IN THE clip above Steve Turley explains recent Russian activity off the coast of the UK, including within UK territorial waters. It gives a good summary of just how toothless the UK now is.
Defence Secretary John Healey responded by calling a press conference from Downing Street to tell Vladimir Putin that the Government is very, very angry with him. Apparently we are very angry and very strong and Russia should be afraid of unspecified threats we issue.
Adopting a stern expression, Healey stated: ‘We see you. We see your activity over our cables and our pipelines, and you should know that any attempt to damage them will not be tolerated and will have serious consequences.’
The ‘warning’ follows British claims of a 30 per cent increase in Russian activity in the North Atlantic, probing the waters of the British exclusive economic zone (200 miles around the UK), and a month-long operation tracking three Russian submarines lingering around cables which supply 90 per cent of the UK’s internet traffic.
The ‘We see you, Russia!’ declaration might as well have been ‘and if you continue we will write a strongly worded letter of protest’.
It’s pathetic.
A strong nation doesn’t pull a press conference to say it’s tracked suspicious enemy activity in its waters. It responds at the time and forces the activity to stop. Reports do describe some response from both the UK and Norway, but if you are tracking them for a month before they leave it’s a little hard to say you have scared them off.
Because the truth is we can’t. We have been reducing the Royal Navy in military review after military review for 40 years.
The US has a policy of trying to maintain a naval strength (not just size, but modernity and spending) that would enable it to defeat any two other navies combined. That policy has been under severe threat from Chinese naval expansion, and from the fact that Chinese naval production capacity now massively outstrips that of the US (they have far more shipbuilding facilities). But the policy was inherited from British naval history, from Britain’s need at the time of Nelson to defeat combined French and Spanish fleets. Following the Napoleonic Wars, British policy became that Britain should have more ships than the next two navies combined. A hundred years ago we were still doing that. It was our idea as the world’s greatest ever maritime power.
Those days of course are long gone.
But even as late as the Second World War we were still formidable. At the start of the war we possessed more than 15 battleships and battlecruisers, seven aircraft carriers, 66 cruisers, 164 destroyers and 66 submarines. During the conflict, the British Empire built about 885 major combatant ships, including 50 capital ships, 229 destroyers, 311 escorts, and 164 submarines, as well as significant numbers of landing ships and tankers.
At the height of the conflict the Royal Navy commanded some 1,400 ships. Clearly during the largest war ever fought those figures are inflated from where they would sit during peacetime. But look at the largest navies just by number of ships today. In 2024 Britain ranked 31st in that, behind such naval powerhouses as Chile, Nigeria, Colombia and Bolivia.
It was in the merchant fleet, in the past, that we showed real depth as well. One third of all merchant shipping in the entire world was still British at the start of the Second World War. We had the largest trading fleet in the world.
Today our trading fleet is 26th in the world. From 33 per cent of all tonnage, to 0.4 per cent (5 per cent if you count unregistered tonnage owned or part-owned by British companies).
It wasn’t war bankruptcy that ended the merchant fleet. It was loss of manufacturing, loss of infrastructure, loss of steel production, loss of territorial waters, loss of shipbuilding facilities, and the final nail of joining the EEC and conceding fishing of our waters to foreign vessels and sacrificing the favoured trading nation status we had with Commonwealth nations and former colonies outside the EEC/EU.
Nor was it national poverty that explains the decline of our armed forces generally and our navy in particular. It was choice by both Labour and Conservative governments to constantly reduce the size of our forces, to pretend we could always be a junior partner to the US, or more recently, could merge into some sort of combined EU force. Our leaders decided that we could reduce it all to tiny sizes because we would never have to act independently again. It was a lie illustrated by the Falklands conflict, where thankfully we still retained just enough strength in military equipment, and the Thatcherite strength of purpose to use it, to defend our interests.
That war should have told us that there would be times when we would have to act alone. Instead, what followed was another stupidity – the so-called ‘peace dividend’ of the end of the Cold War and the idea that major threats were now completely a thing of the past. So more spending reviews, and more betrayals of our capacity for independent defence. It’s OK, there’s still Nato. It’s OK, we still have excellent special forces. It’s OK, we can switch to drones instead of manpower. Only every time ‘OK’ meant fewer men of our own ready to fight for us, fewer ships of our own to man, and fewer planes, and fewer tanks, and less of everything.
All the while the capacity to replace them was being allowed to disappear as well, such as the industrial base and the dockyards. We moved to a retail and finance economy and said farewell to steel production and mining, an error for which Conservatives alone are to blame but which was shared by both main parties. We have deliberately crippled our own oil extraction and use in the name of Net Zero, while purchasing oil from Norway who extract it from the same North Sea where we refuse to drill, and purchasing solar panels from China made using oil and coal-powered energy. The decline of our shipbuilding and industrial base is part of an overall tale of repeated bad choices that we are still making.
Much more important it is to spend our money giving Africans foreign aid for them to then demand reparations as well. Much more important to give the Third World housing when they come to Britain illegally. Much more important to sustain obscene levels of generosity to everyone and everything other than ourselves and our own protection.
Here is the state of the Royal Navy, according to AI summary of what was once the greatest and most feared naval force on the planet:
As of early 2025, the Royal Navy has approximately 62 commissioned ships and 32,000 to 33,000 personnel, marking a significant decline from its historical peak of over 1,400 ships during World War II.
While the total number of vessels including the Royal Fleet Auxiliary (RFA) reaches around 80 ships, the surface combatant fleet has reached a historic low, with only 14 destroyers and frigates available for immediate deployment. The force currently operates two aircraft carriers and ten submarines, but faces challenges with availability, as only two of the six Type 45 destroyers were reported as operational at the start of 2024 due to refit schedules.
Key fleet statistics include:
Total commissioned ships: 62 (down from 80 in 2023 and 861 in 1945).
Personnel: Approximately 32,000 active sailors and officers.
Major surface combatants: 16 units (2 carriers, 6 destroyers, 8 frigates).
Submarines: 10 nuclear-powered vessels (4 ballistic missile, 6 attack).
And here is an assessment of how battle-ready these reduced forces are:
Both Labour and Conservative governments wasted trillions while letting our armed forces and navy atrophy. Then, when already reduced to pathetic insignificance in terms of our capacity to defend ourselves, we wasted money backing Ukraine in order to pretend that we matter.
That is why the Russians want to embarrass us, and that is why they can linger around vital sea cables in our waters. If they want to attack such vital assets, what could we do to stop it? Threaten nuclear escalation from the nuclear submarines we can’t actually put to sea?
The state of our Navy is an utter disgrace. Not in terms of those who serve. I’m sure our sailors are still capable and skilled. But in terms of how few of them there are, and in terms of how woefully inadequate our number of vessels are. And let’s be clear: like the failure to deal with illegal immigration and the encouragement of mass migration, this situation represents a massive betrayal.
The statue of Nelson in Trafalgar Square now looks down on Islamic ceremonies of conquest. At the same time, we have more admirals in the Royal Navy than operational warships (40 admirals, 19-25 warships).
The first duty of a government is the protection of its people from foreign threats, and from foreign armies and invasion. We have failed this duty. We have failed those who still serve, those who served before them, and the people of these isles today.
Our conventional forces are unlikely to not stop a seaborne invasion by a determined and serious fleet of one of the major powers (US, China, Russia, possibly several others). Nor do we use our forces to protect our people from the amateur invasion of the dinghies ferrying Third World fighting-age men into our country.
All we offer are press conferences where weak men make vague threats from a position of abject humiliation.
This article appeared in Jupplandia on April 10, 2026, and is republished by kind permission.
