969
Defence
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MAY 1974
I cannot let pass what the hon. Mem- ber for Huddersfield, East (Mr. Mallalieu) said about Hong Kong. I felt that he completely misunderstood the purpose of our garrison there and certainly mis- judged the moral effect which would result from its withdrawal.
The hon. Member for Salford, East asked the House to listen to ordinary people. I do not know what ordinary people the hon. Gentleman has been asso- ciating with, but my impression is that the ones I meet would agree that defence is the single most important duty of any Government of this country. The Secre- tary of State in the second part of his remarks was in tune with the views of ordinary people. Indeed, he could not have put them better. Incidentally, the right hon. Gentleman demolished the resolution passed at the Labour Party conference last autumn and also demo- lished his party's manifesto. We shall wait to see, as time passes, whose is the dominant voice-the resolution passed at Blackpool, the manifesto or the second part of the Secretary of State's speech.
The right hon. Gentleman said that it was not up to us to point the finger at the Labour Government for their propo- sal to cut defence spending because when the Conservative Government were in office we did the same. But there is a critical difference between the two methods of approach. Our cuts an- nounced last December were cuts of pub- lic expenditure across the board to deal with an urgent situation arising from the suddent increase in the price of oil and the crisis in industrial relations. On the other hand, the Labour Government in their manifesto and at the Labour Party conference promised lasting cuts in defence as a matter of principle and at a time when expenditure on other aspects of Government policy is intended to increase. The Secretary of State tried to claim that the present Government's proposed defence cuts were dictated by a difficult economic situation. That was not how the matter was put at the Lab- our Party conference or in the Labour manifesto. It is something which has just been dreamed up by the right hon. Gentleman.
I hope we shall be told in the Govern- ment's reply to the debate what is the military assessment that lies behind the proposed cuts. We have heard nothing
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about that. Is it that they consider the world to be a safer place? That is not in the manifesto either. All we have heard is something about bringing our costs into line with the cost of defence for our neighbours in Europe. My right hon. Friend the Member for Chesham ard Amersham (Mr. Gilmour) has already shown that that argument is spurious for a number of reasons.
There is another reason for saying that this argument is unsound, but before I go on to that aspect of the matter I should like to venture into the dangerous waters of the 1930s. I suggest that if it had been argued then that we should not pay more for defence than our friends and allies, we should now look back in the light of history and say that that argument was fatuous. Such a course would be equally fatuous at present.
The right question to ask is: what is the nature of the threat? That in turn depends on the nature of the régime with which we have to deal, because the nature of the régime affects whether it might constitute a menace to ourselves? I am constantly surprised that so many Labour Members appear to be so totally ignorant of the nature of the Soviet régime. How many of them especially the Marxist element of the Labour Party to which my hon. Friend the Member for Alder- shot (Mr. Critchley) referred-have read Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Nobel Prize speech? I warmly commend that speech to them, for it is magnificent reading. I have not time to read very much of it, but I should like to read one extract in which the author talks of the fate of other authors.
"
He says:
'A whole national literature has been left there, buried without a coffin, without even any underclothes, naked, just a name-tag tied round one toe."
The fate of so many Soviet authors illus- trates the nature of the Soviet régime. He goes on to describe the régime as one based on violence, treachery and the lie. Those are not comments he made a long time ago. They were made in 1972. In his Letter to Soviet Leaders on 5th September 1973, he denounces the ex- pansionist world aims of the Soviet Union. I ask those hon. Members who may cherish the fallacious view that the nature of the Soviet régime has changed and that it has now become permanently more
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