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6.18 pm
Dr. Julian Lewis (New Forest, East): The novelist and statesman John Buchan referred in his autobiography, which was published shortly after his death in 1940, to his youngest brother Alastair, who fell at the head of his company of Royal Scots Fusiliers on the first morning of the battle of Arras in the first world war. He said of him:
- "I remember that when I occasionally ran across him during the last stages of the battle of the Somme I thought him the only cheerful thing in a grey world . . . I wonder if the future historian will realise how much of the strength of the British army was due to the boys of twenty who brought the kindly ardour of youth into the business of war and died before they could lose their freshness."
Such stories inspire us. They still inspire people in this cynical day and age--so much so that when the Reverend Gary Philbrick, Mr. Brian Lamb of the Calshot activities centre in my constituency, where Flight Lieutenant Kinkead was based when he was killed trying to break the world air speed record in 1928, Councillor Alan Rice of Hampshire county council and I decided to commemorate the 70th anniversary of Flight Lieutenant Kinkead's death, and we invited the family along and told them not to be disappointed if only 40 or 50 people turned up. We should not have worried. Between 300 and 400 people came along to celebrate and commemorate the life of this hero--a man who had died 70 years before. Even as I tell that story, I feel a bit of a thrill of excitement that such a person could have lived and died in such an outstandingly brave fashion.
Both those two young men died unmarried. But what would have happened to them if they had been more fortunate--if they had lived to complete their military career and had postponed any question of getting married until after the completion of their term of service? Today, that situation confronts many people who fought in the war and who gave great service to this country after the war.
I refer--very briefly, because of lack of time--to a letter published in The Daily Telegraph on 5 April 1999. It was written by a gentleman by the name ofI. G. Aubrey-Rees, who wrote:
On 6 April 1978, it was first accepted that the widow of a service man who married or remarried after retirement should receive a forces family pension, which is the formal title of a service widow's pension. However, that change of the rules was not applied retrospectively to
those who had retired before 1978, and who had subsequently married after retirement. The absurdity of the situation is that those whose plight prompted the change in the armed forces pension scheme are the very widows who are now left permanently disadvantaged. Many of them are the widows of men who served a full military career and fought for the nation during the second world war.
The Government--the previous Government as well as the present one--argue against change because they say that alteration in the rules of the armed forces pension scheme would be bound to read across to the whole public service. There will certainly be pressure from other public service groups, but that can easily and legitimately be resisted. The Government recently argued that the armed forces were unique and excluded them, and only them, from the national minimum wage legislation. If the armed forces can be dealt with separately on the minimum wage, they can certainly be dealt with separately on pensions.
Mr. Robert Key (Salisbury):
The pity of it is that our debate will not be widely reported in the press or in the media, nor on television. With luck, the BBC will pick up something of it for a little soundbite here and there. As hon. Members on both sides of the House have said, it is a matter of regret that, for an issue that is so important in our national life, there is apparently little interest. It is true, however, that we have filled the time available. Indeed, we could fill it twice over given the level of expertise and commitment of many of those who have spoken in the debate.
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for New Forest, East (Dr. Lewis) for his contribution and for his dedication to his constituency and to the cause of pensions. My hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury (Mr. Brazier) made another notable speech setting out his passionate belief in the difficulties of overstretch. The hon. Member for Tatton (Mr. Bell) made a particularly telling speech and I am grateful to him. I do not entirely agree with some of his remarks and I think that I have rather more sympathy for the Ministry of Defence police than he has. Nevertheless, he made an important contribution.
My hon. Friend the Member for Solihull (Mr. Taylor) made a telling speech on cadets. I agree entirely with him. I served in the cadet force for five years. I rose to the dizzy heights of company sergeant major and had a--
Mr. Doug Henderson:
Hence the nasty streak.
Mr. Key:
As the Minister says, that is the nasty streak.
I learned a huge amount in that period in terms of self-discipline, becoming a team player and having the good fortune to serve in an Army camp at Celle in Germany. From there, we visited Belsen, which was just up the road. That visit was very early on after the war. That was an incomparable experience for a young man.
My hon. Friend the Member for Romsey (Mr. Colvin) made an important plea for an independent inquiry. This is not meant to be--I am sure that my hon. Friend would agree--in any sense derogatory. It is simply that we need to get to the bottom of how things happened over the past few months in the Balkans.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Bridgwater (Mr. King), as ever, shared his great wisdom with us in demanding a period of stability. We are grateful to him. The contributions from my right hon. Friend the Member for Wealden (Sir G. Johnson Smith) and my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Sussex (Mr. Soames) were similarly extremely welcome.
The Opposition have supported the Government in pursuit of their overriding duty of defending this country and our national interest. We shall continue to do so. There is consensus on unequivocal support for our military forces and their families as well as for the administrative, scientific and industrial civil servants who support them. This support extends to the private sector contractors who provide goods and services and to the 400,000-plus citizens who work in defence-related industries.
Yesterday, Mr. Deputy Speaker--I shall share a little secret with you--I crept off to the Library at 8 o'clock in the morning to prepare for the debate. I worked there for some hours re-reading the speeches of each of the three Labour Defence spokesmen in the year before the 1997 general election. It was not a Herculean task. It did not take very long, but it yielded many words for eating by present Ministers. It also made me realise just how different Labour's policy is in government from its policy in opposition. Labour Members said one thing and they are doing another. They constantly called for consensus between the parties on the fundamentals of defence policy. If we had agreed with their defence policy in opposition and stuck to it, there would no longer be consensus.
Of course, that has not stopped the Liberal Democrats from drifting around and formally linking themselves with the Government on defence and foreign policy, although, typically, having made a speech or two, they have gone before we have reached the end of the debate.
On 14 October 1996, the then shadow Defence Secretary, the right hon. Member for South Shields (Dr. Clark) said:
That does not make it easy to find consensus on the budget. We have a moving target. However, we had the strategic defence review. Parts of it were extremely good. It built on much of the work that we had done, and we welcome that, but it was not strategic, as the Defence Committee pointed out. The foreign policy base lines remain secret to this day, so we cannot have consensus on them. There were gaping holes in the SDR. Home defence was virtually ignored, as the Defence Committee pointed out. There was no serious attempt to address the percentage of national budget spent on defence and security, so we cannot have consensus on that.
As we enter the third year of the Labour Government, they will be held to account for their defence budget. They must find a new soundbite. No one is listening any more as they blame the previous Government for post-cold war contractions in the defence budget and the size of the forces. People remember that, at the time, Labour Members were unilateral nuclear disarmers and Labour activists demanded deeper cuts than the Conservative Government were prepared to make.
That was then; this is now. If the previous Government were criticised by new Labour for defence cuts, why have the Labour Government gone on cutting the budget and increasing the commitments year after year?
In the run-up to the general election in 1997, the present Prime Minister wrote an article for The Daily Telegraph on 3 February. He stated:
What did the pre-election consensus add up to? On14 October 1996, the shadow Secretary of State for Defence said:
On 24 October, the shadow Defence Secretary went further, saying:
The consultation paper issued recently is wholly inadequate. It provides no basis for any counter-proposals. We understand that the Secretary of State will now not announce a decision on the future of DERA before the summer recess, as he previously told the House that he would. Instead, he has apparently invited the private sector interests for tea and sympathy at the MOD main building in Whitehall. I should be grateful if the Minister confirmed that that is the current situation.
On 24 October 1996, the shadow Defence Secretary also said:
Most important of all are the people who serve in our armed forces--the professional service men and women and the people who follow the flag. There is complete consensus about that, but may I have a grown-up word about overstretch? There always has been, and always will be, overstretch, but official figures rarely give the whole picture for families. Tour intervals are very brief indeed. I was told only last weekend of a family in a specialist branch whose tour interval was only five months.
Consensus is difficult to achieve, but let us be grown up about it. Under this Government, overstretch is different in two ways. If the Secretary of State wants consensus, he will have to recognise that; if he wants to improve retention rates, he will have to do something about it. First, the European security and defence identity, which was agreed by Michael Portillo in 1996 and enshrined in the Petersberg declaration, was based on strengthening the Western European Union's role and common defence of NATO countries as well as
The Blair doctrine is incompatible with the current size of our armed services. That is what new overstretch is all about: we have had smart procurement; now it is time for smart families. The Government are failing to implement family-friendly policies, and the strain on forces' families is building rapidly. The time has now come for the Government to invest in families. I know that that is their express intention in the SDR. We support them and want consensus on this matter, but the ball is in their court.
Before the election, Labour promised the earth to our service men and women and their families. At the top of the list was a commitment in last July's defence review to achieve tour intervals of 24 months. The hard reality is that, for some specialist units, a tour interval that is some 15 months on paper is, in practice, as little as five months.
The Foreign Secretary then made his major defence policy announcement last week, to which I have just referred. That will add dramatically to the problems of overstretch, including further reductions in the tour interval. At the recent Army Families Federation conference in Germany, an attitude survey was carried out among forces families. Wives and families are bearing the brunt of overstretch and finding it difficult to come to terms with the pressures put on all three services. I understand that the Chief of the General Staff's briefing team is to talk to units and their families. That is a welcome development but, ultimately, talking will not be enough.
Naturally, the men and women posted to theatre have good morale--it is what they are trained for. That does not mean to say that real issues associated with overstretch are not having a serious impact among married couples when it comes to retention in the forces. The situation is particularly bad among specialist units, such as the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers and the Royal Signals. Back-filling is leading to substantial fragmentation of units. I have even heard of a family in my constituency who were informed that they were about to be posted to Ireland; the soldier was suddenly sent to Kosovo instead, but the Army insisted that his wife packed up the family house on Salisbury plain and moved to Ireland, because her home had been reassigned to an incoming unit.
This month, in some of the Salisbury plain garrisons, 80 per cent. of the heads of household will be absent on service in Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Kosovo or Cyprus. I pay tribute to the men and women of the Army welfare services and to the volunteers of the Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen's Families Association and the Army Families
Federation, but they cannot cope indefinitely with the problem. Hugely important decisions regarding education, housing and finance are being taken in the absence of husbands and fathers by wives who endure the double strain of knowing that their husbands are in danger of their lives, while routine domestic issues assume a frightening significance for those left behind.
Our soldiers are seeing terrible things in Kosovo, and last week an Army wife asked me how wives will cope when their men come home. The wives see on television the horrendous sights in Kosovo. The soldiers are professionals and know how to cope; the wives are not--and do not. What arrangements are Ministers putting in place to help the Army welfare services and other units to cope with family traumas in such circumstances?
Now that the initial task of entry into Kosovo is complete, our soldiers will have to settle down to many months, if not years, of alert discipline and tension--and perhaps boredom for long periods. It is therefore essential to support their quality of life. I have been told this week of wives at home in Germany having to send basic kit, including socks and shower bags, to Kosovo because of shortages in supply. I am grateful to the Minister of State for his commitment on telephone cards. Such matters seem trivial to us in this grand debate in the House of Commons, but such detail is immensely important to service men and women in the field.
"As a terminally ill recipient of an Armed Forces pension, after serving for 34 years, I believe I am very well cared for by the RAF, but when I die in the next few weeks, my widow and family will not be so fortunate."
That was brought to my attention by Major Tom Spring-Smyth, president of New Forest, East Conservative Association, my local association, who writes that,
"since I married after retiring from the army, my pension will die with me and Jennifer"--
his wife--
"will get nothing, yet I was fully paid up".
The Officers Pension Society has been campaigning on the issue of post-retirement marriages for many years. It has got nowhere under Conservative Governments and it is getting nowhere under the Labour Government. Major-General Bonnet, general secretary of the Officers Pension Society, has written to me and explained that post-retirement marriages occur much more frequently in the armed forces because officers are discouraged from marrying before the age of 25. The age used to be 30. They must retire at 55--many are forced to leave earlier--and opportunities for marriage in-service are invariably limited by military service abroad.
"I also support the White Paper's arguments in paragraphs 127-28 against the European Union having responsibility for Britain's defence policy. Again in our policy document we state quite clearly--I shall quote it to the House so that there can be no misconceptions--
That was during the debate on the defence estimates. We have not had any defence estimates since 1996. The Government have twice postponed publication of new
defence estimates. We understand that there has been a little local difficulty, but the House has not had an opportunity to scrutinise defence estimates since 1996.
'Labour does not support the establishment of a European army or proposals to give the European Union a military competence . . . We believe that efforts to develop a common defence policy should concentrate on strengthening the Western European Union as the European contribution to NATO.'"--[Official Report, 14 October 1996; Vol. 282, c. 491.]
"My pledge to our armed forces is that we will offer a period of stability."
He condemned Conservative defence cuts. He wrote:
"The people who have had to bear the burden of these cuts are our servicemen and women, overstretched and under strength as never before. The strain on our Armed Forces is huge."
He continued:
"It would be dishonest to promise to reverse the cuts in defence spending which the Government has made . . . We will keep to the spending plans already laid down for the next two years . . . Our services should not be subject to the same lack of coherent strategy and piling on of new demands".
Two years, and still the Government are cutting and piling on new demands. Only last Friday, the Foreign Secretary said that we would be committing another 8,000 troops on standby for UN operations, on top of those in Kosovo, Bosnia, Northern Ireland, Cyprus, the Falklands, and the RAF in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Italy. Did he spare a thought for the families, or for the retention of our current service men and women, who are prepared to die for their country, but not to sacrifice their family life indefinitely?
"Since taking on the shadow defence portfolio, I have striven to establish consensus, wherever possible, on issues that affect Britain's defence and our security.. The Opposition have done that because we believe that it should be possible, in many spheres, to strike a bipartisan approach on many of the fundamental issues. . . We in the Labour party are willing to offer a consensual approach on the critical matters that affect the security of our country."
1 Jul 1999 : Column 528
So far, so good. He went on:
That is fine; I know what he means.
"Although we seek consensus, we also have the right to be critical of many aspects of the Government's approach such as the absence of strategic planning; the dominance of short-term and ad hoc decision making . . . Such matters annoy us and make us critical of the Government."--[Official Report, 14 October 1996; Vol. 282, c. 490-493.]
"I have tried to argue that there are areas on which there is consensus and areas on which there is potential consensus. There are, however, some things that we believe the Government have got completely and utterly wrong. Their obsession with privatisation really is bizarre . . .
I take his point, but the boot is on the other foot now. The 12,000 people employed by the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency know exactly what Labour meant only two and a half years ago, but the DERA dither is no joke.
What is worrying is that the Government's privatisation mania knows no bounds. They really are sell-off mad. The Defence Secretary's dogma has overcome his common sense."
"Although we are prepared to try to reach a consensus with the Government as far as we can, that does not mean that we slavishly accept all the details of Government policy. Far from it. We believe that in many areas the Government's approach is harmful and destabilising to our armed forces and our security."--[Official Report, 24 October 1996; Vol. 284, c. 216-219.]
I could not have put it better myself.
"humanitarian and rescue tasks; peacekeeping tasks; tasks of combat forces in crisis management, including peacemaking."
It was not about the new NATO doctrine of international intervention, as announced by the Prime Minister at
Chicago on 22 April, nor was it about overstretched British troops providing, in the words of a Government press release:
"Crack UK troops available for UN peacekeeping.
Would it not have been nice if the Government had told the House of Commons about that? Would it not have been nice if there had been one word in that press release about forces families, without whose support the whole thing would be impossible? If the Government are going down that road, we need a new national debate on the percentage of the national budget required to achieve that new international role and we need a reappraisal of the size of the armed forces.
Crack UK peacekeeping troops, able to go anywhere in the world at a moment's notice are to be made available to the United Nations under a new arrangement announced today."
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