The EU’s grandstanding on the Galileo programme is dangerous

On Wednesday four Galileo communication satellites were launched by the Ariana rocket from Guiana. The delivery of the satellites was behind schedule, but the architects of  Galileo say they believe their system will be fully functioning by 2025, rivalling and surpassing the American GPS satnav system.

Galileo has long been a major bone of contention in the Brexit negotiations. To date, the UK has invested more than £1 billion in a project now budgeted at around €10 billion. A great deal of UK satellite technology has gone into the programme, to say nothing of hard British scientific experimentation and labour.

The UK has said it would like to compete in the next round of tendering for equipment and projects for Galileo. It also would like a new UK-EU Galileo treaty acknowledging the British role so far, and its future participation. The EU commission says there is no chance of this. Galileo comes under the European Space Agency, which comes under the EU.

This is the point where things start to turn nasty, and we go through the EU Commission’s Looking Glass into realms of the surreal and absurd.

Earlier this summer, the spokesman for the EU Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, said Britain could only access Galileo now as “any other external customer.” Nor, said Barnier’s office, could the UK expect to benefit from the funds and expertise it already put into the programme.

When Mrs May suggested negotiating a separate UK European satellite communication treaty, Barnier and the Commission stated that Britain ‘could not be allowed access to sensitive defence and intelligence components of Galileo, as an external power to Europe.’

Barnier and Juncker’s office briefed in Brussels that the Commission had the full backing of President Macron and Chancellor Merkel in their hardline stance on Britain and the future development of Galileo.

On the surface, this is an extraordinary exercise in cutting off the European nose to spite its face. Replacing British kit and expertise will cost, and the project will need to get billions more euros from EU defence funds. There is also the more tricky question over whether the UK has any claims over ownership of the intellectual property of the technology and work which it has already invested in the Galileo programme.

To suggest the UK should have nothing to do with European defence and security, the clear inference from the Juncker and Barnier posturing, is also absurd. UK is deeply intertwined with European defence industry, whether the Napoleonist conseillers of the Commission like it or not. Leonardo, Italy’s leading aerospace contractor, would not exist at the high end of its offer but for the work it does in and through the UK. The Anglo-French missile builder, MBDA, is a world leader. Even Airbus is keen to get a slice of the action in the UK-led development of the ‘Generation 6’ combat plane, the Tempest.

The Tempest project is far in advance of the Franco-German project, announced last year, to build a new fighter, and both parties now appear to be having very cold feet about it.

On the risk of sharing security technology and intelligence secrets with the UK through Galileo, Barnier veered between the merely ridiculous to the downright duplicitous. The UK and its principal European military partners, France and Italy especially, share such sensitive material on a daily basis, for example, the avionics of Eurofighter/Typhoon with Italy, and joint production of common munitions such as Exocet, Meteor and Storm Shadow.

Moreover intelligence and common security concerns are aired and exchanged routinely through Nato – still the premier defence and security apparatus of the western alliance whatever bombast is now coming from Brussels on a joint EU defence force and the Common Foreign and Security Policy, wonderful castles of verbiage to which so few European capitals are prepared to devote money and boots on the ground.

Nato is, of course, democratic in a way the Commission is not. Recently members of the Nato parliament, the North Atlantic Assembly, expressed outright dismay to my colleague, one of the UK’s premier defence analysts, Francis Tusa, at the way Galileo is being handled by the Commission’s Brexit negotiation team. Most Nato members want the UK in, as they want other crucial Nato partners, such as Norway, to be in it too.

Galileo has had non-European partners at various stages, as Barnier well knows. Israel, whose prowess in satellites is acknowledged, bid for work in 2005, as did China and Ukraine. Barnier, back then a commissioner, took exception to the UK questioning whether Galileo should be conceived as a direct rival to, or copy of, the US GPS system.

So where does this leave us ? It seems that Mrs May and her team are gaining real traction on a UK Galileo treaty post- Brexit. Why boot Britain out – and at huge cost – of what is in the main a valuable civil navigation communications system, just to balm the vanity of the Old Guard of the Brussels napoleonists ?

Philip Hammond, for one, doesn’t seem to want let the matter rest. The Chancellor is likely to agree to the request by the business minister, Greg Clark, for £100 million start-up funding for the UK’s own rival to Galileo. The UK has a lot of the technology already to build a system that could be working in 2025 and at a cost of £4 to £5 billion. But given the pressure on the defence and health budgets already, where on earth would he find the money ?

It isn’t all as bizarre as it may at first appear, says Tusa, founder and editor of Defence Analysis. A UK-led system, given the UK’s lead in developing low level satellites, could be a big money earner – possibly earning £250 billion in fees and revenue over ten years. With partners in the strategic corners of the planet such as Canada, Brazil and Australia, it could easily have a global reach that Galileo might find tough to match. “It really can be done, and quite quickly,” says Tusa, founder and editor of Defence Analysis.

“Britain has a very good name for quick, pragmatic solutions in defence and security. That is why Macron insisted that the UK is in the European rapid deployment force – which he insists has nothing to do with the EU. The Tempest aircraft  prototype has shown that the UK is still a world player in the field.”

Meanwhile, UK defence still presents more than its share of headaches for the government. The Modernisation of Defence Programme – the review outlining restructuring and funding has been postponed sine die – or at least till we know where we are with Brexit and the Comprehensive Spending Review is wrapped up in November. The competition to build a new frigate, the Type 31e, has been canned. It was hopelessly unrealistic to expect to build a modern surface ship for a quarter of a billion pounds. The restrictions on MoD intellectual property and competition were beyond surreal.

The new aircraft carriers have a number of teething troubles, as do the Type 45 destroyers and the nuclear submarines. When will there be good news? Defence is almost always typecast as a thorn in the side of today’s quotidian politician. Both Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn appear to be in denial of this – to their cost and our cost too.