The hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton (Dr. David Owen) has spoken with the advantage of fairly recent ministerial experience. I have been taking part in similar debates for the last 20 years and I am terribly out of date. Had it not been for my recent visit to Washington and SACLANT headquarters at Norfolk, Virginia, I might have hesitated to intervene today. I was glad to hear the hon. Gentleman laying down that the Navy Board is not infallible. None of us can be infallible in defence questions and it is our duty on these occasions to query many of our premises because it is one of the most difficult tasks to anticipate what will happen in a future war or crisis.

The hon. Member for Sutton spoke of the Royal Dockyards as though the idea of modernising them was a new discovery of the Labour Government, but that is not so; modernisation has been going on for many years. I hope that the more recent results are increasingly successful—more successful than in the early days.

The hon. Gentleman went on to say that the Navy Board sits in a room in which the way the wind is blowing is constantly indicated. I thought he was beginning to tread on dangerous ground because I imagine the right hon. Gentleman the Leader of the Opposition does very much the same thing; he also seems to be susceptible to the way in which the wind is blowing.

The white paper this year in terms of the Navy is not as satisfactory as one might have expected. The references to the Royal Navy are rather scrappy and run only to about three pages. Personally I should like to have seen much more information on this topic than one can obtain from the White Paper.

My hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State admitted the importance of considering the increase in the Soviet Navy. There is no doubt that the most significant thing in defence matters lies in the increase in numbers and power of the Soviet Navy.

When we look at the situation from a broad point of view, we are entitled to ask two questions. First, why is the Soviet Union taking to the sea and devoting such tremendous resources and manpower to this end? Secondly, are we doing our part to match this activity? We can expect to do this only in conjunction with our allies, but this calls in question the whole shape of the fleet and leads us to pose the kind of ques- tions which the hon. Member for Sutton was rightly posing to the House.

The fact remains that the Soviet Union, which at one time had virtually four fleets is now in a position of having one very large fleet. The significance of such a fact might be considerably enhanced if the Suez Canal were to be reopened. This is a prospect which I feel would not be in the interests of this country, although it would be very much in the interests of the Soviet Union. I would go further and ask whether in the long run the victory of India over Pakistan may not turn out to be a victory for the Soviet Union in terms of the possibilities which it opens up. I cannot help recalling that the dockyard at Bombay is by far the best in that part of the world over an area of many thousands of miles.

We must look at the philosophy of the Soviet expansion. In the early days of the Sverdlovsk class of cruiser people wondered whether it was a mistake and whether it was a policy of Khrushchev which would be reversed. Then we saw the build up of the Mediterranean Fleet, no doubt because of the vulnerability of the Soviet Union from the South.

We now have to explain many other aspects of the situation. We now see a large fleet being maintained in the Black Sea, the doubling of naval activity in and out of the Baltic and further activity in the Northern Atlantic. This activity is extremely significant. Perhaps the hon. Member for Sutton was right to say that the most significant matter to be borne in mind was the number of attack submarines in the Soviet Fleet. I would be less certain about that aspect. Many commentators put down that sort of activity to the Cuban crisis and there is no doubt that the Soviet Union learned a lesson on that occasion. Undoubtedly, the Russians have seen the ease with which Soviet influence can be spread round the world by an increase in their fleet.

Other commentators maintain that this activity can be put down to an oil shortage in the Soviet Union and to the fact that Russian eyes are fixed on the oilfields of the Middle East. Yet other commentators argue that this is part of the policy of confronting China, and it is impossible to escape the conclusion that the rivalry between the Soviet Union and China has come to stay.

In the light of such a tremendous build-up of sea power, there are distinct limitations for N.A.T.O. and SACLANT. Furthermore, there is in the United States a disenchantment over defence. Nobody can go to the United States today without being struck by this fact, particularly as a result of the Vietnam war.

We must also remember what a small fleet SACLANT is given. We read in the White Paper that Great Britain's contribution is only a frigate and a guided missile destroyer in turn—not a generous contribution from this country, and it certainly does not seem very generous to those on the spot.