“Whether it’s in Iraq, Syria, Libya or elsewhere — as Prime Minister, if I believe there is a specific threat to the British people, would I be prepared to authorise action to neutralise that threat? Yes, I would.”
It is almost two years since David Cameron lost a vote on intervening in the Syrian war and he has barely spoken about foreign affairs since. He is now slowly returning to the subject, making the case for pursuing Islamic State in Syria. The recent murder of 30 British holidaymakers in Tunisia was almost certainly planned in Isis’s Syrian stronghold of Raqqa. The Prime Minister is making the fairly simple case that the military ought to be able to pursue the enemy.
But there is no chance of the RAF ‘neutralising’ the threat. For all his interventionist instincts, the Prime Minister has spent five years imposing deep cuts on the armed forces; by some estimates, he has reduced the UK fighting capability by up to a third.
This week, we learnt that the RAF’s fleet of fighter aircraft is to shrink to its smallest in history.
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