Political commentary
Role-playing at sea
Ferdinand Mount
How the Royal Navy ever came to be known as the Silent Service is a mystery. All military lobbies are garrulous, but you can't beat an ululation of admirals for the detail and ferocity of their complaints. The newspapers have been swamped with leaks. Mrs Thatcher, it is claimed, plans nothing less than to destroy the Royal Navy. Her Mr Nott has been got at by the wrong people in the Defence Department. He is new. He does not understand the complexities of high strategy. Why should it be only the navy which has to suffer the cuts to make room for the £600 million-a-year Trident programme?
Because Trident is to be launched from submarines, the non-combatant might think. Shows how little non-combatant knows. Trident is the spearhead of our entire defence effort, and its cost should be shared between the three services.
Curious, is it not, how cuts are always said to be tri-service matters, while any new project is a question of 'fulfilling an essential role which only the Royal Navy can play'? From this, as from all previous defence rows, it soon emerges that the notion of a unified Department of Defence is as much a polite fiction as ever.
All defence rows have an odd language of their own. These roles, for example. Now in popular psychology, 'role-play' is the term used to jeer at the way people. behave in public, pretending to be things which really, in some mysterious inner core of self, they aren't. In defence jargon, though, role-play is all. These days, each service is no more than the sum of its roles. And there is a giddy-making arbitrariness about which roles you pick and which you discard. Take East of Suez. At one moment, essential, Britain's frontier on the Himalayas; the next, outdated imperial play-acting.
Now the role of monarch of the seas, capable of showing the flag in every port, is deemed to be a frivolous luxury; frigates and destroyers are little better than floating gin-palaces for tanning the knees of officers leaning over taffrails (do I mean taffrails?) Admiral of the Fleet Sir Edward Ashmore, a recently retired Chief of the Defence Staff, argues that, although defence of sea and air communications and general air defence are 'two bottomless pits for expenditure', we must 'concentrate on that for which by temperament, experience and geography we of all Europe have become uniquely capable, the maritime effort.' Well, he would, wouldn't he?
Sir Edward also subscribes to the fashionable view that the British Army of the Rhine no longer scares Russians because there are so many more of them than there are of us — or, well, anyway, look at the French who don't even commit their troops to NATO, both of which seem funny reasons for withdrawing a division of your own troops. If outnumbered, does one immediately take steps to be further outnumbered? Another view is that Trident is a dreadful mistake and we should have ordered our own Cruise missiles to be launched from B-52 bombers. Or both Cruise and Trident are dreadful mistakes, because we can't afford them and because they don't frighten the Russians either.
The non-combatant (NC for short) has the distinct impression that while all parties have decided preferences, the arguments they use to support those preferences tend to be less than dazzling. Besides, NC muses, has not defence been 'pared to the bone'half a dozen times already?Howcome there is so much left of it?
In manpower, the three services are still roughly at the levels planned by Duncan Sandys back in 1957 — 332,000 today with a greatly enlarged support army of civilians, as against an intended 375,000. Unfortunately, the bill for modern weapons and for satisfied servicemen has continued to rise at a far greater pace than the ability of the poor old economy to pay for it. It is a question of constantly running backwards to stay in the same place.
Every Tory government since the war has come to power promising to strengthen our defences, and every Tory government has in practice been forced to make cuts. Even Churchill slowed down the rearmament programme which Attlee had bequeathed. Historically, the Tory Party has not been noted for its enthusiasm for rearmament, which means higher taxes. Labour governments, by contrast, like Democratic Administrations in the US, having no bias against soaking the taxpayer, often turn out to be surprisingly warlike and are often ready to furnish the means.
But all agree that there are no votes in defence. It is not a subject of much popular interest. Even the feared stalwarts of the backbench Conservative defence commit tee are something of a stage army, and a not entirely united one. While they may share a general view that money spent on defence is well spent, they have their individual quirks. Mr Julian Critchley believes that Britain cannot afford an independent nuc lear deterrent. Mr Alan Clark has a complicated admiration for Russia. Mr Winston Churchill is a somewhat unreliable light tank gun, merrily swivelling, firing in all directions, occasionally jamming. Mr Keith Speed may have done himself some good in this somewhat motley fo'c'sle by getting himself sacked as Navy Minister. But in the ward room the view in such a case tends to be that we could all make this sort of flashy gesture but it really doesn't do. The feeling is less 'we need more chaps like him' and more 'we therefore commit to the deep the body of our dear brother Keith here departed.'
Mr Speed delivered a decent resignation speech to the Commons, but his crispness melted a bit during his rhapsody on the roles which would no longer be filled if the frigates were scrapped . . . patrolling in Belize roads . . . keeping a high profile in Hong Kong . . . it all seemed hardly worth £130 million per frigate, or even £50 million if we built the cheaper sort Mr Speed himself had been working on.
Mr Nott clearly outgunned him. Did we really need three different ways of destroying enemy submarines? Tory backbenchers did not have to believe everything they read in the Daily Telegraph — neatly ignoring the other papers which were full of much the same stuff. Anyway defence spending has been increasing in real terms at 3 per cent a year, as promised at the election, and will go on increasing. We ought to talk of changes in capability, not of cuts in expenditure. Mr Nott is coming on nicely at the three-card trick.
The row will no doubt be settled in the usual unsatisfactory compromise as the summer wears on. The admirals will lose a few ships and a few men, but not as many as they presently fear. But what has, I think, not quite come out so far is the political advantage which Mrs Thatcher, intentionally or unintentionally, gains in other fields by any concessions she and Mr Nott may make on defence. She will be able to say: look, we have saved jobs in the shipyards and in the navy itself by going to the absolute limit of what the country can afford to spend on defence. But that does leave us correspondingly short of money to spend on the Channel Tunnel and on electrifying the railways. The advantage of attacking on all fronts at once on public expenditure is that every concession which is forced out of you is a handy argument for saving money somewhere else. Mrs Thatcher's initial — and nearly fatal — error was to come to power with such a huge privileged area of government activity explicitly exempt from the sweep of her axe: defence, law-and-order, most of health and social security, not to mention the commitment to implement the Clegg recommendations on public pay. Bringing defence properly into the game will not make nearly as much difference to defence itself as the admirals assert. But it will be a considerable help to the Govern merles efforts to control public expenditure in general. A more awkward May for Mrs Thatcher certainly, but perhaps an easier October. Mr Nott's campaign therefore deserves the discreet support of all noncombatants — even if NC may still be a little at sea as to which role, if not which pilot, to drop.
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