The Bitch and Bad Vibes! UK News Review

Well Darlings,

Do you ever get the feeling that something is about to happen? I know I do. It's a feeling of apprehension, and it comes with a sort of impotence - a sense of knowing that whatever it is that is about to happen, I will be unlikely to be able to do anything at all about it. I'm getting that kind of a feeling now, and it's coming across strongly. I feel like we are all living in the lull before the storm; a mighty storm. However from whence it will come, or even of its constituent elements, I have not the slightest inkling - and that is most annoying.

I have several fears, all that I pray are unfounded. Our armed forces, arguably amongst the best in the world, are performing their duties admirably around the world - although perhaps not so much these days for Queen and country as for the whims of a double act known as George & Tony - and they are doing it against all the odds. There is hardly a week goes by when we don't hear something about some shortfall somewhere encountered by our troops. These shortfalls range from a lack of the correct type of equipment - reliable equipment - right through to a disturbing lack of manpower. Many of our gallant boys and girls are suffering prolonged front-line tours of duty.

We must by now all have seen the commanders in the field on our televisions, brave men and women telling us how much they were over-stretched - performing to new limits of human endurance - but were still holding their own. Lately, in both Afghanistan and Iraq, the words "bitten off more than we can chew" have started to creep into many a politician's repertoire. Today we hear Major Jon Swift, who is serving in Afghanistan, claiming that Britain is sustaining higher casualties than the official figures reveal, and telling us our soldiers are often just patched up and sent back to fight without the injury being recorded. He says: "The scale of casualties has not been properly reported and shows no sign of reducing. Political and not military imperatives are being followed in the campaign." Another British Army major there has condemned the RAF as being "utterly, utterly useless", suggesting that more helicopters and manpower are "desperately" needed.

Needed they may be, but do we have them? If you remember, recently there were not enough spare troops available to even man a few dozen Green Goddesses during the industrial action taken by firemen in one of our cities. It is a situation I find worrying, and to me it poses the question: what if? What if something else were to kick off big style in the world? What if it should be more pertinent to us here in Britain than is Afghanistan or Iraq? What then?

As long as I can remember, and I'm quite long in the tooth, we have had defence cut after defence cut. I may be wrong, but I can't remember any time in recent history when we have allocated more money, substantially more money in real terms, for the defence of our country. From ships to aircraft to manpower, for years we have cut back, cut back, cut back, and just when you believed there was nothing left to be cut anymore some Chancellor of the Exchequer would again slash the armed forces' budgets.

A smaller defence budget may be okay for some - for those who believe it is a move towards more peaceable times - but it is totally inappropriate for a country that still tries to be a policeman for the world. We need either to spend more money on our military capabilities, substantially more, or else to accept our limitations and butt out of other nations' affairs. To ask our troops, those people who know their career might one day call for the ultimate sacrifice, to perform their duties against such bad odds is wrong, and it does nothing to bring peace in the world any closer. All it brings closer is the day when we may have no alternative than to accept a humongous and mortifying British defeat or, God forbid, have to use our ultimate weapons of destruction.

Just to make you all feel safer, did you catch the latest possible (spelt: probable) cuts? Defence chiefs are now looking at Britain's naval bases: Faslane, on Scotland's River Clyde, Portsmouth, and Devonport in a review that, we are warned, may lead to job cuts or even closures. The Ministry of Defence tell us the results of their review will not be known until at least the middle of next year, and that it is far too early to know what any reduction to our surface fleet might have on jobs.

Faslane is the HQ of the Royal Navy in Scotland, and is the home of the UK's Vanguard class of nuclear ballistic submarines armed with Trident missiles. Portsmouth is home to a major part of the Royal Navy's surface fleet, much of it simply moored there because there is little money to keep it at sea, and Devonport, with its 15 dry docks and 4 miles of shoreline, is Britain's largest naval base and the home of 7 of our Trafalgar class nuclear-powered hunter-killer submarines.

With all the unrest there is in the world today, is this really the right time to be looking for more cuts? George & Tony may not be around forever, but the way things are looking at the moment there is every likelihood that long after they've gone our forces could still be fighting and dying for these two politicians' dreams. One day historians will make much of that!

Terrorism is another fear I have these days, and one I guess that now most people must have hidden away somewhere at the back of their minds. Like most people too, I suppose, I don't actually fear so much for my own safety, but I dread the massive carnage that may come some day - will come, we are told by our police forces - and how much that would undoubtedly affect so many innocent people. We hear of some remarkable successes by the police and intelligence services in deterring the terrorists' actions (as well as hearing of their mistakes), but it's the one we won't hear about one day which will be the one that really matters.

When we learn that a businessman, Mark Coshever, after accidentally picking up the wrong passport at home, was able to fly from Luton to Amsterdam on his child's passport without it being noticed, one begins to realise just how vulnerable we may be. Apparently airline staff examined Mark's passport twice, yet they still failed to notice the photo it contained was of his daughter - a toddler! Security? I guess it only happens for beards and suntans!

There are so many things wrong with the world today from which my apprehension may have sprung. Global warming, once thought to be a figment of some crank's imagination, then accepted as possibly going to be harmful to us in a hundred years or so, then found likely to be detrimental to the planet in half that time, and now admitted to be something for which no one can do much more than guess at its consequences, but they may be more imminent than ever before supposed, and far more devastating than previously believed with countries fighting each other for something more precious than gold or oil - drinking water - is another topic that worries me. I may not be around to see it, but I do have kith and kin.

The problems we have in society today (the society with a small 's') worries me too. I come from a time when schoolchildren didn't know where they could buy a gun, and none of them carried knives. A fight was just that - a black eye, and not a killing. Crime happened, of course it did, but nobody feared it. Even our underworld adhered to a moral code. An elderly person could walk down any street in their town, day or night, without a care - today none but a fool would attempt it. It was a time before we had "do-gooders", a time when we looked after each other, and a time before the millions of rules and regulations that are imposed on us today - some of them the very cause of many of our troubles.

Since the late sixties the values and the quality of society has deteriorated. It was a slow deterioration at first, and certainly never one as noticeable as it has been in the last ten years. We have seen some remarkable changes recently, and I fear for where we are heading. Taking the dreaded exponential factor of the decay into consideration, unless a turn-round happens soon, ten years from now doesn't bear thinking about.

Today there are many battles on our planet being lost. I'm wondering which of them it is that might be bothering me at this moment. Perhaps it is none of them I've mentioned here. Maybe it is something entirely different. The rogue asteroid? The expected apocalyptic tsunami from when that bit of the Canaries falls into the ocean? The deadly virus that mutates and goes airborne? I don't know what it is, but something is definitely nagging at me. I feel like a balloon is being blown up in front of me - it will explode soon, but I don't know exactly when, and I am waiting for the moment.

Hopefully I shall see you all next week...

"The Bitch!" 23/09/06.