16:50 Mr. Doug Henderson (Newcastle upon Tyne, North) (Lab)

If that is an absolute guarantee, I am pleased that the hon. Gentleman was able to give it, and I hope that it will be given prominence in Conservative thinking on defence policy. I did not expect the Conservative party to come up with an all-embracing outline of what an SDR should eventually produce today, but I did expect some thrust about where it saw the threat coming from in the future. Apart from those threats that I have mentioned so far, does it see a threat from cyberwarfare? Does the Conservative party think that there is a threat from the impact of climate change on, for example, food prices or the availability of food or water? If the Conservative party thinks that those are threats, surely we should have heard something about that from the Conservative Front-Bench spokesman, but there was nothing about that at all. My view is that cyberterrorism is a real threat and could be a major part of any war front in future. It has to be countered, and the resources have to be found to do that.

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17:06 Robert Key (Salisbury) (Con)

I also agree with the hon. Gentleman about climate change. When the Select Committee was preparing a report on the future of NATO two or three years ago, I was struck by a visit that I paid to Denmark. We heard that the Danes were way ahead of the curve in assessing the impact of climate change on strategic sea routes around the northern hemisphere. It was to the Danes’ advantage to ensure that they were on top of defence strategy, because Greenland was suffering from a retreating ice sheet which was opening up opportunities not just for fossil fuel exploration and development, but for the strategic defence of new northern trade routes around the whole of the north American continent. When the Committee went to Moscow, I pursued that point with the Russians. They too have that new opportunity, all around the northern shores of the Russian Federation, with the possibility of new trade routes throughout the world.

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17:42 Bernard Jenkin (Conservative)

The key to a successful 2010 SDR will be a new UK strategic concept, which must embrace the whole panoply of policy—economic stability and trade policy, the future of the EU, NATO and the national security strategy, energy security, climate change and cyber-warfare. It is from those considerations that foreign policy and the SDR must flow. The UK has never institutionalised strategy in that way, but other countries, such as the US, France and Israel do so. It is time that we did so, too.

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18:31 Mr. Gerald Howarth (Aldershot) (Con)

The hon. Gentleman challenged me to set out our vision, so let me do so. The world is becoming a more unstable place, with known knowns—to use the language of Donald Rumsfeld—in Iran and North Korea; known unknowns in Russia and China, and possibly in the Falkland Islands, as my hon. Friend the Member for Macclesfield (Sir Nicholas Winterton) pointed out; and unknown unknowns in terms of energy security, population growth, climate change and, of course, the inexorable rise of violent Islamic fundamentalism. There is also, as has been mentioned, the threat of cyberwarfare. Against this international backdrop of unprecedented threats, what do the Government do? They bequeath their successor a broken society, a bankrupt economy, overstretched armed forces and a gaping black hole in the defence equipment programme. In the last dying days of this decaying Government, the Minister with responsibility for defence equipment and support is haring around the country signing up orders for major items of equipment just weeks ahead of a defence review which is intended by both sides to undertake a root-and-branch review of policy and force structures. Let me say to my hon. Friend the Member for North Essex that we need that review to establish the strategic concept of which he speaks.

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