The uses of adversity

On Sunday, Tony Blair told the troops in Basra that they were ‘new pioneers of 21st-century soldiering’. The praise was fully deserved and sincerely delivered. Over his years in office, the Prime Minister has become a great admirer of the armed forces. Even so, there was a slight problem about the way he chose to phrase his compliment. The emphasis on new century, new army could obscure a crucial point: that the British Army is so good because so many of its traditions and so much of its ethos do not change with the calendar. Tried and tested, they endure.

This also applies to training methods, which have come under attack in recent years because of fears about bullying. At the end of the previous week, it seemed as if new evidence had been published to justify those fears, with the appearance of the Army’s latest Continuous Attitude Survey. This had originally been an internal management tool, enabling senior officers, in effect, to study the results of the Army’s own opinion polls. But under the freedom of information rules, it now has to be published. This always enables the Army’s critics on the Labour back benches to rehearse their prejudices, especially about bullying.

According to the latest survey, only 5 per cent of soldiers claimed to have experienced or witnessed any bullying, but 48 per cent regarded it as a problem. The latter figure was, of course, highlighted. Yet this creates a seriously misleading impression.

There is one basic difficulty: what should count as bullying? It would be easy to come up with a definition appropriate for civilian society, which does not mean that it would work for the Army. The Army must make demands on its personnel which would be unacceptable elsewhere.