Though Cowards Flinch

Eric Joyce, a Parliamentary Private Secretary at the Ministry of Defence, has resigned his position to return to the backbenches. The text of his resignation can be read in full here, and there are plenty of salient points to discuss. First of all, it should be obvious that Joyce, with his paean to Gordon’s handling of the economy and his rejection of early-1980′s Labour defence policy is not a left-winger by any standard. Indeed Joyce was formerly a Major in the army – not exactly the sort one would expect to support disarmament.

The main areas of Joyce’s complaint are as follows; the risk to benefit ratio, encompassing the open-ended nature of the deployment and the need to reduce troop numbers; the relationship between the UK, US and the other NATO allies; finally, the need to reign in Labour attacks on senior defence personnel whilst allowing the top brass to have their say openly. What the purpose of the resignation was, from Joyce’s point of view, I can’t say – whether to influence policy, to remind voters that some Labour MPs stick up for soldiers or whatever.

Yet is clear that now public opinion has moved against troops being sent to Afghanistan to prop up a ridiculously corrupt government, some Labour MPs are gathering a courage to speak that was previously lacking. Are Joyce’s complaints justified?

On the risk to benefit ratio – i.e. the loss of British soldiers’ lives versus an undemocratic, unstable dictatorship – no one can fault Joyce. Except insofar as it would have been nice had Joyce and others said their piece and perhaps forced a change months or years ago. On the rest of it, however, I think Joyce’s reasoning is more suspect. His complaint about the attitude of the NATO allies smells of sour grapes (and inaccuracy) and his demand to let the brass speak rings hypocritical and casts up memories of castigation for writing a Fabian pamphlet and condemning the Army.

“We also need a greater geopolitical return from the United States for our efforts.  For many, Britain fights; Germany pays, France calculates; Italy avoids.  If the United States values each of these approaches equally, they will end up shouldering the burden by themselves.”

It is not clear to me what ‘a greater geopolitical return from the United States’ means. To take more account of what the British government wants? This is what Joyce indicates when he says that ‘the first step’ would be to hold a second round of Afghan elections (as though they’ll be any less corrupt). As for the churlish remarks about Germany, France and Italy, these seem the petulant whining a child wanting to have their cake and eat it; to have the accolades and achieve the mission objectives for less actual effort. To me this belies a failure to realise that the problem is not the number of allied troops: it’s the nature of the mission.

If we take Joyce’s views here as being representative, evidently not much has been learned through eight years of war by this Labour government.

As for letting the officers have their say:

Most important of all, we must make it clear to every serviceman and woman, their families and the British public that we give their well-being the highest political priority.  Behind the hand attacks by any Labour figure on senior service personnel are now, to the public, indistinguishable from attacks on the services themselves. Conversely, in my view we should allow our service personnel greater latitude to voice their views on matters which make distinctions between defence and politics pointless.

I find it interesting that part of making it clear that taking care of service personnel and dependents is a priority is to quit attempting to undermine ‘senior service personnel’. To this twit the matter is evidently not one of actually taking care of service personnel, but of ceasing political tactics that don’t play very well in the public mind. One wonders where Joyce’s fiery ‘uncommandability‘ has gone, and whither his views about the ‘racist, sexist and discriminatory’ officer class, now that he sees it as harmful to Labour’s image to attack senior service personnel.

Personally I’d like to see all service personnel speak out a bit more, form a union of the lower ranks. Hell, I’d bring back the Agitators. Bugger the brass.

Bottom line: Joyce doesn’t bring very much of note to the debate. His sentiments on ending the war in Afghanistan are befuddled. His other claims fairly meaningless to the national political debate, if not outright silly. Yet once again, despite the flowery effluent contained in his resignation letter, the media are using the incident to slam Gordon Brown personally. How embarrassing, a ministerial aide has resigned! What I would have thought more embarrassing is that absolutely no one – not Cameron, not Clegg, not Brown – has a clue how the engagement in Afghanistan ends, beyond arming the people responsible for horrific abuses and hoping for the best.

Of course talking like that might just get me branded unpatriotic!