Ashdown's missile dump security panel puts women to flight

Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2009/06/30/ippr_security_report_fails_to_keep_ladies_on_board/

Generals, spooks and academics want more soft power

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

A heavyweight panel of academics, spooks, generals and politicians led by Paddy Ashdown has published the results of a two-year investigation into the way Britain should handle its national security in future. However the broad appeal of the report will be somewhat undermined by the resignation of most of the female panel members - with one citing a "blokey atmosphere" during its compilation.

The report, Shared Responsibilities - A National Security Strategy for the United Kingdom, is produced by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR - "the UK's leading progressive think tank"). It can be read in pdf here (warning, 144 pages).

Shared Responsibilities was written under the supervision of IPPR's "Commission on National Security in the 21st Century". The Commission was co chaired by former special-forces officer, MI6 spook, Liberal politician and UN overlord of Bosnia Paddy Ashdown. Ashdown's co-chair was Lord George Robertson, UK Defence Secretary in the late 1990s and former chief of NATO. Alongside the two men were various generals, top cops, spooks, academics and diplomats: the sort of people usually to be found in national-security debates.

But the IPPR is "progressive", and Shared Responsibilities is designed to appeal to a broader cross-section of British politics than is normally the case in any detailed discussion of national security. As a result, the original panel also included LSE prof and prominent nuclear-disarmament advocate Mary Kaldor, as well as Shami Chakrabarti of Liberty. Francesa Klug of the Commission for Equality and Human Rights (the former CRE) was also on board.

At the time, human-rights advocate Shami Chakrabarti said that the investigation was "a golden opportunity to address serious security challenges in a rational, principled and non-partisan manner and to ... protect our security without sacrificing hard-won liberties.”

The report is out today, and some would find it fairly progressive. It says that the UK should more or less get rid of the entire Royal Navy and significant parts of the RAF*. The report adds that in the panel's opinion a credible minimum UK nuclear deterrent should be maintained, but the UK should "be prepared, if necessary, to place all or part of our nuclear weapon assets at the disposal of multilateral nuclear disarmament negotiations". It also says that Blighty should rely less on its alliance with the US, stop trying to be able to act independently too, and instead work to create a situation in which the European end of NATO could tackle security matters around the world together without US help**. (Good luck with that.)

In many ways something of a wish list for a more right-on panel member, then. But nonetheless Kaldor, Chakrabarti and Klug have resigned from the panel and are not signatories of the report. The only female remaining on the Commission is German policy wonk Constanze Stelzenmüller, based in Berlin.

"You might have noticed that it was the three women who resigned," Kaldor told the Reg today, mentioning a "blokey atmosphere we found really difficult" in panel discussions. Speaking of her own and the other women's decision to drop out of the process, she said they were "unhappy with the process rather than the direction it was taking ... we didn't have sufficient input. We were reluctant to spend the next year doing the same thing."

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.