George Kerevan: MoD can offer no defence over its budget disarray

Published on Wednesday 1 July 2009 21:37

THE government has pumped £40 billion into bailing out Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds. To find the cash, public borrowing has gone through the proverbial roof.

The government also plans to build two super-sized aircraft carriers and four missile-carrying submarines. Coincidentally, the bill will also be 40bn, if not more. Only last week it was announced that the cost of the carriers had suddenly increased by 1bn – and they are still on the drawing board.

My point being that no-one has the foggiest notion how these six vessels will be paid for. As it is, the one bit of future public spending the Treasury has deigned to tell us about is a reduction in capital spending after the London Olympics, halving the annual cash total from 44bn in 2009-10 to 22bn in 2013-14. Either we are giving up building (or maintaining) schools, hospitals and roads while we build the most expensive miniature navy in the world, or the government has committed itself to a defence policy with no notion of how to foot the bill. I suspect the latter.

On Monday, the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) think-tank – which used to describe itself as "Blairite" – published a heavyweight report on the shambles that is Britain's defence policy. Entitled Shared Responsibilities: A National Security Strategy for the UK, it was written by a cross-party group with a strong background in security and foreign affairs.

They include Lord George Robertson (former Labour defence secretary and former general secretary of Nato), Lord Paddy Ashdown; Lord Charles Guthrie (former chief of the defence staff), and Sir David Omand (former security and intelligence co-ordinator in the Cabinet Office) – you don't get more Establishment.

Their findings make a savage indictment of an administration that has invaded or bombed Sierra Leone, Serbia, Iraq and Afghanistan. First, Britain has cut the proportion of the national cake spent on defence while massively increasing our military commitments abroad. This has over-stretched our armed forces and left them fighting with inadequate equipment.

But there is much more. In our dysfunctional government there is no area of administration more dysfunctional than defence and security – an amazing situation given New Labour's desire to police the world.

Deep in his Churchillian bunker in Downing Street, Prime Minister Gordon Brown has little time for defence matters. As a result, responsibility for security policy is dispersed among a myriad of government departments, most of which are unable to communicate with each other. This means there is no coherence in strategy or equipment procurement.

The Ministry of Defence is still run by the armed services, whose primary enemy – as always – is each other. The navy is determined to maintain senior service status by controlling the nuclear deterrent – known in defence circles as "the Big Willy". This rather begs the question why do we need to spend 20bn on four new Trident submarines: are we planning to nuke Tehran by any chance?

The navy also wants its two giant carriers – a legacy of early Blairism, when the line was to stamp a British-American pax on uppity bits of the world. That required floating airstrips to reach anywhere in the world. Question: post-Iraq, does that strategic vision still apply?

The expensive bit of the carriers is not the ships, but the Lockheed F-35 Joint Strike Fighter that will fly off them. The JSF is so mind-bogglingly expensive that it is likely to drain the entire armed services' equipment budget for years to come.

They are expensive because (1) the builders have the government over a barrel and (2) because they are fiendishly complicated. Complication means they will always break down and so require even more expensive spare parts.

By the way, forget all that guff you've heard about the JSF being "stealthy". Anything that flies during the day can be spotted by a Mk 1 eyeball.

Not surprisingly, the army and RAF are out to sink the navy's carriers. The head of the army, General Sir Richard Dannatt, has gone public and called them relics of the Cold War.

Sir Glenn Torpy, the RAF boss and a Tornado pilot during the Gulf war, is more sneaky. He has just suggested that – in the interest of saving money, of course – the RAF takes charge of all jets, including the ones flying off the new carriers. The navy can have its boats, but the boys in blue get to operate the sexy hardware.

With this kind of dissention in the MoD and military, it is not surprising that no-one seems to be in overall charge.

It is against this chaotic background that we need to view a leaked document from BVT, the builder of the two carriers, which implies that its Scotstoun and Govan yards will be closed after work on the ships is completed in 2014. My suspicion is that BVT and shipyard unions are less concerned about what happens after 2014 and more interested in ensuring that the carrier contract is not cancelled, as the IPPR report suggests.

The report also wants a rethink on any Trident replacement, though it wants too keep a minimum nuclear deterrent. The money saved should be invested in preparing for conventional police actions in "disorderly states", which will require increasing the army's strength by 15,000 personnel.

Cutting the carriers would have a devastating impact on Scottish jobs. My worry is that this may happen anyway after the general election – no matter who wins – because I can't see the money in the MoD kitty to fund them. Given where we are now, replacing the JSF with a cheaper European aircraft could help square this funding circle.

This week Sir Mike Jackson, former head of the British Army, opined that Scotland was safer as part of the UK than if independent. I appreciate the bravery of our soldiers, but I'm less impressed with their generals. No-one in Scotland, England, Wales or Northern Ireland is safe while the MoD is as badly run as it is.