, and we saw the same thing when the defence industrial strategy was produced. Again, that was an extremely useful document, which was signed up to by the then Chief Secretary to the Treasury. He subsequently became the Secretary of State for Defence and discovered that he actually did not have the money to put that strategy into effect, any more than we had earlier had the money to put into proper effect an excellent 1998 defence review. So now that I have antagonised absolutely everyone, I shall end by saying what I hope to see from the review. I hope and expect that its end result will be a changed Ministry of Defence, which is focused more on the threats of the present and the future than on the old cold war structures of the past. I hope to see an element of coherence, so that our future looks significantly better than our present. I hope and expect that the improvements that could be made to the way in which we buy our defence equipment will be far-reaching and helpful. I hope and believe that the result of the reductions in Government spending will be to strengthen the economy of the United Kingdom in such a way as to give us the chance to renew our defence industry. I hope, but fear I may not see it, that we can reverse, as we should, the reductions in our spending on research and technology. I also hope, although I am not at all confident, that enough of our defence structure will remain to take full advantage of the economic revival.