By Desmond Woods
Decades of failure to invest and plan for comprehensive UK defence procurement and rearmament lie behind this decision by Healey, as well as the repeated broken promises on defence expenditure by the Starmer Government.
Talk is cheap. National Defence is not.
Nor can defence expenditure be deferred indefinitely. There never should have been a ‘ peace dividend ‘. It did not exist. The belief that it did exist defunded the UK’s armed forces as a credible deterrent to Russian revanchist interventions in Europe and the Atlantic.
The Royal Navy and British Army I served in are now pale shadows of what they were. The RN held the sea lanes of the North Atlantic open as an ASW force. I was part of an armoured division sent to the Gulf in 1990. It is not possible to do either task now. The RN’s situation is parlous in the extreme. The limits of ‘ make do and mend’ have been far exceeded while the threats rise.
It will take a decade at least to undo the damage done by successive UK Governments, if there is the political will to do it and the funding is raised through reallocation of spending priorities.
It used to be said in the 1990’s ‘ that the British sailor, soldier or airman can stand up to any enemy – as long as it is not the British Treasury ! ‘ Sadly true.
When your Defence Secretary cannot go meekly along with yet more disguised ‘ death by a thousand cuts ‘ and resigns on principle, a PM must be held accountable.
‘ These are the years the locust ate. ‘ Winston Churchill in 1938.
We are already at war in cyberspace and watching kinetic slaughter on Europe’s eastern border. You would think that the threat was enough to get even the most complacent government to urgently redress the expenditure crisis. Apparently not.
