Defence Review To Find "National Consensus" On Future

He slammed Tory defence policy for "relying on an incoherent set of decisions, that seemed to have no relation to the new threats and the new challenges that were posed."

But he's admitted there will be no radical change in defence policy, such as there has been in education and at the Treasury.

"What's important is that we have a strong defence for the country but we also the most appropriate defence for the country and the ability to deal with the sort of issues that are going to confront us over the next few years, and these will almost certainly be very different to those that have confronted previous generations." he said.

Speaking on the the BBC's Today programme he announced his first step was to conduct a Defence Review. But he rejected the idea that Gordon Brown's Treasury would be ruling the defence roost:

"This is not going to be a review that is going to be treasury run, it is going to be an all embracing review that tries to build a national consensus about what the country needs and how it can afford it."

Robin Cook

Mr Robertson was speaking before going to Paris with Foreign Secretary Robin Cook. It is Mr Cook's second visit to Paris in the first ten days of the new government, and will be another chance for Labour to spread the "fresh start" message among their European counterparts.

They will attend a meeting of the Western European Union, the EU's defence arm now bidding to play a key role in security matters.

On the matter of defence spending, Mr Robertson did confirm that he expected defence to account to the same proportion of GDP in five years time as it does now - in 1995 defence accounted for just over 3% of the GDP - but emphasised that the question for him was how to spend the money.

Nevertheless he refuted the idea that the defence review would actually do very little. He criticised the previous government for failing to adapt to new challenges, and allied his defence policy with Mr Cook's foreign policy direction:

"There is a need in this country" he said "to have a consensus about how best the country can be defended, and I dont think that over the years the Conservatives, by locking out practically every other element of society from the process of thought managed to do that. We secondly have to take the foreign policy objectives of the country and establish what they are. Over the years the Tories were simply relying on an incoherent set of decisions that seemed to have no relation to the new threats and new challenges that were posed."