New thinking along the old lines

It may have been one of the least unexpected announcements of the week, but the news that plans for a £14bn Defence Training College at St Athan have been scrapped is a significant blow nonetheless.

We can now expect a counter-play of suitable expressions of horror from unions matched by accusations from MoD mouthpieces about how the previous government raised costly expectations .Of course, there is also the Cairns Doctrine which seeks to blame it all on Labour delays and avoids some tricky questioning by Friends of the Earth.

Word has been flying about for some time about the effort which the Metrix outfit has been allegedly exerting in its “engagement” activities of politicians. Observers put the frenetic lobbying down to a massive projected price tag over two or more decades. The same pundits see phrases like “commercially robust” in the official statement as coded confirmation that it was too much even for an arm of government which earnestly believed that MoD stood for Massively Overspent Department.

"Politicians come and go, but advisors simply change departments" goes the saying in Whitehall and, consequently, the well-touted stories of open warfare between Treasury and Defence have to be treated with some scepticism. Spending cuts may have severely limited the abilities of a office within the Admirality which purportedly still controls the specification of cannon balls - but you can bet that it will not have been abolished.

For a generation or more, ideological & economic arguments over defence have broken down into camps either side of the nuclear deterrent as manifested by Polaris, Cruise, Trident or some other innocuous sounding brand of megaton death. Of course, the collapse of soviet hegemony changed the rules sufficiently so that it was actually some chap from the Russian-owned Evening Standard who claimed this morning that Cameron is about make the same disastrous error as Thatcher. He pointed out that a massive cut back on the Royal Navy’s surface capability in 1981 had led to the Argentinean invasion of the Falklands.

Political historians however would suggest that if it was a mistake; then it turned out to be a damned clever one.