Reflections on politics of the week
Northern Europe could pool defence procurement; a nationwide counter-terrorism force is mooted; Trump continues to purge the military
Three items of news to bookmark while the storm continues to howl.
Paying for rearmament
Last month, the European Commission published a White Paper on rearming Europe, of which one element is a proposed €150 billion loan scheme called Security Action for Europe (SAFE). In essence, the Commission will raise the money on the capital markets and EU member states can then take out “competitively priced and attractively structured long-maturity loans” to spend on defence procurement. There was controversy over the smaller print: the money can only be spent with defence companies within EU member states or in countries which have security pacts with the EU. This excludes the United States, the United Kingdom and Turkey, for example, though does provide additional leverage for the Commission in seeking an agreement with the UK. I highlighted some of the objections in The Spectator.
However, other rearmament schemes are available, to coin a phrase. Politico has reported that British officials met last week with counterparts from a number of European countries to explore an alternative proposal. Together with Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Poland and the Netherlands, the UK is examining the idea of establishing a supranational bank dedicated to joint defence procurement programmes. The core idea, drafted by HM Treasury, is that the upfront capital costs would be carried on the balance sheet of the new institution, leaving participating states liable in their national budgets only for debt interest and maintenance costs. This is most directly relevant to the UK because of the strict fiscal rules under which the Treasury operates and with which the Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, is struggling.
There are other advantages to the scheme. Unlike the European Investment Bank, the new institution would be able to purchase equipment and munitions directly on behalf of its members, and would target a carefully chosen group of investors familiar and comfortable with the defence sector. It could therefore avoid the potential difficulties of investment organisations bound by restrictive ESG rules or concerned about the reputational risk of involvement with the defence industry. It would also not be under the control of the European Commission, a complex and often frustrating organisation with a well-entrenched bureaucracy, and even officials from some EU member states admit this could be beneficial.
The proposal is still at an early stage, and there is much detail absent. Operating outwith the supervision of the European Commission, the new body would need to design its own governance and accountability mechanisms, and the question of who would ultimately make the decisions is a vital one. There are also concerns that creating a group of northern European countries without being able to persuade states like France, Italy and Spain, which are wary of taking on additional debt commitments, could cause division within Europe. Italy and Spain are already towards the bottom of the table when it comes to defence spending, while France, as I wrote in The Spectator in December, is struggling to pass a new and relatively ambitious military budget through the fractious and fractured National Assembly.
This new “defence bank” may come to nothing, but it is, at the very least, good that there are discussions about innovative ways to facilitate and speed up procurement. The UK armed forces suffer from many problems at the moment, and these need to be addressed in different ways: there are deeply entrenched, long-term problems like the appalling delays and cost overruns on major programmes like the Ajax and Boxer armoured fighting vehicles, which are not susceptible to an immediate solution, but at the other end of the scale there are pressing shortage of ammunition and materiel because stockpiles have been donated to Ukraine. We are going to need a number of approaches to rearm and bring the armed forces back to anything like readiness, so creative thinking and identifying partners with similar needs are sensible approaches.
I also wonder if this is a straw in the wind. I have never been an enthusiast for the European Union, for all sorts of reasons, but one source of my antipathy is the nature of the organisation (which, in fairness, stems from its foundation in the Treaty of Rome in 1957; this is neither new nor covert). It is fundamentally centripetal, seeking to gather more and more jurisdiction over more and more areas to the central institutions in Brussels, even if that is then in some cases devolved under the principle of subsidiarity, and it has a highly developed bureaucracy which seems only to grow larger and more influential. Compared to any other multilateral organisation I can think of, the EU is thick with laws, regulations, officials and institutions, and it is committed by treaty to seek “ever closer union”.
Taken alongside Sir Keir Starmer’s enthusiastic if perhaps unrealistic attempt to create an ad hoc “coalition of the willing” to enforce a non-existent peace agreement in Ukraine, does this proposal for a “defence bank” represent a dissatisfaction with the rigidity and complexity of the EU, and a recognition that we may need to achieve our ends more often now through informal agreements, temporary coalitions and loose alliances? One of the criticisms of the European project, which I very much share, has long been that the extent of the EU encompasses too varied a range of economies to form a truly cohesive unit, and that a policy which suits all member states equally is nigh-on impossible. Arguably the Eurozone crisis of 2009 and afterwards was a result of that impossibility, with EU-wide measures designed for the benefit of some members having deleterious effects on others. Perhaps in this new era of global instability, and with the United States, for the moment at least, significantly changing its priorities, we will need to work with partners on a much more à la carte basis than the kind of table d’hôte the EU has traditionally offered. That may be no bad thing.
Rethinking counter-terrorism policing
The Guardian reports that the Joint Reform Team, a unit within the Home Office including representatives of the National Police Chiefs’ Council, the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners, His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and the College of Policing alongside civil servants, is considering plans for a national police body to deal with terrorism and serious organised crime. This is one option being considered as part of a white paper on police reform expected to be published later this year. It would transfer existing counter-terrorism units from local forces to a central authority covering at least England and Wales, either as part of a “national centre for policing” or as a separate and independent law enforcement agency akin to the FBI.
Either of these options would represent radical change from the status quo. Lead responsibility for counter-terrorism across the United Kingdom currently sits with the Counter Terrorism Policing network, chaired by the Metropolitan Police’s Assistant Commissioner for Specialist Operations, currently Matt Jukes, who also oversees Counter Terrorism Command. It comprises 11 regional counter-terrorism units, but some functions remain with the Metropolitan Police, leading to a slightly fractured landscape in terms of responsibility and accountability. It is notable, as The Guardian points out, that both the current Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Mark Rowley, and his predecessor, Dame Cressida Dick, had previously been in charge of counter-terrorism, which is an indication of how important the role has been, especially since 2005. However, it has also long been suggested that even notional responsibility for national counter-terrorism policing is a heavy additional burden for someone trying to manage a 44,000-strong law enforcement organisation with a budget of £4.4 billion and which is plagued by entrenched cultural, behavioural and reputational problems.
The role of the Metropolitan Police has identifiable and logical historical roots. The first counter-terrorism policing unit in the UK was the Special Irish Branch, set up within the Met’s Criminal Investigation Department (CID) in 1883 to deal with the threat of Fenian terrorism, though in 1887 it expanded to cover other areas such as anarchism and foreign subversion and was renamed simply as Special Branch. With the exception of Ireland and then Northern Ireland, which were governed separately, for many years the overwhelming threat from terrorism was to London as the seat of government, so the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police having national responsibility seemed logical enough.
On the other hand, the idea of a national police force of any kind runs contrary to the deep-seated traditions of law enforcement in Britain. While Ireland was policed by the Royal Irish Constabulary from 1822 to 1922 and Northern Ireland by the Royal Ulster Constabulary (1922-2001) and the Police Service of Northern Ireland (from 2001), mainland Britain has always had independent regional constabularies, with the exception of the establishment of Police Scotland by merging eight smaller forces in 2013. (There are arguments that it has not been a happy precedent.) England and Wales are still covered by 43 separate police forces, from the huge Metropolitan Police to the City of London Police with a jurisdiction of (famously) a square mile and fewer than 1,000 officers.
The closest analogy we have is the National Crime Agency, formed in 2013 principally to tackle organised crime, human, weapon and drug trafficking, cyber crime and economic crime which extends beyond regional or international borders. It was the successor to the Serious Organised Crime Agency (2006-13), itself formed from the National Crime Squad (1998-2006), the National Criminal Intelligence Service (1992-2006), the National Hi-Tech Crime Unit (2001-06) and parts of HM Revenue and Customs and the Immigration Service. However, the NCA is not a police force but a non-ministerial government department. Its officers can be designated with the powers and privileges of a police constable, immigration officer or customs officer under the Crime and Courts Act 2013, but they are civil servants rather than police officers.
In 2014, a report on counter-terrorism by the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee recommended that the NCA should assume responsibility for counter-terrorism from the Metropolitan Police.
The Metropolitan Police have a wide remit which has many complexities and the current difficulties faced by the organisation lead us to believe that the responsibility for counter-terrorism ought to be moved to the NCA in order to allow the Met to focus on the basics of policing London. The work to transfer the command ought to begin immediately with a view to a full transfer of responsibility for counter-terrorism operations taking place, for example within five years after the NCA became operational, in 2018. When this takes place, it should finally complete the jigsaw of the new landscape of policing.
The Home Secretary at the time, Theresa May, agreed to review the organisational arrangements for dealing with counter-terrorism, but after the terrorist threat level was raised in August that year, she announced in October that the review would be suspended until after the general election due in 2015. The proposed transfer of responsibility never happened.
The succession of structural changes in what is now the NCA give some indication of how difficult it can be to create a national law enforcement agency that is effective and has widespread support. Some police officers have argued that the current regional network model is a strength, because the front-line policing is carried out by local police who know and are connected to their communities, able to gather detailed intelligence and pass it to specialist officers on a wider level. It also makes local police forces able to be more responsive to conditions and the need for resources on the ground.
On the other hand, it has been argued that creating a new, national body would address other existing problems such as recruitment. Counter Terrorism Policing currently has an establishment of about 9,000 officers but is some 900 short of that, with some ascribing the recruitment problem to the fact that officers from other forces are reluctant to move to a role in which the Metropolitan Police formally becomes their employer, or believe they will have to move to London with the higher attendant cost of living. At the same time, officers at Counter Terrorism Policing can be recalled by their “home” force, which can create instability in the work of counter-terrorism.
The current institutional arrangements are characteristically British in their compromise and diffuseness. There is a feeling of “I wouldn’t start from here”, and certainly to explain the model of British counter-terrorism policing is not to sketch out a system which many people would design of given a blank piece of paper. It undoubtedly has strengths and weaknesses, and the challenge is to discern where the balance between those lies. Counter-terrorism will always require a significant degree of cooperation between different organisations, most obviously between the police, the Security Service, MI5, and the Home Office’s Homeland Security Group (formerly the Office for Security and Counter Terrorism); but there are also the British Transport Police, the Ministry of Defence Police, the Civil Nuclear Constabulary, the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre (JTAC), the National Protective Security Authority (NPSA), the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), among others, to be factored in.
A Home Office source is quoted in The Guardian using one of the more witless phrases of modern politics, “We will always look at what works”. Does any politician or civil servant champion an idea or policy which they think doesn’t work? The problem is deciding what works most effectively and how to achieve it. In the United States, counter-terrorism is primarily the responsibility of the FBI, while in Germany it falls to Bundespolizeidirektion 11 and particularly to GSG9, but these are both countries with explicitly federal structures and clear distinctions of jurisdiction. In France the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Intérieure (DGSI) is the lead agency, created in 2008 and including the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire of the National Police. France, however, has the distinction absent from the UK between the National Police (formerly the Sûreté) and the National Gendarmerie.
We will await the white paper with interest. My instinct is that a standalone nationwide counter-terrorism police force would be too radical and revolutionary a step, and that there would be a danger either of boundary disputes with the NCA or else the temptation to amalgamate existing counter-terrorism activities with the jurisdiction of the NCA: we could end up almost by accident with a body which was responsible for counter-terrorism, organised crime, economic and financial crime, cross-border crime and trafficking, and then why not also add border security and protection of critical national infrastructure, or serious public disorder and policing of political protests and demonstrations, or security of major public events? Lines always have to be drawn somewhere. What is important, as well as “what works”, is a system which, even if complex, is clear, logical and accountable.
The Trumpian purge continues
The second Trump administration will never be dull. What is becoming increasingly clear, though should never really have been in doubt, is the centrality in President Trump’s mind and those of his supporters of personal loyalty to him. His suspicious and paranoid nature chimed perfectly with the public perception of a closed political elite at least indifferent to the interests of the electorate, if not positively hostile to them, and he has carried this to the logical-in-its-own-context conclusion of seeing no difference between loyalty to him and therefore to his agenda, and loyalty to the United States as a polity. For Trump, these are indistinguishable.
It is that reasoning which has seen the extraordinary and personal attacks on senior officials within the government, and this has been particularly evident in the armed forces. Towards the end of February, Trump announced on social media the firing of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Charles Q. Brown Jr, the principal military adviser to the government; shortly afterwards, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth revealed that he was also dismissing the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the Vice-Chief of Staff of the Air Force, General James Slife, the Judge Advocate General of the US Air Force, Lieutenant General Charles Plummer, and the Judge Advocate General of the Army, Lieutenant General Joseph B. Berger III.
The Judge Advocate General of the Navy, Vice-Admiral Christopher French, had already requested retirement despite being in post for only a few months, and had stepped down on 1 January. In addition, the Commandant of the United States Coast Guard, Admiral Linda Fagan, had been fired in January. The President has nominated to be the next Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff a retired Air Force officer, Lieutenant General Dan Caine, who is not of the seniority usually required for the post but is known to have been supportive of Trump. You, as they say, do the math. When Hegseth was asked about the dismissals, he told the media that the officers concerned had not been “well-suited” for their roles. From Hegseth, proof positive that irony is not dead.
Whatever MAGA cheerleaders might insist, this level of purging of senior military leaders on a personal basis by an incoming president is absolutely unprecedented. This week there was more: the Director of the National Security Agency and Commander of US Cyber Command, General Timothy Haugh, and the Deputy Director of the NSA, Wendy Noble, were fired. This came shortly after President Trump had met far-right conspiracist Laura Loomer, who detailed the moves on social media and ascribed them to Haugh and Noble being “disloyal to President Trump”.
It should go without saying that the President of the United States should not be making even a minute in his diary free for a sinister and malignant crank like Loomer, let alone entertaining the possibility—which he freely admitted to journalists—that he might take her advice on appointments. But we need to be fully aware of the gravity of what Trump is doing: senior military officers, from the most senior down, are being removed from their positions for explicitly political-cum-ideological reasons in a way which is unparalleled in modern American history. Some of those being nominated to replace them owe their nomination to the personal favour of the President and in some cases are of dubious suitability and qualification. However, there seems little chance of the United States Senate objecting to any of them, as they confirmed even the most controversial of Trump’s cabinet nominations like Hegseth, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
I doubt this is over. Every success will merely embolden the President, and there are those around him like Loomer who will peddle conspiracies to feed his natural paranoia, acting as cheap Trumpian versions of Grima Wormtongue. Trump already has a cabinet of acolytes and vassals. Not only is there no check on the President, there is an atmosphere positively encouraging his worst traits.