Ex-navy, family friend, now retired had this to say:
'There were cutbacks with end Cold War, but the Tory "Strategic" Defence Review when they came into office in 2010 is where serious rundown of navy started (our great success story in Iraq & Afghanistan is where all money & political attention went) & by the time they left office in 2024 there really was not much left & Labour just continued the policy.
Ships were scrapped early with replacements delayed & numbers cut, remaining ships & subs were run on well past their "Sell By". Royal Fleet Auxiliary (the unsexy but essential logistics train) suffered even worse & we now have no stores ships to provide carrier task group with food, spares & ammunition, which is a slight problem! Running ships on & having too few ships for tasks means ships are in poor state when they go in for refit & those refits inevitably end up longer & more expensive than planned, so the operational ships have to run harder & longer until they eventually get a refit, which is even longer & more expensive, etc. Result in our SSBN fleet of four is that patrols have increased steadily from well-established 70 days average (absolute max 80) from 1960s to 2010, to norm of over 200 days (210 current record). Unsurprisingly morale has gone through the floor, sailors are voting with their feet & recruiting (outsourced of course) is dire, so we cannot even fully crew the few ships that we do have.'
Unfortunately, I think most people now consider potholes more important than defence unless forced to think about it. Idiots on our local chat were raging about the colour of tarmac our local council had used on resurfacing a pedestrian area 'when they could have put down block paving'. When I dared to say something about cost and continuous cutbacks of council funding, some got very annoyed. Hopeless.
