John Redwood: The government is leaving us without a Navy
Lord Redwood has accused the government of leaving the country without a Navy.
Speaking on GB News, he said: “We need to spend the money we’re currently spending better.
“We need to have faster delivery of programmes with probably more streamlined programmes, not keep on changing our minds about what we want, and only having very small batches.
“And we do need to understand we need a full naval capability, which will include both the need for the anti aerial threat destroyer as part of a carrier group or independently operating, as it could have done to defend Cyprus, and the drones may be delivered by a special ship.
“But it looks as if this government has said we can’t really afford to replace the Destroyers, because that may be a billion pounds a pop, and why don’t we invent something new that’s smaller and cheaper?
“I think they’re saying maybe it’s only going to be half a billion each, but they haven’t then doubled up the numbers, so they clearly want a saving out of this.
“This putative drone ship, for 10 years’ time if you’re lucky, and we don’t even know what its capabilities are going to be. They’ve got a lot of work to do on design.
“And meanwhile, the last government had rightly said we’re going to retire all the frigates and put in new frigates, and they were in build, and this government has gone slow on the build.
“It’s talking about one or two of them being sold to somebody else rather than ourselves, and it’s accelerated the decommissioning of the existing frigates to leave us without a navy.
“There’s so much low-hanging fruit, as they say, easy things to cut out that are wasteful, undesirable, or things that we really can’t afford.
“The benefits bill is one of the biggest, where the Conservative Party has set out quite detailed proposals on how to make a substantial reduction.
“But I think the whole Net Zero area is full of things we don’t need to be spending on. I’d start by cancelling all of the carbon capture and storage.”
