(DEFENCE AND EXTERNAL AFFAIRS SUB-COMMITTEE)
21 January, 1975.]
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Mr. DAVID GREENWOOD.
shareholders from Lord Carrington during his tenure of office as Secretary of State, and we were then promised for 1974 a new, bigger, better, richer, and fuller defence White Paper which in fact did not appear at all. My hope would be that it might be possible to emulate the example of the West Germans who have both good discursive material, comprehensive descriptive material and some useful analytical material about, for example, the load on the economy and the pattern of procurement.
Mr. Roper.
17. Could you put in a supplementary memorandum outlining the sort of material there is in the West German defence White Paper and that which you would like to see in a defence White Paper submitted to this House? could gladly do that, but it would be almost as easy to say, take the West German defence White Paper and do that for the United Kingdom.
Mr. Boyden.
18. It is translated into English. We could get copies?—Yes.
Mr. Boyden.] I think we could judge for ourselves.
Mr. Finsberg.
19. To clear my own mind I would like to ask Mr. Greenwood to clarify some points. In an earlier reply he said there was no absolute need for defence; there was no unique figure that was correct. Is he really trying to say that so far as his paper is concerned and the Secretary of State's views are concerned, as brought up by an earlier question, that there is no irreducible sum; is he saying that we might copy the Danes and have an open line to Moscow saying 'Surrender '? What I cannot understand is that he said there are competing claims, the claims of the environment and so on. Is he saying, or am I to understand that he is saying that you can set environment against defence and it does not matter if you have no defence but you will have the best environment in the world? I can- not understand his background philo- sophy-We have to distinguish here I think between my attempt to, as it were, define the nature of the budgeting problem, and my personal views about
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priorities in public expenditure. answer should have read there is no absolute level of defence needs which one can say is correct. This is an aspect of the formal examination of the budget- ing problem. My personal view about public expenditure in relation to private expenditure, and within public expendi- ture civil outlays as against defence outlays, is that, for what my opinion is worth, the balance which emerges from the provisional proposals that we had in December is in fact a very sensible one since we have eliminated those things, or it is proposed to eliminate those things, which appear to be marginal to the United Kingdom's central security interests in and around Europe whilst we have ensured that those core security interests remain unaffected until such time as, in the context of the Vienna talks, agreement can be reached on mutual reductions of forces on the basis of undiminished security. I hold that personal view about a particular level of defence expenditure that is right in relation to other claims on resources. What I was concerned about was to indi- cate to, I think, Mr. Conlan that I do not regard the defence budgeting problem as appropriately defined as needs, on the one hand, which you must fix and then make your money a residual, or fix a sum of money on the other hand and then see what you can get for that money, making that essentially residual. It must be coherent resource allocation.
Mr. Kershaw.
20. I am still not quite clear. Do you say that there is a limit to the cuts in defence which can be made bearing in mind the minimum level of efficiency desired in any circumstance, and having regard to the types of weapons and possible enemies, or do you say there never can be such a limit? I have in mind that the type of enemy one faces must be important. To take on the Central American Republic one needs a different type of expenditure from taking on a sophisticated air force, and if you are to do the second, surely there must be an amount of money which you must allocate otherwise you have no aero- planes or no missiles or whatever it may be. Is there never to be an irreducible minimum to ensure the efficiency you think is necessary?--Yes, but I would have to be at pains to point out that
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