THE armed forces chiefs have entered politics and are to present the government with a shopping list of purchases that it must make, or else be depicted as the Party that stabs ‘our boys’ in the back.
In the face of this military blackmail, Lord Mandelson, the Business Secretary has capitulated without even a shot being fired and without even putting up a token resistance.
He said: British troops ‘will not go without whatever they need.’
The outgoing head of the British army, General Sir Richard Dannatt, says he is compiling a ‘shopping list’ including surveillance and intelligence equipment, that he will present to the government in the full glare of the media spotlight, for immediate satisfaction.
Gordon Brown spent 40 minutes with the Chief of the Defence Staff, Sir Jock Stirrup, on Friday morning.
Afterwards, Stirrup said he was ‘busting a gut’ to get more helicopters redeployed to Afghanistan.
‘I have always said that there’s no such thing as enough helicopters in an operation campaign,’ he said.
He added in his message to the government, something of a threat – that the satisfaction of the army’s demands for equipment were ‘totally non-discretionary. You will just have to provide it.’
Dannatt warned that reducing army numbers from over 9,000 to 8,300 would be wrong.
He also raised the possibility that the Treasury may be unable to fund his ‘shopping list’ forcing the Ministry of Defence to find extra money for the Army in Afghanistan. ‘If this is really important and the national finances are in such dire straits that we are not going to get more money from the Treasury . . . we may have to reorder our budget again.
‘That will not be welcome but it may be necessary,’ he added.
In Britain there has been a tradition that the army keeps out of politics and carries out the requirements of the government of the day.
This tradition dates back to the 1640s, when a revolutionary army not only put an end to feudal society and the theory of rule by divine right by putting the king on trial as a traitor and executing him, but also purged and closed down several parliaments, adopting instead, a Lord Protector.
Once capitalism was established, the bourgeoisie resolved that it never wanted to see such a political army again.
Now in the period of the death agony of British capitalism the army is coming openly into politics again, encouraged by the Tories, this time playing a counter-revolutionary role, as the force that will see to it that British imperialism remains just that, and does not flinch from what it has to do, either in Afghanistan or at home.
This is an angry officers corps, furious at its defeat in Iraq and the way that it is being beaten by the Taleban.
Bourgeois economists are talking about 20 per cent budget cuts on an annual basis for a number of years, while Cabinet ministers are talking about ten years of vicious cuts.
The army chiefs are in no mood for cuts in military expenditure. Using the lives of ‘our boys’ as the state propaganda line, they will be demanding that the military budget be doubled or trebled and that the working class be forced to pay for it with the destruction of the Welfare State.
Generals will move on to reason, that if governments will not recognise what must be done ‘for the good of the country’ then the army has a duty to rescue the people from its government with a coup against the enemy at home.
This is the process that Dannatt and Stirrup have got underway, with the Tories applauding.
The workers policy to deal with this situation is clear. British troops must be immediately withdrawn from Afghanistan and a socialist revolution must be organised to put an end to British capitalism and smash its state apparatus, disbanding and scattering its military police core.