Mother England becomes Little England: (HT)
Yet another scheme by the MoD for cutting costs on the Royal Navy's new aircraft carriers has surfaced in the media, with claims now being aired that one of the two ships might be sold to India.In my darker moments I come to believe that the last Englishman will be a chap named Gupta or Patel. This is not out of any animosity toward the emergence of India as a superpower. Quite the contrary. India will prove an invaluable counter-weight to the ambitions of its authoritarian rival across the Himalayas. It is, rather, a bitter regret that the homeland of so many noble virtues and values, a nation that boasted of being the "Mother of the Free," should, quite literally, sink into ignominy.
The Guardian reports that India "has recently lodged a firm expression of interest to buy one of the two state-of-the-art 65,000 tonne carriers" and that an unnamed "defence source" has told the paper's Tim Webb that "selling a carrier is one very serious option".
The argument here is not that the RN should seek to rule the waves, merely that Britain at least punch its weight in the world. Rather than being the hub of a network of middle powers, joined together into a force with global reach and levels of strength, the British Establishment have decided to become a satrap of the Eurocracy. The twin forces at work here are shame and "practicality."
In the wake of the two world wars nationalism was given a very bad name. Love of country had blinded the leading European states to respect for humanity. Our nation, uber alles, and all that. It was a sloppy argument, and really only plausible in continental Europe. Whose nationalism? Was it the Britons, of that generation, whose love of their country had caused two world wars? Or was it their patriotism and grim determination that saved western civilization? Not all nationalisms are created equal. If shame brought men to question British greatness, the "practical" men sought to reassure those with any lingering pride to surrender to "inevitability."
Had Aristotle lived in the modern age he would have added "inevitability" to his list of logical facilities. It's a kind of argument from authority, except that authority is history. Not history as you or I know it, or Gibbon knew it, but history as Marx understood it. This is going to happen. Absolutely. No questions. Either get with the program or find yourself a place in the ashcan. Why? Because it's inevitable. It denies, of course, that men have free will. To deny that is to misunderstand man and his track record. It is to substitute a hunch for a fact.
The end of the Vasco da Gama Era meant Europe was no longer the center of a global imperial system. Hemmed between Soviet Russia and America, the marginalized Great Powers over reacted. Rather than retrench, they sought to surrender. To remain relevant Europe had to unite. Who was Britain to avoid this inevitability? The Channel is really only a narrow stretch of water. You can see, on a good day, Calais from the Cliffs. So you can. Geography is powerful, but not invincible. If it were, Europe would today be under either a Soviet or Nazi heel. What saved Europe was the Anglosphere. That people in every corner of the globe would think it right and natural to fight for an island thousands of miles away, in the name of a sovereign they had never glimpsed in the flesh. Charles de Gaulle, in rebuffing one of Britain's early attempts to enter the then Common Market, remarked that Britain did not think or act like a continental nation. Amen to that. Now if only the successors to Macmillan and Heath, would begin again to appreciate the General's sound logic.
Britain still punches her weight, but she has fiscally wrecked herself, and every department in Whitehall has no doubt been asked to draw blood from a stone to repair it. I can well imagine every UK government office is now looking for an aircraft carrier worth of savings to lend solvency to the country.
ReplyDeleteIndeed, I think Beaverbrook has nailed that point on the head. In order to afford your welfare state, you need money, and right now, you've got nothing left.
ReplyDeleteFrankly, I'm not surprised they're taking it from defence, one of those legitimate points of government expenditure that virtually everyone can agree on (except the pacifists, even though their philosophy is only pracicable due to the dying and killing of others on their behalf). It's easy to appear as an appeaser and go on arms reduction than to cut the welfare and actually give people an incentive to work for their own welfare.
I regret to say, your Parliament is dominated by Chamberlains, and your Churchills are left marginalised and ignored in the wilderness.
Still, there's hope. You just need a political bayonet (with some guts behind it!).
I shouldn't worry about the carriers, they are the battleships of the modern era. Verging on obsolete but still the symbol of naval supremacy.
ReplyDeleteAs much a many people do like to attach the label of "yesterdays" technology to aircraft carriers, the fact of the matter is that without them, expeditionary warfare in any meaningful way is not possible.
ReplyDeleteAs perverse at it may sound, the UK could not have sustained her initial effort in land-locked Afghanistan without her current carriers. Have no doubt, the future of warfare is actually a return to what we now call "expeditionary" warfare, which soldiers of Victoria's empire in the North West Frontier, would immediately recognise. It was actually the mode of industrialised warfare between WW1 and the fall of the Berlin war which was out of kilter.
Without aircraft carriers a nation is reduced to the tier of second-ranked powers, as it looses the ability to undertake independant action. And if you actually need two platforms to have one available for operations,selling one is a false economy of the worst sort. They may as well do with out both.
However the real question for the UK cabinet is - do they want to remain a first world power, with the ability to project power independantly, or do they see the UK as merely an adjucnt to the USA?
I'll have to agree with Wells. The Blair-Brown years have seen a massive expansion in the size of government. How many diversity officers could be dispensed with? There is plenty of fat in Whitehall, to say nothing of the welfare state.
ReplyDeleteCarriers are absolutely necessary to carry both aircraft and troops to where they are needed. The Falklands proved that, and the insurgent wars continue to do so. What worries me more is that we continue to deplete our Navy, wholly forgetting that in any European war we absolutely rely on the sea lanes to supply us. Without Naval power we will have to capitulate within days. We are sitting too smugly thinking that the USA or our European allies will look after us, they never have before, (it took a lot of convincing to get the US in the last time), and so we should not rely it.
ReplyDelete