A POLITICIAN’S FIRST instinct is personal survival. If he or she is a party leader, then the party itself is also to be considered. Then, somewhere down the line of priorities comes their country’s survival: survival that is, in terms of its defence. For without such a department of state as the MoD, diplomacy would be rendered meaningless, as would our liberties.
According to parliament’s defence select committee, its members express ‘mounting concern’ that the military has fallen bellow ‘minimum utility’ and suggests that the Coalition has sacrificed national security to make savings. James Arbuthnot, the Tory MP and committee chairman, is reported in this morning’s Telegraph as saying, ‘This is a clear example of the need for savings overriding the strategic security of the UK and the capability requirements of the Armed Forces.’
We are told that we are still the fourth largest spenders on defence, even after taking the axe to our armed services. Could this be because other Western nations are also making similar cuts to us. If so, such a claim is meaningless and disingenuous.
Defence reviews have always been headlined by the politicians as an exercise in adapting our country’s defence needs to the modern era…when what they invariably mean is cuts in defence expenditure.
One would have thought that our present crop of politicians would have learned from recent history, when the 1980s defence review was cruelly interrupted by the Argentineans; but sadly they appear to be either ignorant or arrogantly dismissive of such events when slaying the national debt.
I suppose that this is what comes of having planted our parliament with professional politicians, lawyers, social workers, PR consultants, media savvy spin doctors, and trade union appointees. In other words, people with very little experience of the world they live.
Of the above types, the professional politicians are the most ill-equipped to do the job they were elected to do. From school to university, and then to parliamentary internship, before being elected as members of parliament itself; all without ever making contact with what is popularly known as the ‘real world’.
I can only think of one minister in the present government who has a real and genuine love for our history and is blessed with the gift of writing about it. William Hague is a rare example of what was once common in our parliament. It was once filled with such men who took governance seriously enough to make a study of their country’s history, and made literary royalties from it.
IF EVER THERE WAS AN example of what my argument is trying to make; then surely the topic of oversees aid is a case in point. The Department of Oversees Development is the only department of state to have ‘merited’ an actual increase in its budget; while every other department, including the one that was set up for our nation’s defence; has to suffer the harvesters’ scythe when the national debt has to be reduced.
If ever there were a true understanding of this nation and its past; as well as a love for its future; then the first priority for any modern politician, in the circumstances we find ourselves in today, should always be to look toward our nation’s defence; and if we have money available to enhance or increase any department of state’s budget in such times…then it is to the defence budget that we must turn to protect.
I find it incredulous that this most important and vital department of state should be diminished by the overseas aid budget.
When the assault on the MoD began, I thought that the Conservative element to this coalition ‘of equals’ must have given much ground away, dangerously so, to its Liberal Democrat partner.
But it appears that the New ‘Conservatism’ was at one with their coalition partners. So our country’s defence was of lesser significance to our politicians than was the overseas’ aid budget. What does this say about government priorities and modern politicians?
THE POLITICIANS I GREW UP with were themselves giants of statesmanship - whether I agreed with them or not. They all had a sense of this country’s history and of its importance; especially when it came to this country’s defence. For they knew the importance of having a convincing military power, to meet the needs of diplomacy and of being heard on the world stage.
After the last war when we had to, rightly, defer to de-colonisation and an American supremacy; we still held on to a military presence; for the importance it played in our being listened to, was fundamental to our post war future. The power of a nation’s defence is considered long before its diplomacy. Today, after these cuts, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, will speak without being listened to.
After these defence cuts, we will no longer be taken seriously diplomatically; because diplomacy is the means by which a country seeks to avoid conflict. But in order to be taken at all seriously diplomatically; the nuclear option of having a military presence that is taken seriously by our diplomatic opponents is required.
THE MINISTRY OF DEFENCE has cost this country many billions in misplaced procurement decisions. So the MoD has played its own part in bringing about the current defence cuts. The MoD is overmanned by tens of thousands and hopefully will be drained of such wastefulness. For if cuts are deserved in this ministry, it is among the civil servants themselves whose numbers nearly surpass those serving in the British army; but whose financial costs in terms of pay and pensions are extravagant to say the least. For in the public sector it is the taxes from the private sector that sustains such profligacy.
But such squandering and frittering away of tax payer’s money should not be allowed to put in peril our island defences. Let the MoD civil service take the full force of the defence cuts; and if they are not enough then look to the overseas aid budget.
I ask the politicians to remember this. They are in receipt of public money through taxation and they are supposed to spend it in accordance with what they believe are within the interests of the British public. But those interests must never be secondary to those which the British public decides are their priority.
When David Cameron decides to put the interests of overseas development aid before the defence of the realm by increasing the formers’ budget and decreasing the latter’s; then something is ghoulish and gruesome about the way our politicians seek to preserve British sovereignty: if indeed the preservation of British sovereignty is their goal, which I doubt with the ascendency of a United States of Europe…but of course, this is another story.
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