No man can serve two masters and we have to decide whether to be an active member of NATO, which has kept the peace in Europe since 1949 or the European Defence Union, which is effectively an attempt to create an army under the control of the EU in its continuing and so far successful quest to be a superstate rather than a loose alliance of sovereign states.
It is NATO not the EU which has kept the peace in Europe since 1945, NATO, with its huge nuclear arsenal, which kept the West safe during the Cold War, NATO which protects member countries bordering Ukraine from attack by crazed Putin. Nothing the EU can do will ever be as effective but for a long time it has been building the European Defence Union.
Ursula Von der Leyen has made her own view of the future very clear: there should be no veto on defence issues and there should be a single defence procurement contract, which is bad news for British Defence firms such as BAE, Babcock and Harland and Wolff shipbuilders. Is anyone awake?
Peace in Europe is protected by NATO, not the EU - Ann Widdecombe
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Indeed, we should be expanding our capacity to build our own ships for our own navy in the interests of employment and of certainty and similarly in other areas of defence. We are now reaping the results of depending on other countries for our energy instead of building up our own nuclear power stations and we must avoid repeating that mistake in defence where we should be self-sufficient at all costs.
Freed of EU competition rules, we should be taking full advantage on behalf of British firms, but Starmer is going the other way on his path to “reset” relations with the EU.
A veto-less procurement union as envisaged by von der Leyen would mean we had surrendered command and control and we should have nothing to do with it, but it now seems clear Britain is heading that way.
Of course recent events have changed the picture somewhat but whatever else Trump has or hasn’t got right, he has put a metaphorical bomb under NATO, refusing to allow its members to shelter behind the vast American nuclear arsenal while not meeting their own expenditure commitments.
Keir Starmer is not the man to lead us away for the European Defence Union.
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Perhaps we should take a leaf out of his book when dealing with recent demands that Britain should pay large sums to join the Security Action for Europe initiative or indeed with Macron’s ludicrous suggestion that we should renegotiate fishing rights as a price of belonging. We could maybe just gently point out that if Europe wants to shelter behind our independent nuclear deterrent the flow of obligation is in the other direction.
A coalition of the willing is an excellent idea in the current emergency with Russia but it must be just that. A coalition, not a dictatorship and of the willing not the compelled.
For years we have run down our defences, relying on America and hoping that everything would be all right on the night. We now need to send that into urgent reverse. In 1990 we had 153,000 regular soldiers and 73,000 reservists. By 2000 that had fallen to 110,000 and 45,000 respectively. By 2020 that had become 80,000 and 29,790.
The EDU can do nothing that NATO cannot do and, if we are to concentrate our efforts into an effective alliance then it is NATO with the proven track record and the more collegiate approach that better serves our needs than the EDU with its unproven abilities and highly prescriptive approach. The choice is ours but oh, how I wish that did not mean it is Starmer’s.
