Stalin asked that rhetorical question when someone mentioned that the Vatican wasn’t exactly happy with the outcome of the 1943 Tehran Conference.
It was wartime, and the number of divisions was a relevant criterion of national strength. The Soviet Union, for example, had some 300 divisions at the beginning of its war with Germany and roughly twice that number at the end of it.
At the time of the Tehran Conference, Britain’s 85 divisions weren’t a match for Stalin’s army but we still had the Vatican’s comfortably outgunned. Then again, the Pope didn’t need any soldiers (apart from a handful of those cute Swiss guards) and Britain did.
Now the world is facing the most dangerous time in post-war history, Britain must again take stock of her divisions. There’s no point in the Vatican doing so: the strength of that institution doesn’t depend on military muscle. Hence today’s Pope would answer the same question with the same single word: none.
However, if Andrew Neil is to be believed (and he is usually trustworthy), Britain could echo His Holiness by letting his answer reverberate through Whitehall: none. “We spend over £50 billion a year on defence,” writes Mr Neil, “yet the British Army could not field a single fully equipped division.”
I recall debates about the European Union some 30 years ago. Following my usual tendency to leaven gravity with levity, I voiced my support for a united Europe, provided it was united on a different basis.
“We should put an armoured division on Eurostar,” I suggested, “establish a beachhead at Gare du Nord, get some more troops across, take over Paris and then on to Berlin. That’ll unite Europe alright, under the aegis of a new British Empire.”
“A damn good idea,” replied my interlocutor in the same spirit. “Except we don’t have an armoured division.” His response was, I thought, as frivolous as my suggestion. It was as impossible for Britain not to have a single division as it was for her to harbour acquisitive designs on France.
Thirty years on, his jest has come true, to potentially catastrophic consequences. Yet even if Britain’s military strength or lack thereof isn’t tested in combat, the disgrace mentioned by Andrew Neil has to be a symptom of a deadly systemic malaise.
This malignant disease afflicts public administration in the UK, both elective government and civil service. Looking at the two front benches, I can’t remember a single Parliament in my lifetime so densely inhabited by cowardly, inept nonentities.
To be fair, the nonentity quotient may be at its highest now, but Britain has had and survived incompetent governments before. Our civil service, widely considered the best in the world, was able to step in and pull the country out of the quicksand. That’s no longer the case: over the past few decades the civil service has degenerated to its present miserable level.
Corruption reigns, and the worst kind of it, not just a few palms getting greased. Our government and His Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition seem to be competing against each other in which can betray more of their sworn responsibilities.
How else can you explain the catastrophic state of our defences? Britain’s annual defence spend of £58 billion may be criminally low, but it’s still the second highest in NATO. So one has to wonder where that money goes.
Is it pilfered? Some of it doubtless is, but not enough to account for our denuded defences. Most of the problem is bungling procurement, lackadaisical administration and a general atmosphere of indifference and incompetence.
By comparison, France, though far from free of her own similar problems, spends £4 billion a year less on defence and yet, for the first time since Trafalgar, has more warships than Britain. How did that come about?
Obviously, while budgets are important, simply throwing money into the black hole of incompetence isn’t going to heal the underlying disease. Britain has the heaviest tax burden since the Second World War, and yet I’m hard-pressed to name a single public service that functions well.
The NHS? Don’t get me going on that.
Some seven million Britons (10 per cent of the population) are currently on waiting lists. It takes a fortnight or longer to get a GP appointment. And, perhaps most shocking, our cancer survival levels are up to 15 years lower than in some other civilised countries. France, for example, had better survival rates in the 1990s than we have at present.
Apparently, the NHS denies chemo- and radiotherapy to many patients, especially older ones. They’ve had a good innings, so there’s no point throwing good money after bad, seems to be the underlying philosophy. No wonder calls for euthanasia, voluntary or otherwise, are becoming more pervasive and shrill.
(My own Stage 4 cancer was treated privately, which is why I can still vituperate against the NHS over 20 years later.)
For obvious reasons, comparisons with France crop up often in my writing, so here’s another one. Roads in France are infinitely better than in Britain. And I don’t just mean the major motorways, whose upkeep is financed by tolls, nor even the N (national) highways maintained by the government. Even the small D (departmental) roads are regularly resurfaced, with nary a pothole anywhere in sight.
That’s something to ponder during long bumpy drives on British roads, with your car’s axels screaming bloody murder every few hundred yards, and your wife threatening to throw up unless you slow down.
The same goes for road construction. I’ve seen a 10-mile bypass on a French N road not far from us built in a couple of months. Replace months with years, and you’ll get closer to the likely length of a similar project in Britain.
Both Britain and France are largely socialist, with France even more so. Britain’s public sector spends 45 per cent of the GDP; in France that figure is closer to 60 per cent. But one suspects that centuries of dirigiste centralism have immunised France to socialism more than Britain’s relatively more recent exposure to the same blight.
If socialism has been drip-fed into France’s system in ever-increasing doses, Britain’s body was walloped with a huge dose within a few post-war years. The country was eventually brought to her knees in the 1970s, only then to lean on Mrs Thatcher’s mighty shoulder and rise again.
No such shoulder is in evidence now, and the country’s knees are buckling again. That’s devastating news for everyone who loves Britain and for the country’s allies who depend on her.
We pray that someone will pull the country out of the morass into which she is sinking, but no such saviour other than God is visible anywhere. And He seems cross with us.
“France, though far from free of her own similar problems, spends £4 billion a year less on defense and yet, for the first time since Trafalgar, has more warships than Britain.”
Shocking. Simply shocking. How the mighty have fallen.
USA headed in the same direction I fear. World will be a much more dangerous place.
In the U.S. we spend about as much per year on defense as the next 10 highest spending countries combined. (Of course, who is to believe the numbers reported by Russia and China?) We still have 11 aircraft carriers (not to be confused with the new breed of helo carriers) – which is the same number as the rest of the world combined. And we vastly outnumber the rest of the world in the number of naval aircraft. But we know that readiness does not depend on numbers alone. The Pentagon has been focusing on recruiting women and confused men, so yearly goals are missed by a wide margin. I like to think that during a real emergency, the “good ol’ boys” still populating our “flyover” states would answer the call. Possibly wishful thinking. I hear the occasional report of the incompetency of the Chinese forces, but it is hard to know what is accurate reporting.
As with the period after the first world war, I think we have lost the stomach for armed conflict, but for different reasons – reasons that may not be so easily reversed in a crisis. “Better dead than red” has been replaced with, “You know, red is actually pretty cool.”