HMS Ark Royal leaves Portsmouth for Turkey today to be dismantled and sold for scrap; the Harrier jets she once carried are being sold to the Americans for spare parts. She’s being decommissioned early as we can’t afford to keep her now. Times are tough, and hard choices need to be made. The same bulletin had, as its preceding item, news that the coalition government has decided it can now afford to spend £16 million of the money it’s borrowing to send an astronaut into the EU’s space station. The Labour government deemed this unaffordable in the boom years, but the well-informed BBC report explained how thinking has changed:-
“For decades, successive governments have kept out of Europe’s space programme believing it to be a waste of money. Now, it’s felt that space is no longer a strange luxury but an important part of the modern economy… It’s understood that ministers believe it’s an embarrassment that countries such as Belgium, Canada and Kazakhstan have sent astronauts to the Space Station where the UK has not.”
If I were a Belgian minister, I’d be embarrassed that my government could afford vanity missions to space, but not a military worthy of the name. If I were a Kazakh, I’d wonder why crackpot regimes are always fascinated by expensive toys rather than providing basic services to the people who need them. And if I were a British minister, I’d wonder whether it really will take a Suez-style debacle before the government realises the implications of the downgrading the military by such an extent.
UPDATE: Here’s our rocket man, interviewed on R4’s World at One.
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