Steven Dunne - BLOOD SUMMER

Serving in the British Armed Forces has been the single greatest honour of my life. During my 40-year career, I have been posted all over the world, from Sierra Leone to Mogadishu, going from one extreme to the other – conducting Arctic warfare in -30C conditions one minute to undergoing months of gruelling desert training in sweltering 50C heat the next. There have been hairy times, such as a six-month tour in the IRA stronghold of Crossmaglen, one the most dangerous postings for the British Army during The Troubles. There have also been extremely tough times. In Afghanistan, I was among the body-recovery team for RAF Nimrod, which crashed near Kandahar following a catastrophic mid-flight fire, killing 14 service personnel. The devastation I saw will stay with me to my dying day. But undoubtedly the most challenging aspect of military life has been enduring the way in which successive governments have treated our Armed Forces. To politicians, we are almost an afterthought, which is why they fail to provide the equipment, funding and resources our brave men and women need. Meanwhile, we see the disgraceful treatment of our veterans, who face prosecution from activist lawyers and the political establishment merely for doing their jobs under extreme pressures. Which is why I have chosen to leave the military and join Reform UK as its first Spokesman for the Armed Forces. I can no longer stand by and see service personnel being expected to operate in increasingly demanding and dangerous circumstances, often separated from their families for long periods and putting their lives on the line, while time and again being left feeling undervalued, under-resourced and forgotten. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, defence spending has dwindled to unworkable levels. When I signed up in 1986 aged 18, the Armed Forces had 330,000 service personnel. Today, the combined personnel of the Army, Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force stands at 148,000 – barely enough to fill two Premier League football stadiums. Watching the decline over the past five years from inside the Ministry of Defence has been particularly difficult. Each year budgets have shrunk and every time we have asked governments the same questions: What do you want us to cut? What is it that you think we no longer require? The answer from Whitehall has always been the same: That’s your call. What made matters worse was when we looked around and saw where taxpayer money was going. Britain spends £330billion on welfare compared to just £60billion on defence. Andy Burnham insists national security cannot come at the expense of our social security – but how can you have one without the other? As for procurement, it has become a byword for waste, delay and indecision. Troops are promised world-class equipment but years later, those same projects are often running late, are significantly over-budget or have failed to deliver the capabilities originally pledged. Equipment for Ukraine can be sourced, tested and delivered in less than eight weeks. The same process for British defence would take ten years, when the world has never been more dangerous in my lifetime. This is because our system has to be totally risk-averse and decision making is managed through huge committees. All this indecision has now come back to haunt us. While long-term defence modernisation remains essential, the immediate priority must be ensuring that the Armed Forces are equipped and resourced to respond effectively to a crisis at short notice. This means urgently expanding our current supplies and producing more kit quickly. Make no mistake, Britain must prepare for the possibility of a major conflict. The threat from Russia over the next five years remains very real. I have zero belief that the old parties will fix this. Reform is the only organisation I trust to make the changes we desperately need.