They cost taxpayers vast sums of money. You might argue that the taxpayers should simply have been able to keep that money. Or you might argue that it should have been spent on fighting want, ignorance, ill health, idleness and squalor. But either way, you cannot argue for spending it on wars instead, if at all avoidable.
They create new enemies (and entrench or embitter old ones), and thus create future threats.
And they are morally and socially disruptive. Everything to do with the Swinging Sixties started during the War. Just ask anyone of that generation. My late father always made that point in the Eighties, when Margaret Thatcher was on about the Sixties: she was right, but it really all went back to the War.
Now these things are being said openly, in television documentaries and in newspaper interviews with aged figures: the epidemic of venereal disease during the War, how London's and other cities' parks were turned on VE Night into giant outdoor orgies worthy of (indeed, surpassing) anything to come in the summer of 1968, and so much else besides.
Sometimes a war is inescapable, such as when our territory is invaded. But we are neither fighting nor facing any such war today.
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Yes - It's also worth remembering when it was that sex tourism really took off in the otherwise deeply conservative country of Thailand.
ReplyDeleteOh, and what was that old phrase again? "Over paid, over sexed and over here". All the old tales about stockings and chocolate... Makes the idea of British women selling themselves as low rent whores sound so innocent and wholesome, even cheeky, doesn't it?
Doesn't it just...
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