I RECENTLY had the pleasure of being the guest speaker at a meeting of the Bristol branch of the Royal Naval Association. The continuing pride of service of the men and women at the meeting and their loyalty to Queen and country impressed me.

Conversation with some of them made me aware of the sacrifices that their service had required of them. For example, one retired sailor told me that he served for 24 years and because of his specialist skills in marine engineering, even when the ship returned to port after a long deployment at sea, he was not allowed to return to home and family because he was needed to supervise repairs to his ship.

This meant that in the latter years of his service the amount of time he had spent at his own home was very little indeed. Little wonder then that the RN is having such a recruitment problem and the other armed forces are doing little better. How glibly politicians and the general public fall into accepting this incredible devotion to duty without much thought or gratitude.

Soon after I met the veteran sailors, two retired army generals supported each other in making public statements that were highly critical of the way this Government and previous ones have allowed huge gaps in the UK defences to develop.

I groaned at the news a couple of years ago that to save money the Ministry of Defence would be making redundant skilled and experienced military personnel and trying to fill the resultant gaps with reservists yet to be recruited.

I wrote of my doubt that this was achievable based on my long experience of trying to maintain the retained (part-time) fire service. I have been proved right and no doubt some of the gaps referred to by those two generals relate to a flawed approach to recruitment and retention.

Margaret Hodge MP has just published a book entitled Called to Account. Margaret chaired the public accounts committee until last year and in her book she reveals some depressing facts about how Government wastes taxpayer’s money on a vast scale.

High on the list of wasteful departments is the Ministry of Defence. The two new aircraft carriers yet to go into service were being built during a time that allowed the select committee to audit how the MoD was managing the contracts. An alarming story of indefensible incompetence was uncovered costing billions of pounds and years of delay in the ships entering service.

Summarising the chapter detailing the long list of MoD failures, Margaret Hodge comments that there were many other occasions when her committee was shocked by the MoD regularly wasting many millions of pounds on procurement. While all that money was being poured down the drain, to cope with the budget deficit, members of the armed forces were being drastically reduced.

To compensate for the poor performance of the politicians and civil servants, the members of the fighting services are being stretched and made to suffer. They don’t have a trade union or the right to strike so they just have to get on with it, unlike the junior doctors that also hold our safety and security in their hands, but are not averse to putting that at risk by taking strike action.

The men and women who serve in the fighting services deserve a lot better than they are receiving. Taxpayers are entitled to their money on defence being spent with much greater diligence. It is the first duty of any government to ensure the proper defence of the nation.