Strategic Defence and Security Review

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 2:51 pm on 4 November 2010.

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Photo of Edward Leigh Edward Leigh Conservative, Gainsborough 2:51, 4 November 2010

Mr Donaldson made an important point about the potential threat in Northern Ireland. He underlined much of what I will say, in that we simply cannot rely on events panning out in a certain way. In Northern Ireland in the mid-1960s, for instance, we could never have foreseen that events would start deteriorating very quickly in the late 1960s.

In a way, I feel that I am going full circle. Forty years ago, when I first got involved in politics, one of the things that propelled me into politics and away from the Royal Navy university cadetship that I had at the time was the debate about the Royal Navy, the then Labour Government cutting the number of aircraft carriers and the resignation of the Navy Minister. In the early 1980s, I started working with my hon. Friend Dr Lewis, who, by the way, would have liked to have taken part in the debate but for attending a funeral. He is one of our foremost thinkers on defence, and we set up the Coalition for Peace through Security.

At the time, a fierce debate was raging about the Royal Navy. Keith Speed resigned as Navy Minister because he felt that the Navy was under threat. At the time, it had 66 destroyers and frigates. Within a year of his resigning, the utterly unexpected happened-the Falklands were invaded and we needed no fewer than 23 frigates and destroyers to retake them. By the way, this very day, Cristina Kirchner, the President of Argentina, has pledged an "eternal fight" for the Malvinas. It is extremely dangerous, therefore, to assume that we will see a particular scenario over the next 10 years.

I very much admire my hon. Friend Sir Peter Tapsell, who is the Father of the House. He gave an important speech to the 1922 committee last week. Such speeches are supposed to be private, and I will not, of course repeat it. However, I want to repeat just one interesting point that he made-it is so good, I cannot resist the temptation. He said that when he left the employment of Anthony Eden many years ago, Eden gave him a framed copy of the Locarno treaty. The treaty represented the high point of the belief between the wars that peace was assured. Of course, we all know that it was not.

There was a disastrous tendency between the two world wars to believe in what was called the 10-year rule, which assumed that there would be no war for another 10 years. In the 1930s, Lord Hankey criticised the 10-year rule, to which we are apparently returning. He asked who could have foreseen in the spring of 1914 that the world would be convulsed by a world war within a couple of months. If we look back at history, it is clear that any 10-year rule or academic scenario that suggests that we do not need the aircraft carriers for 10 years is extremely dangerous. I am therefore very dubious of any confident statements on how the world will look in five, seven, eight or 10 years' time.

We are, after all, a maritime nation. I agree that for many periods in our history, the Army has been neglected, but never the Royal Navy. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries and in the early part of the 20th century, it was considered essential as a maritime nation dependent entirely on trade-as we still are-to maintain a significant Royal Navy. I echo some of the comments that have been made on Royal Navy planning. We will be left with just 19 serious major ships, and we are hugely dependent on them. We will need to deploy large numbers of them to protect the aircraft carrier-or carriers-and we should be extremely concerned about that situation.