One might suppose that living on an island was even better, from the defence point of view, than living somewhere very spiky and reliably accessible only through tunnels. All one has to do is to manage one’s affairs with a reasonable degree of economy and to rely upon the sea as one’s moat. Patrolling the said sea with some kind of navy would be a reasonable precaution, and making preparations to repel invaders even more so.
This never really worked for Britain. By the time it became worthwhile trying to repel invaders, it had ceased to be possible to manage the affairs with economy. The island was no longer self-sufficient, and depended for some of its food supply upon imports. This invited enemies to apply blockade, and to starve the island into submission like a beseiged fortress.
Enter the Royal Navy. Once upon a time, it seems, there was a theory about how the Navy protected trade, trade paid Customs duty, and Customs duty paid for the Navy, this being fair all round except for the bit about Customs, nobody ever seriously expecting that such a thing, once allowed, would ever stop there.
The expert witness: N.A.M. Rodger, celebrated naval historian, in The command of the ocean [ISBN 0713994118], p.41:
During the Dutch War there were still many members of Parliament who believed, as they had believed in 1640, that the navy could and should live in peace and war from its own ‘natural’ revenue, the Customs, paid by the foreign trade which the navy protected. This idea had proved to be unrealistic ever since ‘Tonnage and Poundage’ had first been voted to support the fleet in 1347, but Parliamentary optimism was proof against three centuries of experience.
Since the Dutch war (indeed, since Rodger’s first volume) things have become worse in that the population of the country has increased, its food-productive land area diminished, and its reliance upon imports become heavier:
…the bread that you eat and the biscuits you nibble,
The sweets that you suck and the joints that you carve,
They are brought to you daily by All Us Big Steamers
And if any one hinders our coming you’ll starve!
[Kipling, 1911]
It is impractical to address any of these considerations in the short term and so it seems inevitable that trade will have to be protected by the Navy until further notice.
Whether ‘protection of trade’, as opposed to ‘adventurist shenanigans at our American cousins’ behest’, really does require massive force-projection hardware such as large aircraft carriers, rather than a larger number of less specialised vessels, it is clear that the maintenance of a Navy capable of ensuring that we are neither starved nor invaded, its primary and arguably only justifiable function, is going to cost more than Customs duties, even trade-suppressingly onerous ones, are likely to raise. If we grant that one method by which the Navy is to do these things is by carrying a nuclear deterrent, then the cost increases markedly.
It is in some ways easier for the Swiss. Their landlocked fortress of a country is defended by their numerous, ferocious and well-equipped army, who can, while waiting to defend it, carry on as civilians. This is not possible with a navy.
So even if we can defend the island of Britain in the Swiss, rather than the American, idiom, how are we to pay for the Navy?
Wikipedia gives the 2007-8 defence budget as £38986 million. There is some reason to believe that the Navy might account for about one quarter of this total, or perhaps £10000M.
Assuming that half of the 60M people in the country were to be employed, which may or may not be realistic, that would be £333 each, per year, or about £1300 for the current defence budget. If this could be halved by radical economies, then about £650pa would be required to meet the needs of defence. This is one of the two justifiable functions of government, the other being the provision of mechanisms of law-enforcement and binding arbitration. How much this costs seems to be a matter of extracting snippets of information, like molars, from the Home Office and other departments using the pliers of the FOIA. It would perhaps not be unreasonable to suppose that with the same attention to economies it might come to about the same, bringing us back to £1300pa each. This, the result of guesswork as much as anything else, might be at least of the order of magnitude of the bare minimum that a libertarian government, having eliminated all unnecessary state spending, would be obliged to expect from its working people in order to provide for ‘Law and War’.
Will we all pay this, and, if so, how? To what extent can we reduce the army budget by emulating the Swiss? What sacrifices of libertarian principle are we prepared to make in order to reduce the costs of policing? Do we really want or need to be a ’superpower’? To what extent are we prepared to balance the value of oil supplies against the cost of attempting to guarantee them? What, if anything, can realistically be done to address the issue of self-sufficiency?
To be continued.
