The threat that next month's budget will
include large cuts in defence spending – perhaps as much as £1 billion – has
brought out the worst in the Tory right.
"If the Chancellor is looking for areas
to cut," fulminated Winston Churchill MP in the House of Commons on
Monday, "surely it is in the abuse of social security that he should be
looking." "Defence spending has already been cut much too far, in
order to pay for ludicrous welfare benefits," echoed Lord Wyatt of Weeford
in the Times the next day. "Billions go on untaxed child benefits
enjoyed by millions of the comfortably off, who would not suffer without them.
The scandal of the rising billions spent on invalidity benefit continues. Theft
from the NHS costs £500 million a year . .."
Already there are rumblings of a revolt by
the Tories' barmy back-bench bastards when the budget comes to the vote, which
if it happens will be the most serious challenge to John Major's authority
certainly since publication of Margaret Thatcher's memoirs and perhaps since
the rebellion over Maastricht.
It is tempting in the circumstances for the
opposition parties to sit back and watch the spectacle of the Tories yet again
tearing themselves apart. But the temptation should be resisted. Both Labour
and the Liberal Democrats need to make it clear how they would do things
differently from the government – and that means more than merely calling for a
"proper" defence review.
The brutal reality is that the very basis of
Britain's defence policy is obsolete. Apart from Northern Ireland, the raison
d'etre of the British military since the late 1940s has been to sustain a
key element in the deterrence, and if necessary repulsion, of an attack on
western Europe by the Soviet Union and its allies. That is why Britain is a
member of Nato, why it retains a substantial army and a large airforce in
Germany, why it has nuclear missile submarines and a significant navy. It is
also why the defence sector is such an important part of the British economy.
It was always arguable whether the actual
threat from the Soviet Union justified the scale of the British military: even
at the height of the cold war, the left argued that defence policy-makers
misunderstood Soviet intentions and that the over-emphasis on military
preparedness distorted the British economy.
Today, however, the problem is of an entirely
different order. Put simply, the Soviet threat has ceased to exist with the
demise of the Soviet Union. And, however unpleasant Boris Yeltsin or his
successors might be, the chances of something comparable re-emerging within
the next 20 or 30 years are extremely slim.
Of course, the world of the "new world
order" is no more peaceful than the world of the cold war: there are
currently some 50 hot wars raging across the globe, one of them, in Bosnia, on
the edge of western Europe. There are still roles for the British military in
peacekeeping, protecting humanitarian relief efforts and, more often than the
government thinks, intervening directly to defend democracies against
aggression.
But such roles require a military that is
much smaller and, equally importantly, has a very different shape and very
different equipment. So far, there has been little progress since the end of
the cold war in reducing the size of the armed forces and none whatsoever in
changing their structure and hardware to suit the new conditions.
There has been no redefinition of Britain's
defence roles: the slimmed down forces are supposed simply to be doing a little
less of just what they were doing before. Britain remains committed to
retaining nuclear weapons, an army and an airforce in Germany, and a navy
capable of patrolling most of the North Atlantic Ocean.
The only large procurement project to be
cancelled in the past three years has been the embryonic
"sub-strategic" tactical air-to-surface nuclear missile, pronounced
dead by Malcolm Rifkind this week, which only ever became a big deal at the
very end of the cold war after the INF treaty outlawed land-based medium-range
nuclear weapons in Europe. The government remains committed to such projects as
the European Fighter Aircraft and the Challenger 2 tank, which make no sense
except as job-creation schemes now that the cold war is over.
Virtually nothing
has been done to help with the conversion of military factories to civilian
production. Tens of thousands of workers in the defence industries have lost
their jobs; tens of thousands more face the dole in the next four or five
years.
All this makes the Tories vulnerable to attack
on defence from the left for the first time in years. Yet Labour has had almost
nothing to say on defence policy beyond grumbling about
"Treasury-led" defence spending cuts, and the Liberal Democrats are
not much better. At times, it appears that the opposition would like to
restore the government's cuts.
Part of the problem is, of course, that both
parties have their eyes on marginal seats in areas of the south and south-west
hit by cuts in defence spending – and indeed a crude unqualified call for
defence spending cuts, as advanced by some on the Labour left, would be not
only electoral suicide but wrong. Millions rely on the defence industries for
their livelihoods, and they no more deserve to be thrown on to the dole than
miners or hospital workers.
But there is every reason to believe that a
well-presented case for planned conversion of military industries and redefinition
of Britain's defence roles could strike a chord even in those parts of the
country reliant on defence spending. That the opposition has failed to produce
anything approaching a reasoned alternative to the Tories' shambles on defence
is symptomatic of an appalling loss of nerve.
