John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con): A hundred years ago on Sunday, a deafening silence broke out over the vast battlefields of Europe. Then, as now, there must have been very mixed emotions.

There would have been that great sense of loss and remorse that so many people had been slaughtered, and so many people maimed and incapacitated. I guess that for those in the trenches there was apprehension. Was this for real? Could they trust the enemy? Would this truce hold? Could they stumble out of those muddy dungeons that had been their safe houses over all those long weeks and months of toil into a more open and free world where they could behave more normally? But they were, and we are, also permitted some joy that at last this murderous, bestial war was over. After four years of mass industrial slaughter, with millions of individual tragedies between the men and the families of the different combative nations, at last the slaughter was over. There was a chance to build something better.

When I lay a wreath in the morning in Burghfield and in the afternoon in Wokingham, I will be very conscious of two things. I will be conscious that there are war memorials in every other village and town in my constituency that time does not permit me to visit that day. As I look up at those lists of names on those two war memorials, I will be very conscious of how long those lists are and of how many brothers are together on the same list, with a double or treble tragedy for the family.

That scale of loss is difficult to comprehend and to wrestle with.

It reminds me of my two grandfathers. As is the case with most of us, our great grandfathers or our grandfathers were the survivors. They were young men who fought as young men and then tried to build a more normal life when they got back from the trenches. They had not had time to have girlfriends and to marry and produce children before they went off to war. My two grandfathers, like many others, went at the earliest possible opportunity, or may even have misled those involved about their age so keen were they to volunteer. Both fought on the western front.

One was badly injured, but, fortunately, recovered. I wanted to know from them, as a boy and as a teenager, more about these terrible events. Like many of their generation who had been through the war, they did not really want to share it with us. It was obviously so awful. They did not seek my praise and they did not seek my sympathy. They wanted to shield me from it. I wanted to know more about it, but I think that they took that view because it was so awful.

We have heard many moving remarks today, particularly about those who died, but let us think about those who survived. Let us think about what it must have been like to have four years of no normal life—as someone who was 17, 18, 19, 20 or whatever they were—where they had no normal social life and no normal family life apart from very rushed periods of leave, when they could not pursue their normal sports and leisure pursuits because space would not allow it, when they had no privacy, and when they had very repetitious food. The dreadful things they fought are obvious—the shells, the bombs, the rifle bullets, the snipers and the machine guns.

You can just about imagine how awful it must have been to have that fear that you were going to be asked to advance on barbed wire and machine guns, knowing that you had very little chance of surviving, but what about the boredom? What about the relentless discipline and the inability to know how to fill the time while you were worrying about what was going to happen next? All of those things must have been dreadful.

So this is what I think we need to do. We owe it to them, to all those who directed the war, and to all those in this Parliament who sent our army to war—time does not permit this afternoon—to have a proper analysis and discussion about how we can do better in future. I am no pacifist. I think we have to arm ourselves well to protect ourselves and to preserve the peace.

We have fought too many wars and, too often, we sent our army into wars where they had limited chances of winning. We did not have a diplomatic and political strategy to follow the war. There is no use in winning a war, unless we win the peace as well. We know that the sequel to the first world war is the second world war—the tragedy that it all had to be done again on an even vaster scale with even bigger munitions and more terrifying bombs, eventually ending with the explosion of two atomic bombs to bring it to a very sad conclusion.

We need to ask ourselves how we can make sure that diplomacy and politics does not let people down so much again. How was it part of our strategy that, twice, this Parliament sent small highly professional British armies on to the continent to fight a war against a far bigger, better armed foe when they had no chance of winning because they had too little resource, the wrong weapons and the wrong tactics. In the first world war, it took four years to recruit a mighty citizens’ army, to invent a lot of new weapons and to develop new tactics during the war. We were sadly unprepared. We asked them to do too much and it is amazing what they did.

The Remain spinners have long since run out of new or vaguely credible lines. Yesterday the BBC Radio 4 Today programme did its best to keep their flag flying. The Business editor led the questioning on food shortages, when there isn’t a scrap of evidence that any important continental exporter is about to cancel supplies or that the UK is about to place new barriers at our ports to keep the food out on March 30th. Instead of asking enough of his chosen expert and then of Sainsbury about the Argos acquisition, the possible tie up with Asda, the highly competitive state of the UK food market or about how they might source more UK produce to cut the food miles, we had to have the same old nonsense scares. There is a simple answer to all this. We don’t believe them!

The UK government is trying to get worked up about a possible EU agreement.
Just remember this is not a possible future trading or partnership agreement. It is not anything the UK actually wants. They are talking about the EU’s Withdrawal Agreement, which contains many things including £39bn that Leave voters do not agree with.
I just hope the Cabinet realises in time that trying to sign such a deal will go down badly with many voters, and would place the UK in a very weak position. There are plenty of Conservative MPs who have said they would not vote for it, and it will need primary legislation. The government cannot commit the UK to this. Only Parliament can.

There are plenty of channel and North Sea ports allowing easy passage of goods from the continent to the UK. The Dutch and Belgian ports would love to lift more of the Calais-Dover trade. Calais has made quite clear it wants to keep the trade. No need to worry. There will be plenty of imports coming in on 30 March after we have left. Remember, the UK government will decide what checks to have at Dover! No need to delay them. They mainly come in already inspected, checked and logged electronically away from the border.

I gave another version of my Trafalgar talk this year, close to the anniversary of the battle. One of the reasons I am interested in it is that it was a moment when the UK public sector in the form of the English Navy excelled itself. It did so to such an extent that Nelson’s flagship is still a commissioned vessel of the modern navy sitting in dry dock at Portsmouth. 200 years on from the battle its strategy and tactics are still analysed by modern naval experts and officers.
The task before Nelson, the other officers and men was formidable. They had to engage a large enemy fleet with little wind to drive them to battle. The enemy allies had 25% more fire power and 22% more battleships than the English force. Confidence, skilled seamanship, faster gunnery and better tactics helped secure them a remarkable victory, with 17 battleships captured, one blown up and four more captured a little later after they fled the battle. It was an important victory at a time when the UK was under severe threat of invasion. All Napoleon wanted his Admirals to do was to hold the English Channel for long enough to get the troop barges across, but they failed to get anywhere near to do the job. Trafalgar set them back again and turned out to be the end of serious invasion threat, though Napoleon did rebuild his navy and did threaten in other ways as the war wore on.
Accounts of how and why they succeeded include mention of several advantages which I will not dwell on here. One feature which gets less mention is that the public sector Navy encouraged a very entrepreneurial and individual approach to leadership. Whilst Captains were paid state employees on a reasonable salary, and whilst their ships were supplied and victualed by the Navy, the Navy also agreed to pay Captains and crews prize money for any captured ship. This  included the money realised from the  sale of any cargo or effects on the ship as well as the value of any warship to the Navy. Captains could plan to get rich if they gained a command that allowed substantial raiding of enemy commerce, and would do well out of a successful battle if they captured and returned enemy ships for use in the Royal Navy. Captains could use some of their own money to enhance the ship and its cargo if they wished. They had flexibility over who joined the crew and how they carried out their orders for a voyage or mission. Crews liked working for Captains who had the Midas touch.

Captains could often be relieved of command and put on half pay, waiting for some suitable new opportunity. It meant there was a keen determination to excel, both to be offered the better and more profitable commands, and to ensure success when opportunity came to take a prize. Some experienced and distinguished Captains wanted to stay as Frigate Captains as these ships were more regularly used as state privateers against enemy commerce. The victors of Trafalgar were given additional prize style money by Parliamentary grant, as a grateful nation was aware that all too  many of their captured prizes were lost in the storm which followed the battle.
It would not be right to re enact the same incentives naval public sector personnel enjoyed in the 1800s to the modern public sector, but it does remind us that personal incentive can lead to innovation, daring and success. There are acceptable ways of reward which can stimulate innovation and sensible risk taking. In this respect the navy of Nelson had much more in common with the first Elizabethans who plundered Spanish commerce from the New World, than with our own second Elizabethan Age.