I am not certain that my right hon. Friend, whom, incidentally, I congratulate on his knighthood, has quite grasped the subtlety of the point that I was trying to make, which was not so much about the substance of defence but about the way in which we take decisions in this House.
The point I was making was that if we vote on something, as happened to the Labour party over Iraq in 2003, it then becomes extremely difficult to criticise the Government for what they do subsequently. It is right that we should scrutinise the Government, but we should not vote on these matters. We should have huge debates, statements and votes after deployment, but the moment that we allow ourselves to be forced into whipped votes before deployment, we are, by definition, emasculating this House. It is quite wrong from the point of view of defence and from the point of view of parliamentary scrutiny. We demand the right to scrutinise the Government, and we can do that only if we do not vote on the wars.