It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Prime Minister with domestic troubles must be in want of a war. But one with no money can, at best, hope to look warlike while spending less than promised on a conflict that is, for the voter, comfortably distant.
And so it is for today’s Strategic Defence Review, the inevitable kit-check for every incoming government. They are as predictable as bank holiday rain, and about as dampening to the spirit, for their main aim is to make a new broom look brisk while planning for what conflicts will look like in a decade’s time.
Except: 1) They’ll look stupid and pointless, as they always do, and 2) You’re in the midst of a technological revolution and absolutely nobody thought lads trained on Nintendo Game Boys would one day come in useful.
Last time Labour entered power in 1997, their SDR predicted troops would in future only be used in humanitarian missions. They spent billions on navy vessels that could carry Royal Marines to help out in disaster zones, and dumped tanks in favour of snatch Land Rovers, then promptly entered into land wars in Iraq and Afghanistan where the first was useless and the second were deadly.
They would better be known as Silly and Delusional Reviews, authored by top brass making brrm-brrm noises and politicians cosplaying as tough guys when their idea of a fight is a stern letter to the editor about the lack of patriotism in Foxy’s latest column.
But there is one aspect of the Starmer Project’s little ego trip which everyone seems to have overlooked, and it is that Britain has decided to stop being one of the good guys.
Everyone who works for the government, or likes Starmer, will at this point puff out their cheeks and scoff. Putting a human rights barrister in charge of weapons should be the best possible thing you could do with them. No more extra-judicial killings by the SAS, right lads? Hmmmmmm. I thought that was the whole point of them.
The thing Prime Ministers never quite get is that they may sit at the top of the chain of command, but everybody beneath them knows it’s temporary. To the Ministry of Defence – an institution which has existed in some form or other since the days of Alfred the Great – it’s just like having a supply teacher in charge. They think they wield ineffable power, but the rest of the class is thinking let’s get this one to say we can buy 12 new submarines and do colouring-in on Friday afternoons.
And it smacks of just such a wheeze that the new SDR promises levels of funding the politicians won’t commit to, on timescales that won’t be met, for drones that our enemies already have tens of thousands of, and missile factories creating long-range weapons already outclassed by hypersonic versions in the hands of Russia, China and the US.
The creation of jobs and production lines will create a more militarised economy better able to respond, if and when a major war begins. But such a war would need to wait until we are ready. In truth, we’re promising to take money from the disabled to spend on equipment that’s already defunct to fight wars that will be conducted with a touchscreen. It’s purely political patriotism.
Taking money from the sick and the crippled to make more of the same is supposed to be what the bad guys do. There’s little mention in the SDR of how we are expected to deal with a new wave of veterans, damaged by traumas of battle on-screen or IRL. Around £1.5bn will be allocated to improve housing for existing troops, which is less than half of what’s needed to make the estate fit for human habitation. And nothing has been said about what happens to the troops that will need to be recruited, once they’ve served their purpose.
But perhaps a clue to how this government plans to handle this knotty issue can be found in its decision to buy F35 jets capable of dropping nuclear bombs. The practice of relying on the purely-defensive at-sea deterrent, housed in hidden, patrolling submarines which have kept the peace for 50 years, is to be supplemented with airborne nukes which turn the most powerful weapons in our arsenal into offensive tools. What was a shield will become a first-strike device, and when defence editors tell you these are “low-yield tactical weapons, nothing like Hiroshima” remember this: they’re worse.
The bombs that fell on Japan were atomic, pea-shooters compared to the B61s which these jets can carry, and which are thermonuclear fusion weapons capable of infinitely greater destruction. Their yield can be fine-tuned according to need, and be anything up to 20 times as powerful as those that ended World War Two. It puts planes and crews at risk to fly over enemy territory, relies on gravity and is at risk of being blown-off course, and if it were to be shot down would suffer a non-fissile explosion likely to cover vast areas with fallout for thousands of years.
The whole point of such an airborne bomb is to scare the bejeebus out of everyone under the flightpath. It patrols in the same way as a permanently-clenched fist patrols at the end of your arm. A defensive tool becomes naked aggression, and the whole world was here before: it was called the Cold War, was characterised by sweaty-palmed world leaders leading every news bulletin with their chins, and it ended only when everybody put their fists back in their pockets.
In Opposition, Defence Secretary John Healey told the veterans who helped create that deterrent, and who show 345% increases in radiogenic leukaemia, 10 times the normal rate of miscarriage and elevated rates of suicide, that he was in favour of multilateral disarmament. Today, he’s threatening to fling the same radioactive legacy at untold thousands of foreign citizens.
At the same time his ministry is still telling those same veterans, as it has for 70 years, that they were perfectly safe when dirty bombs were detonated at the ends of their noses. Tell me, class, if they are so very safe, why are we spending £15bn to terrify the world with a load more of them?
The one thing every SDR never bothers to check for is morality. We rely on politicians for that. Which may be why some of the SAS will cheerfully slot a civilian, why nukes can be turned from a deterrent to a come-on-then without any discussion, and why nuclear veterans are still waiting for the Prime Minister to notice they exist.
Wrapping yourself in a flag, taking money from the poor, and leading a defence ministry hallucinating with the madness of mutually-illogical policies is not what the good guys do. If a Prime Minister does not look after our heroes and our lame, if we do not treat them with the same dignity and honour, then there are no British values left worth defending.