National, Security

I loved The West Wing, but I knew it wasn't real.

We never used to have a National Security Adviser. Still less was the position merged with that of the Cabinet Secretary, reserving the Headship of the Civil Service to a securocrat. Nor are Civil Service appointments non-political. Nothing ever truly is, and the Establishment-Tory-cum-liberal-elite view of the world is as far from political neutrality as anything could possibly be.

We never used to have a National Security Council, either. That Cabinet within the Cabinet includes people with no direct connection to the parliamentary process, and who hold their current positions as stepping stones to highly lucrative employment in the arms industry.

And for what? We can do nothing about, say, Hong Kong, comical though it is to see the people who insisted on keeping its people out of Britain now wishing to create the possibility of importing three million Cantonese who in any case had no reason to feel any affection whatever towards this country. Do look up how we used to run the place.

And three million? That barely is "a city in China". That is a provincial town in China. There are a lot of Cantonese-speaking provincial towns, and quite a few of them are economically well-developed these days. "Why should this one be any different?" Why, indeed?

The main point, however, is that there is nothing that we can do about it. Absolutely nothing at all. Just as there would be nothing that we could do, even if we wanted to, in the dispute between the equally loathsome Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi high in the hills of Ladakh, which was also once part of the British Empire.

On either of those points, there would be little or nothing that the real National Security Adviser or the real National Security Council could do from Washington. Never mind the wannabes in London, which never used to have them.