THE 82nd anniversary of D-Day falls on Saturday (6 June). I expect to be visiting the new British Normandy Memorial at Ver-sur-Mer on the day with the choir of Portsmouth Cathedral, who will be singing at a commemoration at the cemetery at Bayeux.

Since I came to live in Portsmouth, I have become increasingly aware of the importance of the Royal Navy and the part that it plays in our national life and identity. Not far from here is Winchester, from where Alfred the Great ruled Wessex. He is credited with founding a navy before England was in any true sense a nation.

Richard I chose Portsmouth as the base for the fleet that carried troops to the Third Crusade. In 1545, during an attempted invasion by France, the Mary Rose went down in the Battle of the Solent; its remains were recovered in 1982.

With all these connections, the navy is still regarded as the “senior” service. Today, when a warship goes out from our naval base, the sea walls are crowded with relatives and well-wishers. We have naval memorials in the cathedral’s south aisle. Naval families come to the cathedral for christenings, weddings, and funerals.

Last June, I spent a day as a speaker at a conference of the Royal Naval Chaplaincy Service at Shrivenham, where, inevitably, I learnt much more than I was able to impart. The loyalty, good faith, and professionalism of those whom I met touched me, as I became more aware of anxieties about recruitment and sustainability.

It is troubling that recent governments have failed to fund defence seriously. Surely the first moral duty of any government is to protect its citizens. While we spend more and more on welfare, the navy is short both of vital ships and weapons.

This is troubling at a time when Russian warships are passing insouciantly through the English Channel and threatening undersea cables in the Baltic and the Atlantic. Our resolve is being tested by a known aggressor, and there is a strong likelihood that one of our NATO allies will be threatened or even attacked in the next few years.

President Putin likes to present himself as the defender of Christian civilisation, buying into the view that Orthodox Moscow is “the Third Rome”, after the Rome of the popes and the capital of the Byzantine Empire. It serves his purpose well that our politicians fiddle with seeming trivia while our defences have been allowed to run down.

I sometimes think that we have come to wallow in shame about our imperial past in ways that prevent us from making provision for a safe and prosperous future. Any revival of English Christianity should include pride in our armed services, as well as sorrow for our past sins. The call to sacrifice for the sake of peace is something that our forebears understood, but which we seem to be in danger of losing.