The EU's Nobel Still-in-One Piece Prize

Blois, France. 10 December.  It is one of those surreal European days.  The EU has just formally accepted the Nobel Peace Prize (it was Tom Lehrer who wrote that political satire died the day Henry Kissinger was awarded the Prize) when the sad truth is that far from multiplying European power and influence in the world the EU these days is diminishing it.  The surrealism is particularly pointed because below me Jeanne d’Arc (Joan of Arc) sits astride a charger cloaked in the finest armour looking west towards the English she sought to kick out of Europe.  Here in Blois English and French history meets on the banks of the Loire, that most royal blue of French rivers, symbolised by a small statue of a small woman born six hundred years ago in 1412 who changed the course of European history.  Europe is clearly approaching yet another historical bifurcation and being Europeans there is a tendency to think it is the only show in town.  It is not.  What is happening in the world beyond Europe is what is really interesting and there Europe is the past. 

 

In some ways the Prize marks the end of the European world.  Imagine a map centred not on the Greenwich meridian, but on the International Dateline.  The line runs not across the Atlantic but the Pacific from the Arctic to the Antarctic between China on one side and America on the other.  To its east lies the old West; to its west lies the new East. That is the new fault-line in global politics, the new Mackinderesque geographical pivot around which power will be organised.   Unfortunately, Europe’s inability to confront this new order is day-by-day driving the Old Continent inexorably towards a strategic cliff; a decisive moment of decline in which peace and impotence are interpreted as one and the same. 

 

Danger is everywhere on this map and it is all connected.  The unseemly growth of mighty but unstable China and its Asian neighbours, the slow and tragic collapse of middle eastern states, a fast-growing world population competing for ever scarcer food and water, the endemic intolerance and corruption of powerful near-neighbour European elites, the desperate energy competition between the consumptive oligarchies and the consumptive democracies, the new/ideological struggles between the children of the Book and between those of no ‘Book’, the merger of mass destructive technologies with ideology and old-fashioned state calculation.  Indeed, this is the very stuff of the twenty-first century.  And where is Europe on this map?  Indeed, whilst the next decade will mark the critical formative crucible of a new world order, Europe will be in a self-imposed strategic nowhere with NATO and the EU left hanging in the no man's land between rhetoric and reality. 

Can Europe be saved from an impotent future?  Britain and France are the only two powers capable of re-injecting some semblance of strategic reality into an EU/Europe which either seems to think it can opt-out of global change or simply does not want to play by the power rules the world is imposing.    However, Britain and France are moving rapidly in opposite directions.  France sees itself at the centre of Europe’s interminable struggle to create/save itself from itself.  Britain has no desire to be in such a place and yet the EU prevents it from playing the role of balancer it afforded Europe in the centuries following Jeanne d'Arc.  Inevitably, the very political fallout of this fundamental divide is beginning to creep into the strategic defence relationship. Sadly, in spite of high profile military exercises the much-lauded 2010 Franco-British Defence and Security Treaty is beginning to run out of political steam.

This time of year the Loire belies its age and skips youthfully in full flow on its way to the Atlantic.  Channelling turbulence will be critical if London and Paris are to save their vital strategic defence partnership. It may seem counter-intuitive but if the strategic conundrums being mapped out for both Britain and France are to be managed the treaty becomes more not less important.  The British must align with a new strategic bloc around the Americans and yet preserve key European ties above and beyond the EU.  France's somehow has to get other Europeans to think anew about the global balance of power, even if European integration was meant to be the eternal antidote to such power politics.      

If Britain and France cannot find common cause then the new forces of global change will help drive Britain beyond the EU.  This will be not only because of a level of political integration that might make sense to the descendants of Colbert but never to those of Locke or Mill, but because the EU will have lost all contact with strategic reality.  Indeed, it is the retreat of EU leaders into political and strategic fantasy that is doing the greatest harm to Europe’s future by disconnecting European security from world security and which makes today's award seem a little preposterous.

Jeanne d’Arc once said, “Of the love or hatred God has for the English, I know nothing, but I do know that they will all be thrown out of France, except those who die there”.  Maybe!  So, well done EU (I suppose that means me but watching leaders drink champagne on my behalf always seems a tad distasteful) but what about the world and what about tomorrow?  

The EU's Nobel Still-in-One Piece Prize (Just)! 

Julian Lindley-French

The Meaning of Ontology?

Alphen, Netherlands. 5 December.  It has been an interesting week spent careering around southern England in my little blue VW Polo with that vaguely manic look on my face I wear when behind the wheel.  I had the honour of addressing the First Sea Lord’s conference and the admirals, commodores and captains of the Royal Navy at HMS Collingwood near Portsmouth as to why NATO is so important to the future defence of the United Kingdom.  These were serious people dealing with serious issues and I was struck not only by the openness of British military thinking, but also their self-critique, although having come from the Netherlands which is in defence meltdown it was a little surprising to listen to complaints that the Royal Navy is only getting two new super aircraft-carriers, some fifteen state-of-the-art destroyers and frigates and six new nuclear attack submarines.  This sense of open minds and open thinking was reinforced at a small meeting on Monday at Kensington Palace with the British Chief of Defence Staff to discuss the future role and posture of the British armed forces. 
 

In between the two military meetings I attended a small academic conference in Bath on ostensibly the same subject.  Now, being academics the title of the meeting had to have the words ‘strategic’, ‘culture’, ‘transformation’, ‘European’, ‘security’ and ‘identity’ all in a row, but in the words of an immortal Lancashire comedian Eric Morecambe, “not necessarily in that order”. 
 

I knew I was in for a tough day when certain words beloved of the academic with nothing much to say started to appear.  ‘Ontological’ was liberally sprinkled about, although ‘epistemological’ and ‘reification’ also beloved of the theorist lacking a point, appeared only occasionally.  Ever since my long lost student days I have been suspicious of these words as I do not know what they really mean and I am not at all sure those that spout them do either.  They seem rather to be part of the ritual of ivory tower semantics into which so many politics departments at British universities have retreated in the past twenty years or so.  Much a-speak about nothing.
 

This was confirmed to me by an exchange I had with a senior academic at the meeting.  I say ‘exchange’ as it was more an ambush as clearly the chair and the academic assailant had pre-planned the attack, which was akin to British politician Denis Healey’s observation about being ‘savaged’ by a particularly genteel colleague as being “mauled by a dead sheep”.  The subject was Europe.  Now, many of you will know that I used to work for the EU and for many years was a passionate believer in ‘Europe’.  However, based on many years of hard political, economic, social, foreign and defence policy analysis and given current shocks I am now profoundly concerned about the direction of ‘Europe’ and Britain’s place (if any) within it. 
 

My analysis was duly presented only to be attacked with what can be best described as an analysis-free emotive rant.  I wanted to tow Britain out into the Atlantic, I was told.  The world’s fifth or sixth largest real economy and third biggest defence spender had no alternative but to accept its fate and sign up to a new EU it does not want in which it will be in a permanent minority.  No facts, just assertions.  And, as what passed for ‘argument’ petered out (as it did) the assailant feeling himself to be struggling then became just plain rude.  I did not understand either British politics or the way the EU works.  I resisted a giggle at that moment.
 

As I was listening I suddenly had an insight into the grinding leftist conformism of British academia.  There are certain analyses one is not allowed to make any more because it simply does not fit into the prescribed, politically-correct dogma that so much of British academic output reflects.  Rather, one must pass one’s days debating on the head of a pin the increasingly irrelevant shades of grey of mantra and produce undecipherable peer-reviewed literature that can only pass muster if it reflects current academic dogma before it is accepted into the not-so-great pantheon of academic bureaucracy.  The gap between the real world the armed forces are dealing with and the pretend world of much of British academia simply cannot be bridged.  What a shame. 
 

As I left Bath en route to another more interesting meeting I could not help but be reminded of a famous 1980s exchange between Margaret Thatcher and Irish Prime Minister and academic Garret Fitzgerald.  Thatcher was hand-bagging on about policy and practice when suddenly Fitzgerald had the temerity to interrupt. “That’s all very well, Prime Minister”, he said, “it may indeed work in practice, but does it work in theory?” 
 

Does anyone know what ontology means?

  

Julian Lindley-French

Tony Blair: The Man Who Would Be King (Again)

Aquae Sulis (Bath), England.  30 November.  Bath Spa, this most quintessential English town, surrounds perfectly-preserved AD 43 Roman thermal baths and adorns the deep valley of the River Avon with rows of Georgian villas clad in golden, sunset-shade Cotswold stone.  It is a place seemingly impervious to change.  And yet, if Tony Blair has his way, Bath and the rest of the England over which his fiat once ran, will cease to self-govern for the first time in almost a thousand years.  In a speech this week to Chatham House Blair was at his dissembling best.  He accused Prime Minister Cameron of committing a “monumental error” by seeking to forge a new relationship for Britain with the EU and described Euro-scepticism as a “virus”.  As ever with Blair it is not what he said that is interesting, but what he did not say. 

 

Typically, Blair failed to address the real question; why so many of we Britons (both ancient and young) who have hitherto been either pro-EU or EU-neutral are now joining the ranks of the Euro-realists?  Indeed, on the day the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) made serious electoral gains Blair made no attempt whatsoever to address the very real and just concerns of people who feel betrayed by a government he led who quietly passed over so much of Britain’s sovereignty to a Brussels increasingly impervious to national accountability.  This was Tony Blair at his disingenuous worst.

What Blair did not say was that the last time the British people were given the chance to vote on a history-cleaving relationship with Brussels was back in 1975.  Then the question was whether or not Britain should remain a member of an economic community made up of independent European nation-states.  Back then no-one other than a few Euro-federalist fanatics could have foreseen the wholesale transfer of British political and parliamentary sovereignty to Brussels that has since taken place.  A Brussels that he helped to build and which today has power and influence over ordinary Britons that no-one would have possibly agreed to back in 1975.  Instead, Blair paints a picture of a nothing much has changed Brussels and an EU of today that will be the EU of tomorrow.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

 

This week’s European Commission paper on “deep and genuine” banking and fiscal union demonstrates the lie that Tony Blair is peddling.  Come 2014 a new EU treaty will be drafted.  By Blairite definition it will be the next, decisive step on the road to an undemocratic European super-bureaucracy with which no-one in Britain should have any truc.  Indeed, if ratified this treaty could well represent the beginning of the end of national self-government in Europe.   

At the very least the political space that Blair claims Britain can occupy between the single currency and the single market will cease to exist.  Blair knows this but will never of course admit it because by his calculation he personally stands to benefit.  Blair figures that come the end of Herman van Rompuy’s term as EU Pretend President two years hence in November 2014 he is well-placed to succeed.  His reasoning is clear; as Germany endeavours to push the new treaty towards ratification a showdown with Britain is inevitable.  One way to help buy off the British is to make a Briton EU ‘President’.  Blair has himself well and truly pencilled in for that job.

 

In his Chatham House speech he said that a British departure from the EU would be “politically-debilitating, economically-damaging and hugely destructive of Britain’s true long-term interests”.  He also said Britain could join the Euro within five years.  The latter demonstrates just how far out of touch Blair has become.  The former demonstrates how little regard Blair has for the one word he did not mention – democracy.  It is a democratic deficit that Tony Blair glossed over, in that Tony Blair way of glossing over the inconveniently critical.

Ironically (and hopefully), Blair and his sell his country down the swanny personal ambitions might just be confounded by a most unlikely and unexpected adversary. This week the German paper Der Spiegel ran a headline “Grossbritannien Danke!”  Germans, they said, should thank the British for saving Europe from a bureaucratic monster. 

 

It was George Washington who warned that “Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused”.  Blair talked of a “real and present danger to Britain” if it left the EU. The real danger is the end to self-governance posed by the future EU he champions.   

Tony Blair, the man who would be king (again).

 

Julian Lindley-French

The Geo-Politics of Shale

Alphen, Netherlands, 26 November.  Energy is the stuff of power.  Long dead British Socialist Aneurin Bevan once remarked, “This Island is almost made of coal and surrounded by fish.  Only an organising genius could produce a shortage of coal AND fish at the same time”.  Aneurin (he was Welsh and they inflict such appellations on their young) lived in those long-distant days before the EU concentrated such organising genii in Brussels.  Today, Bevan would have to add shale oil and gas to his irony.  As Britain contemplates a new energy policy to stop the lights going out (and the UN starts yet another doomed to fail climate change conference) the British Geological Survey suggests that Britain’s shale oil and gas reserves are enough to make the Island again energy self-sufficient for many years to come with up to 1,000 trillion cubic feet of gas alone. 

 

Britain is not on its own.  Significant reserves have been found in France, northern Germany and Poland.  Indeed, current estimates are that the top five producers could be the US, Canada, China, Brazil and the UK, with the International Energy Agency suggesting this month that the Americans could be energy self-sufficient by 2035.  It is not often that a genuine geopolitical game changer comes along but all the signs are that shale oil and gas is precisely that.

At present it is still too expensive to extract such oil and gas in volume compared with conventional hydrocarbons.  Indeed, current extraction costs in the North Sea could be up to $200 per barrel, compared with between today's marginal costs of between $50-60bn for the extraction of conventional hydrocarbons.  However, US technology is driving down the cost of both onshore and offshore extraction, and the British are among world leaders in extracting energy from tough environments.

There are also concerns about just how much of the suggested reserves can be exploited.  This may explain the reticence of governments to make forecasts that prove over time to have been too optimistic.  It could also be that governments are concerned about possible environmental damage and must in any case continue the search for balanced energy policies in which renewables remain an important contribution to the national energy mix.  There are also some possible and unfortunate side-effects.  Last year concerns were expressed in Lancashire that the use of high pressure water (fracking) to drive oil and gas reserves up and out of the shale had caused small earthquakes (a Beatles song?). 

What about the geopolitics?  If for once the major producers of oil and gas also become the major consumers then one of the main causes of systemic friction will have been removed.  Hyper-competition over resources between the consumptive democracies and the consumptive oligarchies such as China, in which power is legitimised by economic growth rather than the vote, looks at present to become the signature threat of this century.  Moreover, a shift in the balance of energy power away from the Middle East could (just could) make the region more stable as it will certainly concentrate the minds of leaders therein, although I fully accept it could have precisely the opposite effect.  As for Russia, Moscow would become one producer amongst many and would have to compete for exports on price…and behaviour.  

The implications for Europe's security and defence would also be profound.  Absent the need to look beyond its borders for energy would the US be quite so prepared to pay the price it currently pays to stabilise Europe's extended region?  It will of course pay close attention to oil-rich Iran’s nuclear ambitions and Egypt's political turmoil because the US guarantees Israel's security.  However, absent the comforting presence of an America focussing much (not all) of its grand strategic effort on Asia-Pacific and Europeans will surely once and for all have to get serious about security and defence.  At the very least shale would change the terms and conditions of the transatlantic security contract which at present threat from the great European defence depression.

There is a also delicious irony to this story.  On 21^st October, 1912 the British began work on HMS Queen Elizabeth, a super-Dreadnought battleship which joined the Fleet in 1915.  The Royal Navy’s first all oil-fired ship paved the way for the conversion of the entire British Grand Fleet from coal to oil and in effect started the West’s dependence on the Middle East.  Ironically, the new HMS Queen Elizabeth, a 65,000 ton super aircraft-carrier will be launched in 2015, just at the moment when such oil dependence may begin to come to an end.

Shale will also change th balance of power within states.  The UK’s massive shale reserves are under England and the English North Sea.  Energy is indeed the stuff of power.  Good luck Scotland!  As for Lancashire, I have never had any problem with giving Lancastrians a good fracking! I am a Yorkshireman. 

Julian Lindley-French

Labour Stalinism?

Alphen, Netherlands. 24 November.  It is all over the British news.  A Labour Party-controlled town council in Rotherham has just taken three foster children away from guardians because allegedly they had joined the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP).  This was done on the grounds that UKIP is a 'racist' party.  UKIP might have strong views about Britain leaving the European Union and the damage done to Britain by Labour-inspired hyper-immigration, but there is no evidence it is racist.  

 

Rather, the story is now rebounding on the Labour Party which is accused by some of Stalinist - a lethal dictatorship posing as an ideology. That is utterly unfair. The Labour Party has many faults but it is not Stalinist.  However, behind the moderate social democratic facade of Labour's national leadership lurk some dogmatic and intolerant leftist extremists that too often once in power Labour spends too much time appeasing.  As a hitherto life-long Labour supporter I abandoned the Party precisely because of the leftist intolerance of this branch of the Party and which too often leads to this kind of nonsense. 

 

There is also something very South Yorkshire to this story.  Rotherham is the neighbouring town to my own city Sheffield.  Both have long been home to traditional Labour supporters; hafrd-working, fair-minded, tough people who can be blunt but rarely dogmatic.  Indeed, as one of the first ever comprehensive school (ordinary) kids to go to Oxford I am hewn from the same block.  The trouble is that the kind of intolerant leftist bigots behind such a decision are attracted to places like Rotherham because Labour could put up a donkey as a council or parliamentary candidate and it would get elected. 

 

Such a ridiculous decision made against people who on the face of it seem very decent foster parents can only have happened due to the intolerant political correctness that the Left is imposing on British society.  It is an intolerance in which almost everyone is now looking over their shoulder (or over their blogs and tweets). This is for fear of the anti-free speech race and equality laws Labour introduced when in power to prevent dissent and to mask the appalling mess they created in my country.  Indeed, I just had to edit out a sentence from this blog for fear it might be mis-interpreted as racist when it was most certainly not and having known discrimination myself I am no racist.

 

First, Labour must apologise to this couple publicly and nationally.  Second, the Labour Party must make it perfectly clear that it will not tolerate such intolerance and cast from its ranks those extremists that are doing so much to create a climate of fear and mistrust in Britain.  Third, those contemplating voting for Labour at the next general election in 2015 should read the small print.  There is a very real danger that once again we will all be sold a social demoratic and moderate manifesto only to find ourselves once again at the mercy of Labour's hard Left. 

 

Labour is not a Stalinist party, but one only has to look at the damage thirteen years of Labour rule did to Britain to see that Stalinist elements lurk within its ranks. This kind of intolerant Leftist madness just proves it.

 

Julian Lindley-French           

The EU Budget: Fog in the Channel Continent Isolated?

Alphen, Netherlands. 22 November. The Americans call it Thanksgiving.  Today is the day collected Yankdom commemorates the fact that the lunatics and fanatics we British (and sensible Dutch) had rather sensibly tossed out had survived for a year in a wilderness that was to degenerate into the United States.  They were helped by the local native Americans which was probably the greatest error of strategic judgement since (according to Blackadder) “Olaf the Hairy, High Chief of all the Vikings, accidentally ordered 80,000 battle helmets with the horns on the inside".  Today is also EU Budget Day when our Dear Leaders head to Brussels to spend what could be several nights (this summit could be a fabled ‘three-shirter’) disagreeing only for Germany’s Chancellor Merkel, the EU Headmistress, to eventually tell them the correct answer to a question none of them thought they should ask; just how much does European ‘solidarity’ cost? 

 

On the face of it the seven year 2014-2020 EU budget that they are disagreeing is a huge argument over relatively paltry sums.  At €940bn the EU Budget represents just under 1% of the entire EU economy.  However, there is an important principle at stake. At a time of real economic pain across the EU when cuts are biting deep everywhere the Omission wants a gob-smacking 5.9% increase to some 1.05% of EU GDP.  The Omission tries to finesse this away by saying much of the money has already been committed to projects and that since 2004 its tasks have grown exponentially.  However, that masks the two essential budgetary contradictions: the EU only works if there is economic growth and too few European taxpayers are expected to pay too much for too many. 

 

Twenty of the twenty-seven member-states are so-called ‘net beneficiaries’, i.e. they get to have significant amounts of my money transferred to them for what is meant to be investment in cross-Onion growth.  In other words some 200 million people in seven countries (Britain, France, Finland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Sweden) effectively pay for 300 million others.  With Poland gaining the most such transfers are called ‘solidarity’, which in Onion-speak means give me your money or else.  That was fine when western European economies were able to afford it. But as yesterday’s increased British borrowing figures showed that is no longer the case.

 

The EU Budget is complicated further by the industry-specific subsidies which also generate transfers from rich country to rich country.  The Common Agricultural Policy or CAP represents some 40% of the EU Budget (down from 50% in 2004).  In 2013 Germany will contribute €3bn, Italy (which is broke) €1.9bn, the Netherlands (me - and I am soon to be broke) €900m and Belgium (definitely broke but pretending otherwise) €800m, with Greece, Poland, Spain, France, Ireland and Hungary the biggest beneficiaries.  The EU locks in aspic a chronically-outdated farming industry supported by a CAP that emerged in the early days of 'Europe' soon after World War Two when it was feared Europe could not feed its people.

 

The summit will quickly get silly.  France’s President Hollande is preparing to do battle with British PR-Meister Cameron over the CAP because when in doubt at home a French president always attacks Britain.  In fact, much though the British would love it to be about them so that Cameron can be seen to go down with ensigns a-flying and guns a-blazing, it is not.  The Germans, Dutch, Finns and Swedes are also unhappy with the Omission’s 5%.  Moreover, it is not just how much money is spent but where on earth much of it goes.  The Court of Auditors has refused to sign off on the Omission’s accounts for seventeen straight years because of implied fraud in many EU projects (that is why I call the Commission the Omission!). 

 

EU Pretend President Herman van Rompuy has suggested a rather natty, naughty little compromise designed to tempt the British into a political trap.  He wants a reduction of €60bn in the Omission’s proposals but rather sneakily demands Britain abandon a rebate that was negotiated by a handbag-slinging Margaret Thatcher back in the 1980s.  The aim is to make the British again the issue rather than the stupidity of the system. 

 

The solution?  It is precisely what the Germans are rather sensibly suggesting; a ceiling of 1% EU GDP, cuts and reform to the CAP and more money transferred to infrastructure and regional development funding which benefits Europe’s increasingly urban population. 

 

So, to avoid soiled hand-made, taxpayer-funded shirts why not just go to Brussels and listen to Headmistress Merkel?  In any case, the real battle will be over European political union which will erupt soon after she is re-elected next September. 

 

There may well be fog in the Channel, but it is made far thicker in Brussels by the opaque bureaucracy that the EU is fast becoming.  Enjoy your Turkey Yanks and give thanks; you could be an EU citizen!

 

Julian Lindley-French

 

Britain's New Defence Covenant

Alphen, Netherlands. 19 November. Last week, General Sir David Richards, Britain’s Defence Chief said, “We have a whole load of tasks expected of us. Our political masters are quite happy to reduce the size of the Armed Forces, but their appetite to exercise influence on the world stage is, quite understandably, the same as it has always been”. Implicit in Sir David’s statement is a fear that the British Government could be about to make the greatest strategic error since the Suez fiasco in 1956, by implicitly and effectively abandoning Britain’s strategic partnership with the US through further defence cuts and insisting London can build a new defence relationship with Europeans, many of whom are cutting their armed forces to the point of extinction. It would be strategic illiteracy at its very worst reducing Britain to the third rank of defence actors and critically undermining wider strategic influence. Therefore, Britain needs a new Defence Covenant with a commitment from both major political parties to spend at least 2% of GDP (and that means real money) on defence for the next decade at least.

 

Britain is of course facing difficult economic choices but it is precisely such moments that coherent defence strategy is vital. Doing ever more with ever less is not strategy. Just around the corner major crises lurk in the Middle East, North Africa and beyond in which the British armed forces may not only be required to act but given the strategic brand they still represent will underpin all other tools of national influence. Moreover, defence expenditure in much of the world beyond Europe is booming. The one thing this world will guarantee is strategic surprise.

 

First, Britain’s military strategy needs to be lifted above the current muddle which still too often reflects an internal struggle between the services over money. As Britain shifts emphasis post-Afghanistan from land to sea, driven by the strategic choices being made by the Americans and the non-choices of Europeans, a powerful Royal Navy will be critical to British strategy. And yet, in spite of the two future super-carriers the Navy has only 19 serviceable surface ships to operate and network across five domains; land, sea, air, space and cyber and at least five oceans. The new Astutenuclear-attack submarines are reputed to leak and are too slow, whilst the new Type-45 destroyers are too few in number. A reasoned balance also needs to be struck between full-time and part-time forces. If the regular Army is cut again to 75,000 as is rumoured then placing so much responsibility for Britain’s future operational élan on a new Reserve Army will be taking an enormous risk to say the very least.

 

Second, Europe’s great defence depression will lead Britain to rely more not less on the Americans with NATO critical as a planning and command nexus between three parties; North Americans and Europeans at very different levels of capability and strategic partners critical to defence grand strategy. NATO, with Britain and France at its core, will find itself the Atlantic wing of an American-led Western grand strategy which will span the Pacific. However, to make NATO Europe work London must lead by example and such strategy is only credible if the British retain armed forces which are seen by Washington and others as capable, adaptable, agile, sustainable, but above all powerful even if only modest in size.

 

Now, with vision and political and will all these problems can be fixed and the new system made to work. And, given the equipment planned a powerful and affordable future force is achievable. Therefore, the 2015 Strategic Defence and Security Review must make an unequivocally clear statement of ambition to rebuild Britain’s forces with funding to match. This will be the new Defence Covenant underpinning a revised force plan that will seeFuture Force 2020 as merely a milestone en route to Future Force 2025and then Future Force 2030. What matters is a clear force development strategy and no more cuts to the defence budget.

 

Cameron’s latest mantra is that Britain is engaged in a global race. What about the defence race? The government claims it will spend £160bn (c.$250bn) over the next ten years to rebuild the British armed forces, and that having closed the £38 billion (c$60bn) black hole in Britain’s defence budget money is coming available. However, the word is that the armed forces will take a further hit in the next Comprehensive Spending Review. Unfortunately, if London cuts the defence budget further not only will Britain’s strategic future be in jeopardy, but with it NATO and the alliance with the United States as London in effect chooses to tie itself solely to a defenceless continental Europe in headlong retreat and given events in the EU is fasting leaving Britain. History would not be kind. One deals with uncertainty by dominating it with strategy and capability not by cutting and prevaricating.

 

It is time for a new Defence Covenant and quickly.

Julian Lindley-French