UNDER cover of the media’s focus on Gaza, Ukraine and the EU’s proposals for a defence pact with Australia comes the publication of the EU’s defence and security Roadmap, the next step in the achievement of the EU’s power-grab of defence and security responsibilities from the sovereign nations of Europe, and subordinating these responsibilities to the unelected, unaccountable EU Commission. I have written on this before, so readers should not be unduly surprised. Horrified, yes, but surprised, no.
The EU-Australia proposal is a clever decoy of course, a cover story to make the EU-UK agreements on defence appear more acceptable to the British public, while the Starmer government continues to be willingly entrapped in the spider’s web of the EU.
The Roadmap itself is a 16-page document which bears reading. It is, naturally, full of the usual coded language, describing how member states’ militaries – and defence industries – will work together co-operatively. Interestingly, the UK is barely mentioned and this is probably deliberate, although it is set out that the UK will participate in joint procurement – I have written previously on the dangers this poses to our national defence industrial base. What gives the lie to this cover story is the list of key steps and milestones to be achieved. These are: air and missile defence, strategic enablers such as air and sea transportation, military mobility, artillery systems, cyber, AI and electronic warfare, missiles and ammunition, drones and counter-drones, ground combat and maritime capabilities.
In themselves these appear laudable objectives, in keeping with the undoubted requirement for Europe to do more for its own security and, as I have remarked before, no sensible person should be against co-operation and collaboration in defence, under the umbrella of Nato. However, this Roadmap is not about Nato and it is not about co-operation and collaboration. The vast scale of what is proposed in these milestones is breathtaking and should make the ambitions of this project absolutely clear to all. These milestones are all, in fact, cogs in a single machine, as one clear-sighted commentator has pointed out.
Not mentioned in the Roadmap are the costs. These are in part financial, in that the UK will be obliged to participate in the EU’s defence fund. But the costs are also in terms of sovereignty. PESCO, the Permanent Structured Co-operation mechanism and its ancillary structures are, as I have already made clear elsewhere, the way that our defence will be hijacked. Given the Parliamentary majority of the current government, and its desire to do as much damage to our country as it can in the next three years, this will come to pass. A future government that really represents the interests of the country will simply have to undo it.
