Defence

How do you solve a problem like Karzai?

A few days after President Barack Obama flew to Kabul to look Hamid Karzai in the eye and demand that he combat corruption, drugs, crime and the influence of notorious warlords in his government, President Karzai has blamed foreigners, including UN and EU officials, for “very widespread” fraud during presidential and provincial elections last year. He is quoted as telling a meeting of election officials: “There was fraud in presidential and provincial council elections – no doubt that there was a very widespread fraud, very widespread … But Afghans did not do this fraud. The foreigners did this fraud.” As insane notions go this one is quite extraordinary – even

How long will it take Gordon Brown to act on this?

Defence minister Kevan Jones was extremely foolish to re-open the Gurkhas’ residency issue at the electoral cycle’s eleventh hour. Accusing Joanna Lumley of maintaining a “deathly silence” over the campaign was a temptation too many for fate.   She’s silent no longer. She convened a press conference and immediately gained the moral, and strategic, high-ground, saying: “(There is) a sense of regret that it has come to this, almost clearing our name in public. “We want to call on the prime minister to confirm that the policy is one that he still completely supports, to affirm from the prime minister that the MoD is still behind what it said it

Fraser Nelson

Back to his Tory best

George Osborne has just set the scene for tonight’s Chancellors’ debate by announcing something neither Darling or Cable will be able to match: a tax cut. It’s a real one, it will benefit some 20m workers and (best of all) it will be paid for by spending cuts. While the amount is not huge – everyone on under £43,000 will be £150 better off – it indicates the route the Conservatives would go down in government.   Trusting people with their own money, and stoking the recovery by cutting the tax on jobs. Here are the main points: 1) Osborne would raise National Insurance threshold in Apr11. One of the

The neocons were right

When your face has been slammed into a concrete pavement, as you take cover from the mortar fire, you struggle to think the best of your fellow man. I certainly did. I cursed the Iraqis who were firing at me, and swore at the Iranians who were arming them. Most of all, I thought “what the hell are you doing here, you idiot?” I could have stayed in my diplomatic posting in Washington, DC. I could have been satisfied with my work in Bosnia and Afghanistan. But I had to go to Basra. Duty, a hunt for adventure, a worry I was missing out and a feeling that we, I,

Labour’s plans require non-ringfenced Budgets to be cut by 25 percent in the next parliament

At lunchtime, the press headed off to hear the referee’s verdict on the Budget. The Institute for Fiscal Studies is now so respected that its view of the Budget largely determines the news agenda. Its briefings are now so popular that they can no longer be held in their basement. So, journalists, economists and accountants piled into a room at the University of London Union which is normally used for battle of the bands contests rather than Budget analysis. The most striking number the IFS presented was that if Labour ringfences the already protected areas of spending for the whole parliament, other departmental budgets will have to be cut by

Vested interests at the MoD

Yesterday, Alistair Darling pledged £4 billion for the MoD, earmarked for Afghanistan. He did not specify what the cash would buy, presumably because the Defence Spending Review will take place after the election. But a day is a long time in politics and the forthcoming spending review no longer seems to be so decisive: BAE and the MoD have signed a £127million four-year contract to design the proposed Type 26 frigate. This is welcome in principle: the Type 22 and 23 frigates need to be replaced eventually and British companies and their employees will prosper. But this contract should have fallen under the spending review – defence procurement remains unreformed

Entente nouvelle?

Could Britain and France share defence assets? Julian Glover’s column in the Guardian concludes: ‘As for the new carriers, they are, unlike much defence equipment, adaptable and manoeuvrable. They could sail to the rescue in Haiti or feed the hungry in Mogadishu as easily as obliterate Tehran. We should build and deploy the first, and persuade the French (whose own grandiose carrier doesn’t work) to complete and equip the second: a shared fleet for two European nations that have yet to reconcile themselves to their more modest place in the world.’ Politicians on both sides of the Channel speak eagerly of deeper entente. But there is not always a way

A Case for Scrapping the Joint Strike Fighter?

Photo: Eric Piermont/AFP/Getty Images Cato’s Tad DeHaven and Think Defence each have good posts on the future of the increasingly troubled Joint Strike Fighter. Costs have risen by 50% since 2001 and the plane is already looking like it will be delivered years late. Since the main justification for the JSF was that it was going to control costs this is a problem. The Americans will stick with it, but does that mean we have to? At present we seem to be heading for the worst of all possible worlds. As Think Defence puts it: It does not take a genius to work out that volumes will be reduced and

A welcome return of defence diplomacy

Shadow Defence Secretary Liam Fox has given an interview to the Sunday Express, where he talks about overcoming a sense of “colonial guilt” bestowed by revisionist historians and the need for a new government to forge defence links with commonwealth nations, such as Australia and New Zealand, but he also cited India and Saudi Arabia. They have a “strong appetite” for closer defence links with the UK, he argues.   Looking at variable defence relationships with countries like India, and non-NATO partners like Australia makes good sense. Nicolas Sarkozy has done the same – and even invited Indian troops to march down the Champs-Élysées last year on Bastille Day. A

RIP EDA?

If you listen to the Tory front bench, you’d be excused for believing that Rue des Drapiers, 17-23, Ixelles in Belgium houses a place of unadulterated anti-British evil. What lies at this address? The European Defence Agency (EDA), which the Tory party has pledged to pull Britain out of should they win power. Does this institution really aim to curtail Britain’s procurement of its own military hardware, and suborn future purchases to a common European plan? The truth is different and a lot more boring. The EDA does not procure anything for EU governments. It does not force the military to do anything. It exists to develop European defence capabilities

Clegg: Heir to Thatcher?

Nick Clegg has a blue rose in his mouth in tomorrow’s Spectator, serenading readers – and showing his hidden Tory side. I have to say, he puts his heart into it. Not only does the Lib Dem leader say he’ll end the structural deficit with 100 percent spending cuts (not the 20 percent tax rises, 80 percent cuts combo that the Tories advocate), but he even heaps praise in Lady Thatcher. More, he describes her as something of an inspiration: just as she took on vested interests in the 1980s, so he will take on the banks now.   Personally, I can’t quite see the equivalence – and Clegg as

Lloyd Evans

Tornado in the chamber

It was like a volcano going off. At PMQs today Cameron was calmly dissecting the prime minister’s underfunding of the Afghan war when he quoted two former defence chiefs who’d called Brown ‘disingenuous’ and ‘a dissembler’. Then someone shouted, ‘they’re Tories!’ Cameron lost control. Instantly, completely. His temper just went. White in the face, he leaned his flexed torso across the dispatch box, hammering at it so hard that it nearly disintegrated. ‘Is that it?’ he yelled. ‘Is that what this tribalist and divisive government thinks of those who serve this country!?’ Rippling with anger he demanded that the PM dissociate himself from his backbenchers’ smears. Brown stood up, in

Yet more good money after bad

So, the government is tying the taxpayer to £11bn of new IT contracts before the election, making the Tories’ planned immediate IT cuts very expensive. Is this latest example of a scorched earth policy? Or Labour ‘getting on with the job’? With the polls narrowing, I can’t see Labour setting a fiscal booby-trap that they could well have to de-fuse. But there’s the rub. Brown scorches the turf beneath his feet as he governs: he cannot stop spending money. An £11bn bender is irresponsible in this climate, plus Labour has a baleful record on IT contracts. It has bungled a staggering £26bn on flawed IT systems, many of which were

Brown seems to have blustered his way through yet another potential crisis

Yesterday, Gordon Brown argued that he curbed defence spending to prevent the public finances from spiralling out of control – but added that he had still given the MoD everything they had asked for.  So, when it’s anything but defence spending, he boasts of all that extra “investment”.  But when it comes to defence, he suddenly grows a fiscal conscience, of sorts.  If we weren’t talking about our country’s ability to fight two wars, there’d be something crudely hilarious about it all. Today, various defence figures have rounded on Brown; arguing, rightly, that his tractor statistics avoided the fundamental point – that, despite increases in the defence budget, the military

All quiet on the Chilcot front

I just took a quick stroll around the block from Old Queen St, to check out the situation on the ground outside the Chilcot Inquiry.  The most striking thing is how few protestors there are – about ten at most, I’d say, and a fraction of the number that marched out against Blair a few weeks ago.  Brown doesn’t even make one placard’s list of – and I quote – “Lying R. Soles,” which includes Blair, Campbell, Straw and Goldsmith. It’s all rather suggestive of how Brown has managed, over the years, to separate himself from those who made the political and moral case for war.  But there lies the

Fraser Nelson

Brown’s betrayal of Basra is the real issue here

Might Gordon Brown get away with it at the Chilcot Inquiry today? I suspect so. The media seems obsessed with the run-up to war, whereas the real crime was the betrayal of Basra. Brown made false claims to Parliament about the fall of violence in the city which, as he would have known, was being left in the hands of Shiite death squads. He would have known that, as the Chilcot Inquiry established, we had just a couple of hundred soldiers trying to keep peace in a city of millions. He misled Britain out of Basra as knowingly and mendaciously as Blair led Britain into Iraq – leaving the people

Brown faces his interrogators

Tick, tick, tick … there’s only an hour or so to go before Brown’s appearance in front of the Chilcot Inquiry.  And, athough I generally feel that this whole process is a waste of time, effort and newsprint, there’s still something grimly fascinating about today’s proceedings. Brown has, after all, always tended to keep a low profile when it comes to Iraq.  Let’s see whether Chilcot & Co. can trudge their way through the murk of tractor statistics and other obfuscations. We all know, broadly, what they’ll be asking.  How did Brown feel about the Iraq War?  And did he, as Chancellor, provide enough money for it?  In which case,

Wanted: The Hague Doctrine

Out of the conference hall, and back on to the campaign trail, it would nice to see the Tories talking about the things which make them ready for government.  In particular, William Hague should make a foreign policy speech setting out what ideas he has, and which would merit him being referred to as the likely “greatest foreign secretary in a generation” by David Cameron. Hague’s past foreign policy speeches have been solid, but unspectacular. He ticks off the likely issues, talks about global trends and looks knowledgeable about the crises that could emerge. But there is no overaching concept, such David Miliband’s idea of Britain as a “global hub”.

Defence debate? No thanks, we are British

A few days ago, BBC Newsnight ran in effect the first live TV debate between the three parties when Secretary of State for Defence, Bob Ainsworth, Shadow Defence Secretary, Liam Fox, and Liberal Democrat defence spokesperson Nick Harvey shared a platform at the Imperial War museum. The programme was meant to focus on the main issues facing the future of British defence and security. In the event, it defaulted to a discussion about Afghanistan. Despite Jeremy Paxman’s prodding, many of the strategic questions were shirked as an audience of generals and airmen fought each other over which service had played a bigger role in the Afghan theatre, and the issue

Byrne’s cuts deception

Liam Byrne has caught the Brown bug – not for raging in his underpants you understand, but for fiscal conceits. Tony Wright, the Public Administration Select Committee Chairman, called Liam Byrne (and the opposition as well) to task for misleading the public on the dire effects of cuts. Wright may be proved right: frontline services could well be decimated by the cessation of funding. But he missed Byrne’s deception. The indispensible Andrew Sparrow reports: ‘Byrne said that between 1985-86 and 1988-89 public spending as a share of GDP dropped by 8.6%. Between 2011-12 and 2014-15 it is forecast to drop by 5.9%.’ Because Treasury figures have been constantly out, the