In These New Times

Monday October 18 2010

Irish independent

‘WE were on the brink of bankruptcy,” said the UK chancellor George Osborne yesterday as he tried to defend his draconian package of spending cuts and tax rises which will be revealed in detail on Wednesday.

But, like the impoverished inheritor of a crumbling stately home, the prime minister, David Cameron, is finding it hard to abandon the imperial ambitions of his predecessors.

The former US secretary of state, Dean Acheson, famously remarked back in 1962 that “Britain has lost an empire but has not yet found a role”. Cameron was not born until four years after that speech but the strategic dilemma posed by Acheson has, if anything, intensified in the decades since then.

The foreign secretary, William Hague, sounded like one of Queen Victoria’s cabinet ministers yesterday when he proclaimed: “We will remain a global player, we will remain a serious military power.”

Hague has to be upbeat about what is left of the UK’s military capacity because he has run into a storm of criticism from his US opposite number, Hillary Clinton, who is frightened that a near-bankrupt Britain will have to decimate its future commitments to Nato, leaving the beleaguered Obama White House to play the solitary role of global policeman.

If Osborne had had his way, Hague’s proud assertions of global clout would indeed have been little more than words. But, thanks to a vicious bout of Whitehall infighting and thanks, also, to the expensive contracts already signed by the previous Labour government, Osborne has reluctantly had to agree to go ahead with spending £5bn (€5.7bn) on two new aircraft carriers.

The navy, which was terrified that outposts like the Falklands would be vulnerable to invasion without the carriers to protect them, can hardly conceal its delight. One of its former chiefs, Admiral Lord West, said: “There is a strategic necessity for them. They provide four-and-a-half acres of British sovereign territory with no over-flying rights, we don’t have to put troops on the ground with all the risks of terrorism and so on, and we can influence the world and keep a stable globe, which is very important for our wealth in this country.”

Unfortunately for the navy, as the defence minister Liam Fox was forced to concede yesterday, there is going to be a gap of several years between the carriers becoming available and the new fighter aircraft to be deployed from them.

To the fury of other key Nato countries, the new fighters will also be unable to use carriers from the navies of major allies. In the words of William Hague, Fox inherited from Labour “a truly awful mess”.

While the top military chiefs fret about aircraft carriers and troop levels, shrewd observers at Westminster are equally worried about the emerging threat to key UK services like water, gas and electricity from cyber attack. It sounds like something from ‘Dr Who’ but the recent disruption of Iran’s nuclear programme by a deliberate computer virus attack on its operating software has highlighted the vulnerability of complex societies reliant on 24/7 information processing.

Iain Lobban, who runs the top-secret government communications HQ, based just down the road from Cheltenham racecourse, said last week that cyber attack was a “real and credible threat” and he revealed that Whitehall networks were targeted by an average of 5,000 malicious emails every week.

Intriguingly, while Fox has been arguing in public about conventional military spending, he has made much less play of the fact that Osborne has agreed to put an extra £1bn (€1.1bn) into cyber activities, both attack and defence, between now and 2013.

Fox has paid a price for his tough stand against the Treasury. He has become the target of a nasty smear campaign apparently orchestrated by rival departments whose ministers and civil servants have been less successful at curbing the impact of the Osborne cuts. They have been taking revenge on him by spreading rumours about his drinking and his “partying”.

Fox is not the only MP to be in the media spotlight over “partying”. Here’s a mobile text message that sounds like something sent by a hormone-laden teenager: “You are, and believe me i know what i am talking about, u r very, and i miss you, sexy XXX.”

In fact, that message was one of many sent by a Liberal Democrat MP, Mike Hancock, to a young woman who turned out to have mental health problems. Her care staff reported the texts to the police and Hancock has been arrested and bailed. He claimed that he was trying to help her “as a constituent”.

No fewer than six Labour MPs are now in trouble over financial sleaze, the latest being the high profile former Europe minister, Denis MacShane, whose membership of the party has been suspended.

Members of the House of Lords have also run into trouble and four of them will face fines and public humiliation this week when the parliamentary verdict on the way they manipulated their expenses will be published.