1. Britain’s Place in the World
Reaffirming that the United Kingdom is an open, outward facing nation of considerable influence this sections covers the issue of how we might perceive our global role. After reading the section it is hard to see what is different from any other political party and it does not actually highlight any changes or solid proposals, mostly ‘is’ and ‘are’ rather than ‘will’
1.1 The response to changing threats
Todays threats are indeed more complex but have been so since the last strategic defence review in 1998. The substantive proposal is to ‘understand what is happening and respond sensibly’
Oh, that alright then
1.2 Labours record
As might be expected this is just a list of Labours failings, not sure what place this has in a strategy paper that is forward looking but why miss the opportunity of scoring political points, even if many of the things highlighted were either exactly the same under the last Conservative government or had their roots in Conservative government policies of old. The accompanying Green Paper does omit the Labour bashing section.
1.3 Conservative Solutions
This is simply a summary of good intentions and what changes will be put in place, more detail follows in the subsequent sections.
There will be a fundamental reorganisation of the relationships between foreign and domestic policy with regards to security and resilience.
This is long overdue and should be applauded.
