The British Government is now swinging hard in the direction of an independent European military capability after years of opposition, no doubt because it wishes to influence what may become inevitable and then draw it into the Atlantic system.

There may also be significant cost considerations alongside hopes that, given economic difficulties in the US, a federalised Europe will be the new patron of the British arms industry on which so many manufacturing jobs, and so New Labour votes, depend.

Cost considerations are clearly uppermost in British minds. There are openly stated plans for cuts in defence procurement and a growing awareness that the Afghan War is a futile drain on resources that will extend far into the future.

Inveigling Europe into taking on Anglo-American ‘duties’ overseas is undoubtedly central to thinking in Washington and London. There is no stomach left in London for excessive support for the next American adventure, let alone unilateral action.

The new Defence Secretary John Hutton (very much from the Labour Right) is trying to create a new and more martial image for the Government, indicating greater sympathy for soldierly gripes and wanting to promote a certain degree of militarisation with parades through the streets.

It is no accident that it is in his constituency [Barrow-in-Furness] that sections of two huge ‘white elephant’ aircraft carriers are being built – a massively expensive project for power projection that is not currently at threat because of its economic pump-priming role in a Labour heartland.

But all this talk must be seen in the context of the undoubted pressure on the defence industry to appreciate that long term spending plans must be reduced in scope, for reasons of national economic survival.

In other words, the UK is going to take another one of its periodic and necessary lurches away from its expensive claim to be a Great Power. The secret to understanding the modern British State is to remember that it is the heir to a feudal dynastic mentality in which power must be projected or be lost.

The only difference between a Plantagenet State and a New Labour State is scale, the integration of very different economic interests into the model and the benefits that accrue to certain sections of the ruling coalition from having a strong tax-producing and job-creating defence sector.

Every so often, an imbalance arises between the benefits of power projection and its costs. Usually, this is represented as 'imperial over-stretch' (as when the Raj was forced to take over the responsibilities of the East India Company). This later requires withdrawal to cope with new circumstances.

Throughout British history, since the peak of a power which arose almost accidentally from the process of buttressing the profits of trading relationships, the British State has tried to delay the inevitable withdrawals because each withdrawal looks like a defeat instead of an adjustment.

Imperial overstretch in the 1930s helped make the UK vulnerable to continental and rising power predation. The costs of resistance to predation led to the 'winds of change' decolonisation designed to fit a reduced power into a new cold war model of 'junior partner' to a hegemonic Washington.

Most of the history of Britain since the 1960s has been one of sufficient and limited defensive projection based on alliances such as NATO and on the fundamental special relationship in which the UK acts as US agent in return for the nuclear deterrent and de facto subsidisation of its right to Great Power status.

Even Thatcher's engagement in the Falklands was within this model - a defence not an extension of territory in order to establish prestige and rights to the top table. The Americans were initially disinterested and she pulled it off because she had a military 'fit for purpose'.

Blair, on the other hand, appears to have been rather dim, learning neither from her nor the more cautious Harold Wilson who backed America in every way except risk the effect of overstretch on a finely balanced British economy and defence capability.

Blair took the surge of tax funds arising from London's central role in globalisation as an excuse to adopt a dynastic approach to foreign policy, only, in his case, his kingly approach was directed at meeting an ideological drive, progressive humanitarian internationalism.

He took on far too much, assuming an ever-expanding treasury in the same fit of hubris intrinsic to other ideological dynasts such as Phillip II of Spain. Fortunately for the country but not for the military, his Chancellor, now Prime Minister, kept him on a tight budgetary rein.

By the time of the current credit crunch, insufficient funds were available to meet the operational demands created by the foreign policy of a dreamer - a sort of deluded Black Prince expending national geld on visions and strategies far beyond this small country's capability.

On the other hand, the Government was also planning major defence projects - aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines, and so on - on the assumption that the arms industry as a whole would create both big tax dollars on exports and supply jobs and that economic growth would create an everlasting pool of wealth.

This was all predicated on a naive and ignorant faith in globalisation and securitisation and on London's ability to remain at the competitive forefront of the provision of global services.

It also helps to explain the remarkable New Labour (given its liberal claims in foreign policy) commitment to illiberal regimes, such as the Saudi, because of their massive contribution to the sustenance of the arms sector through mega-contracts.

These mega-sales were nothing to do with the war on terror as such but only on ensuring the economic underpinning of a strategy of power projection elsewhere. An arguable intellectual elision took place whereby operations in failed states were the means of stopping terrorist atrocities in the West.

Policy was also predicated on the centralised control of a party that could now ignore the distaste of its more liberal members for an economy based on arms sales by detaching a component of that class of activist with a promise to use guns for humanitarian purposes. A true pact with the devil!

With a credit crunch that is frightening the likes of the German Finance Minister into Teutonic gloom and countries like Pakistan, the Ukraine and Iceland close to the edge of financial collapse, the strategy is looking distinctly silly.

The scale of international humanitarian problems now looks far beyond the wit of a West that will have bigger problems sustaining the livelihood of its own citizens. Tax take is crumbling and, if international investors may tolerate some short term pump-priming, they want long-term fiscal stability.

As after the First World War and after Suez, the UK is now having to face some stark facts. It cannot afford to project power - nor can France as it is also perhaps beginning to recognise. These two dynastic states (revolutions do not change things) are now less sophisticated than Germany in this respect.

The sensible way forward would be to reduce the defence sector to the necessary - after all the government itself admits that it is under no current or near-future threat of invasion. This might involve improved operational collaboration within Europe but need not mean a breach with Washington.

Unfortunately, the economic and political embeddedness of a post-imperial defence industry and the ideological and dynastic elements in a political class increasingly detached from the population at large suggests that the governing class will continue to flaff around for some time trying to hold and eat cake.

As for the defence industry, used to rolling in contracts under the expansionist Blair, it is no fool, it recognises reality. It is pushing for clarity and lobbying hard to retain its extremely profitable if now more uncertain business prospects.

If Trident and the aircraft carriers are to be ring-fenced for political reasons, then this leaves less money for the much more simple business of recruiting, training, equipping and maintaining the morale of the regular units that actually do the work.

To some extent, the industry just wants an election out of the way and a new government to mount a fresh strategic defence review without having to worry about what the ‘great unwashed’ think about it all.

The truth is that pump-priming projects designed to ensure technological innovation and 'trickle down' within the UK economy need to be reconsidered in terms of their long term use-value to a nation that is still important but which has to adjust to its relative decline and look to the needs of its own people.

We are faced now with yet another mis-timed forced and confused lurch downwards when, if the dynastic principle and the power of special interests had been challenged, we might have had more effective operational defence amidst a population more at ease with itself.

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