Paper tigers

I was catching up on some recordings on the TV yesterday, including something I had missed the ending of, a documentary series about HMS Queen Elizabeth visiting the Far East.

The final episode was a real eye opener, as a £100m+ aircraft crashed on take off. Luckily no one was hurt but this happened during the Covid lock down and so I thought there must have been an enquiry into such a loss since then.

What I found was shocking, the aircraft crashed because an engine cover had been left in the engine. But that was just the primary cause, what the enquiry really revealed was that the Navy had nothing like enough engineers to maintain and service the few aircraft it had. The US marines not only supplied many of the aircraft and aircrew for our flag ship but they also maintained their own aircraft with more than twice the numbers of ground staff as the RN.

Many RN crew were sent to sea without even the most basic Naval training, which would normally be compulsory before they were allowed to sail because no one else was available. Crew were tired, over stretched, not well enough trained, badly managed and made mistakes.

A better example of the hollowing out of our armed forces it is hard to imagine.

Cutting ships, tanks and plane numbers gets headlines, inadequate training, poor maintenance, not enough spares, stretched crews, don’t. Everyone carries on patriotically, no one points out that in peacetime these mistakes could have killed, and that in wartime these mistakes and gaps would render our armed forces vulnerable to a shocking and bloody defeat.

The Queen Elizabeth’s voyage to the Far East was supposed to be a show of strength designed to impress China. They will have watched this documentary and seen everything that the British public was not expected to notice.

Our fleet is a paper tiger, 14 years of Tory cuts have led to this, increasing defence spending to 2.5% of GDP will not be enough to reverse this trend.

We need more ships, submarines, planes, tanks and other technology all of which is very expensive and even now we need far more people, highly and properly trained people, to run this technology.

Yet an ageing population will suck up increasing amounts of government spending in coming years and they will also demand higher pensions and lower taxes too, 40 years of Tory lies about having your cake and eating it too have guaranteed that.

The hollowing out of our defence capability was a deliberate Tory policy to hide their own incompetence and weakness, when the flag shaggers demand higher defence spending remember that.

Jonty’s Jottings

From Jonty Bloom Media Ltd

Economics, trade and Brexit, not necessarily in that order but the dog always comes first.