With thanks to Peter Hitchins
The Navy sinks and nobody rocks the boat
Astonishing and saddening revelations in an excellent edition of the BBC's File On Four warned us that the Royal Navy is slowly dissolving, centuries of tradition sacrificed in a couple of decades.
The programme revealed serious worries about safety in submarines. We are selling perfectly good ships to foreign navies and the money is not even coming back to the taxpayer. While it declines, the Navy's men and women suffer.
Ship's companies have to wait days to return home after long deployments as their vessels chug at half-speed to save oil. If they get to port after 5pm, they have to moor offshore overnight to save paying dockers overtime. The worst thing about all this is that hardly anybody cares