Invitation, Intervention, Intervision

Oh, for pity's sake, the country that took three years to capture 20 per cent of Ukraine is not going to be parking its tanks on anyone's Atlantic coast anytime soon even it wanted to, and that is not an aspiration that Russia has ever expressed by any means.

Not even Germany wants to send troops to Ukraine, and which British troops does Keir Starmer plan to put on the ground there? There barely are any. Cancelling Trident would make it possible to give each of the Royal Navy, the British Army and the Royal Air Force an additional £70 billion, but even that would not compel anyone to join them, as they were already perfectly free to do.

It is useful for the debate on conscription to be revisited from time to time. Ignore anyone who advocated a military intervention unless you could imagine that person as an 18-year-old in battle. The call for war always comes primarily from the liberal bourgeoisie. That is the class least likely to join the Armed Forces voluntarily, or to see combat even in periods of conscription. Operationally, that is of course just as well. But if there is not a strong enough case for conscription, then there is not a strong enough case for war. Unless a country needed to mobilise its entire healthy and able-bodied male population of fighting age, then it is not under sufficient threat to justify going to war at all.

Complaining about not being invited to the table is by definition something that only unimportant countries do. If they mattered, then the situation would never arise. As for nonsense about Britain as an Atlantic Bridge, even today's funny little event was held in Paris. And what of a European Army? While Reform UK sells itself as the way to vote for Donald Trump in Britain, Nigel Farage still wants Ukraine in NATO, and this is what that would mean. The former husband of Dame Andrea Jenkyns, and father of her child, Jack Lopresti, himself a former Conservative MP and Deputy Chairman, is already in that Army. Alas, then, Dame Andrea is unlikely to represent us in the revived Intervision Song Contest. But someone should.