Ashdown's missile dump security panel puts women to flight

Generals, spooks and academics want more soft power

By Lewis Page • Get more from this author

Posted in Government, 30th June 2009 14:10 GMT

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People should solve problems by sensible negotiations, not violence. But you just can't talk to some people.

Kaldor said she disagreed with the report's finding that a UK nuclear deterrent should be maintained, but that hadn't led to her decision to leave. (One should note that the rather more subtle unilateral-disarmament advocate Prof Michael Clarke stayed on board, saying he'd only endorsed the deterrent "out of recognition that it reflects the majority UK opinion after several decades of public debate on the issue".) Indeed Kaldor said she thought perhaps she should have stayed too, as her minority opinion could then have been officially noted - but she'd found the handling of the project offputting enough that she left anyway. Prof Kaldor did state, however, that it would be unfair to accuse the men on the panel of not listening to her and the other women who resigned.

Even so, it's noticeable that it wasn't just the British women but the human-rights, sexual-and-racial-equality and nuclear-disarmament advocates who felt unable to keep on meeting regularly with a fairly progressive sample of the sort of men who determine national-security policy in the UK. Ironically from some viewpoints, the very sort of people who advocate dealing with problems primarily through negotiation felt unable to keep negotiating in this case.

Shared Responsibilities also advocates that the British military, police, spooks and so on should learn to work more effectively with other and fluffier kinds of people - the aid department, foreign office, health officials, lawyers and judges and rights activists and so forth - in the pursuit of peace and security for all. Blighty and its security people should seek to get things done in the world more through the use of "soft power" and negotiation rather than strongarm methods.

But if it's done anything concrete at all, the fashion in which the Shared Responsibilities project has proceeded - if not the report itself - has starkly illustrated just how alien and hostile the various British subcultures involved here are to each other. ®

Bootnotes

*The document specifically highlights the following projects (and only these) for the axe: the Royal Navy's new carriers, the F-35 jets to fly from them, the new Type 45 destroyers and the new Astute-class hunter killer subs. "Reduction in anti-submarine warfare capability" and "streamlining" of "the number of naval bases we maintain" is also advocated. That's a pretty clean sweep for the RN, leaving nothing but minehunters, the Trident subs (for a while) and the Royal Marines left.

As to the RAF, for some reason they're to be allowed to keep the Nimrod and the Eurofighter, but the Tornado bomber force should go and there should be "reductions in the scale of our air defences".

The Army would only be asked to consider getting rid of some of its Cold War era main battle tanks; or maybe not. "The UK will need to retain sufficient conventional air and armoured forces to ensure tactical level dominance," says the report. There's no such caveat regarding the need for a navy.

**A US senator, Tom Daschle, was also on the IPPR panel to start with. He's gone too.