The Gray Monk

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May 29, 2006

Maids of all work

Portsmouth Dockyard fifty years ago would have been solid with Grey Funnel Liners as the RN's ships were sometimes called, usually by insiders. Since then the number of ships and the facilities that have supported them have been progressively reduced. In the period 1947 - 1957 all but one of the battleships were deleted and sent for scrap. The excuse put forward by the Civil Service was that " a single bomb could destroy and entire fleet". The used the same trash argument in 1964 when they deleted the entire aircraft carrier fleet and the last battleship - HMS Vanguard. The real reason for this destruction of the fleet was the need to raise money to balance the treasury books as spending spiralled out of control under the various Labour Governments headed by Attlee, Wilson and Callaghan. The simple solution? Sell off the big ship's for their scrap value - and pay off the matlots that manned them! Instant Treasury saving and windfall. Who needed the Fleet anyway, after all Mr Wilson's great chum Kruschev was going to be the President of the Soviet State of Europe anyway.

A pair of Type 23 Frigates alongside in Portsmouth. Their single automatic gun mountings belie their real fire power, some of which is concealed in the structure aft of the gun mount.

The Navy was saved by the fact that the then Chief of the Defence Staff, Lord Louis Mountbatten, redesignated the three mini-carriers "Through Decked Cruisers" in order to get around the fact that Parliament (Populated as ever by morons and idiots) had endorsed the Civil Service decision that the Navy did not need Aircraft Carriers. That, in itself, arose from the fact that, again to save money, the Civil Service had cancelled the defence contracts to purchase a new generation of carrier aircraft and our Fleet was therefore left with out of date aircraft for the carriers. A further stay of execution came with the Falklands War, a war we should have lost! We had neither the fire power nor the ships for such an expedition and it was largely down to the fact that those we did have were better handled, more aggressively fought and used than those of the other side than the Civil Service's ongoing cuts had provided for.

Under the present government our armed forces have seen even more swinging cuts in manpower, material and support than under any previous regime. Our fleet is reduced to an operational strength on paper of 35 ships - but more than half of those are small craft. The three carriers are reduced to one in service, one "laid up" and one "in maintenance" and a glance around Portsmouth Dockyard tells the same story of the rest of the larger ships. The truth is that under Blair and his anti-military morons, the civil service has been able to get away yet again with the argument that "one modern frigate has more fire power than the entire Grand Fleet at Jutland." Quite apart from the fact that this is complete tosh, the Grand Fleet numbered well over a hundred ships - which took a lot of individual sinkings to destroy. They could also all be deployed individually to anywhere you needed them - and one ship remains one ship. It may have more fire power, but it is still one ship. Unless the moron in the civil service who obviously thinks it can be more than that is aware of a means whereby that single ship can be in at least forty places simultaneously, he/she/it had better stop using that insulting phrase.

Perhaps the government's "openness and honesty" over the mess in the Home Office can be extended to the MoD and we can at last reveal the fact that the MoD is unfit to manage the defence of the realm - primarliy because the senior Civil Servants who now infest it and have no understanding, knowledge or background in the services are incompetent. On the other hand, maybe that would be a step to far for Blair and his Civil Servant appointees.

Posted by The Gray Monk at May 29, 2006 09:14 PM

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Comments

Posted by: Candi at June 17, 2006 03:38 AM