Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s government has confirmed plans to replace the Royal Yacht Britannia, decommissioned by Tony Blair in 1997, have been scrapped as part of his return to the ‘managed decline’ policies which have characterised the Conservative Party through most of their time in office since 2010.
The original Royal Yacht Britannia served the Royal Family, chiefly in their public role as ambassadors for what public relations-obsessed politicians refer to as ‘Brand Britain’, for well over 40 years, carrying the late Queen Elizabeth II and other dignitaries on almost 700 foreign visits and close to 300 visits around Britain.
Tony Blair pledged it would be replaced by Labour before winning the 1997 general election, but did not do so, and the Conservatives (Tories) did not pick up the baton after regaining office in 2010, either.
Not until after the vote to Leave the European Union in 2016 did a replacement vessel begin to be seriously considered, with Boris Johnson championing the idea of a new Britannia as a kind of oceangoing embassy and a showcase for British shipbuilding and technology for Brexit Britain.
Naturally, the vessel, which would have been named for the late Prince Philip, the King’s father, has now been cancelled as part of Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s tax-hiking, public spending-cutting managed decline agenda, rejected by Tory members when he lost the party leadership election to Liz Truss but imposed on the country anyway after Tory MPs ejected her from office and installed him in 10 Downing Street without consulting members a second time weeks later.
“In the face of the Russian illegal and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine and [Vladimir] Putin’s reckless disregard of international arrangements designed to keep world order, it is right that we prioritise delivering capabilities which safeguard our national infrastructure,” said Defence Secretary Ben Wallace, previously a strong supporter of the yacht initiative, of the cancellation.
He confirmed the “termination of the national flagship competition” to design the yacht “with immediate effect” and that the government would instead “bring forward the first MROSS ship in its place” — that is, a Multi-Role Ocean Surveillance Ship able to “protect sensitive defence infrastructure and civil infrastructure” and “improve our ability to detect threats to the seabed and cables,” presumably with such incidents as the damaging of Russia’s Nord Stream gas pipelines to Germany in mind.
While the £250 million earmarked to build the yacht is easy to excoriate as an extravagance, it is a drop in the proverbial bucket placed next to total government spending — much of which is highly questionable.
On top of roughly £7m a day and rising spent on accommodating migrants in free hotels, for example,UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), a key distributor of government research and development funding, was reported just this weekend to have blown around £27m on “embarrassing” schemes to “decolonise” a collection of dried plants at the Natural History Museum and increase LGBTQ+ representation at historic castles, among other things.
The government have also spent some £120 million on the little-known ‘Festival of Brexit’ — intended to be a World’s Fair style event showcasing the best of British, but ultimately renamed ‘Unboxed: Creativity in the UK’ and infested with woke events centred on Black Lives Matter, drag queens, and “childhood gender fluidity”.
View looking south across the west end of the Great Basin at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition or Chicago World’s Fair, 1893. (Photo by Chicago History Museum/Getty Images)
‘See Monster’, a temporary public art installation made from a disused North Sea drilling platform in Weston-super-Mare for the ‘Unboxed: Creativity in the UK’ festival, formerly the Festival of Brexit. (Photo by Sabine Glaubitz/picture alliance via Getty Images)