Last month’s Total Politics magazine featured a profile of Liberal Democrat Armed Forces Minister, Nick Harvey. The piece looks at Nick’s life before politics, his time as a pre-coalition MP, and the various issues that now end up on his desk as a minister in the Department of Defence.
Here’s a sample:
“This is a difficult and challenging time for the Ministry of Defence and it’s vital that we meet the needs of our service personnel,” said Nick Harvey following his appointment as Minister for the Armed Forces in May 2010. At a time of unprecedented budgetary constraints it promises to be one of the most difficult periods in the department’s history.
Having worked as the shadow defence secretary since 2006, the 49-year-old Liberal Democrat MP was well briefed on his ministerial portfolio. The experience would have served him well for his first task in government, to help undertake a comprehensive strategic defence and security review, the first since 1998.
With defence spending set to fall by 8 per cent over four years and 42,000 MoD and armed forces job cuts expected by 2015, Harvey will oversee a significantly streamlined armed forces despite Britain continuing to have the fourth largest military budget in the world.
The decision to scrap the Navy’s flagship HMS Ark Royal has come under particular criticism with some suggesting recent events in North Africa and the Middle East have exposed Britain’s military shortcomings. Harvey denies the review has compromised action in Libya but the debate on whether Britain is risking its national security and interventionist capacity is only likely to intensify as the cuts take hold.
You can read the whole profile over on the Total Politics website here.
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One Comment
I am a Liberal Democrat `Coalitionist’ supporter who bemoans the loss of the flagship Ark Royal in the spending round.There has an Ark Royal, and several generations of this vessel since the time of the Spanish Armada in 1588. Subsequently, it has crucially been seen and heralded as a symbol of British Naval strength and its invincibility on the high seas, over three centuries.
The current deployment of British forces in the Libyan freedom cause has shown that the French General de Gaulle is prominent but the British equivalent scrapped and the apparent replacement Queen Elizabeth modern carrier, not expected to be launched for a decade.