Defence Review

With one hand, Boris Johnson would have swatted away the China hawks on the benches behind him. With the other, he would have pointed at the Labour front bench while sneering that, yes, he wanted to cut both the nuclear weapons and the conventional Armed Forces very drastically indeed, but the other side wanted there to be no nukes whatever, which would have been true, and scarcely many more than no troops, which would not have been.

Instead, though, the Labour front bench has been recaptured by its usual holders, the people who would retweet demands to "liberate" a fictional country. Poor old Johnson has had to outflank them by pulling out of his back pocket a 40 per cent increase in Britain's nuclear arsenal, complete with transparently nonsensical claims about Russia, of all places. Meanwhile, both parties remain agreed that anything that might make life bearable would be "unaffordable".

But the issuing of currency is an act of the State, which is literally the creator of all money. A sovereign state with its own free floating, fiat currency has as much of that currency as it chooses to issue to itself. All wars are fought on this understanding, but the principle applies universally. The State also has the fiscal and monetary means to control inflation, means that therefore need to be under democratic political control in both cases.

Take the £205 billion that was cited by CND as the cost of Trident, since the true figure is certainly not going to be any lower than that even before a 40 per cent increase. Round that up to £210 billion, and then give an extra £70 billion to each of the Royal Navy, the British Army, and the Royal Air Force. That would buy a great deal of political capital, and it would do much to still the hostilities that break out periodically among the Services, including in the pages of The Times and the Daily Telegraph.

This would be within a context in which military force itself would be used only ever in self-defence, while BAE Systems had been renationalised as the monopoly supplier to our own Armed Forces, with a ban on all sale of arms abroad, and with a comprehensive programme of diversification in order to preserve the skills that were currently employed in the arms industry.