Britain's Air Defence Plan Is A Very Large Umbrella

Britain is to be shielded from the skies by a single enormous umbrella, a canopy of waxed canvas roughly the size of Wales, held up at the edges by anyone who can get the afternoon off. The price is ten billion pounds, which sounds like a lot until you learn it is to be spread across ten years at a billion a time, and a billion a year is the sort of number this country describes as modest when it is going to a defence contractor and as reckless when it is going to a bus route.

The design was unveiled to reporters in Birmingham on a trestle stand that kept folding itself shut. Shoppers who stopped to watch were assured this was deliberate, a demonstration of the deployment mechanism, and that the fabric would be treated with something, probably, at a later stage. The handle will be somewhere near Rugby. Nobody has been told exactly where, because that is precisely the sort of thing an enemy would want to know.

Experts have been briskly unhelpful. One senior figure has already told MPs that an entry-level version of the serious foreign equivalent runs to eighty billion over a decade, which makes ten billion either a bargain or a tarpaulin, depending which of the two you have been paid to say. The honest answer, offered by a think tank in the tone of a man reading a gas meter, is that ten billion probably buys some radar and some aircraft and will not cover every square inch of anything, so the umbrella will be held over the dense bits and the rest of us will be encouraged to stand closer together.

Funding is described as straightforward. The money comes out of savings, and savings come from the parts of the state that cannot hold a press conference in a shopping centre: welfare, benefit caps, housing support, the research budget for not cooking the planet. The nation is broke in every direction that involves a person and solvent in every direction that involves a thing with a trigger on it. Nobody finds this odd any more. We have quietly agreed that money is imaginary until it is pointed at the sky, at which point it becomes real and arrives in forty-eight hours with a laminated brochure.

Somewhere in a business park outside Stevenage, a company that makes umbrella components has told its shareholders that the outlook is encouraging. It is not corporate welfare when it has a radar on it. It is strategic.

When a reporter raised the obvious difficulty, that a thing with a handle in the Midlands cannot cover Shetland, Cornwall and Norfolk at once, the room was told the government of the day would tilt it. Tilting will be done by consensus. A rota is being drawn up for the Home Counties first, on the grounds that they have the most to lose and the best access to car parking.

It is understood the umbrella does not open in high wind, which is when the country is most likely to need it. Both main parties have now accepted the central principle of British strategic thinking, which is that the weather is coming either way, we cannot afford the roof, and somebody really ought to be holding something.