‘Huge’ cost of aircraft carriers meant ‘less scope’ for funding health and education | “Vulnerable” aircraft carriers are about Britain “counting for something in the world”

Tony Blair’s treasury secretary Alistair Darling told the prime minister that buying aircraft carriers was a “political” rather than a military choice and would mean less funding for social services.

Declassified files from 1998, Blair’s first full year in government, contain deliberations among officials and ministers on Labour’s manifesto commitment to replace Britain’s three aircraft carriers with the two new ones the UK currently possesses.

Darling wrote to Blair in June 1998 about the carriers and the aircraft to go on them, at a time when their cost was estimated at over £20bn.

He said: “The US already possesses a substantial capability in this area: sufficient to meet any likely future coalition requirement. It is therefore clear that whether the UK needs to contribute in this way is a political rather than military question”.

Darling added that the £20bn price tag was “huge” and “would mean there would be less scope for redirecting funding to our priorities in health and education”.

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Britain formally launched two new aircraft carriers – HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales – in 2017 and 2019, at a cost of £6.3bn. The new warplanes to be put on them were estimated in 2018 to cost a further £13bn.

Lord Richards, a former chief of defence staff, told journalist Richard Norton-Taylor that the carriers were “behemoths…unaffordable vulnerable metal cans”. They have since been plagued by serious mechanical problems.

The British political and media establishment is currently demanding an increase in military spending to face the alleged rise in threats to national security. Yet the files suggest that the motives for Britain having a strong military are not always those publicly claimed by officials.

A “strong” defence policy “gives us the lead on defence in Europe, ensures US respect and guarantees our high standing in the world more widely”, Blair’s foreign policy adviser John Sawers, wrote to Tony Blair in June 2001. Sawers would go on to become chief of MI6.

Blair’s defence secretary Geoff Hoon told his boss something similar in June 2003, saying that “our armed forces are a key lever… to influence US strategy”, referring at the time to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.