And so the 30-year betrayal of our Armed Forces goes on The news that Royal Navy shipbuilding in England is to end after 600 years is only the latest chapter in the story of how, over the past 30 years, successive governments and a dysfunctional Ministry of Defence have progressively brought about the virtual destruction of our Armed Forces. Much more than is widely realised, however, there has also been a strong EU dimension to this sorry tale. The last occasion when our services were still able to operate in full accord with their proud traditions was the retaking of the Falklands in 1982, only made possible in the nick of time thanks to an array of ships which our cost-conscious defence secretary, John Nott, already planned to scrap. His successor, Michael Heseltine, as a fervent Europhile keen to integrate our defence industry with Europe, set in train the process whereby our helicopter industry came to be owned by the Italians and landed us with the Eurofighter project, a hugely expensive aircraft initially designed to fight a Cold War that soon afterwards came to an end. In the Nineties, integration with Europe proceeded apace under Michael Portillo, who discussed with the French setting up a joint "carrier force." But it really blossomed with Tony Blair's St Malo agreement with France in 1998, leading the following year to the Helsinki Accords. Their intention was to set up a "European Rapid Reaction Force," to which each EU country would make its own contribution, with Britain's to centre on those two huge aircraft carriers only now taking shape. The MoD and the Army's top brass then came up with their own grandiose contribution, designed to reshape the Army round a futuristic network of electronics, the Future Rapid Effect System or FRES, the projected cost of which spiralled up to £16 billion until it was quietly abandoned. This fixation on fighting imaginary wars of the future not only played its part in the scrapping of many old regiments, but also in sending our troops to Iraq and Afghanistan hopelessly ill-equipped for the real wars they had to fight. Even now, many people do not realise just what a disaster Tony Blair let us in for in Iraq when, after glorying in our invasion with 42,000 men, he then left the Army with only 9,000 soldiers to pacify the British sector of Iraq, where fanatical militias were running riot. As chillingly chronicled by my colleague Richard North in his book Ministry of Defeat, this led to one of the most humiliating defeats in the Army's history, when our troops, having retreated from Basra, were contemptuously ordered to leave the country by the Iraqi prime minister. After years of mismanagement under Blair, pouring billions into one botched MoD project after another, under this Government the betrayal has continued. Our demoralised Armed Forces have been deprived of ships, aircraft and men fit for any purpose they might be asked to serve until, as a monument to that betrayal, we are left with little more than those two half-built monster carriers and no aircraft to fly from them. Just as apt might be the fact that we now, thanks to a process Mr Heseltine set in train by flogging off Royal Ordnance, have to rely on the French to provide the nuclear triggers for the American missiles that make up our "independent" deterrent. At least when we liberated the Falkland Islands our services were doing it to rescue our own citizens. Thirty years of largely futile foreign adventures later - and shrinking our forces to a shadow of what they were in the name of cost-cutting and European integration - we can only stare in disbelief at the scale of what has happened. For advice on ignoring snow, ask Sir Mark Walport Sir Mark Walport, the Government's chief scientific adviser, told a committee of MPs that the reason why the number of people in Britain who disbelieve in man-made global warming has quadrupled since 2005 is because their fuel bills have risen. As an immunologist who self-evidently knows even less about climate science than the assorted biologists and "surface chemists" who previously held this pointless post, Sir Mark clearly hasn't noticed the global warming piling up outside his window in our recent record-breakingly cold winters. This is a man who was quick to endorse that report for the BBC Trust by the snail expert Steve Jones, calling for the BBC to show not less bias on climate issues but more. I was also pleased to see Sir Mark telling the MPs that he "intensely dislikes" the use of the term "warmist," because it suggests that "there is some kind of a cult around warmism." He might do better to switch to a new career as a stand-up comedian, although I doubt whether this would match his present salary of £165,000 a year.