Letters | 18 June 2011

Missions impossible


Sir: I hesitate to challenge Sherard Cowper-Coles’s concerns about our military chiefs (‘Who’s in command?’, 11 June), but it seems to me that they have a good reason for overplaying their hand with the politicians. The reality is that our armed forces are at best a third of the size they need to be to do the things that the politicians ask of them, and they have been criminally underfunded for well over 30 years.

Sir Sherard no doubt has a point, but his efforts would be better directed towards exposing the gross political failure and cowardice that puts otherwise honourable men in such a completely impossible position — and, worse, puts us at real risk and lays us open to national humiliation on an epic scale by pretending to be able to do something that we patently cannot.

R.S. Foster
Sheffield

Our muscle in Brussels


Sir: James Forsyth is right that the EU’s need to resolve the Eurozone crisis will give David Cameron the opportunity to renegotiate our relationship with the EU (Politics, 11 June). Unfortunately we are grievously ill prepared. One reason is that Whitehall has long since ceded to Brussels most of its expertise in trade negotiation (as opposed to trade promotion).

We should seek reform and repatriation of powers within the EU. But to be credible we must have a fallback plan to withdraw from the EU altogether under Article 50 (Treaty on European Union). Without such a plan and the determination to follow it through, the peer pressure of 26 against one in the European Council and the predictable obstructionism of the European Commission would put Cameron in an embarrassingly weak negotiating position.

The ideal solution would be a bilateral customs union agreement with the EU with separate agreements to cover areas such as services, intellectual property, public procurement and competition.