Action This Day: five steps to safeguard the nation

Professor Niall Ferguson, the distinguished historian and commentator, says that we are a few geopolitical inches from another world war. History is accelerating fast. Denial and wilful blindness have placed us in a potentially perilous position. This once in a generation crisis must immediately be reversed, with firm action by the whole nation across the parties.

The following five actions are required to safeguard and prepare our population and national infrastructure. We must do everything possible to deter and prevent war, and perhaps much worse, from happening.

First, put defence and resilience on a whole of nation and cross-party basis, by establishing a Defence and Resilience Cabinet Committee.

Second, announce that defence spending is increasing forthwith to 4% of GDP, or well over twice the present MoD budget of £55 billion. Key defence and resilience manufacturing should shift onto 24/7 production.

Third, appoint a heavyweight politician at Deputy Prime Minister level to take charge of National Resilience. This would include responsibilities for industrial capacity and national infrastructure, as well as defence and civilian reserves.

Fourth, appoint the stand-out military chief of the last 10 years as Secretary of State for Defence – the individual with the highest-level knowledge, understanding, judgement and command experience over rookie politicians. Think of this nation in 1914, when a shocked Prime Minister Asquith appointed Field Marshal Lord Kitchener as Secretary of State for War. Kitchener was the single person whom the leading German General Ludendorff, writing after the war, claimed had prevented France and Britain from buckling in 1915. A more recent example General Jim Mattis, a battle-hardened US Marine who was a fine Secretary of Defense during Donald Trump’s first two years in office before falling out with the President over Syria.

Fifth, appoint a former PM and former 4* military chief to head “Red Team” thinking about our assumptions and plans to do everything possible to reduce our vulnerability to strategic shocks, avoiding Whitehall groupthink at all costs.

Our leaders must bring a halt to the nation’s persistent fascination with relatively unimportant things. They have to make defence and resilience the top national priority. This requires a national dialogue between our political and military leadership and society. We need wartime level leadership if we are to have any prospect of deterring and preventing it. Trend lines are only going the wrong way. Current thinking, assumptions, spending and plans have spectacularly failed us.

In May 1453 Turkish historians noted “when we were pounding the walls of Constantinople, the Byzantines were debating the gender of angels”. After a thousand years as the greatest city in Europe, Constantinople fell to the Ottomans. Might future historians make similar reference to our distraction with gender and other – by comparison with defence — trivial issues?

Last weekend Iran unleashed 350 missiles and drones against Israel. Prior to Iran crossing the threshold of major state on state engagement, the prevailing view here in the UK was that, in an election year, there was zero prospect of defence and resilience being put on a national/cross-party basis. This view ignores the fact that nearly every expert believes that this was precisely what was required. That dynamic has changed overnight — or should have done. The national interest must now assert itself over party political interest. The public need to be reassured that party politics will not get in the way of doing, and being seen to be doing, everything possible to deter and prevent war, with all its death and disruption.

The current assumption that major decisions and procurement orders will not be made until after a post-election strategic defence review has just been blown away. Big decisions and top priority procurement orders need to be placed right now. Just as they would within 24 hours of an attack on UK or our vital interests.

We have reached a historical inflection point. The widely respected Polish PM, Donald Tusk, has said that there is a 1939 feel in the air and “what is most worrying is that literally any scenario is possible”. Both previous Defence Secretaries and Armed Forces Ministers are campaigning hard for a fundamental root and branch switch to whole of nation defence and resilience. The House of Commons Defence Committee has recently reported that we are far from ready for war.

Winston Churchill said: “Civilisation in every age has been nursed only in cradles guarded by superior weapons and discipline.” In election year, it is worth reflecting that even in 1940 the divided Conservative Party would not have chosen Churchill to replace Chamberlain. It was the demand by the opposition Labour Party, who insisted that Churchill be PM as a pre-condition for forming a wartime national government, that saved the day.

History is calling. If they were alive today, Winston Churchill, Clement Attlee and Margaret Thatcher would be going into “Action This Day” mode. It is time we did the same. We need to start moving from lagging years behind the curve to getting upstream of known growing dangers. These five action priorities are the starting point.

Nigel Hall is the founder of NewBletchley

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