In Parliament yesterday the Minister of Defence Bob Ainsworth announced the Defence Green Paper leading up to a long overdue Strategic Defence Review. You heard that, right? It’s been in the papers and everything. Here’s a picture of the proceedings. How curious. Now what message does all that green leather uncovered by backsides convey?
I mean in the middle of a nasty war rapidly going wrong by most accounts, at a point where pretty much all reasonable observers reckon that UK defence policy has reached the crunch point with reality foreclosing on all the lazy do-nothing options, it must have been something really, really huge that kept 95% of MPs away from the House to debate the vital matter of the day. Mega-huge sale at John Lewis? Just guessing.
Update: the image above was sent to me by a friend who I now realize obtained it from the very fine ThinkDefence blog. A very gracious tip of the hat to them.
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I suspect two factors are in play here.
The first is that any MP interested in defence wanted to read the green paper rather than listen to Bob Ainsworth.
The second is the rather sad fact that when asked to name their key election issues (without prompting any topics), the majority of people don’t mention the armed forces. It’s just not a vote winner like health and education.
The strategic communications challenge for the military may be as much about justifying its budget and future in straitened times as it is about explaining current operations…
Tom,
For the first time in many generations I think that Defence will be an election issue; sparked by Iraq and the Chilcott inquiry but also given the way that the public has engaged with ongoing operations in AFG.
The problem for parliamentarians is that the Green Paper only sets out the discussion to follow in a Strategic Defence Review that many of them will not be there for – hence the low interest.
Like most of the population, MPs have made up their mind on the war.
What a disgrace.
I could not agree more. It is also always amazing how quickly the commons empty after PMQs on Wednesdays.
If my sense of direction is right it seems that the opposition considerably outnumbers the government here. That says something to.
Taking into account the relative proportion of Labour to opposition MPs, roughly three times as many opposition members turned up as Labour ones (~6.7% to 2.7%). I didn’t factor in the Speaker.
Perhaps this article from the Boston Globe sheds some light on why the bums (literally) are missing from the photo: http://mobile.boston.com/art/21//bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/01/31/easy__true/?single=1
Perhaps most people truly believe easy=true. So, the logic might be: more money on health makes me healthy; more money on education makes me (or my children) smarter and more employable. But defence? More money on defence makes me safer? Not sure it works with the public or the politicians in the West at the moment. Is the subject matter and the arguments in the SDR far too complex to be true? Maybe try a better font…
We must know whether the Bob commenting above is the same as the Bob in the picture. If so, we may have cracked it – instead of decorating strategy documents with inspiring shots of Tommies handing out sweets, lets speckle our strategy with pictures of MPs, to spark their interest. Between flicking through to find the picture of them, they might read some of the content.