Blighty at crossroads

Life, politics, everything are full of bizarre contradictions. Here we are mourning the loss of 79 lives in one of the most terrible fires since the Fire of London in 1666, and discovering that at least 60 tower blocks in the country are dangerously fitted with exactly the same inflammable cladding that helped turn Grenfell Tower into a raging bonfire, partly due, it seems as a result of local authority economic cutbacks. At the same time, later today, the Royal Navy's new 65,000-tonne aircraft carrier, minus any fighter aircraft, will set sail from Rosyth dockyard for a trial run, having cost Pounds 3.1 billion to build. Now I'm a great supporter of the Royal Navy, of a strong defence for this country, always have been, but even I can see that things have got somewhat out of kilter in recent years. It's a terrific-looking ship, it will tower over Portsmouth when it goes there in due course for its permanent home base. But it won't have any operational fighter aircraft on board until 2023, and who knows where the world will be in six years' time. By then we may have had five years of Jeremy Corbin and a Labour government! Maybe they will scrap the carrier programme, although I doubt it, or sell the second one to Nicaragua. Maybe by then Corbyn, if prime minister, will have made sure the Trident nuclear deterrent is scrapped, despite support for it from the Labour Party. But when the decision was taken to build two giant aircraft carriers - in 1998 (!!!) by a Labour government - the future looked very different. Now we have Brexit which means everything is uncertain, cyber warfare, an army so small you could just about fill a scout hut with it, the likelihood of a very left wing government taking over from the Conservatives and a huge hole in the defence budget which will only be filled if the services are cut even more. Maybe, once the two carriers are operational, if they ever are, there won't be enough trained sailors to crew them, let alone pilots to fly the F35 Joint Strike Fighters. It's all topsy-turvey. A beautiful mighty ship that we can't really afford. And how vulnerable will carriers be in the next decade with the proliferation of super stealthy supersonic anti-ship ballistic missiles? But, despite all the arguments against having these two gigantic ships, Britain cannot just turn inwards and become a second-rate country with a third-rate defence. This is the conundrum. But I fear that within the next eight to ten years, some UK government of whatever political persuasion is going to cry, "enough is enough, we can't afford to do everything anymore". I heard that argument for the first time about 25 years ago, at a dinner for dozens of military types who were trying to look into the future. Everything comes round in circles. Meanwhile, the first of the supercarriers, HMS Queen Elizabeth, is off to sea for a great demonstration of Britain's power-projection capabilities. God bless her and all who sail in her.