'The first duty of any Government is to keep its citizens safe - and Britons have been failed,' Patrick Christys says

In fact, he lost it whilst he was being skewered on defence spending yesterday.

We need to be brutally honest about the state of the British Armed Forces. They were hollowed out by the Tories, and now we have a human rights lawyer in charge of them.

It took us nearly a month to get a Type 45 Destroyer to Cyprus after Hezbollah attacked it.

The reason it took about a month was that we only have six of them, and not a single one of them was ready for deployment. They all either had technical faults or were in drydock for maintenance.

The size of the British Army that is ready to deploy is just 55,000.

So there are about 74,000 in our regular forces, but a fifth of them aren't ready for action. So that means you could fit the entire British Army into Old Trafford football stadium - and even then, about a fifth of them aren't ready to be deployed.

We've got massive issues with recruitment. Numbers have dropped 38 per cent since 2019. That is despite running a load of woke and inclusive advertising campaigns.

Yeah, we'll just stop the war for the call to prayer, won't we? One way of getting people into the military is through the cadets, isn't it?

Well, we've just closed the largest cadet training site in the southeast and filled it with illegal immigrants. That's Crowborough.

We've closed the site to train our fighting men and pumped it full of foreign fighting-age men.

The RAF had to ground its entire fleet of fast jet training aircraft in 2023 because of an engine problem. In fact, the RAF is so short of pilots that were bringing in Indian pilot instructors to train what few pilots we've got.

Now, one of the reasons we've got a pilot shortage is because the RAF launched a disastrous diversity scheme that discriminated against white men.

The Air Force committed to having 40 per cent women and 20 per cent of personnel from ethnic minorities by 2030. They said that they had limited space for "useless white males".

Well, now we don't have enough pilots, so it looks like those white lads weren't so useless after all, doesn't it?

Another reason for overall low recruitment and morale in the Armed Forces is the prosecutions of our SAS heroes and other members of our military accusing some of them for murder, years, sometimes decades after we sent them off to war.

And this is something that Keir Starmer has personally been accused of being involved with. Back when he was a human rights lawyer.

Our military vehicles have apparently been hacked by China.

Ministry of Defence staff have been told not to have discussions in military cars because they worry that China has planted listening devices into a fleet of electric vehicles, which we brought in in an attempt to help the military go green.

In 2024, a launch test of our Trident missiles from our nuclear submarines failed for a second time in a row.

The Government has just been forced to spend £9billion renovating military homes, because we were forcing soldiers and their families to live in damp, mouldy, crumbling properties.

You wouldn't even house a dog in some of those homes. And by the way, for all the talk of Starmer increasing the defence budget, if the Chagos deal goes ahead, the £100million a year we're giving to Mauritius is set to count as part of that defence spending. It's madness.

This is no comment, by the way, no comment at all, on the brave men and women who serve our great country. They are the very best of us and it is a disgrace that they have been treated like this.

But we have to face facts. Thanks to years of complacency and incompetence, our political leaders have allowed our Armed Forces to become a shell of its former self.

We've slashed our national defence and then done away with the border on the south coast. We've stripped back the army and let Iranian terrorists sleeper cells into Britain.

All the money spent on welfare, so people can sit on their backsides and have as many kids as they want. All the billions spent on illegal immigration, all the stupid foreign aid projects like building a road that led to nowhere, all of that pointless virtue signalling... for what?

We have no land-based system capable of shooting down ballistic missiles. Seriously, just think about that. How ridiculous is that?

The first duty of any Government is to keep its citizens safe, and successive Governments have failed us.

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