Your Country Needs You!
The Failure of the UK's 'Policy Elite'.
‘Oh, we don’t want to lose you, but we think you ought to go, For your king and your country both need you so’.
Oh! What a Lovely War!
In light of the breakdown of the long-established international, rules-based order, and the existential threat now posed to NATO by President Trump, the UK and her European NATO allies must stand united and unyielding against a growing axis of hostile state actors. If history teaches us anything, it is that bullying, black-mail and bare-faced aggression must be met head-on with resolute determination. Anything less is appeasement.
It is not, however, lost on me that the last decade has witnessed a colossal failure of the UK’s so-called “policy elite”. This comprises politicians, senior civil servants, think-tanks, tame academics, “useful idiots”, and a succession of senior officers from the Armed Forces. Yet who will suffer from the incompetence of this self-regarding and self-perpetuating policy clique? Ultimately, it will be the men and women of the British Armed Forces, who, once again, will be called upon to risk life and limb in any future war. “Joe public”, too, will be “called to the colours” so as to correct – with lethal force, if necessary - the myriad failures of policy-makers.
What is particularly galling about this lamentable state-of-affairs is that 99.9% of people in the UK have routinely been excluded from the magic circle of those discussing and formulating flawed, myopic and presentist policies. In view of recent calls for more public participation in preparations for war – incidentally by the very people who placed the UK in such a precarious position in the first place - the stench of hypocrisy, arrogance, high-handedness and avoidance of responsibility on the part of this “policy elite” is as deplorable, as it is insulting.
Recent news that teenagers, and ex-Service personnel in their sixties, might very well be called-up in the event of hostilities, has the strong whiff of Adolf Hitler’s Volkssturm in the desperate winter of 1944/45. Just as in August 1914 and September 1939, major policy failures in previous years have resulted in Britain being less than ready to fight a high-intensity war against peer opponents. Once again, the architects of Britain’s foreign-defence policies have “sleep-walked” into international crises of epic proportions. And just as in the First and Second World Wars, it will be “Tommy Atkins”, and not the UK’s “policy elite’”, who will bear the greatest burdens, deprivations and dangers, if war becomes the last resort.
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