RUTHFULLY YOURS

● David Cameron should require every member of the cabinet to spend an hour reading the recent Henry Jackson Society report entitled The Tipping Point: Britain’s National Strategy Policy and the UK’s Future World Role, and then hold a cabinet meeting to decide whether the UK wishes to maintain its centuries-long role as a global power, which alone can protect our worldwide interests, project democratic values and guarantee our children’s security – or whether we should merely decline by default into just yet another European country.

● He should establish a non-party political committee to provide the government with a proper, well-considered national strategy that furthers the national interest through the effective co-ordination of all instruments of economic, political, cultural, military and diplomatic power, which can provide effective responses not just to predetermined definable threats but also to strategic shocks that can materialise without warning, at any place and at any time, such as the Falklands crisis, Gulf War and Arab spring.

● He should tear up the Strategic Defence Review of 2010 and ordain all that future defence reviews should be threat-driven and not budget-driven. He should accept that there can be no prosperity worth enjoying without security; that our global role is not a lifestyle choice but an imperative for the security of this nation and our economic interests, our trade routes and our energy supplies.

● He ought to reaffirm his excellent statement made at RMA Sandhurst on August 13 2010 that “There are difficult decisions ahead but I will never forget that the defence of the nation is the first duty of any government”, but back it up by committing the government to providing all three services with the resources they need to protect British interests in an increasingly dangerous and unstable world; retain their vital morale; and protect the essential special relationship with the US and the cohesion of Nato. This would probably involve reversing the defence cuts that have already done so much damage.

● Veto Palestinian statehood at the UN regardless of what the rest of Europe and Nato do, until such time as Hamas renounces its determination to destroy the state of Israel, which is the vanguard of the west’s struggle against radical Islam.