Torygraph:
There has to be a day of reckoning for those who made this mess
Taxpayers reading the coverage of the SDSR this morning will be forgiven for wanting to grab their pitchforks and march on the MoD. To be told that the least worst option is to buy a £3bn aircraft carrier, deploy it without aircraft, then flog it to whichever tin-pot country desperate enough to buy a second-hand white elephant is such a rage-inducing development that David Cameron is going to have to work hard to explain it later today.
We will naturally focus on the detail of the defence review and whether Britain’s future strategic security needs can be met by post-cuts armed forces. But we should also devote some time to scrutinising the decisions and processes that got us into this mess. The scale of the waste is such that it is hard to view it without the words ‘criminal’ and ‘neglect’ coming to mind. On Friday the Coalition published the organogram of Whitehall to ‘clear out the crap’ and it is this kind of information that we should now use to ask questions of those whose signatures must be on these decisions. Starting with the defence secretaries who were on watch when contracts were negotiated and signed, to the senior MoD officials and forces chiefs who thought it was a good idea to endorse contracts that carried penalty clauses greater than the cost of procuring the equipment in the first place, we should draw up a list of those responsible. What about the politicians who are now enjoying lucrative directorships? Who are the officials looking forward to gold-plated retirement reinforced by lavish consultancy deals with defence companies? Should they be allowed to slip away into obscurity? And if all decisions funnelled back to a
certain Fife MP who wanted to protect jobs at Rosyth, shouldn’t we say so and demand an accounting?