Britannia ruled the waves

As Pete wrote this morning, the plan to share aircraft carriers with France is controversial. It seems that concerns over sovereignty, job losses and differing strategic interests reduce to the one issue that no government has addressed: the protectionist system of defence procurement, which hampers the operational effectiveness of our armed forces. Typically forthright, Douglas Carswell identifies the problem:

‘Seems like protectionist defence procurement isn’t quite giving us sovereign capability the way we were promised, eh? Had we ordered much of the new carriers to be built overseas, we could have had them at a fraction of the £5 billion cost. But the asinine logic of the Defence Industrial Strategy means that we instead had to have them built in the UK.   Why? It gives us sovereign capability, we keep being told. Balls. Instead we end up with British-built carriers that may not have airplanes to put on them – and which we have to share with France.