Trade union Unite has warned that continued delays to the government’s Defence Investment Plan are putting UK defence jobs and industrial skills at risk, according to the union.
The Defence Investment Plan was originally expected to be published alongside the Strategic Defence Review last summer, but has since been delayed several times. Unite said it has now been advised the document may not appear until March or later, increasing uncertainty across the defence manufacturing sector. Unite represents thousands of workers across the UK defence industry and said it has held repeated discussions with government over recent months, including submitting reports calling for defence spending commitments to be translated into long-term industrial investment.
The union said speculation over the potential purchase of US-made defence equipment, rather than domestically produced systems, is contributing to instability for employers and workers. Unite argued that the issue extends beyond employment and directly affects national security and the preservation of specialist industrial skills. According to Unite, the UK’s low investment rate compared with other G7 nations risks undermining its ability to sustain capabilities such as combat aircraft, helicopters, uncrewed systems and satellites. The union said prolonged uncertainty could lead to the loss of highly specialised skills that are difficult to regenerate once lost.
Unite is urging the government to publish the Defence Investment Plan as a matter of urgency and to ensure it includes commitments to several major programmes. These include replacing older RAF fighter aircraft with new Typhoons assembled in the UK and equipped with British-built engines and weapons, awarding the medium lift helicopter programme to Leonardo’s Yeovil facility, and retaining domestic production of the Skynet military satellite communications system.
Sharon Graham, Unite’s general secretary, said: “The government’s inertia on this issue is an act of self-harm. With employers planning in the dark and threatening job losses as a result, the government needs to stop the dither and delay.”
She added: “Failing to back British defence manufacturing would be a devastating own goal, destroying jobs and skills.”
Graham said earlier commitments linking increased defence spending to jobs, skills and innovation now needed to be backed by firm decisions.
“When the announcement was made for higher defence spending, it came with guarantees around jobs, skills and innovation. We now need to move beyond the warm words and deliver,” she said.
Unite also confirmed that senior defence representatives at Leonardo and other major defence sites have written directly to Prime Minister Keir Starmer calling for swift action to prevent job losses and safeguard industrial capability.
What a crazy situation, On the one hand the PM and Chancellor are claiming to be putting the UK on a War Footing, whilst on the other the MOD and Defence Chiefs are having to make some “difficult decisions” due to a lack of funding. The announcement of yet another round of defence cuts seems imminent, albeit undoubtedly hidden by the usual promises of Jam tomorrow (2030? 2035?)
Much of the necessary work would not be completed until after the next election anyway even if they started it tommorrow. Not really sure why they are afraid to start work? Perhaps the current Government don’t understand it is normal to spread the costs.
Going to park and/or sell a carrier.
If Brazil makes a good offer, consider it a done deal. The UK is the only NATO country that is disarming instead of rearming.
Brazil doesn’t have any fixed wing aircraft that it could use from a carrier. Very few countries do.
Must be Trump’s fault…
Why can’t they release an initial DIP so we can all get a gist of it and then a finalised DIP later? Can even call it “double DIP-ping”.
The ongoing delay is very morale sapping amd making us all think the worst.
Because they don’t want to spend anything on defending the country, on the contrary they want to disarm it, it’s going to be the worst government in defense matters in the last 40 years, and that’s saying something, because the previous ones have been bad or very bad.
“the worst government in defense matters in the last 40 years”
Defence*
And also, were you around the past 15 years? It doesn’t sound like you were.
It’s telling that the plan hasn’t been released. That means the government are trying to put spin on it and fudge the results. The DIP shouldn’t be necessary after a clear SDSR that should have guided what was required and orders for equipment and structuring of the armed forces should have followed the SDSR. The DIP is just a chance for the government to row back, fail to invest and not equip and arm or prepare the armed forces to face the very real threats.
All our national wealth goes on welfare and ballooning benefits bill
Triple lock pensions
Illegal asylum seekers with 90,000 in hotels ( accomodation, clothing, food and even things like mobile phones paid for by UK taxpayers):then add 80,000 in the last 5 years given social housing in priority over UK citizens. We are mugs.
If people voted overwhelmingly for this ultra-woke government, it’s their responsibility.
They didn’t vote overwhelmingly mate, while they got the most MPs, their majorities were extremely small, in some cases just a few hundred, hence the total lack of control the muppets in the cabinet have over there party and the parliamentary Labour Party, as all those clowns are running scared of losing their seats with such small majorities.
Just order 150 Typhoons, another 10 P8s, quadruple GBAD and some JSM – there done. Control the air control the battle-space.
You forgot the 5 additional Wedgetails
How many 10s of billions would that cost? Pure fantasy numbers.
Yep – defence ain’t cheap which is why we used to spend 40% of our gdp on it. Now under liberal governments it’s down to 2%. The Ukrainians will see defence spending as essential – if you think it’s fantasy ask yourself how much you believe your families safety is worth
The F35 is cheaper and better. Theres a reason why the Typhoon is due to go of service in 9 years time
But is dependent long term on Trump not throwing a tantrum and stopping future sales to the UK. Given his impulsivness that is haedly out of the question. Likewise with our SLBMs. We really need to decouple from the US as much as possible (unfortunately)
Typhoon will be in service until at least 2040. That is the RAF’s current estimated OSD, but as GCAP will not be ready in sufficient numbers by then, many believe that Typhoon will be around well beyond. It is also European, so not dependent on the ramblings of the US President.
I would argue that we need to de-risk US arms orders where possible. Ordering more Typhoon now would help if we find ourselves unable to order or operate F35, by maintaining fast air mass. Not that it helps the carriers.
Trump wil be gone in 3 years. The Typhoons radar cross section wont get smaller in 3 years. It doesn’t change the fact the Typhoon is an older less capable aircraft that is more expensive
All true, but it is under our control, which the F35 program will never be. For me, de-risk means hedging our bets, don’t abandon the F35, but realise GCAP is far away and may always be too expensive to field in numbers. Hence an additional order of Typhoon now.
It is a mute point, as we all know this government will not increase spending to pay for it.
Paying more money for a less capable aircraft that will be available later isn’t a good use of limited resources
It is if the US decides it does not like what you are doing cuts off your spares and grounds your fleet until it does as you as.. yes something sovereign capability is a bit more expensive and is a little less good but it is sovereign and in geopolitics and geostrategy there is nothing more important… cheap wizz bangs that you buy from someone else create an illusion of false power.
Will MAGA be gone in 3 years ?
South America will be great. The Mercosur trade deal is the one to watch. Not sure about the USA 😂
Storm shadow, Meteor, UK production – it’s a potent platform and alongside Wedgetail a very potent mix. Alongside a 150 order also quadrupling of pilot training. Forget the army all immediate funds and focus should go into RAF, GBAD and RN…
150 less capability more expensive aircraft is not a good use of limted funds available
The threat is today not 10 years time. You ain’t going to get any more F35s quickly nor the trained pilots with them.
Tick tock
Err the production rate for the Typhoon is lower than the f35. 191 F35s were delivered last year, just under 1/3 of the total number of typhoons built in 32 years of production. There are 1300 F35s in service after 11 years of production and 609 typhoons in service after 32 years. Once again. The F35 is cheaper, more capable and will be available sooner.
In 9 years time the F35 will still be armed with Asraam, amraam and iron bombs.
Quite a step up from Typhoon?, eh?
AA
We need to cap the order for F-35B, fit what we have with Storm Breaker and spend the money on the A model instead. And maybe replace the T1 Typhoons with a dozen new ones. I would sleep easier if we had an extended range Storm Shadow, the 7000 Nightfall missiles and the 2000km Anglo- German IRBM.
So NATO has essentially fallen, the US looks like it’s turning into a raging Geostrategic Competitor to the EU and is essentially threatening other NATO members with invasion.. and we cannot even start publishing what we are going to be investing in defence wise…
Here is a novel thought just do what is in front of you, make the orders and investments you needed to do now.. having your defence industrial capability start to crumble because you are not ordering the kit needed when your entire Geostrategic position is falling apart before your eyes is insane.. to make a journey you put one foot in front of another foot… just do that, order some fucking equipment…
This is to true issue with modern UK government ( from my experience of having to take instructions from the DOH), the ministries are utterly and completely obsessed with publishing huge complex silver bullet plans.. and seem to think getting the silver bullet plan looking wonderful for publication is the be all and end all.. and in having this obsession HMG cripples its executive agencies ability to enact policy on the ground.
Write to your MP and say this (possibly without the f bomb, though I share the sentiment)
I have on many occasions.. to both my MP and I even directly told the minister for health ( Jeremy hunt ) to his face what I thought of the DOH.. I even wrote a full investigation report ( root cause analysis) on why the department of healths culture of massive levels of written instructions was causing significant harm.. it did F bomb all 😂😂😂 and I was a senior leader who’s whole job it was to tell they what the failures were.
The NHS is the biggest Welsh Chapel in the world. The good news is the choirs are good and it’s good value for money. The bad news is that the oppressive woke puritanism, management by targets and bunker mentality are not a lot of fun for staff or patients. The NHS is the repository of the good and bad in our culture. Weird.
The target mentality is like everything else both good and bad.. if you understand the point of the target ( the requirement health outcomes) and aim to achieve that it’s good. The problem is many managers don’t actually understand the point of the target and seem to think the target is the outcome…. Personally it’s why I don’t think you should have none clinician healthcare managers… All healthcare managers should have a fundamental understanding of the system they manage and if they have not first hand experienced the pain and death they cannot make valid choices.
It’s actually sensible because most very experienced clinicians in there 50s are really a bit slow and middle aged for the cut and thrust of direct care.. but their knowledge, experience and wisdom is second to none.. I’ve worked with both old clinical staff who became senior managers and senior managers who did not go through the clinician ranks.. I know which ones understand the purpose of the target.
I’m just a patient ( or customer) so I can’t comment on who makes the best managers. In general though management by target, especially if it is linked to approval ratings or financial rewards often leads to offloading problems to prior or subsequent or alternative processes or to bastardising the process rather than re-engineering it. For improvement of a system or process it has to be stable and predictable in the first place. To an outsider the NHS does not look stable – more like jumping from one crisis to the next. From talking to friends it also looks like there is a lot of ‘rework’ going on – often a sign of rushing things or taking short cuts. Lots of treatments work well – e.g. new knees and hips – but for me there are also some quite serious cultural issues in the NHS; as evidenced by a series of failed reviews of maternity services, it’s pretty clear to me that there is an anti woman, anti- mothers culture – a sort of perverted attitude to women and mothers. The fiasco of the geordie nurses in the changing room gives us an insight into this misogyny.
The outsourcing of mental health hospitals is also not working; the treatment is slipshod, disrespectful and ineffective.
I have wrtitten to my MP and to Wes Streeting to ask why we are rolling out a vaccine for Chickenpox, a disease which has caused virtually zero deaths, while we suffer 3rd world maternity services which maim and kill dozens each year. Wrong priorities. Lions lead by donkeys comes to mind.
It’s interesting one of the big issues is healthcare is never stable.. Peter Drucker who is essentially the single most respected thinker around modern management theory famously said that healthcare systems are the most complex human systems ever devised.. even just the pathway for one disease is profoundly complex and there are somewhere in the region of 50,000 different diseases.. most will have exactly the same symptoms but very different causes, outcomes and treatments..as well as individual presentations.. many people will wander around with multiple diseases and the treatment for one will interact with another and different treatments interact with each other… this means in a healthcare system there are almost unlimited ways to causes harm.. and may treatments just randomly kill or cause harm for shits and giggles..
Essentially what this means is anytime you interact with a patient you are essentially undertaking an educated guess and balancing probability of harm.. is the treatment more likely to harm than the disease.. and consider this.. lung cancer and a virus can and do produce the same set of long term symptoms.. but if you fully investigate for lung cancer and give a CT you have a not insignificant chance of giving the person the same cancer you were looking for… infact in the US its thought that 5% of all cancers are caused by CT scans.. consider how many people have a post viral cough.. some of those will actually be lung cancer and if you find it early they may survive, but most will not .. so how many scans would you need to do to change the outcome for 1 person ( 10,0000 ? ) but for every 1000 people you CT to see if its cancer you will give 1 person cancer…
Not only have you got this complexity but treatment changes constantly.. medical professionals need life long learning because the treatments they give change like the wind… a new diagnosis pathway this week an new drug next week a new surgery the week after..
Then you have the morality questions… how much money should we spend to keep one person alive for one more day of suffering ? If it costs £50,000 pounds to keep a palliative cancer patient alive for 1 month.. but with that you can return the mobility and remove pain for 10 patients for 10 years each ( with knee replacements) what should you do…
Maternity is a classic example.. we consider medicalisation of birth safe and yes if you have midwife led birth at home some will die.. but also if you have medical lead birthing in a hospital there is evidence the interventions cause deaths ( infact more deaths)..
The problem with healthcare is we go right and people die.. so we are forced to go left and then people die so we go down the middle and people die… and the public make us go left against…it’s a never ending cycle of trial and error.
Your living essentially within a constant web in which it’s truly impossible to predict or model the outcome of your actions and changes.. you employ more advanced nurse practitioners in primary care to see patients to save money, but nurses are far more risk averse than Drs and the number of diagnostics tests undertaken goes up and costs more.. you don’t invest more in physio for recovery to save money and two years later you system is overwhelmed by cronic muscular skeletal issues.. if you give all men over 50 PSA tests you will create massive levels of false positives for prostate cancer and over treat huge numbers of men to massive detriment.. but when we don’t check men for prostate cancer we get large numbers of men who will suffer from treatable cancer…..and it goes on and on and on
Just your example of chicken pox.. infact I’ve had to watch a child die of chickenpox as we could not same the poor little thing.. and every year about 20 people die of chicken pox in the Uk mainly young children and pregnant mothers, with about 4000-5000 people hospitalised with major complications.. the modelling on vaccination shows that we would essentially remove those deaths as well as almost all hospital admissions and would even after the cost of the vaccine program save 15 million pounds a year.. but actually what will be the uptake..will it cost more to actually try and get everyone vaccinated etc etc.. will in 20 years we find the vaccine has some long term consequences we did not know..
And sometimes we just have diseases that should be fine but make a small shift and kill your patients in the most hideous way imaginable.. one hour the patient is talking to you with the symptoms of a common cold and the next hour their lungs have liquefied into a bloody pool on an ED floor as you explain the grieving young family you have not the foggiest idea what the hell just happened…. It turns out the bacteria that did it was a common one a huge number of us have in our respiratory system, it just had a random genetic shift and melted the persons lungs.rare but happens… ( that one scared the shit out me for about 2 years).
Finally you just have the cases where literally there is no agreement on what is the right thing to do there is a very good argument to be had that the prescription of SSRIs has been a disaster for wider mental health.. infact before SSRIs were pushed the Japanese did not even have a world for depression.. the drug companies had to make one up to push SSRIs into the Japanese market.. there is now a massive argument raging between NHS consultants on the efficacy vs massive side effects of SSRIs.. but we still dish them out like smarties if someone goes to their GP feeling a bit low.
or you just have plain bad actors that convinces everyone to do the wrong thing for.. a classic case is Oxycodone when the drug company persuaded the US establishment that it was none additive and should be prescribed for mild pain as they started pushing oxycodone without any oversight about 90 people a day in the US were dying of prescription painkillers.. it’s even worse now.
On top of this you just add the public changing how they do things or being unreasonable.. the MMR vaccine and its poor uptake.. the Liverpool care pathway, the best thing that ever happened to the care of the dying..destroyed essentially because the public could not accept the simple truth that treating dying people is cruel or that giving a dying person hydration actually increases the suffering they will endure ( try telling a relative it’s better to die dry and dehydrated and that by hydrating their dying relative they are enacting huge cruelty on them.. )
Finally ion top of all that you add the political.. every time a government comes in they all insist on reforming the NHS.. no other nation goes near their healthcare system because it’s like having a stadium of a million dominoes.. flick one over in reform and you have no idea how the million will fall.. and the British government flick the domino every 5 years.
Modern healthcare systems are without doubt the true miracle of our age.. Almost all of us should all really be dead by 65 and instead our average life expectancy is 82.. and to support that our healthcare system provides 600million patient contracts a year.. 1.7 million patient episodes of care a day. It’s prescribes and dispensers 1.2 billion prescription items a year, undertakes over 1 billion labs diagnosed tests a year, about 60 million radiological tests..
Essentially the management of a healthcare system should be organic and a national exercising over decades… the moment you put in short term political fixes you screw it up…or if you leave it to its own devices you get a disastrous nightmare ( the US system is the best example of system that needs more control inplace.. a 4.4 trillion dollar system that actively kill many hundreds of thousands of people a year.. estimated for the US system are about 250,000 deaths a year from errors in hospital care, 80,000 a year to hospital acquired infections, 100,000 a year to none error drug adverse reactions, then you have around 100,000 prescription drug overdoses a year… so the iatrogenic ( healthcare) deaths from the US system are about half a million a year.. interestingly the NHS is actually considering one of the safest systems in regards to iatrogenic deaths at about 19,000-20,000 a year for all types,.. considering the US has only 6 times the population but about 25 times the iatrogenic deaths… ( almost all caused by, over prescribing, over testing and overtreating… the curse of private healthcare).
Morning Jonathan, well, that was better our than in! My apologies. I must have caught you too close to January Blue Monday 😂
I prescribe a lie down, a cup of chamomile tea and a long walk in the country to de- stress.
😂 I have two things I love to write about, healthcare and geopolitics/geostratagy.. it’s very therapeutic 🤣😂
I retired from healthcare management for a good reason and just see clients privately.. no politics no KPIs.. just me and them.. it’s bliss
A wise move I would say 😊
You are right about complexity of course. I was always taught that the way to approach a complex (maths) problem was to break it up into smaller problems. I do wonder whether the NHS ( driven by the treasury and the pharma industry view that statistics = science) is not leaping prematurely to mass vaccination as the solution to every problem. For example, 20 deaths from chickenpox looks to me like a ‘Black Swan’ where we haven’t spotted that the colour is different. Just a thought.
To be very honest Paul the chicken pox is pure trying to reduce admissions.. it’s not the deaths it’s the 5000 acute admissions. Average length of stay for each of those admissions is 4 days… that’s about 20,000 bed days a year..there are also about 5 gp appointments per 100,000 patients per week for chickenpox.. that’s in the ballpark of 150,000 gp visits a year.. so 20,000 bed days and 150,000 GP visits all at the busy time of year that you have zero control over.. add in the fact it’s 2 weeks off school for every child and a parent having to take time off work as career… that’s all high cost stuff.. those child admissions are about £300 pounds a bed day before treatment costs.emergency GP visits are not cheap either..
The final bit is the whole burden is in a 3 month period each year with cycles of some years going well over.. at the same time all the other diseases hit their peak..as you cannot surge healthcare provision ( it’s one of the big issues) It’s actually even bigger than it seems.. ( you end up with over provision in the summer to manage your winters surge.
So if there is a cheap easy way to stop all that you do it.. as we already run the childhood imms program it’s go no more cost in appointments we don’t need any more staff ( we just add it onto one of the standard childhood imms appointment) and the NHS will pay at most a tenner a pop for the vaccine.. so it would be about 20 per child with no real extra resources needed.. but saves you 20,000 acute bed days and 150,000 GP appointments.. it’s a no brainer to be honest.. I would have done it a couple of decades ago and saved the UK hundreds of millions.. infact Canada and the US have been doing it since 1995 in their childhood imms programmes.. Germany Japan Italy everyone is doing it now…
Sorting maternity on the other hand is hard yards..and not doing the work on the vacation program would make any difference to maternity as the core resource is fundamentally different.. the fundamental issue is staffing and in healthcare that’s murder to manage.. we simplify don’t have the number of midwife’s and consultants we need for our birth rate.. and because of that we have basically broken the staff we have so they leave and make it worse… the big issue from the start of train ing to having an expert midwife takes about 8 years and for a consultant about 15 years… so if you even started now your not seeing the fix for a decade.. and you can do all the management magic you like in healthcare if you don’t have the clinical staff you don’t have a service (just like a navy without frigates)… the final killer is that to train clinical staff takes away the very staff resource you need to run your service ( this is the problem I faced as a workforce lead for emergency care.. I did not have enough advanced nurse practitioners but to make more meant I had to divert advanced nurse practitioners away from front line care to develop and grow the new ones)
So essentially the vaccine program is a piss easy proven intervention that will save money and suffering and we have the staff and systems already in place to deliver and it moves an urgent care issue that helps overwhelm in winter to a summer planned care do it when it’s convenient program ( if you can turn an emergency unplanned and uncontrolled event into a controlled planned care event you always do it). Where as maternity is an entrenched cultural staffing issue that will take a decade of focused work to dig out of.. if we can because finding people who want to even train as midwives is hard.. men will not do it and you need the top of the draw women who can both get a clinical degree and work in a high stress life and death environment day and night after day and night and get paid less than a teacher, plumber etc.. and finally live with the fact when they make the mistake ( and they will because every clinician has to live with the fact they will fuck up.. we just hope we don’t kill them) they may loss their career, go to court and have to know they killed a baby… it’s a shit job.. I would not do it for all the tea in China any my whole career has been emergency care, major incident management and investigation and prevention of catastrophic mistakes that killed people… so if I would not do it you know it’s bad 🤣😂
Up to this point in time the European option was really to placate Trump hang tight onto their chairs and run the clock down on the Trump presidency in the hope that the mid terms would pour a bit of cold water over his antics.
That overlooked the fact that if MAGA does badly in the mid terms Trump will just denounce it as fake voting or something else that he dreams up in or someone tells him 5 mins before.
Some very weird stuff going on here as US has the right to base loads of forces on Greenland anyways and a minerals deal is perfectly doable.
Or is this just an attempt to coerce a really good minerals deal for Trump’s golf buddies?
It will all be about something incredibly simply at the end of it so simple and so basic that we probably wouldn’t credit it.
It is about something very simple, Trump and his ego.
I honestly think this is creating the crisis.. if we think the unthinkable and consider the trump government just another authoritarian government, play number one of these governments is to create external crisis and threats to keep their support base in line and fired up.. and give excuses for clamping down if we consider the actions we are seeing in the US in that context it makes every sense.. to be honest I would lay you a 50/50 bet on the U.S. checks and balances surviving the assault.
50% US civil war
50% Trump wearing a straight jacket
Maybe on follows the other.
I would be more nuanced
30% democrats win the checks work and trump ends up popped away and MAGA is put in a box as they lose all support and get voted out.
10% MAGA win and respect and keep the checks and balances in the constitution.. the US continues.
20% MAGA win again and in this term destroy what is left of the checks and balances.. the US becoming an authoritarian christo fascist state.
20% democratics win checks and balances fail and there is civil strife caused by MAGA supports
20% MAGA wins and democratic supports decided that their constitution will not survive and move forward with civil strife
One of those any guess which one.
Apposite leader in the Times today: End of the Affair. European leaders must think the unthinkable – a NATO without the US. Reason enough to double check the SDR and DIP ‘NATO First’ planning assumptions. On the whole the unions’ support for their members’ jobs aligns pretty well with a strategy of reducing reliance on the US in favour of sovereign and European sourcing.
It seems our government isn’t ready to make that leap. If the US is no longer reliable, the SDR’s assumptions are not worth the paper they are written on. What we can’t do at this stage is openly state this and re-do the SDR, writing out the US. It would become a self fulfilling prophecy.
We should however be preparing by increasing the budget faster and getting the DIP published/actioned ASAP.
I’ve just rescanned the SDR. I think most of it still holds. As you say the challenge is faster rebuilding of capabilities. I think Starmer’s response to the Greenland issue is right – hold firm but not retaliatory: the US mid term elections may rein in Trump and the MAGA brigade. We have just approved the new Chinese embassy. Light the blue touch paper and retire to a safe distance?
There has always been a need to keep China onside (as far as they will ever let us). I just hope we have the safeguards in place against tampering of the cables than run underneath the site.
I wonder whether we would have approved this is our relations with the US had been “normal”.
I don’t know abour the physical distance between the fibre ducts and the proposed embassy building or its foundations, any barriers. I assume that the security services can monitor and protect the cables remotely or otherwise.
We can’t ignore China. What we need to do is get the best out of our dealings with them and be firm in not compromising our values. It won’t be easy. Got to have faith in ourselves.
That was shown on a video by the DT. They showed the unredacted floor plans of the underground areas of the embassy, and the plans where nearby FO cables run.
99 Centimetres.
On the face of it, scandalous.
However….I for one do not think for a moment that the UKIC is stupid, unlike many. I also read that, maybe, they actually quietly approve. All eggs in one basket, if any Chinese in official positions are non declared Intelligence Officers, which there will be, it is easier for A4 to watch them, rather than covering multiple sites. I read that 7 premises are reduced to a single site with the embassy.
Also, cables can be moved. And the most sensitive financial data rerouted. If they plonk an underground data centre next to them, take action.
If the US is treating ENATO this badly, try to improve relations with China. If they go to war with the US, the US should be on its own in that, why should we assist after Iraq, Afghanistan, and all the rest.
Yes in the end hold the reasoned line, make sure the red line is known and as soon as the US crosses treat it as we do Russia, no more no less. But we have to in that time we have left recognise and behind the facade put in place a post NATO plan.
Why do we need to wait for the “ plan” to start the procurement process of much needed equipment and surely the current world geopolitical situation necessitates that the chancellor break her much cherished fiscal rules and borrow slightly more money.
The countries finance are not great but countries in far worse dept/ gdp situations are spending .
Equipment ordered today will take several years to be delivered so there is zero stopping them.
Even if they say ordered more Typhoons or more type 26, both in my humble opinion we badly need . The equipment will not start to be constructed for several years . The Type 26 after the Norwegian boats are built the Typhoon after the current orders.
We have zero mobile artillery except for a handful of archers and we won’t see our “test” RCH 155 for another two years, this is beyond laughable . Why do we need to test anyway. The Ukraine army is getting them shortly and they will test them in actual combat.
Either they are
1) gas lighting the country over how far away the barbarians are from the gate. Given recent event this I think is unlikely.
2) they simply don’t care. Content to blame the last lot. Yes the barn door has been badly beglected but that is no excuse for ignoring it now.
If it is a. Matter of money, stand up, make the case for an additional penny tax and show it goes where it is needed .