One of the most pernicious myths over here about the failed Blair premiership was the idea that he was in any lasting sense an effective military ally of the United States.

To be sure, he despatched thousands of British troops to Afghanistan and Iraq, who (despite being disgracefully under-resourced) often made a valuable and, not so infrequently, heroic contribution to the coalition’s effort. At the same time, relentless budget-cutting (a very rare phenomenon indeed elsewhere in Britain’s public services during the Blair/Brown years) not only reduced the impact that British troops would make in those conflicts, but, far more seriously, in other conflicts to come.

This was a trend made even worse by Blair’s continuous attempts to integrate Britain’s forces more closely into the EU’s evolving military-industrial complex. In his Telegraph column today Christopher Booker gives just the latest instance of where that disastrous policy has lead:

Fifteen years after John Major (in his wish to be “at the heart of Europe”) signed Britain up to what was called the Future Large Aircraft project, the EU’s bid to build a replacement for the US Hercules transport aircraft appears on the brink of collapse. Despite last week’s plea from Airbus’s chief executive that the A400M project must be kept going to save “40,000 European jobs”, all we have got so far for our £1.2 billion investment has been
28 computerised photographs of an aircraft so beset with technical problems it seems unlikely ever to fly.
But with Britain’s ageing Hercules fleet due to fall out of the sky by 2012, we have now missed our place in the queue for replacements. Due to Tony Blair’s Euro-besotted decision in 2000 to buy the A400M, it seems our Armed Forces will soon be incapable of fighting overseas, even if a prime minister of the day wished them to do so.