In an under-reported speech at last month’s Labour conference shadow defence secretary Jim Murphy said that the party must aim to replace the Conservatives as the traditional party of the armed forces.
“Let’s look at what the Tories have done over the past year or so,” he said. “An army cut by 7,000, an island nation with aircraft carriers but no aircraft on them. You don’t have to be a military strategist to know what aircraft carriers are meant to do – the clue is in the name.” I could add that we now have more generals than battle-worthy tanks.
Murphy went on to offer serving and former military personnel Labour membership for £1. And he pointed out that the military are not just hit by strategic blunders and life-threatening cuts in equipment and hardware – their families are also threatened by cuts at home, the onslaught on the National Health Service and the attack on schools and further education.
It is high time that Labour embraced the services. There are historic reasons for doing so. In 1945, returning soldiers, sailors and airmen and the many thousands still abroad delivered a landslide victory for Clement Attlee. They were the sons of Great War veterans who had been promised a land fit for heroes but instead swopped the trenches for the dole queue. Many returned with copies of Robert Tressell’s Ragged Trousered Philantropists in their backpacks. Having defeated fascism, they expected something better when they came home, and they got it. That burning sense of social justice applied to all ranks, but was particularly strong amongst squaddies and NCOs.
Now the army’s most fertile recruiting grounds are the deprived but proud streets of Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle. For too long, Labour’s upper echelons have been reluctant to appeal to that potential vote, partly for intellectually snobbish reasons, and partly because of the unpopularity of some of Tony Blair’s wars. They
forgot that supporting soldiers in
Basra or Helmand does not make you a warmonger.
Now, thank heavens, the tide is turning thanks to a new generation of former serving soldiers who have entered Parliament. On the Tory side, there is the larger-than-life Colonel Bob Stewart, in many ways an almost cartoon Tory, but who remembers the names of every Cheshire Regiment soldier who was wounded or died under his command in Northern Ireland and Bosnia. In the 1982 Droppin’ Well INLA bomb, six of his “lads” died and more than 30 were injured from a 120-strong unit – an attrition rate last seen on the Somme.
And on the Labour side there is Dan Jarvis, a former para. Jarvis made the best points this week on the Liam Fox affair, attacking him not for his private life but for a series of bad judgements which have shredded military morale.
“The armed forces do so much for our country”, he said. “They deserve
the highest standards of leadership, integrity, judgement and trust.”
Fox’s first misjudgement was his decision to allow the strategic defence and security review to become a spending review, sacrificing a coherent vision for Britain’s future defence role.
Since then, as Jarvis pointed out, he has sacked service personnel via email while they were still on operational tours of Afghanistan and Libya and told submariners thousands of miles away that they are no longer needed.
Fox also appointed Lord Ashcroft, whose Tory fund-raising has been, let’s say, open to criticism, to a highly sensitive role in Cyprus. And he drew contempt from serving soldiers when he claimed that reservists – admittedly a brave and motivated body of men and women – could do the same job as regulars in an attempt to disguise spending cuts. “That showed a severe lack of understanding when it comes to the nature and character of combat operations”, Jarvis added.
At the time of writing, Fox was still clinging on to his job. When he does go, it should be for the above reasons, not alleged indiscretions
