The aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal has sailed into Scotland for the last time, as part of a farewell tour. The fleet flagship of the Royal Navy, which is being decommissioned after 25 years service, sailed down the Firth of Clyde.
It is due to dock at Glen Mallan Jetty on Loch Long to unload its ammunition. The ship will stay in Loch Long for five days before sailing around the north of Scotland and on to Newcastle, close to where she was built.
The Ark Royal left its Portsmouth base for a farewell tour of the UK on Tuesday. The aircraft carrier is being retired three years early as part of cost-cutting measures announced by the UK government.
Some of my academic work has to do with the politics of military equipment and national prestige. There's a tendency to have clinical, or potentially even cynical, view towards the emotional attachments that develop between people and the material instruments of foreign policy. The sorrow that accompanies the retirement of a warship like Ark Royal, not to mention the enduring popularity of national naval memorials in the United States and elsewhere, serves to temper this tendency. It's genuinely sad to see a great warship retire before her time. The Queen's inspection makes it particularly poignant; one of her earliest major foreign tours was aboard HMS Vanguard in 1947, and her reign has witnessed the profound decay of the Royal Navy as a global force.
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