Britain, Defence, Government, Military

Defence to get billions more to help tackle terror threats

DEFENCE

THE Armed Forces are to be handed billion of pounds to tackle threats from terrorists and hostile states such as Russia.

The Prime Minister has said that the Government would do better on defence in the future to ensure the capabilities meet the changing threats facing the UK.

Details of the promise of billions in the next autumn Budget to Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson came after Theresa May announced a cash injection of £800million to the Ministry of Defence.

The Treasury will release £600million from a contingency fund in the next financial year so it can go towards building a new class of submarines to carry the UK’s nuclear deterrent. This will free up money for operations and training, areas which would have been cut otherwise.

A further £200million will be made available to move forward certain projects this year, which in turn will give the department more room to spend money on other schemes next year.

Mr Williamson said that this is a welcome boost to our Armed Forces, ensuring that the country can be defended and in protecting our national interests with the ultimate capability. The Defence Secretary said that in an increasingly dangerous world we must strengthen our ability to counter the intensifying and evolving threats we face to keep Britain safe.

In the Commons, Mrs May said: “Today’s announcement will ensure the work to rebuild the UK’s new world-class submarines remains on schedule and is another sign of the deep commitment this Government has to keeping our country safe.”

The MoD is carrying out a defence review to examine which areas of the department need more money after dire warnings about the present state of the Armed Forces.

The Modernising Defence Programme comes after a wider Strategic Defence and Security Review in 2015.

The mini review will be published this summer and is expected to say that the MoD needs greater investment in more modern capabilities – and extra resources.

 

SOME within the military are calling the £600million boost for the Ministry of Defence a “minor miracle”.

The Prime Minister said the money would come from underspends elsewhere, adding that the work to rebuild the new nuclear deterrent remains on course.

With an increasingly belligerent Russia sending nuclear-capable bombers towards our airspace, and with their submarines haunting sea approaches to Faslane, this is surely a time for vigilance and internal unity.

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Britain, Defence, Government, National Security, Terrorism

Security Review: Terror threat to UK to get worse

BRITAIN

A SECURITY review warns that Britain could face a greater threat from Islamist terrorism over the next two years.

Intelligence experts fear battle-hardened jihadis in Syria are dispersing to set up cells elsewhere from which to plot attacks on the West.

There are also concerns that die-hard fanatics could try to come back to Britain to carry out massacres.

These factors, on top of concerns that youngsters at home are being easily radicalised on the internet, point to a heightened terror threat.

The assessment comes after MI5 chief Andrew Parker recently warned that the terror threat was already the worst he had ever seen in his 34-year career.

A security shake-up detailed in the National Security Capability Review, states: ‘We expect the threat from Islamist terrorism to remain at its current heightened level for at least two years and it might increase further.’

The review comes in the wake of five terror attacks on British soil last year and this month’s nerve-agent attack on Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, in Salisbury.

In other details from the review, it can be disclosed that:

. The UK will introduce a ‘fusion doctrine’ to use military, financial, cultural and diplomatic clout to quash threats;

. ‘Unprecedented’ levels of intelligence were shared with allies after Salisbury to make the case for action against Russia;

. Russia, Iran and North Korea are identified as the key state-based threats;

. So-called ‘soft power’ such as the BBC’s World Service and social media will be used to tackle misinformation.

The review outlines the threats facing the UK and how the Government plans to deal with them.

In it, Theresa May states: ‘Every part of our Government and every one of our agencies has its part to play. As long as we defend our interests and stand up for our values, there will continue to be those who seek to undermine or attack us. But these people should be in no doubt that we will use every capability at our disposal to defeat them.

‘Over the past year we have witnessed appalling terrorist attacks in London and Manchester. But also a brazen and reckless act of aggression on the streets of Salisbury: Attempted murder using an illegal chemical weapon, amounting to an unlawful use of force against the UK.’

She said national security depended on not only the police, security services and the Armed Forces, but ‘on our ability to mobilise… the full range of our capabilities in concert’.

The nerve-agent attack in Salisbury shows just how important it was to counter propaganda from Russia. The Kremlin had put out more than 20 stories to confuse the picture.

On top of this, up to 2,800 Russian bots – computer programmes that generate posts on social media – are thought to have tried to sow confusion after the poison attack by spreading deliberately fake information. Officials have feared for months that IS jihadists defeated in Iraq and Syria could morph into a new terror group.

But the danger from Islamist extremists moving into other regions seems likely to increase the threat to British citizens. There are, for example, cells in Yemen, Nigeria, Somalia, as well as those remnants that remain in Syria and Iraq. There is no doubt that they will seek to project out.

The biggest shift in the terrorist threat comes from those who have been radicalised in their own communities and through their interactions in cyber space.

. Russia can take fight to space

Air Chief Marshal Sir Stephen Hillier, Head of the RAF, warns that Russia could defy international rules by attacking in space.

THE UK must be ready to confront Russia in space as technology opens a new frontier, the head of the RAF has said.

In the wake of the Salisbury nerve-agent attack, Air Chief Marshal Sir Stephen Hillier warned that Moscow could defy rules to attack in space.

He said enemy states were developing space weapons capable of destroying satellites and jamming GPS signals.

The Chief of the Air Staff said the RAF needed to be able to combat such threats. At the Royal Aeronautical Society in London, he said: “We have potential adversaries like Russia who are disregarding the rules-based international system and exploiting environments in whatever way they feel they can to their advantage. I don’t foresee a war in space, but I can see us being contested for use of space and for people trying to deny some of our specific capabilities.

“We already see that to a significant degree and we need to be prepared to deal with that threat.”

His warning of intensifying threats from Russia comes ahead of the publication of a defence review in the summer.

Weapons could affect the ability of aircraft to operate, cripple satnavs and shut down maps on mobile phones.

Consumers could also be stopped from using cashpoints and online banking because such activities rely on satellites and time signals.

Sir Stephen said: “We could look at it and say, ‘Yes that is the theory, but they wouldn’t do it, would they?’ Well they would never launch a nerve-agent on a city in the United Kingdom, would they? But they did. So, we need to be ready for those situations.” Pentagon experts believe Russia and China are developing lasers and missiles that could take out satellites in low-earth orbit, according to reports.

Sir Stephen also hit out at Russia for its use of a military grade nerve agent, as well as the “criminal activities of the Russian state in cyberspace”.

He said: “The post-war consensus that has provided the basis for the rules-based international order is being challenged and undermined.

“We must respond, collectively with our NATO and other partners, to counter hostile acts by Russia against our countries, our interests and our values.”

It comes as Western capitals brace for Kremlin reprisals after the list of British allies kicking out Russian spies over the Salisbury attack grew to 27.

Ireland, Belgium, Macedonia and Moldova have joined the list while NATO said it would cut the Russian delegation at its headquarters by ten.

Moscow has threatened a “tough response” to the expulsions.

. See also Britain’s Military and the 2015 Defence Review…

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Arts, Books, Britain, History, Society

Book Review: Hearts And Minds

SUFFRAGISTS–SUFFRAGETTES

Smashed windows, lobbed bombs and underhand tactics. A fascinating new book in this 100th year of the suffragette movement casts new light on the bitter rivalry between the women who fought for the vote. The war between the sisters.

A USEFUL mnemonic for remembering the difference between suffragists and suffragettes is ‘Millicent: non-militant’.

Millicent Fawcett and her suffragist crowd were the peaceful ones who trundled around Britain in horse-drawn caravans, waved embroidered banners, dropped leaflets from hot-air balloons and used the art of gentle persuasion.

The suffragette Pankhurst and her troupe were the ones who went around smashing shop windows, bombing pillar-boxes and slashing paintings in the National Gallery.

Jane Robinson’s lively new book on the subject, published in this 100th anniversary year of the Representation of The People Act of 1918 – that, at last gave women the vote – is an excellent source of reading for fleshing out those spare bits of general knowledge.

Suffragists, Robinson tells us, were rude about suffragettes, calling them a “dictatorship movement of the sort that drives democracy out”. Suffragettes were rude and curt back, saying that suffragists were “staid, so willing to wait, so incorrigibly leisurely”.

The author of this book brings all these straight-backed Edwardian ladies to life, telling the story of the centrepiece of the suffragist movement: the Great Pilgrimage of 1913, in which thousands of suffragists walked all the way to London from far-flung corners of Britain for a mass rally of 50,000 in Hyde Park.

The aim was to drive the world’s attention (and that of stubborn prime minister Herbert Asquith) to the growing swell of opinion in favour of the women’s vote – and to prove women had the ability to turn the world upside down without violence.

 

THEIR peaceful protest proved to be the prototype for others, from the Jarrow march of 1936 to the Greenham Common peace camp of the 1980s.

Did the pilgrimage do any good? Well, trying to get Asquith to change his mind was like banging your head against a brick wall, and it would take a four-year World War to bring about the Act of Parliament for which the campaigners yearned.

But it was their suffragist training that gave women the confidence to step into men’s jobs when the war started; and by their war efforts in factories and hospitals they “worked out their own salvation”, as Asquith himself put it.

On a sunny morning in June 1913, the Great Pilgrimage began – the Watling Street Pilgrims setting off first, for their five-week walk from Carlisle.

It was thanks to a sensible piece of sartorial advice for the pilgrims – that skirt hems should be taken up four inches to prevent them getting caked in mud – that skirt lengths began their slow progression up the leg from that moment on.

Some pilgrims wore their smart new Burberry raincoats (“airy, light and porous … the ideal coat for the Pilgrimage”, according to Burberry’s own advertisement). Lady Rochdale, carrying her rolled umbrella, strode out side-by-side with Emily Murgatroyd, a weaver at a cotton mill since the age of ten. In those class-ridden days, this pilgrimage was the first coming-together of women from all walks of life – though the wealthier ones did enjoy the luxury of posting their dirty laundry home and picking up parcels of nice clean blouses en route.

The Land’s End Pilgrims started next, then the Great North Road Pilgrims, then the North Wales Pilgrims, and so on, until the Brighton and Kentish Pilgrims stepped out in the final week, all fixing their compasses on Hyde Park.

One of the less literate pilgrims spelled “suffrage” wrong in her diary – “sufferage”. Robinson coins this spelling mistake as a useful word to describe how some of them suffered for their cause. Vast swathes of the public couldn’t tell a ‘gist from a ‘gette, and classed them all as “pantomime villains” who deserved to be beaten up or pelted with rotten tomatoes, stones and rubbish.

In Birkenhead the Pilgrims were pelted with coal – not by disaffected men, but by women and children, reminding us that there was vociferous female as well as male “antis”, who believed that women should shut up and (as one poem went) be satisfied with “The right to brighten earthly homes / With pleasant smiles and gentle tones”.

To a woman, they picked themselves up, dusted themselves down, rearranged their sashes, and started all over again. They wore body armour in the form of pieces of cardboard which they moulded to the body in the bath and then allowed to dry, so they fitted snugly. The more “sufferage” they endured, the stronger their sense of sisterhood grew.

 

LUCKILY, there were just as many kind and supportive locals across the country who gave them hot baths, as well as crumpets for tea and beds for the night. By the day of the Hyde Park rally on July 26, the atmosphere in London was celebratory.

From the gates at all four corners of the park, thousands of pilgrims poured in. Seventy-eight speakers stood up on platforms, announcing that the “tide had turned”. An hour later, bugles sounded, and the resolution was proposed: “This meeting demands a Government measure for the enfranchisement of women.” It was passed unanimously.

A page later, Asquith’s pompously anticlimactic reply to the suffragists’ post-rally letter demanding that he take notice will have many readers banging their heads against a brick wall. “I feel bound to warn you,” he wrote, “that I do not see my way to add anything material to what I have lately said in the House of Commons as to the intentions and policy of the Government.” In other words, “Nice try, but no cigar.”

The suffragettes continued with their usual business of window-smashing and raiding Downing Street – all of which, the suffragists believed, did more harm than good to “the cause”, blackening the reputation of campaigners. Everyone was so busy smashing things up or not smashing things up that none of them noticed that “the war to end all wars” was creeping up behind them.

During that cataclysm of a war, women really proved their worth. By 1915, the slogans on their banners had changed to: “Shells Made by a Wife may Save a Husband’s Life”. And indeed they did.

Suffragists and suffragettes alike did astonishingly demanding war work, including running hospitals on the Western Front.

The great suffragist Katherine Harley – who had come up with the idea of the Great Pilgrimage – was killed in 1917 by a shell while caring for refugees in Serbia.

“We can’t give these suffragists and their militant sisters much in return,” Robinson writes, “except a promise to use the vote they fought so hard to win and, wherever it’s necessary, to keep on fighting.”

– Hearts And Minds by Jane Robinson is published by Doubleday for £20

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