SoylentNews

It seems that the Daily Mail (yes, I know), among other mainstream outlets (Guardian), are beginning to see the light (and realise why Blair abolished the death penalty for treason in 1999) over what's been happening for the last ten years regarding Britain's diminishing ability to defend herself from external threats. Something the UKColumn, an independent service, has been reporting for years.

While previously singing the praises or scoring political broadsides against the Government on such potentially explosive topics as the cost of the Prime Minister's lunch, the papers have studiously ignored the fact that while the ink hadn't even dried yet on the construction contracts for Britain's next generation aircraft carriers or the planes intended to fly off them (the F35 JSF contract which is now looking in doubt even as the number ordered has gone from 140 to 14), her old carriers Ark Royal, Illustrious, and Invincible, are currently in pieces in a Turkish knacker's yard, being parted off to metal recyclers all over Europe. The first of the new Queen Elizabeth class carriers, HMS Prince of Wales, was floated in a Fife dock last July yet still not a single aircraft has been certified flight ready for her. Meanwhile, one of the largest floating decks on the planet is anchored off the South coast of England in sight of the city of Plymouth, where she proudly displays a deck full of combat ready warplanes. It's not a British carrier, nor are the aircraft intended for the British carrier... I'll use the term "fleet" loosely, we don't even have an operational carrier now... it's the USS Theodore Roosevelt, anchored offshore for a five day visit because the sea is too shallow for her to come further in.

Sidenote: the F35 has failed to live up to performance promises, it has also run overbudget hence the drop in the order - which is costing the British taxpayer the same amount of money for 14 planes as it would have done originally for 140!

As for the rest of the Naval force, Britain is offshoring crews for the other ships because due to defence budget cuts, she finds herself unable to provide a full complement to any single ship. Even the coastguard are using foreign crews. The bite is being felt across all services, with Army and RAF numbers being slashed not through technological innovation, but through political wranglings, misappropriation of funding and equipment, and secret deals with Europe - namely the Franco-British Defence Agreement which ties our two armed forces into a conglomerate of Army, Navy, Air Force and Civil Defence/Police Forces commanded by the French and manned by Germans, Poles, Belgians and Spaniards. Winston Churchill would be spinning so fast in his grave we could generate electricity from him.

We fought off an entire nation back in the 1940s, today we can't even defend our borders from a baguette-wielding Frenchman. He simply outguns us.