Sep 29 2007
The New Royal Navy!
The Telegraph is reporting that the British Royal Navy has big, big plans for its future. Thanks to extreme cost cutting by the government, the RN is working on plans to downsize the fleet. Even more than before.
The Ministry of Defence has produced a plan to decommission five warships from next April, which would reduce the Navy's capability to the level where it could carry out only "one small-scale operation".
Separate documentation from inside the department suggests that the total number of ships in the Navy and Royal Fleet Auxiliary could fall from the present level of 103 to 76 in 2017 and only 50 in 2027 — a reduction of more than half.
The information has been supplied in an email from a whistleblowing official inside the MoD, who has given details of a row between senior officials in the department and Andy Burnham, the Treasury Chief Secretary, over the allocation of money to the MoD over the next three years.
The deal, sealed under the Comprehensive Spending Review and announced in July, gave the MoD an annual increase of 1.5 per cent above inflation for the years 2008-11.
Our operatives have managed to obtain a photo of the entire Royal Navy after all the cost cutting is finished.
(Photo by Silje L. Bakke)
2 Responses to “The New Royal Navy!”
[…] What this leads to - what Navy Britain will have 40 years from now - Gaius quite accurately shows. […]
[…] I posted about the plans of Britain's labor government to gut the Royal Navy. Yes, I did so in a way that made fun of them. Michael Van Der Galien described my take as quite accurate. He also pointed out the deadly seriousness of the problem: It’s easy to make fun of the Brits, of course, but fact of the matter is that I don’t find this funny at all. Britain once had the most powerful Navy in the world. Labor’s goal seems to have always been to bring it to utter destruction; it has almost succeeded in doing so, if it goes ahead and implements these plans it will succeed. This will not only weaken Britain, it will weaken the West as a whole and the EU. Forget about playing an important role in the world, forget about defending ourselves against possible future attacks, forget about it all. Europe will be handicapped and useless. All we’ll be able to do is to live in our Kantian paradise, hoping everyone will just let us be and live in peace. For if they do not, we can’t do anything about it. […]