Public's risk aversion could threaten security
Bill Rammell has warned the public's aversion to troop deployment could harm national security
Also In The News
|
By Adam Leveridge
Stefano Domenicali has said Ferrari are working hard to recover the performance deficit they had to their rivals in 2009. |  |
Thursday, 14, Jan 2010 11:04
By Elizabeth Davies
In a speech delivered last night, the armed forces minister warned that the public's lack of understanding of the military risked putting Britain into "inglorious and impotent isolation".
Speaking to the Institute for Public Policy Research, Bill Rammell argued that increasing public reluctance to deploy troops harmed Britain's ability to defend its borders and pursue its national interests abroad.
He acknowledged that the content of his speech would be controversial, but said it was designed to "stimulate debate" ahead of a general election.
Mr Rammell identified three particular trends in society that he thought were "positive" in general, but which were contributing to the public's negative attitude towards deployments.
While a "decline in deference" was clearly a good thing, combined with increased tolerance of different ways of life, "healthy skepticism" risked becoming "blanket cynicism" towards those in positions of authority. It was extremely rare that a government decision to commit British troops was "black and white", he admitted, and said that the public needed a better grasp of the complexity of defence issues.
Secondly, he said, the new round-the-block information environment had profoundly altered the relationship between the public and their government. Access to information at the click of a button had given citizens a tendency to immediately look for a culprit when something went wrong.
He accepted that the Ministry of Defence (MoD) needed to work even further for transparency, but also said that "the public needs to accept that the battlefield is a uniquely dangerous and uncertain environment". Death is a part of war, he argued, and the only way to fully protect troops is to refuse to deploy them at all.
A third trend Mr Rammell identified was a new belief in the freedom of information. While this was often extremely valuable - he raised the fact that inquests in soldiers' deaths are now commonplace, rather than for exceptional circumstances - the public needed to realise that sometimes the government needed to withhold information. This was not "evasiveness", but something essential for ensuring the success of an operation.
It was important for the government to justify a mission to the people, and Mr Rammell conceded that the MoD required a "cultural change" in its information strategy. However, the media and the public needed to understand the complexity of contemporary military operations.
Comparing the current conflict in Afghanistan to the second world war, Mr Rammell admitted that the immediate threat was much less obvious to the public but nonetheless very real. Protecting British national security was now more about containing threats before they emerged, but "prevention is not as easy to demonstrate as cure".
Nonetheless, Mr Rammell argued, this "prevention" was essential for British national security. In a reference to the UK's 19th century "splendid isolation" approach to foreign policy, he said: "My great fear is that we as a nation will become so risk-averse, so cynical and so introverted that we will find ourselves in inglorious and impotent isolation by default."