The stuff of satire – from the written evidence to the committee of Liverpool Coastguard PCS Union members.
’27. Warship analogy
‘The CEO (being a Second Sea Lord) tells us that he is taking the MCA on a passage like “taking a new
warship to Sea. There will be problems but my men will batten out the problems on sea trials”. The Coastguard
is not a new warship, we don’t have the capacity to launch it and fix it as we go along. It is an emergency
service who provides assistance to people at sea. It should be right before it launches. We can not understand
why assessments and in-depth investigations have not been done about current workloads and why proper trials and testing of any new systems not carried out.’
Jeepers.
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Would this be Captain Pugwash and the good ship “Black Pig”?
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Idiot.
Glib, supercilious, contemptible idiot.
It’s that “can do” response of the service chiefs to the politicians, (knowingly? cynically?) flying in the face of all the facts and common sense, that has allowed them to take the country into all its recent unwinnable wars, whilst at the same time conducting unprecedented cuts to the defence budget.
Ben MacIntyre, the author and Times columnist, defines those unholy siblings, “wishfullness” and “yesmanship” – words, paradoxically, first coined by the head of Naval Intelligence in WW2 – which conspire to topple every insitution in which they prevail. They predominate in this story.
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The second Sea Lord sounds a touch complacent in the light of the news that a new British submarine on it’s way back from missile launch trials off the US eastern seaboard has been crippled by a rudder problem, and is limping back into a US naval port for damage assessment. Apparently this has thrown our nuclear deterrent into a state of disarray.
Can anyone spot the analogy?
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