British Prime Minister David Cameron has cut British defense
below the minimum level for national security, despite pleadings
from service chiefs, much of his own party, and large sections of
the public.
Britain’s front-line Air Force is now hardly bigger than
Belgium’s, with only seven squadrons of modern bombers and fighters
(Belgium has six). The Falkland Islands are defended by just four
aircraft. The Navy does not have a single capital ship. The air
operations in Libya have had to be conducted without a single
dedicated aircraft-carrier, multiplying their cost and diminishing
their effectiveness.
The Army has lost one historic regiment after another, and a
succession of coroner’s inquests has blamed the deaths of British
servicemen in Iraq and Afghanistan on skimped and inadequate
equipment.
Where American troops have armored vehicles, British troops have
been forced to travel in ancient Land Rovers, leaving them
vulnerable to improvised roadside explosives.
Servicemen in all three services have been sacked without
warning in mid-career, sometimes receiving notice of dismissal
while actually in action.
There also seems to be a peculiar decadent passivity. An elderly
British couple in a yacht off Somalia were kidnapped by pirates and
severely mistreated while a Royal Navy auxiliary ship, the
inappropriately named Wave Knight, with heavy machine-guns
and a contingent of heavily-armed marines aboard, stood by,
virtually alongside, and did nothing, lest the pirates’ human
rights be violated (I am not making this up).
When the pirates attempted to seize a Russian ship, the oddly,
but perhaps more appropriately, named Moscow University,
the Russian authorities evidently decided it was time for the
Moscow University to teach them a lesson: they stormed the
ship, captured the pirates, and sent them home, but apparently
without benefit of their boat. Given they were several miles from
shore, and in shark-infested waters, it is perhaps not surprising
that they and their colleagues have attacked no more Russian
ships.
Meanwhile, Cameron has said Britain’s foreign aid expenditure is
“ring-fenced” and will not be cut in any circumstances.
International Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell claims that
lavish foreign aid makes the UK something called a “development
superpower” and that voters should take the same pride in it as
they do in their armed forces.
Britain has actually decided to increase foreign aid spending by
34 percent to about $24 billion. Mitchell claims this spending is
achieving “brilliant” results and gaining the country admiration
around the world.
One wonders if there is not some kind of impulse for national
suicide at work in Westminster. Mitchell claims: “My ambition is
that over the next four years people will come to think across our
country — in all parts of it — of Britain’s fantastic development
work around the poorest parts of the world with the same pride and
satisfaction that they see in some of our great institutions like
the armed forces and the monarchy. This is brilliant work that
Britain is doing.”
This includes $600 million a year to India, which, as Tory MP
Phillip Davies pointed out, is spending billions on defense and has
its own space program. It has a navy with about twice as many ships
as Britain, a booming economy, and probably more nuclear
weapons.
This is despite the arguments of LSE economist Lord Peter Bauer,
whose Dissent on Development was published in 1972, and
others including a growing body of African economists, who believe
foreign aid, except for emergency disaster relief (where something
like an aircraft-carrier might be useful), is actually
counter-productive and hinders rather than helps long-term
development.
Now, however, the British Daily Mail
reports that African countries which persecute homosexuals will
have their aid slashed by the government in a bid by David Cameron
to take his homosexual rights crusade to the Third World.
Mitchell has already cut aid to Malawi by about $40 million
after two homosexual men were sentenced to prison.
A spokesman for Mitchell said: “The Government is committed to
combating violence and discrimination against lesbian, gay,
bisexual and transgender people in all circumstances, in this
country and abroad. We take action where we have concerns.” This
could be taken as a naked declaration of cultural imperialism.
Meanwhile, Pakistan will continue to receive more than $400
million a year, but there the victims of persecution are only
Christians, who don’t count. Hundreds of millions go to such
dubious beacons of liberty as the Democratic Republic of Congo and
the gulag-police state of Vietnam (try founding an opposition
political party there, and see where it gets you!), with no
suggestion that aid be tied to ordinary human rights.
While all persecution is worse than deplorable, it seems the
British Conservative government considers the rights of homosexuals
in Africa worth cutting aid over. Not the case with innumerable
other instances of persecution, nor its own national defense.
