28 January 2009, Dr Liam Fox MP (Conservative), Shadow Secretary of State for Defence:Thursday, March 05, 2009
Forecasters caught out …
The Times today notes that a worse-than-predicted shower of snow left motorists stranded in parts of South West England, while heavy frost caused commuter chaos in the South. Thus:Forecasters admitted being caught unawares after up to 3in (8cm) of snow landed overnight near Okehampton, in Devon, while parts of Somerset and West Dorset also experienced heavy flurries. However, the travel chaos spread beyond the areas affected by snow this morning, with several train services from the south coast to London being suspended, disrupted or cancelled due after heavy frost froze power lines.
And the Met Office forecast for the whole of the year is?2009 is expected to be one of the top-five warmest years on record, despite continued cooling of huge areas of the tropical Pacific Ocean, a phenomenon known as La Niña. According to climate scientists at the Met Office and the University of East Anglia the global temperature is forecast to be more than 0.4°C above the long-term average. This would make 2009 warmer than the year just gone and the warmest since 2005.
Considering their recent record, the scientific "consensus" tends towards the view that they couldn't forecast their way out of a paper bag.
COMMENT THREADHow things change …
… the Conservative Party has pledged to launch a Strategic Defence Review after returning to government. In addition, we will introduce a US-style system of quadrennial defence reviews and put this requirement into legislation in order to ensure that any future SDR is taken out of the political cycle. This is the only sensible course of action.
7 May 1996, Mr James Arbuthnot (Conservative), Minister of State for Defence:I have always believed that the Opposition want to carry out a major defence review because they lack the courage to say what they really want to do ...
… and stay the same!
COMMENT THREADPlaying games in the bubble
We do not hear so very much about "joined-up thinking" in government these days – presumably because it has been given up as a lost cause. For the gentlemen (and ladies) in the House, however, their task is to mount a general oversight of the affairs of government, which presumably gives them the opportunity to take a wider perspective of issues.
That, unfortunately is not the case. Our wise and dedicated MPs, it seems, fall into exactly the same trap as our masters, thinking along tramlines, totally unable to deal with the bigger picture.
Yet another classic example of this inability is today's much-hyped reportfrom the Commons Public Accounts Committee on the great Chinook disaster – a project started in 1995 which has left us with an expenditure of £422 million for eight aircraft, which originally cost £259 million and have yet to fly operationally.
For sure, it is the job of this committee to examine high expenditure projects and draw conclusions from them – and this the committee has doneagain. It has already visited this project several times. But what it is not entitled to do – and does not assist by so doing – is to draw lurid conclusions which are not supported by the evidence or for which there are other inferences to be drawn.
However, you can immediately see that the line taken by Edward Leigh, the chairman of the committee, is calculated not to bring any light to the subject but simply to create an opportunity for grandstanding. This we see in the publicity, which has The Times reporting "'Troops put at risk' by MoD blunder in deal for Chinooks" and The Daily Telegraph telling us that MoD "Chinook delays 'endanger' troops".
Here, there is a link between the shortage of helicopters on operations and the fact that troops are often as a result required to use less safe modes of transport, exposing them to risk. And there is a case to be made that the absence of helicopter lift was a direct factor in a number of deaths in Afghanistan.
Not least, there was the death of Jack Sadler, killed by an explosion as he was riding in a Wimik while escorting a slow-moving convoy of guns which could have been quickly and efficiently delivered by helicopter.
But the point here is that these deaths occurred ten years or more after the original Chinook order, and many years after 2001 when it was evident that the project was going belly-up. The fault, therefore, lies in the failure then to make alternative provisions for airlift to make up for the shortfall of capacity represented by the non-availability of these machines.
On this, we have charted endlessly the availability of alternatives and pointed out that there were many different options that could have been taken. That the MoD consistently refused to take up any of these lies at the heart of the airlift shortage.
But what is sinister about this, and Mr Leigh's pathetic attempts at self-aggrandisement, is that this issue was explored in the oral questioning by the committee. Led by Ian Davidson, we thus see this exchange:Q138 Mr Davidson: Was there nobody else, Australia, New Zealand, anybody else at all from whom we could have borrowed stuff?
Sir Bill Jeffrey is currently Permanent Secretary for the MoD, its most senior civil servant, made a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath (KCB) in the 2007 New Year Honours List. It cannot be said of Sir Bill that he actually lied. Most probably, there was nobody from whom we could have borrowedhelicopters. But there were most certainly many opportunities to leasehelicopters. Jeffrey was being somewhat economical with the actualité.
Sir Bill Jeffrey: The truth is that in the two significant campaigns that we, the Americans, the Australians and others are engaged in, helicopter support resources of this kind are at a premium. In fact, there is in my view a strong need to persuade NATO allies in particular to be ready to deploy their own helicopter capability on their own account. At the point in time you are referring to, we did explore with Americans in particular and we found it just was not possible.
Q139 Mr Davidson: In the same way that it would appear the French want to borrow our aircraft carriers, if you read the front page of The Sun—and it must be true because it is in The Sun—there was nobody from whom we could tap helicopters at the time then?
Sir Bill Jeffrey: No.
However, had Davidson been better briefed – or had he or any other members of the committee got off their idle arses and done some homework – they could have picked Jeffrey up on this, and got to the bottom of the issue.
This is not what our gilded MPs are all about these days. As long as Mr Edward Leigh can get his name in the papers with a lurid headline, the committee has served its purpose. As for ensuring that our troops are properly equipped, so that they do not have to die, well that is hardly of any importance at all.
But, if we want to play Mr Leigh's games, it is useful to note that, buried in the oral evidence – but not highlighted by the media – were some interesting snippets of information. The original request from the RAF for Special Forces helicopters was formally made in 1994, for the CH-47E (more correctly, theMH-47E). This was turned down by the then defence procurement minister, on cost-cutting grounds. From that stemmed the decision to adapt the eight HC Mk2s, a decision which led directly to this procurement debacle.
And the minister who made the decision? Ah! The Conservative colleague of Mr Leigh, Mr James Arbuthnot, currently chairman of the Defence select committee. It is he who so recently labelled the FRES project a "fiasco". Well, it seems it takes one to know one.
COMMENT THREADThey are so thin-skinned these days
It is rare for me to look back to anything that can be described as the good old days because as an historian (if only in my dreams most of the time) I know full well that those days did not exist. But there are occasions when one does wish that there was more of the politicians of yore.
I do not sigh for more honourable, truthful or even patriotic politicians. Across the field they are now as they always were. It is, as I have said before, the system that allows them so many possibilities of interference in our lives that is at fault. However, I do wish our political class showed itself to be just a little less sensitive and thin-skinned. Let's face it, nobody forced them to go into public life and, in particular, to go into politics, the most controversial of all parts of public life. Now that they are there, they have to take the rough with the smooth and accept brickbats as well as bouquets.
This appears to be a problem in other countries as well. Those of us interested in American politics have watched together with the people of that country with astonishment as the President of the United States and his staff attacked one critic after another in vicious personal terms. Say what you will about President Bush, he never descended to this sort of muckiness.
The biggest campaign President Obama seems to be waging is against Rush Limbaugh. Yes, that's right: the President of the United States is waging a political battle against a radio presenter. And we all know who is going to win that battle.
Rush's popularity is soaring and while Obama's personal popularity is not falling yet (neither did Dubya’s at this stage) his policies are sinking. Now Limbaugh has invited the President to come and debate on his show – mano a mano, as they say, without his personal advisers, muckrakers or the ubiquitous teleprompter. So far there has been no acceptance.
Well, much as I like to discuss American politics, which seems so much more entertaining and important than outs, it is time to turn to our own thin-skinned politicos. I seem to have earned the disapproval of yet another of our elected representatives, this time no less a personage than John Redwood.
Last October I wrote on the BrugesGroupBlog in a posting that was mostly about George Osborne's travails:The other name is that of John Redwood, an unlikely candidate but you never know. The great advantage of Redwood becoming Shadow Chancellor would be not his supposed euroscepticism, which, like most Tory euroscepticism, is worth considerably less than Neville Chamberlain's infamous "piece of paper", but the fact that, according to his own interminable stories, he knows how the European Union operates.
Mr Redwood, who is to address the Bruges Group on 18 March, seems to have taken umbrage. (One wonders what he makes of what the boss wrote about him about the same time. Probably had the vapours.)
This means that when Mr Redwood assures us that a Conservative government will do such things, all of which happen to be EU competence, not only we shall know he is lying, we shall also be able to assume that he knows he is lying, something one can never be quite certain of with the rest of the Tories.
Mr Redwood would, it seems, like to have some corrections made to the comments about him on the BrugesGroupBlog. Well, I am happy to issue corrections but I have no idea what it is he wants corrected: that he is lying or that he knows he is lying. As soon as I find out I shall issue that correction.
In the meantime, let us contemplate the equally dishonest and incompetent MPs of 1812 when Spencer Perceval was assassinated within the House, the only British Prime Minister to whom such a fate has befallen. In the wake of the event and, incidentally, the murderer, John Bellingham, was apprehended by one of the Prime Minister's colleagues, there were calls for greater security to be extended to Members of Parliament. This idea was rejected scornfully. Those who go into public life must take the consequences. How times have changed.
UPDATE: Those two offending paragraphs have now been deleted from the BrugesGroupBlog, though clearly they can still be read here. The BGB's future is under review. Stay tuned.
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Thursday, 5 March 2009
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