The eminent former NATO Secretary General bravely tackled the Welfare Budget issue yesterday, but he failed to talk about the two enormous elephants in the room. The first is how Britain’s education system has deliberately sabotaged the Armed Forces by denigrating military life and putting off young men and women from joining-up. The second is how money for the uniformed services has been syphoned-off by Security Mandarins in Vauxhall.
Twenty five years ago the Army’s Student Presentation Teams reported growing difficulty in accessing some urban schools even though they offered to deliver some of the National Curriculum’s mandated lessons. At that time, I spoke to over ten thousand head teachers and community leaders in towns and rural areass throughout England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. They were overwhelmingly supportive of the Armed Forces and the need to instil in young people a sense of duty to the country and high achievement, which in turn provided positive encouragement for a military career. However, since then, under the misguided banner of anti-elitism and the naive assumption that Britain is not under threat, military careers have been put in the dustbin and Lord Robertson’s “corrosive complacency” has taken hold in Whitehall.
The second “elephant” can be traced to the publication of the 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review. That was the moment when the security services, which had been underfunded for decades by the Home Office and Foreign and Commonwealth Office, licked their lips because they suddenly had access to the Armed Forces’ money. Adding a second whammy of making the MoD pay for the nuclear capability meant that the Army in particular was hollowed-out so much that it could no longer deploy and sustain a full armoured brigade on operations abroad. The mantra under successive governments was that the old way of fighting with main battle tanks was over. However, what has been made absolutely plain in Ukraine and Iran is that Air Power alone will not prevail and you still need large mechanised armies to defend your country.
The third issue was touched on briefly by some Media commentators yesterday. Why did it need an 80 year-old former MP to raise this issue? Winston Churchill was under 60 years old when he took up the re-armament issue in the early 1930s when appeasement was holding sway. He and others such as Hugh Dalton, a Welsh Labour MP who was three years younger than Churchill, were accused of warmongering, but they were proved to be right. So the real question is: where are the current MPs who will take up this cudgel, before it is too late?
A Time When Tanks Were Valued
Rupert Wieloch 