Antonia Cox: Trident expert claims announcement on successor submarines imminent

Antonia Cox was Conservative candidate for Islington South and Finsbury at the general election and is author of More Bang for the Buck: how we can get better value from the defence budget, published by the Centre for Policy Studies.

An announcement is imminent on the successor submarines carrying the nuclear deterrent, according to Lord Hennessy, the historian and member of the British American Security Information Council's cross party Trident Commission. Hennessy told an audience of nuclear policy experts today that key "Initial Gate" decisions on the boats, missile compartments and propulsion systems had already been signed off by the Treasury and MOD.

Antonia Cox: We must not allow Labour to outflank us on defence

Antonia Cox was Conservative candidate for Islington South and Finsbury at the general election and is author of More Bang for the Buck: how we can get better value from the defence budget, published by the Centre for Policy Studies.

Jim Murphy, the shadow defence secretary - described as "thoughtful" by Benedict Brogan in the Telegraph this week - is not just that. He is a man with a plan: to park tanks on Tory lawns. Speaking on Thursday to an audience of serving and retired officers, academics and defence industry representatives, Murphy made it clear that cosy consensus, in the form of Labour support for the Government's policy of conditions-based withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2015, would go only so far.

Murphy is thinking the unthinkable. Labour dreams of replacing the Conservatives as the strongest party on defence, ripping up one of the most basic assumptions of British politics.

A Strategic Defence and Security Review in which hard choices were dictated by the deficit, and in particular by Labour's overcommitted defence equipment programme, was always going to upset those parts of the forces which lost out. And now Murphy can get a hearing for saying there were three other holes in the SDSR - Egypt, Tunisia and Libya.

HMS Cumberland, which extracted so many British citizens from Benghazi, was on its way to be scrapped, to save perhaps £60m. Amid the to-ing and fro-ing over imposing no-fly zones, coinciding uncomfortably with RAF job cut announcements, more attention may be paid to the delays and technical problems with the fifth generation Joint Strike Fighters Britain is buying from the US.

Antonia Cox: Will jobs cuts at the home of Trident compromise our safety?

Antonia Cox was Conservative candidate for Islington South and Finsbury at the general election and is author of More Bang for the Buck: how we can get better value from the defence budget, published by the Centre for Policy Studies.

A new front has opened up in the battle over deficit reduction. The Prospect union has this week sent a letter to the Defence Select Committee, warning that safety at the Faslane naval base on the Clyde, home of the nuclear deterrent, might be compromised by job cuts.

At a time when painful measures in October's Strategic Defence and Security Reviewv - such as scrapping the Harrier fleet, along with service personnel and civilian job losses and other efficiency gains - are reported to fall £1 billion short of the MOD's £8 billion budget reduction target, a public row over savings already assumed would be bad news for the department.

Unions often use safety arguments without good cause, and this could be shroud-waving – but the Defence Secretary, Liam Fox, should prepare defences against the claim before it gains any traction.

The letter to the Committee comes at a time when Dr Fox is due to announce whether Coulport, the part of the base where the Trident warheads are stored, will be operated by a consortium headed by the US defence giant Lockheed Martin. Unions, Faslane’s peace protest industry and the SNP are already objecting. The Nats’ Westminster leader Angus Robertson has raised the stakes:  “Weapons of mass destruction are the most sensitive areas of military technology and should not be privatised,” he told Scottish media in October.

Antonia Cox: Bernard Gray may have previously advised a Labour Defence Secretary, but Liam Fox was right to appoint him as Chief of Defence Materiel

Antonia Cox was Conservative candidate for Islington South and Finsbury at the general election and is author of More Bang for the Buck: how we can get better value from the defence budget, published by the Centre for Policy Studies.

ConHome readers might be wondering what Liam Fox is doing in appointing a former Labour special adviser to the key post of Chief of Defence Materiel. Not only is Bernard Gray a rounded figure who might have difficulty squeezing into a tank, but he is not a general or an admiral. But that is the point. After the now infamous contract for the QEII class aircraft carriers - £4 billion and counting - which would have cost more to cancel than to deliver, the case for greater commercial expertise and experience in defence procurement is clearer than ever.

Mr Gray was a special adviser to one of the more distinguished of Labour's six defence secretaries in thirteen years, Lord Robertson. An ex-journalist, he later headed the private equity-backed buyout of some specialist News International publications. An experienced businessman himself, he has no illusions about the power of the defence industry. Its ability to mobilise constituency interests, and to hire former generals and permanent secretaries, give it formidable clout, even though direct full-time jobs supported by MoD expenditure are less than 0.3% of total UK employment.

That said, Gray seems genuinely determined to do defence procurement better. In the New Year, when the Defence Secretary is focusing on overseas strategic relationships often neglected by Labour, he will have to do much of the heavy lifting for Lord Levene's report, due in the summer, on how procurement processes should be reformed.

Antonia Cox: The lessons Afghanistan should learn from Tunisia on women's rights

Antonia Cox is PPC for Islington South and Finsbury and a leader writer at the Evening Standard. She has just returned from Tunisia, where she was observing the role played by women in civic society.

As British soldiers face a tough summer in Helmand province, and the new Obama strategy for Afghanistan promises more development aid, it has never been more important to look for fresh approaches to reconstruction of one of the poorest countries on earth.

Our Department for International Development describes “building an effective state with a solid political base and a thriving economy” as one of its longer term objectives for Afghanistan. As the narcotics trade increases, however, it is more urgent than ever to find new ways to expand other economic activity.

Last week, I visited Tunisia as part in an informal delegation led by Fiona Hodgson, Vice-President of the National Conservative Convention. During her time as Chairman of the Conservative Women’s Organisation, Fiona highlighted the issues of the lack of rights for women in many developing and post-conflict countries and continues to work on this agenda. Also taking part in the delegation was Dr. Shazia Ovaisi, the Chairman of the Conservative Women’s Organisation’s Muslim Group, and Nicola Blackwood, the Parliamentary Candidate for Oxford West and Abingdon and a member of the Conservative Human Rights Group.    

Tunisia is one of the most advanced Muslim countries in respect of women’s rights, and the purpose of the visit was to look at what women bring to political and economic development there. The Tunisian example is little known here because, as a former French colony, Tunisia has relatively few links with Britain. 

Antonia Cox is PPC for Islington South and Finsbury and a leader writer at the Evening Standard. She has just returned from Tunisia, where she was observing the role played by women in civic society.

Antonia Cox: What the aircraft carrier delays tell us about Labour’s defence failures

Antonia Cox is a leader writer at the London Evening Standard, author of the Policy Exchange defence publication The Best Kit, and on the Conservative Candidates List.

The biggest ships the Royal Navy has ever ordered will enter service at least a year or two late. Despite MoD promises of “minimal implications to jobs”, the announcement by Defence Secretary John Hutton yesterday must have been a painful one for Gordon Brown. Back in July, the Scottish media were told of a “dream come true”; £3 billion order for the two aircraft carriers. This would secure or support 10,000 jobs in the Clyde yards, where the Prime Minister’s father once ministered to the poor, along with 1,600 at Rosyth, next door to the Prime Minister’s own constituency. Now, the estimated £1.5 billion hole in the MOD budget means the announcement -  which also included some bad news for other projects - could be followed by further delays or cutbacks. The shipyard unions will not be happy with Mr Brown.

More importantly, the news highlights both Labour’s failures in defence and also the scope for the Conservatives to offer a much better thought out defence policy that would support our armed forces as they deserve, despite intense spending pressures.

Labour cannot deny the aircraft carriers are essential. In a world of changing threats to British interests, the ability to conduct expeditionary warfare is vital. Terrorists and threats to the shipping that still carries much of our trade can come from anywhere, not necessarily places where there are allies nearby to offer airbases or passage through air space. Anyone who heard how the Somali pirate attacks drove up the oil price can see that.

Antonia Cox: The Conservative understanding of society

Antonia Cox is a leader writer at the London Evening Standard and mother of three. She was previously a Commons research assistant, investment banker and banking correspondent of The Daily Telegraph.

Labour's David Miliband claims, in a recent Spectator article, that there is a contradiction between David Cameron's emphasis on people "turning to each other" rather than to the state, and the Conservative leader's call for state intervention on the environment. He is trying to dismiss Mr Cameron's thinking as a muddle. It's worth pointing out that he fails completely.

Conservatives - as opposed to extreme libertarians - have never had any difficulty in saying that, where the social costs of certain kinds of behaviour are not reflected by market costs, there is an argument for state intervention.  Environmental damage is a case where behaviour which is currently lawful may very well be doing great harm. If the worst predictions of rising sea levels come true, the impact on trade and migration could be significant, on a scale easily capable of justifying government action. There are questions about what form legislation should take but the size of the impact is so great that there is no difficulty - providing other states also take action - in justifying intervention.

So the contradiction Miliband claims to find does not exist. What Cameron is saying about "turning to each other" is that while state intervention may sometimes be necessary - as in the environmental case - it is not the only way to improve people's lives. To rely on government action predominantly is to undermine the other bonds between individuals - a line of thought that goes right back to Burke. And of course, state intervention often fails because the state is a poor spender of other people's money and its own power can corrupt it.

It is very clear from Mr Miliband's article that the left, even his New Labour social democratic left, still fails to address these limits to the state's effectiveness. His version of the idea of social justice, based on that of Bernard Williams, begs the question of how much compulsory
redistribution of wealth is necessary in order to "curtail unjustified inequalities". The reality, of course, is that if a society redistributes enough to get rid of every "unjustified" inequality as defined by the left, so much damage is done to incentives to work and save, and so much power sucked into the hands of those carrying out the redistribution, that it ends up leaving everyone worse off. Conservatives, including David Cameron, understand this while the left still does not.

In this article David Miliband has nothing to say about families, charities, social entrepreneurs and religious institutions, other than citing Tony Blair's notion of "interdependence", which, unlike David Cameron's idea of "social responsibility", is devoid of ethical content.  David Cameron's best formula so far: "There is such a thing as society - it's just not the same as the state" tunes in with what most people feel about the families, voluntary organisations and other groups to which they belong. That Mr Miliband should feel the need to attack the concept of social responsibility, and do such a poor job of knocking it down, is a sign of his and Labour's vulnerability in this area.

As a would-be candidate, I wouldn't dream of getting into philosophical territory like this on the doorstep. But for those Conservatives who feel anxious about the party's move towards the centre ground, it's worth drawing attention to the fact that under the present leadership we can talk usefully about mutual responsibilities without losing a distinctively Conservative vision.  Our vision of the state's role is still informed by an understanding of government's limitations, and of the power of other institutions - particularly the family - to increase human welfare. That is not a muddle. That is Conservatism.