IF there’s one thing I’ve always admired about the military, it’s the capacity to get things done. Those things of course might not always be to everyone’s liking or meet with approval, but give the military a challenge and there’s a can-do approach that many of our politicians could learn a thing or two from.

Maybe that’s why some politicians like to be seen rubbing shoulders with our men and women in uniform. It’s the perfect prop that makes up for their own shortcomings and often aims to reassure a nervous electorate that they have things under control when in fact nothing could be further from the truth.

The Tories especially have long since recognised this, which perhaps explains their penchant for straddling tanks or armoured personnel carriers with Margaret Thatcher, Ruth Davidson and Douglas Ross immediately springing to mind.

I’m old enough to remember the firefighters strike of the late 1970’s when the sight of the “Green Goddesses” – the Bedford fire engines manned by soldiers – was something of a novelty on the streets of the UK.

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But fast forward to today and it seems that at every crisis point we have troops doing what a civilian infrastructure in any properly functioning country should be more than capable of handling.

There will of course be those occasions when support from the military in emergencies is to be welcomed. But this by and large one would expect to be the exception not the norm as is increasingly the case under Boris Johnson’s teetering government.

In fact, I would go as far as to say that Military Aid to the Civilian Authorities or MACA as its dubbed in Whitehall has become something of a leitmotif of the Johnson government.

Certainly, the Covid pandemic is one of those exceptional moments during which the deployment of military medical personnel to help get as many vaccines into arms as possible was a move welcomed by most of us.

But just over a month ago it was troops driving petrol tankers during a fuel crisis that even Transport Secretary Grant Shapps had to concede was in part a result of a backfiring Brexit in action. Then this past week soldiers and marines were called upon to focus on welfare checks in communities still badly affected by Storm Arwen.

No doubt those worst affected by the storm and cut off would have been glad to see help arriving at their doorstep albeit in the shape of armed forces personnel.

Bailing out the civil authorities in times like this is not in itself a bad thing, but surely there is a big difference between such occasional intervention and what in the UK is a creeping reliance on the military in a run-down state that so often appears unable to cope.

As I understand it soldiers can only be asked – not compelled – to assist by government authorities, and only as a last resort when normal emergency planning has been overwhelmed. It tells us a lot then about the state of the UK and the extent of cuts under current Tory rule; how heavily it now leans on the military when things go wrong.

Not of course that the armed forces themselves have escaped the impact of Tory government cost cutting as the recent “restructuring” measures showed in reducing the strength of the regular army from 82,000 to 73,000 in the next four years.

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It’s curious too that while Ministry of Defence civilian staff numbers have risen in the last six years, the numbers of full-time soldiers have been cut by 500 over the same period. But hey, proper planning has never been this government’s strongpoint unless it’s finding a way to grease the palms of ministers or making sure that their pals profit in some shape or form along the way.

As I said earlier, the military have got a justifiable reputation for getting things done, that much was obvious during the recent evacuation from Afghanistan. This it managed despite what we now know from Foreign Office (FO) whistleblower Raphael Marshall to have been the “arbitrary and dysfunctional”, handling of the crisis by the UK Government.

In written testimony to the Foreign Affairs Committee which convened earlier this week as part of an inquiry into Britain’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, Marshall estimated that 75,000 to 150,000 people, including dependents, applied to the team for evacuation but that “fewer than 5% of these people have received any assistance”.

Here once again was UK Government incompetency writ large with thousands of emails from Afghans potentially eligible for flights going unread by the FO, and animals being prioritised over people in an airlift. Despite evidence to the contrary Johnson has denied that he intervened to prioritise pets over people, telling reporters that the claim was “complete nonsense”.

But it didn’t stop there. Marshall’s damning 39-page statement included allegations of “inadequate staffing” and “lack of expertise”, with FO staff members “asked to make hundreds of life and death decisions about which they knew nothing”.

My point is that there is a pattern in all of this. Be it the handling of the response to the Covid pandemic, transporting fuel during recent shortages or evacuating vulnerable people from Afghanistan, Johnson’s government is not fit for purpose.

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Its incompetency is matched only by Tory collective arrogance, evidence of which was on full grotesque display yesterday in responses to reports of the Downing Street Christmas party in breach of Covid regulations.

But such ineptitude is not restricted to here at home as the Afghanistan fiasco so starkly revealed. That the UK military managed to pull off the humanitarian mission it undertook in Kabul earlier this year has everything to do with their own levels of planning and logistics and nothing to do with government strategy or policy which was woefully found wanting.

It was David Cameron who back during the campaign for the 2010 General Election spoke of a “Broken Britain” which the Tories, he pledged, would fix. Just over a decade on, Britain under Johnson is well and truly broken and no amount of leaning on the military can cover up for this government’s dereliction of duty. It’s a dereliction Scotland must now rid itself of with a renewed sense of urgency.