Britain East of Suez - The Costs Mount ...

Gordon Brown visited Afghanistan at the beginning of the week. He praised British soldiers for their victory in clearing out the Taliban from Musa Qala. A great deal of planning and effort went into a short, sharp campaign that had been necessary in order to establish terms for a forthcoming spring offensive.

The loss of the town in February 2007 had been humiliating to the British. The next stage of the offensive appears to be cast, at least publicly, by the British primarily as a matter of winning 'hearts and minds’, providing economic assistance based on poppy substitution.

Meanwhile, a Financial Times report today outlines the law and order situation as the British hand over Basra to full Iraqi control. Anarchic rivalries between militia, criminal gangs and tribal groups present a serious challenge to the local authorities. The UK commitment to the Province suggests that it will be advising and funding Iraqi state forces for some time to come.

You can see the common denominator - a hope that considered and carefully applied economic assistance, working with local authorities, can reduce the need to make use of Britain's depleted military resources. 

A variation of this underpins the British approach to Palestine where the Annapolis Summit is supposed to lead to conditions where British 'expertise' can guide economic development aid towards state authorities who are committed to peace, law and order.

Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan - these are names from the old British Empire. We seem to have reverted to the 1930s when the British Treasury worried incessantly about the costs rather than benefits of imperial overstretch directed against increasingly strident local nationalisms whilst maintaining a too-weak European defence capability and trying hold the line against Depression-led class warfare at home.

All this return to a life East of Suez takes place against the background of deep military discontent at lack of funding not only for equipment but also to maintain adequate service conditions for troops.

Irritation can only grow as taxpayers learn that they have now forked out an increasingly unacceptable £30bn to Northern Rock under conditions in which the Government appears to be engaged in a policy that can only be described as ‘socialism for shareholders’. This, in itself, suggests that decadence has set in within the British centre-left.

As we write, the British police, guardians of domestic order and the force that really helped to defeat revolution in 1926 and 'anarchy' in the 1980s, is considering whether to claim the right to strike under European law if their pay demands are not met. The last police strike was in 1919 but the police today are now the domestic frontline against environmental and terrorist as well as growing criminal threats. Alienate the police and you alienate the British middle class.

But let us get back to the military. The Financial Times Editorial today refers to British troops being placed under “enormous and unsustainable pressure”. The scale of the crisis is now well understood – the British military is at breaking point and can no longer be ‘quick-fixed’ even if the funds were to be made available.

Since 1997, the current Government has sent troops to the Africa, the Balkans, Iraq and Afghanistan. Since 2001, it has been lurching from expedient to expedient without any strategic planning or adequate budgetary provision.

Conscription is out of the question, training is under-resourced and good quality men, in an era of relatively full employment, are unlikely to be attracted into forces where living conditions are dire and the threat to life and limb is as likely to come from a loose cable or sheared bolt, or an allied global positioning error, as from enemy gunfire.

The navy is in no better shape with ships mothballed. And the country still has to carry the cost of Trident, an increasingly absurd white elephant, as well as big ticket aircraft carriers to 'meet new threats'. We have not even started to factor in the diversion of resources into homeland security. And yet who is to blame?

Current right-wing rage is directed at Brown not as Prime Minister but as a past-Chancellor who starved his then-boss of funds in favour of schools and hospitals. Any rage should really be directed at the previous Prime Minister - though we must always remember that the two men have always been a partnership: the reputation of New Labour rises and falls with the reputation of both men in tandem.

First, we saw a naive 'progressive' impulse towards near-unilateral interventions (Africa and the Balkans) regardless of cost. Then, as hubris rose to new heights, we saw a reversal of a sixty year steady withdrawal from East of Suez in the wake of 9/11 – all to keep an ungrateful Washington sweet and to sustain some sense of British power within an outdated Atlanticist model.

For those interested in the problem of Britain East of Suez, we have an extensive review of the issues in the latest edition of the journal Lobster ["A Brief Sojourn East of Suez: A Last Gasp for British Great Power Status", Edition 54, Winter 2007/2008 - see below for further details]. Some brief excerpts:

" Even Adolf Hitler and General Tojo expected a decent long-term return on their otherwise economy-shattering short term adventurism and, in this, were little different, except in their brutal impatience, from the pragmatic East India Company" [p.3]

" Failure in Iraq may ... be regarded as yet another failure of intelligence rather than as a military failure per se: the poor soldiers never stood a chance." [p.4]

" ... we should think of this [intervention in Afghanistan and Pakistan] now as less an imperial intervention East of Suez and more an extension of community policing in the West Midlands." [p.6]

You get the drift. The questions arising now are surprisingly simple.

Afghanistan and NATO are long-term commitments. Either the UK takes resources from domestic requirements (starving the community of the application of those marginal resources that make life bearable, as it did in the 1930s) or it starts to cut back on those commitments sharply - or make some hard choices between these commitments and others in the strategic sphere. What it cannot do is carry on as it has done for the last decade.

The political class has an in-built psychological flaw in favouring ‘gloire’ over practical matters like feeding, housing, training and educating people so it may well be that the people will eventually have to take their elected masters in hand.

Certainly the utility of the morally usable Trident system must be under question. Equally, an old debate, does the British military exist to defend 'these islands' and its sea-lanes or to preserve a trading empire? And, a new addition to the great game, can these imperatives be pushed aside to use the people's resources to protect the rights of other peoples in faraway lands?

The critical question, with £30bn sunk inadvisedly into Northern Rock to keep the banking system in place, is whether the British people will be prepared to see less investment in housing, healthcare, education and welfare in order to sustain the ideological aspirations of centre-left progressives and right-wing neo-imperialists. Will the sheep now turn on the wolves or will they be fleeced and eaten?

A Note on Lobster

Lobster is the premier British journal investigating what can loosely be called para-politics, which is the analytical investigation of what goes on outside the mainstream reported world of public life. Lobster was founded in 1983 by Robin Ramsay and Stephen Dorril, although Dorril moved on to engage in other research projects so that the magazine is now solely edited by Robin.

While working together, Ramsay and Dorril co-researched and co-wrote a much-admired (and subsequently largely corroborated) book on the security service plots against the late Harold Wilson, Smear: Wilson and the Secret State while Dorril separately went on to write the nearest we have to a definitive history of MI6 in 2000.

Lobster most famously exposed the 'Colin Wallace affair' [subsequently the subject of a book by Paul Foot] but, in addition to being an outlet for investigative reporting and for latest news on various 'conspiracy theories', it contains important material on political and security networks and on public policy influence that is often unobtainable elsewhere.  More underground than Private Eye, it is less conventional and serves a different purpose.

Robin Ramsay himself generally adopts a sensible, critical approach to conspiracy theory and has published popular guides that emphasise a 'middle way', critical of all-encompassing theories on the one hand but accepting of the probable existence of activity by relatively small cliques and networks who confuse their interest with the public interest. His own work and interest in the JFK assassination is worth following.

However, readers of Lobster should always retain their critical faculties since editorial policy is 'open' and sometimes material may slip through that is or cannot be corroborated. It should be seen as agenda-setting and as a source for further investigations rather than always definitive - and as a corrective to material that is provided by official sources as well as to 'group think' from within the political and media establishment.

For more information on Lobster and subscriptions, contact the Editor at 214 Westbourne Avenue, Hull HU5 3JB, UK.  Telephone: 01482 447558 or e-mail robin@lobster.karoo.co.uk . A CD-Rom of all back issues is available as well as at the website at www.lobster-magazine.co.uk  Lobster appears twice-yearly and is good value at £6.00 pa (UK - £9.00 Europe and £10.00 outside Europe).

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