County President, Mr Neville Howard OBE, address to Conference
TALK TO ROYAL BRITISH LEGION - 3rd DEC 2016
Once again we come to the end of the year and, once again, I have to thank all those who helped with the poppy appeal.
I will leave it to Judith to announce the total thus far, but it is a further increase on last year. Given the economic situation, this is nothing short of miraculous and reflects the dedication, enthusiasm and effort you have all contributed.
Congratulations!
Buddhists, being Buddhists, are incapable of proper cursing, but, despite this handicap, there is an old Buddhist curse which says ‘May you live in interesting times’.
Indeed we may.
The Labour party has elected an un-reconstructed Marxist as its leader.
The Brexit campaign was based on a series of guesses and a couple of really whopping fibs.
Donald Trump’s campaign seldom let truth get in the way of a good sneer or an impossible promise.
One can only wonder at the depth of disillusion of the average voter with their respective political systems in each of these examples, but all resulted in an outcome unexpected even by those who were campaigning for it.
So the British economy and very possibly the American as well have been thrown into disarray. Neither the British nor the American political systems carry with them the support of their own nations.
Germany, France and Holland are due to hold elections soon. All three countries have right-wing political parties vying for power.
And this at a time when the security of the world is in grave doubt.
There is an Indian saying ‘No tree is so large that a small dog cannot piss on it’. And so it has proved.
The Taliban, al Qaeda and the so-called Islamic State have developed asymmetric warfare, where an overwhelmingly strong state is confronted by a much smaller one, into an art form.
So what does the future hold?
Well, it is a wise man that can see beyond tomorrow, but try this for a series of linked facts.
The EU, with the exception of Germany and France, which is not a member of NATO anyway, has been unwilling to spend anything like the 2% of GDP on defence demanded by NATO and have let their armed forces slide into disrepair; their rationale being that they could always rely on the USA to do the heavy lifting.
The European government is unelected and is desperately slow to take decisions. The European parliament is merely a talking shop which relies on the agreement of all countries concerned to legitimise any decision. This is a tortuous and unreliable process, akin to watching paint dry in cold weather.
Witness the European trade deal with Canada, which took seven years to negotiate, but was derailed at the last minute by Wallonia, a part – just a part – of Belgium.
The ability of the EU to operate under stress has been tested before, with lamentable results, witness their outstanding achievement in the former Yugoslavia.
Britain, shortly to leave the EU, now has an army with fewer infantry soldiers than were killed on the first day of the Somme. The Prime Minister, in response to a request last week by the visiting Polish Prime Minister, promised to send 120 men, one infantry company, to assist Poland.
A resurgent Russia is feeling its oats and has realised that the West has little answer to the sudden application of hard power: witness their actions in Georgia, the Crimea, Eastern Ukraine and Syria.
The western response, the tardy exercise of soft power, may well weaken Russia in the medium term, but it seems not to deter Russia in the short term.
Russia has also discovered, to its gleeful surprise, that it can meddle in western elections without retaliation.
Britain and the EU have long taken for granted that the USA will lead the way and, provided European nations provide a modicum of effort, the heavy lifting will be done by the USA. America has also been relied upon to provide the credible deterrence which lies beyond the EU’s capacity.
But the old certainties are on the change. The new American administration, in place as of the 20th January next year, has been elected on its promise to put America first. It has questioned the validity of NATO and has threatened to scrap a number of formal alliances and trade deals with its Allies in favour of repatriating jobs to the USA. It may become isolationist.
If even a fraction of the rhetoric during the election is valid, what price the heavy-lifting then?
We thought, this time last year, that with the end of the Afghan war, while we would continue to have to care for the disabled for a generation, at least we would have seen the last of the body-bags for a while. We may well have been optimistic.
Watch this space.
