Arundells: Bournemouth MP Tobias Ellwood talks military strategy

MP for Bournemouth East, Tobias Ellwood who also served in the Royal Green Jackets gave a talk at the home of the former Prime Minister Edward Heath at Arundells on Friday, June 23.

He said: “The topic today is New World Order or disorder. In the last 3-4 years, I believe we have lost our place, our identity, our mojo.

“We have almost been seen to retreat from what is going on around the world. It’s a concern because I want us to remain a player and an influencer or be a force for good on the International Stage.”

MP Tobias Ellwood (Image: John Rose Photography)

The withdrawal of British troops from Afghanistan clearly concerned him.

Tobias said: “When we pulled out of Afghanistan, I said I believed it was the high tide mark of Western Liberalism after the second world war, with us deciding to abandon the country that we had gone into, handing it back to the insurgents we went in there to defeat.

“We lost our appetite to support democracy and the people that were there. Now, the Taliban is taking over. Extremism is returning.”

MP Tobias Ellwood talks military strategy at Arundells (Image: John Rose Photography)

When it came to the war in Ukraine, he felt that Britain had risen to the occasion, but that Vladimir Putin had been watching the Afghanistan withdrawal assessing that Britain was unlikely to turn up to the fight.

Tobias said: “We are now in the interesting position of Ukraine moving from defence to offence which is a major achievement but let’s unpick Russia a bit. We don’t spend enough time learning what our adversaries are thinking. Why are they actually doing this?”

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He suggested that Russia did not want a prosperous Ukraine on its doorstep and with Ukraine about to join the EU and heading towards NATO. The country was starting to go places. It was the last thing Putin wanted.

He added: “There’s something bigger here that we need to understand about Russia and that’s Russia’s history itself. There is something in the psyche of the Russian people, the motherland comes first.”

He explained that Putin needed to feel strong. He had brought the country back to five per cent growth following the collapse of the Soviet Union and had a severe grip on its own communications. Much of Russia believed the war is NATO’s fault.

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Tobias explained: “I just want to make that clear that what we see in Eastern Europe is far bigger than just a war in Ukraine and guess who is watching this very carefully - China. They are watching our response; they are watching our protocols and watching our desire to rise to the occasion or not.

“We have been very slow to gain the political courage to stand up to Putin, we have been spooked by his rhetoric and we need to regain that cold-war statecraft. “

According to Tobias, the story about China is a miserable one. A superpower up to the 1800s, it had one-third of all trade and one-third of the population. There was no interest in going anywhere else. But then the West turned up."

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Tobias said: “Through the Opium wars, we made China high, that’s what we did and then, we exploited it, which led to civil war as we cut the country up. We’ve forgotten that, but China remembers.”

He admitted that being a politician over the last few years had been hard and that they had lost sight of what they wanted to achieve.

He said: “Today, it is all about loyalty and being a sycophant. It should be about putting the nation’s interest first, about governing from the centre of politics and having a sense of purpose. Then, people follow.”