Defence priorities in a changing world

Daily Mail, By DAILY MAIL COMMENT, 16th March 2011

Only five months have passed since the Coalition’s hastily-drafted strategic defence review. Yet already the world on which its assumptions were based has changed in the most dramatic way.

It is no exaggeration to say we are almost certainly witnessing an historic realignment of the globe’s geopolitics.

In Tunisia and Egypt, regimes entrenched for decades have collapsed overnight. In Libya, Colonel Gaddafi is fighting a merciless civil war against rebels campaigning for democracy.

Turmoil: Smoke rises from burning tents at Pearl Square in the Bahraini
capital Manama And as the world’s attention focuses on the tragedy in
Japan, the turmoil in the Middle East has reached Bahrain.

If this contagion were to spread to neighbouring Saudi Arabia, which has 20 per cent of the world’s oil, the implications for the West are awesome.

Both Saudi Arabia and Bahrain are Shiite nations, ruled by Sunni minorities. Nearby Iran, desperate to extend its influence, is also Shiite. So not only could our oil supplies be threatened, but we could find a new fundamentalist superpower in the Middle East.

Meanwhile the U.S., on which Britain has relied so heavily, shows growing reluctance to commit its forces to foreign operations. Europe, as usual, can’t decide on anything.

So we are left increasingly to fend for ourselves.

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• Get out of Tokyo: Foreign Office tells all Britons to leave toxic radiation zone as Japanese 'lose control' of stricken reactor
• Oil, militant Islam and the terrifying dilemma now facing the West

As David Davis says, the defence review is hopelessly out of date. Indeed, isn’t it bitterly ironic that in the very week when David Cameron threatened a no-fly zone over Libya, the Royal Navy decommissioned its last aircraft carrier and the Harrier jump jets that could have helped to enforce it? And why? Because the defence review could envisage ‘few circumstances where the ability to deploy air power from the sea will be essential’.

True, there were pressing reasons to hurry the review through in the Coalition’s early months, when the markets needed convincing that Britain was serious about tackling the deficit. After all, the MoD was (and remains) the most notoriously wasteful department in Whitehall.

But as the Mail warned at the time, their haste to identify cuts while leaving our bloated aid budget untouched was simply madness.

There is no shame for a Government in adapting its policies to rapidly changing circumstances. There is deep shame, however, in leaving Britain’s interests exposed – and issuing threats that we lack the means to fulfil.

The defence review must be reopened.

Politics of deceit

From the OECD comes confirmation of a truth this paper has been arguing for years: the sensational improvement in exam results under Labour bore no relation whatever to real performance.

In a blistering report on a decade in which education spending doubled, the highly respected organisation finds that standards measured by independent tests showed only ‘minimal’ improvements or actual ‘declines’.

This is the story of a generation betrayed by the politics of deceit.

The task of restoring honesty to exam grades, and halting Britain’s relentless slide down the international league tables, could not be more urgent. The country’s future depends on it.

Mission impossible?

Whatever the truth about the UK rescue team’s aborted mission to Japan, one ineluctable truth remains: at a time when countless fellow human beings were suffering and dying, 12 men who had the will and know-how to help were turned away.

Our officials should have strained every sinew to make the mercy mission possible.

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