Attention!

Following the resignation of John Healey, the Defence Secretary last week, followed by Armed Forces Minister Col. Al Carns (Rtd) it seems that the government’s Achilles Heel has turned out to be defence. Well, in some people’s eyes it always was, the Labour Party allegedly being home to thousands of leftie pacifists who were led only a short while ago by a leftie pacifist. Are Labour’s leftie pacifists replacing Labour’s anti-Semites as the new target for the party’s enemies and the next project for Starmer to ’Change?’ For Carns, who may harbour leadership ambitions, one might consider environmentalists to be on the side of leftie pacifists, and poor old Ed Miliband’s old fashioned clinging on to the idea that climate change poses a huge security threat could mean he must be shoved to one side. Carns thinks we should, to coin a phrase, ’drill baby, drill’ in the North Sea, since doing so would somehow help preserve our energy security in this precarious world. If what’s left of this fossil fuel resource could be wholly destined for the UK market alone one might suppose there could be a grain of truth in Carns’ argument, but that would call for a significant re-arrangement of global oil trading arrangements. Such a unilateral declaration of fossil fuel independence might invite retaliation. Carns’ tough talk adds little to the debate about where this government should go, but it got some good coverage in the Telegraph today. He might help us better understand what should be spent on defence by using his experience to tell us where the money, particularly in procurement is wasted. Lots to go at there.