Too Little, Too Late
Today’s announcement on defence is pointless. The promises made will never be honoured. The Prime Minister won't be here when it has to be delivered.
Getting children out of the house is exhausting. Is there a limit to the number of times you can say: “put your shoes on”? If there is, I don’t seem to have reached it. But even saying it a hundred times doesn’t get it done until you either, finally, make it through the door, or you reach the point where it’s not worth it. You’ve already missed the train or the film and might as well stay home.
Being in opposition is driving me to the same distraction and desperation for action. For more than a year many of us have been calling for the government to publish the Defence Investment Plan. It was promised alongside the Strategic Review published last year but somehow never quite made it to print.
It’s not hard to understand why. Instead of understanding the need to pay for the wish list he’d asked for, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer did not, as the military put it, situate the estimate. So the list grew larger than his political muscle could bear.
What followed was predictable and predicted.
First came the delays. Despite promises almost weekly, the government had to come up with the kind of excuses that even my kids won’t try. The dog ate it. I’ve finished it, it just needs colouring in. Every line I, ahem, may have tried a generation ago, repurposed in the service of the state. They worked as well as they did for me 40 years ago.
So ministers were made to look weaselly as they twist and twitter in the chamber, half nodding to a non-answer, unable to tell the truth: there’s no new money and the promises are unaffordable with the old. And so we go round the circle again.
“This is the third time I’ve asked you to put your shoes on. Please put them on!”
But again the minister explains why preparations are both brilliant and unnecessary. He is already striking deals with manufacturers across the UK, generating growth and opportunity. The plan isn’t what we need.
“So you’re saying you don’t need shoes?”
And off the minister goes again, explaining the importance of an integrated plan, the alignment of energies and the reason for the delay is that the laces are on wrong. Sorry, no, that’s my kids.
Until you get to the point we’ve just reached: the moment of publication. I have now been told, with certainty though not for the first time, that the DIP will come out next week. It has to, because otherwise the PM will have nothing for the NATO summit in Ankara. And this is the summit at which allies are meant to show how they are paying for the Hague pledge they all signed last year. He is walking into the one room in the world where an empty plan will be most obvious.
Here, finally, is the press line and the punchline of this story. But it isn’t funny.
A plan only matters if someone is going to be around to deliver it and everyone in Whitehall, everyone in the City, everyone in every capital that matters knows the truth that isn’t being said out loud: the window has closed. The train has left and the film is nearly over. It doesn’t matter if you get your shoes on now or print the Defence Investment Plan, no one cares.
The document will be published, thick and glossy. The foreword will sound determined, measured and authoritative. It will talk about balancing ambitions and building on strengths. It may even make a strategic choice or two. But every word will be irrelevant and no one will bother reading it. It will be the plans to a lost war or the menu to a closed bar.
This DIP is the choice of a prime minister who still inhabits the space but has long since lost the power to determine the future and no one believes it will hold. No investment will flow from it and no alliance will be built on it, because you cannot anchor a generation of national security to a man whose authority is all in the past.
It is being rushed into print not to fund a single ship, regiment or squadron, but to give one man something to wave in Ankara. That’s a prop not a plan, it’s salving an ego not saving a nation and we are fools if we think the world doesn’t see it.
No manufacturer will tool up a production line, no ally will rebase a single decision, and no Treasury official will release a single pound against numbers that everyone expects the new king to tear up. You don’t sign a thirty year procurement contract or alliance on the word of a Prime Minister whose own voice is now a whisper ignored by his own party.
Once that’s happened it’s time to stop. Still asking your kids to put their shoes on once the train has gone and the film has finished won’t make them ready for next time. It’s done. The train left and it’s time to plan for a different future.
Yes Tom, but never forget that the reason why Starmer/Lab won power was because your colleagues, and the collective responsibility, fouled up time and time again and were voted out because the population of the UK (or those who could be bothered to vote) just wanted rid of you.
I fear that the, almost, continuous 'phsyco drama' that led the Tories (my political homeland) which led you to select charlatans, fruit loops and the truly hopeless as leaders has not bottomed out, so you're nailed on to be opposition for far too many years until the 'Conservative Party', and its true and electable values, returns.
Until then, in terms of defence (which the Tories let down time and time again): keep your puttees ironed and re-build your belt kit because, even though our reserve committment has long-expired, we'll be required to 'man-up' and step in to defend the 'flag-shagger demo crew' from harm because they'll be far too busy collecting their UC &PIP to spend down the boozer to actually put themselves in harms way.
Is there going to be a 3rd gulf war