Mike Alderson FRSA

I did some FoIs on tax payers money HMRC wasted on zombie Brexit border inspection posts for all those checks the UK never implement. NAO has previously estimated cost of brexit as £4.7bn, but this is the narrow border spend... theguardian.com/politics/202…

There was indeed a time when senior military commanders served a vital, unyielding constitutional function. During the Second World War, Field Marshal Alan Brooke (Chief of the Imperial General Staff) famously spent half his waking hours standing up to Winston Churchill, bluntly killing off catastrophic strategic whims with hard arithmetic. In 1982, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Terence Lewin was indispensable to Margaret Thatcher during the Falklands: providing unvarnished, lethal military counsel, establishing the War Cabinet’s operational parameters, and telling Downing Street exactly what was required to win—not what the Treasury wanted to hear. The creation of the unified Chief of the Defence Staff (CDS) role in 1959—championed by Lord Mountbatten and solidified in the 1964 creation of the unified Ministry of Defence—had an initially defensible purpose: stopping the Admiralty, War Office, and Air Ministry from fighting tribal turf wars over procurement and duplicating budgets in the Cold War nuclear era. What the role has degenerated into, however, is a corporate shock absorber for Whitehall. The decisive death blow came with the 2011 Levene Reforms. Those reforms stripped the individual service chiefs—the First Sea Lord, the Chief of the General Staff, and the Chief of the Air Staff—of their constitutional direct access to the Prime Minister. Instead, power was concentrated entirely in MoD Main Building, split between the civilian Permanent Secretary and the CDS. From that moment on, the CDS ceased to be a fighting commander and became a corporate executive in ceremonial dress: • Managing decline instead of deterrence: Rather than resigning on principle when sovereign capabilities are butchered, successive Chiefs of the Defence Staff have functioned as the Treasury’s compliance officers—signing off on shrinking the Army to 72,000, retiring frigates with no replacements, and gutting ammunition stockpiles. • The PR buffer: Their primary operational utility to Downing Street today is public relations. A politician cutting defence looks reckless; a four-star commander in gold braid sitting on a BBC sofa nodding along and calling for "efficiency and innovation" gives the cuts an institutional hall-mark. • Bureaucratic capture: They are steeped in civil service managerialism, promoted through Whitehall committee rooms rather than operational combat command, resulting in a culture where producing another glossy "Strategic Review" takes precedence over maintaining physical artillery barrels. We have created an administrative caste of peacetime generals who spend their tenures writing glossy Strategic Defence Reviews and absorbing political flak, while signing off on the hollowing out of our combat mass. If our military leadership refuses to resign on principle over an unpatrolled seabed, a hollowed-out surface fleet, and a regular army cut to 72,000, then having a Chief of the Defence Staff is purely ornamental. Abolish the Whitehall boardroom, restore independent authority to the individual service heads, and stop sending four-star managers to run PR for state failure.

🚨Labour’s Bill Would Let Energy Firms Dig Into Your Tax Records and House Value So They Can Charge You Extra to Subsidise Others Energy Secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh introduced the Energy Independence Bill last week that would hand energy companies access to eight government databases, including your HMRC tax and income records, child benefit, property value and pensions. This is a major expansion beyond the limited fuel-poverty data they already get. Official assessments openly plan “progressivity”: discounts for some households paid for by extra levies on those judged better off. Nothing happens until the bill passes and ministers create a scheme through further legislation. Her department calls it targeting support. The unmistakable purpose is giving private firms the power to inspect your private finances and raise your bill to subsidise everyone else. This is not support. It is a deliberate decision to treat your private tax records and property value as legitimate tools for deciding who gets charged more, then hand that power to private energy companies. Once the machinery exists, Labour will expand it. The only real question is how far they intend to go.

The Army is developing new Reserve structures and a new Reserve Operating Model to give reservists clearer roles, missions and opportunities to contribute to national defence. Click image for more. ukdefencejournal.org.uk/?p=7…