Navy Supplementary Estimate, 1936.

Part of Orders of the Day — Supply. – in the House of Commons at on 4 May 1936.

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Photo of Mr Ronald Ross Mr Ronald Ross , County Londonderry

Supernumerary to the requirements of the Labour Government's idea, I agree, then. If there is any criticism of Vote A, I would point out that it is only now reaching the strength which it enjoyed before the Labour Government came into power in 1929; it is within a few hundreds of that figure. My right hon. Friend will be able to look that up, and I think he will find that I am right.

There are only two lines of attack on which this Supplementary Estimate can be criticised. It can be attacked on the political ground that a fleet of this strength is unnecessary for this country. It can also be attacked on the technical ground that, although a strong fleet is necessary, we have not in this Estimate taken the best steps to attain the strength that we ought to have—that we might have spent our money in a. better way. The first ground of criticism can be disposed of very quickly. It has not been taken seriously either by the right hon. Gentleman the Member for Hillsborough or by the right hon. Gentleman the Member for North Cornwall (Sir F. Acland). I think they both admit that, in this time of international unrest. when successful aggression is stalking abroad in Europe and in the world, when the hopes that we had built upon the League of Nations seem to be at all events partially unfulfilled, and when our great efforts at disarmament have met with no proper response from other countries, we are driven to a position in which we must rely on our armed forces being adequate for our protection. Of course, it is only with reluctance that this rearmament policy has been adopted. The first policy of the Government was disarmament and negotiation by treaty, but we know that those hopes, in spite of the best efforts of all concerned, have been to a great extent unfulfilled. Our margin of safety is far lower than it was in the days before the War, when we had a two-power standard, and anyone who has studied the matter will agree that, as regards our margin of safety, we are in a much worse position vis-a-vis all the other naval countries.

There was one point of great interest in the speech of the right hon. Gentleman. He alluded to the collective naval forces of the League, and suggested that those forces would be so great that we need not adopt this policy of expansion. I would remind the Committee that we are infinitely more vulnerable to naval attack than any other member of the League of Nations. In 1930, an interesting table was produced by the trench Government in connection with the Naval Conference of that year, including figures showing the relative standards of naval need by which the countries could be measured. It took the need of Italy for naval defence as unity, and it gave that of Japan as 1.6, France 3.0, the United States 4.2; and the figure for the British Empire, or the British Commonwealth of Nations, as I suppose I should now call it, was 10.0. Our need was recognised to be as great as those of Japan, Italy, France and the United States added together. These were not our figures, and they were computed on the basis of area of territory, length of coast and communications, external trade, and seaborne traffic. I do not think that other countries can be expected to have the same interest in protecting our seaborne trade and in protecting our Colonies and our people abroad as we have ourselves, and we must never forget that the lifeblood of our Empire pulses through arteries thousands of miles long and that we are wholly de- pendent on what comes to us from across the seas.

Turning to the second line of attack—the technical line—the suggestion is that the measures to be taken under this programme are not measures that are best calculated to preserve the naval defence of this country. The right hon. Gentleman the Member for North Cornwall addressed himself particularly to that point, and I shall hope to do my best to reply to some of the interesting remarks which he made. The first thing one must remember is that, if we, as politicians, abandon the first ground of political criticism and adopt the technical ground of criticism, we are not technical experts. The right hon. Gentleman the Member for North Cornwall criticised the programme on technical grounds, but those who have devoted their lives to the study of this subject—