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On 28 October, the Secretary of State said in the other place:

“The Territorial Army and the UK reserve forces make a vital contribution to keeping our country safe—to defending our citizens, territory, interests and national security. They also make a vital contribution to the fabric of our society as a whole. They represent important values: a strong volunteer ethos, a commitment to service, giving back to society and the values of community”.

That is sterling stuff. The right honourable Gentleman went on to say:

“The TA has become an integral arm of the regular Army, supporting the operational commitments of regular forces ...14 members of the TA have died on operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and more have been wounded, 31 returning with potentially life-changing injuries. Their sacrifice must not and will not be forgotten”.—[Official Report, Commons, 28.10.09; col. 353-54.]

This was from the man who proposed to cut their funding drastically. It was sheer madness. It was only as a result of a major hue and cry that he changed his mind, and even that change of mind was piecemeal in its formulation—reacting to public opinion, yet again,

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when they realised that they had got it seriously wrong. We are constantly told by the Government that they are doing everything in their power to provide the best equipment and on time, but the current conflicts are very real, substantial and dangerous.

The MoD’s current procurement programme, and the way in which it is run, is shambolic. Some of the equipment is unfit for purpose; some, like the Osprey body armour and most of the personal kit, is, on the other hand, excellent. Most of it takes far too long to procure, and all the time we are told that the MoD is desperately short of funding. We are talking about the lives and well-being of our service men and women, and I should have thought that they deserve the very best of support when they are loyally placing themselves at huge risk, and often paying the ultimate price, for the benefit of their country and their Government.

When the Government find themselves able to pour numerous billions of taxpayers’ pounds into banks which very nearly failed due to the practices and failures of their managements, why on earth cannot they find the money to adequately fund our Armed Forces who are engaged in the defence of the realm and others, striving to provide a better future for ourselves and our children? Is it not high time that the Government began to take the advice of the chiefs of staff—the real professionals—when it comes to deployment numbers and other matters of a military nature?

1.33 pm

Lord Soley: In view of the recent losses of life in Afghanistan, it is probably inevitable that we spend a lot of time on Afghanistan, although the debate is wider than that. I want to make two comments about that at this stage, because there is a case for a more in-depth debate about Pakistan. First, I think that people ought to revisit the comments made by the Minister about the nature and complexity of the threat that we face. He spelt them out very clearly and they need to be heard. That brings me to my second point. It is a fatal mistake for Members of this House of any political party or of none to score political points on such issues. We all have stories about what soldiers, sailors and airmen have said to us, but I have simply one, which is, “Why do you have those point-scoring games when we are fighting here?”. We should remember that.

I am aware of how easy it is to score points in this debate. I say that in particular to members of the Conservative Party who believe that they will—indeed, they may—form the next Government. If so, they will inherit not only Afghanistan, but the complexity, as my noble friend pointed out, of an insurgency combined with a terrorist organisation, both of which seek to get weapons of mass destruction. We should consider the complications that we had in dealing with terrorist groups in Northern Ireland and put that into the context of what we are doing now, which has only been mentioned by a couple of people today, of trying to deliver a strategy and fight this war with 40 other nations. It is as though we were trying to solve the Northern Ireland problem with 40 other nations involved. Do not underestimate that.

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I say to those on the Front Bench of the Conservative Party that they should be very careful about that, because they will need the support of opposition political parties, and they will need the media in support, if they are in government, and it will be a lot easier to get it if they remember what I am saying. If noble Lords want an example of what a good speech you can make to demonstrate that you can deal with the problems without getting into point-scoring, they should read the speech by the noble Lord, Lord Freeman. He drew attention to an area of immense importance, something that affects the morale of our Armed Forces. He did so in a constructive, thoughtful and sensitive way, and he suggested some solutions. It was a great speech, and I commend it to the House.

I want to talk about something slightly different but very important underpinning the issue. It is about how we can inform, educate and persuade the public of the importance of what we are doing. It is all too easy to say that we need greater political leadership or a few great speeches, saying why we are at war, or whatever. If that was going to work, it would have worked in the 40 other countries as well. They have exactly the same problem convincing their electorate, their people, as we have in this country. Do not kid yourself that this problem can be addressed in such a simple way. There is disaffection with conventional political messages and political leadership speeches. Be very careful: that is the answer.

I come to the core of what I wanted to say. I nearly did not make this speech today, but I knew that Afghanistan would be debated and I now want to make it even more. The point is about how we find new ways to educate, inform and persuade people. I have already talked about the internet, and I now do not want to go back to that, although it is key. I made that speech here on another occasion.

I have learnt an awful lot from what I have been doing for the past few years—here I declare an interest—as the chairman of the Mary Seacole memorial statute appeal. She was the Caribbean nurse who, in the 1850s, went to the Crimea and nursed British troops. I would never have said this 10 or 15 years ago, because I am not a great arts person, frankly, but what has struck me is the enormous support and understanding that that has produced. One lady said to me how important that was for her in bringing alive a history that she knew was there of the contribution made by people from what was then the Empire to Britain, and how we have forgotten it at our peril. I am struck when I go to meetings how many people say that. It is a way of getting through to people that I could never have done as a party politician—I must say, nor could anyone else here today. It worked because it was a different type of message.

I refer back to what the Minister said. These complex conflicts will go on. There will not be nice, neat wars with a start date and a finish date, there will be complex ongoing situations. Here, we need to remember our history, because this is not the first time that we have done things like this. As I have said before in this House, look at the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. Britain set out under successive Governments to stop that trade by military, political and economic

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means. People underestimate what was achieved. If you ask people how many troops we lost in the campaign to stop the transatlantic slave trade, they do not have a clue.

In fact, 16,000 Royal Navy personnel and marines lost their lives, 200,000 slaves were released and heaven knows how many hundreds of thousands were prevented from going into slavery. That is something of which we should be uniquely proud. When I talk about that now, I find a great response. Although I am not sure how we take that forward, the Commonwealth could be immensely important. We need some recognition of what was achieved in that so-called illegal war, when the papers in Britain were saying, “Bring our boys home. Don’t let this war go on. We are not achieving anything. We are making matters worse”—because when we chased slave ships, they threw the slaves overboard. “You are making it worse”, they said, “bring them home”, but we saw it through. The losses and sacrifices have never been recognised; perhaps it is time that we did.

With the Commonwealth, I think there is a case for us doing a memorial—I have learnt this from the Mary Seacole thing—in somewhere like Ghana where it would link with the fight for freedom by the slaves themselves. It would say, “This is your statute of liberty. This is how it was done”. It was done by troops from Britain fighting the very sort of conflict we are fighting today, which has a moral imperative as well as a political and economic imperative. All those things are there. They are never easy or quick and are often brutal. The anti-slave-trade battle was particularly brutal.

Therefore, I say to the House that we should be a little cautious about trying to score political points. We should start thinking laterally about the way in which we can take the argument forward and win the hearts and minds of people not just in this country, but in the 40 other countries that are with us in the coalition in order to persuade people that what we are doing is right.

1.41 pm

Lord Selsdon: My Lords,

“If ye break the faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders fields”.

That is my starting text. Many noble Lords may not be aware of the history of the poppy. That poem was written by a Canadian doctor John McCrae in 1915 and taken up by a bright young girl, Moina Michael, in the United States a little later. She went out and bought a silk poppy. She was training people in the YMCA in the States. She was given $10 when she finished, and she went out and bought poppies. A year or two later, a Frenchwoman at a conference there took the poppy thing back to Paris; it did not arrive here until 1920.

I always wanted to know how many deaths we have had since the Battle of Hastings. I tried over recent days. I was thinking that it was somehow symbolic of the poppy situation in Afghanistan. How many poppies were there per hectare there, or how many people had died? We know that 1.7 million people from the

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Commonwealth and this country were killed in the First and Second World Wars. We know that we lost 7,000 at the Battle of Waterloo. We know that we have fought perhaps 110 battles since the Battle of Hastings, with much loss of life and wounding. However, we now turn to a situation where defence suddenly becomes war, and war brings with it death, disability, distress and an element of sadness that runs throughout life. I have to make promises from time to time. I have a beloved wife Gabrielle, who weeps buckets almost every day and says, “You must do something about this. What are you going to do?” and of course, as the noble Lord, Lord Soley, says, “Bring our boys home”.

It is difficult to say why we are there or what we should do. This is, of course, not the first Afghan war, which was a disaster for us, nor the second Afghan war, nor the third Afghan war, which lasted but a month in 1919—I think it was May to June; this is the fourth Afghan war. When will we ever learn? Noble Lords may remember that evocative song of the 1960s, “Where have all the flowers gone?”. The flowers were picked by the girls who had married the soldiers, the soldiers went to war and where had all the soldiers gone? Gone to graveyards, every one.

I am a great believer in doing things post things, so I imagine myself like the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, an excellent journalist. There was I, out on mission, to report back to my editor daily by telegram. I put together the things that I would say that may demonstrate much better than my own words—although these are my own words because I was a journalist—the sort of things that we have confronted and will confront. My report is basically 100 years old, with the help of the Times newspaper of 1903, and goes like this; I will try and do it in stentorian tones.

“In the Gulf, a British warship was sent to patrol to keep peace following the quarrel between the ruler of Kuwait and Bin Rashid who had proclaimed himself King of Arabia. In Iran, Major Showers captured the fort of Mobiz and broke up a terrorist band under Muhammed Ali who was killed. In Baluchistan, Major MacMahon took a force to sort out the Perso/Afghan border dispute. In Afghanistan, the new ruler, Habibullah, released 8,000 prisoners on the occasion of his coronation and then tried to introduce compulsory military service by raising regiments of Afridis. In the north-west frontier, General Egerton took four columns of 700 men into Mashud territory to combat terrorist raids and thefts of arms by Afridis. In Somaliland, the Mad Mullah, Abdullah Mohamed, resumed his raids on the British protectorate and Colonel Swaine and his native levies restored stability with heavy losses of men and camels. In the Balkans, riots between Croats and Serbians led to martial law in the Croatian capital, Agram. In Nigeria, in Kano, diplomatic efforts failed and the Emir assembled 1,000 mounted men and fortified the city. Colonel Moreland, with 1,200 men of the West Africa frontier force, restored order and there were no problems in Lagos or Sierra Leone. In South Africa, Kitchener confirmed the end of the Boer war and a peacekeeping contingent of Commonwealth troops left Australia for the Cape. In the Caribbean, major eruptions of volcanoes in Martinique and St Vincent required humanitarian support. In South America, revolutions in Venezuela

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and Colombia continued and British trading vessels were seized. Lord Lansdowne, with German support, blockaded the coast and seized Venezuelan warships. Customary political unrest continued in Uruguay. There was speculation that the bank rate might fall from 3.5 per cent to 3 per cent”.

We have done that sort of thing throughout history and we will do it again and again. We must be prepared for it and we need a rapid reaction force. For that, we need equipment and transport, but we have a problem, which is sometimes called money. We always have the historic problem of the Ministry of Defence, as it is now, and it has been a problem throughout history. These problems will always be there. So what do we do now about a shortage of money? The defence budget is £36 billion, about 20 per cent of which goes to the Navy. In the latest Government document, they have shown comparative budgets, including £79 million for education and so much for this and so much for that. But they leave out my favourite—how I hate them at the moment. They are the animals called NDPBs. Non-departmental public bodies are referred to sometimes as quangos. I do not know how many people they employ, but they have a budget of £43 billion, which is more than the defence budget. I have asked 21 Questions in your Lordships' House. The last time, the response was that it is not known how much the budget is. It is very simple: let us take 50 per cent of the NDPB budget and we have solved our defence problem.

1.48 pm

Lord Walker of Aldringham: My Lords, I count myself among those who have serious misgivings about the success of our last two defence reviews. I would contend that the first of these in the early 1990s failed because it made some changes which were not properly thought through—housing and medical are but two of them—and that of the later 1990s never was resourced properly. The outcome has been that, ever since, commitments and resources have been out of balance, to the serious detriment of our Armed Forces and the embarrassment of our Government. Surely, whichever party is in power, we need to get this right next time.

Unlike the chairmen of any business, the chiefs of staff are required to sustain the British Armed Forces’ capabilities to be successful on operations in support of government policy. Paramount in their being able to do that must exist a strong relationship between the political and the military—between our Ministers and our generals. It has to be healthy and effective on both sides. If it is not, I believe that the next defence review will be flawed and that our men and women fighting in strange parts of the world will be left in doubt as to the level of support that they can expect from the Government. I hope fervently that the events we have seen over the past nine months or so in this respect mean that the relationship between our military and our politicians has not resulted in irretrievable breakdown.

The quickest route to irrelevance for our Armed Forces will be via a failure to recognise the vital correlation between what they are for and how they are designed. They must be fit for a clearly understood purpose. In deciding what they are for, as always there will be the temptation to focus on the softer end of

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military capabilities because, by and large, they are less expensive. Indeed, we have heard suggestions of that today. This would be folly because we cannot see 10 years hence and you cannot hope to keep the peace if those who threaten you doubt your ability to wage war. They will simply laugh in your face. So if we end up with Armed Forces that cannot be used in many circumstances, they will simply wither on the vine.

There is also the risk that decisions about what they are for will give too much weight to the counsel of those who have disapproved of our experiences and our engagement in Afghanistan and Iraq. If there is no political will for our military forces to be used, they will not go on operations. If they do not go on operations, they will gain no experience, and without experience they cannot hope to provide us with the sort of success that our governments have traditionally looked for. Again, they will wither on the vine.

Of course, our Armed Forces must continue to embrace sensible change. We have heard already that the strategic environment has changed quite dramatically, and that the threats we face as a nation have changed beyond all recognition since the end of the Cold War. The way we deal with them has changed as well, not least because of the role we play in the military, and there is no reason to suppose that that rate of change will lessen in any way. The Armed Forces, on the other hand, are institutions which are rooted deeply in experience and tradition, strong values and standards, but the reality is that if you look back over the past decade or so, they have had to undergo changes so dramatic that many a commercial enterprise would have been brought to its knees by them. I have no doubt that the armed services will respond to whatever changes they are asked to undertake.

There is, too, a fundamental importance in the “balance” between the marriage of ideas, technology and people. We have seen an explosion of ideas and technology over the past 10 or so years, and their application across the spectrum of warfare has been beneficial in many ways. But while there may come a time when technology will transform the world, we are certainly not there yet. The one constant in that equation is people. We must not allow our Armed Forces to become mechanistic; they must retain that spark of originality and unpredictability that is available only in the human form, and we want them to be capable of success, something that robots certainly cannot do for them at the moment. Indeed, it is the men and women of our Armed Forces who remain key to everything we decide in the defence review. We see on a daily basis their dedication, determination and courage in the face of uncertainty, separation from family and extreme danger, and we see it in Technicolor. They come through with flying colours time and time again. But the price of sustaining such remarkable people is significant and should not be underestimated. They must be properly trained and equipped. Above all, we must look after them fittingly when they sacrifice their health and, in some cases, their lives at the altar of what this country asks them to do.

We also need enough of them. We have heard the word “overstretch”, but it fails to illuminate properly the complex relationship between commitment, capability

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and resources because it distils it into a simple percentage. However unsatisfactory the measurement, it is widely known to be a corrosive dynamic. A policy of the “bare minimum” simply does not work on the battlefield, so we must get the numbers right. As we have seen so clearly over the past few years, underinvestment in defence is as physically and politically painful, and as potentially catastrophic, as underinvestment in health, education or any other public service. The Armed Forces’ domestic profile has been raised in recent years, drawing out that sleepy but bottomless affinity that the British soldier has with the British people, who I believe would be happier to spend money on soldiers, sailors and airmen—but not their bureaucracies—than is commonly thought.

Whatever else may come out of the defence review, we must ensure that the value of these people to our nation is recognised and rewarded, and we must alter the collective political conscience by allowing defence to have fair claim on the national purse. If we do not, then I fear that this defence review will fail us as well.

1.55 pm

Earl Attlee: My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for introducing the debate. I declare an interest as I am a serving TA officer, although nowadays I am not training very much. Nevertheless, the recent cuts have cost me half a day’s training.

All noble Lords must have been disappointed when the Prime Minister was careless enough to lose the services of the noble Lord, Lord Drayson, to motor racing. He was the first Defence Minister that I detected industry taking the slightest notice of; it would say, “What Lord Drayson wants to do is—”. That says volumes about the Minister and the country is lucky to have him in post.

In previous debates I urged withdrawal from Iraq in order to concentrate on Afghanistan; I am pleased that this has happened. However, the MoD is resourced for one enduring medium-scale operation and one small-scale operation. Medium scale is a brigade of 3,000 to 5,000 men and women. However, we have deployed just over 9,000 personnel, so they are operating at 100 per cent overstretch. The good news is that the requirement for headquarters and associated staff is reduced. As a result, there is less opportunity for TA officers to deploy, but that is a positive indicator.

The situation in defence is dire. In the MoD the overriding priority is Afghanistan with the possible exception of the deterrent; everything else is being taken as a risk. In his excellent opening speech, the Minister touched upon some of the potential threats that we face. A real threat could arise from a scrabble for natural resources—the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Boyce, has covered this far better than I can—but, in theory, we cannot undertake a large-scale deliberate intervention, an LSDI, for at least a decade, maybe 15 years. We are degrading the physical and conceptual components of fighting power necessary for LSDI. Training is at particular risk, especially with officers, at all levels.

Fighting a counterinsurgency campaign from fixed operating bases is different from manoeuvring an armoured brigade around an area of operations. Both

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are very difficult, of course. The Government are taking the high risk of cutting the capability of manoeuvre forces for high-intensity warfare. Heavy armoured units are being given low priority for training resources. In addition, the lead airborne taskforce was disbanded in late 2007; a battalion-size para drop has not been conducted since 2007; the lead amphibious battle group has been stood down due to the heavy commitments of 3 Commando Brigade; and the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Boyce, touched on the need for naval power. He is absolutely right. The Minister reminded us that we have not conducted a medium-scale exercise since Exercise Saif Sareea in 2001. Our ability now to deploy overseas at more than battle group level in a benign environment is extremely limited; if we tried to do it, we would probably become unstuck.

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