Yesterday I was honoured to be invited to attend a speech by Michael Howard on defence in Blackpool.
It is the first time I have seen the Conservative leader speak live and I was impressed with the things he had to say and the manner in which he said them.
Introduced by Group Captain Al Lockwood, who was the U.K army spokesman in Iraq and is now the Conservative candidate for Sedgefield, Howard addressed a number of concerns he had with the Labour government’s defence record and future plans.
His concerns centered around two main points:
1: That the United Kingdom must maintain strong links with NATO and not allow any European defence co-operation to undermine this alliance.
2: That the Blair government had fundamentally undermined our armed forces and deprived them of critical resources.
On all the points I agreed with Howard.
It was shocking to hear that 50 serving officers in Iraq had been served redundancy letters while serving! It was amazing to hear that we would soon have new aircraft carriers without any aircraft because of poor planning by the MoD and it was depressing to hear how our ever stretched armed forces continue to be cut by this government, shown by the senseless destruction of history and regimental pride in the regiment cuts.
As I have previously argued, a flexible set of armed forces are of course essential to our security, but scrapping whole regiments is not the best way to achieve this and is unnecessary. My grandfather’s regiment the Royal Scots is one set to go and I will argue against such moves until I am blue in the face.
I have also written a disseration on U.K defence alignments post-Iraq and I know how essential it is that we maintain a central actor in NATO first and foremost and that means ahead of any EU force. We must also look at expanding NATO’s remit outside of Europe, allowing it to take on wider roles within the international community, using its immense operational experience.
A final point that Howard made was that we should not be supporting the EU’s attempt at ending the arms embargo on China. As Howard noted, China has still not made large enough human rights advances, furthermore we risk annoying the United States’ to such an extent that they refuse to sell Europe any military technology through a fear that it may end up in Chinese hands - this will not help our country at all.
A final point which Howard did not make, but I certainly believe in, is that we cannot yet trust the Chinese with any new military technology. They are a country with amazing potential, but we do not know how that potential may be used. I for one would prefer not to let them get too much military technology before I know they have honest intentions and want to be the west’s allies.
