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Sitting Ducks
A very British coup from the UK's top military and diplomatic figures
Britain's leading defence institute has warned that the nation has become a "soft touch for home-grown terrorists" thanks to the government's failure to confront immigrant communities who refuse to integrate.
The Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies urged the government to restore security as an absolute priority. Failure to "lay down the line" to immigrant communities, it claimed, had left "confused and vulnerable" Britain in a poor position to tackle extremism.
Britain, it continued, was presenting itself as a "fragmenting post-Christian society, increasingly divided about interpretations of its history, about its national aims, its values and in its political identity.
"The country’s lack of self-confidence is in stark contrast to the implacability of its Islamist terrorist enemy."
The RUSI is one of the world's oldest defence research institutes - "think tank" seems too modern a phrase to describe this august institution, founded at the initiative of the Duke of Wellington in 1831. The Queen is the organisation's patron. The report, Risk, Reality and Security, was written by Professor Gwyn Prins of the London School of Economics, and the Marquess of Salisbury, the former Conservative leader in the House of Lords, expressing "the consensus of a private seminar series which met at intervals between May 2006 and January 2008", attended by former military chiefs, diplomats, analysts and academics. The attendees, named in the paper (see below for link), read like a list of establishment figures, the like of which we haven't seen in Britain for some years.
As the Telegraph reports, the RUSI "is thought to represent the views of many current senior members of the Armed Forces."
In the genteel manner of this elder establishment, the paper amounts to a coup. The cult of multiculturalism is criticised, the government's failure to support the armed forces comes under attack and in one enigmatic clause, the authors warn that the European Union's drive towards ever closer union occurs despite public opposition:
"Britain is an island adjacent to continental Europe. Our security depends upon continental
arrangements not encroaching on our basic freedoms, that do not sap but amplify our strengths and that do not traduce the limits of public consent."
The paper also touches on the weakness of international institutions such as the UN as well as the EU, noting that the "practical preferences" of Britons are evident in telephone and emigration patterns between Australia, Canada, the US and New Zealand.
As well as the threat of terror from within and without Britain, the paper also deals with rising risks related to climate change, competition for resources with developing world giants, and rising Russian nationalism.
Solutions? The authors call for a radical constitutional overhaul. From The Times:
"They called for the establishment of a new powerful Cabinet committee, consisting of senior ministers, defence chiefs and officials, to coordinate security policy across the full spectrum of government activity.
"The committee should be supported by a second joint committee of both Houses of Parliament which would be responsible for identifying gaps in capability and to build consensus on security and defence issues."
It also called for a more robust approach to national identity:
"The deep guarantee of real strength is our knowledge of who we are. Our loss of cultural self-confidence weakens our ability to develop new means to provide for our security in the face of new risks. Our uncertainty incubates the embryonic threats these risks represent."
So much for David Miliband's "hub of ideas." So much for the media and academic establishment's erosion of British values and the government's destruction of national identity over the past decade or more. Read closely, the paper is an invigorating critique of New Labour values and the client state it has created. Alongside the liberating backlash which followed Archbishop Rowan Williams' idiotic comments on sharia law, this report would appear to mark a turning point. Watch this space.
