The Valiant of This Warlike Isle?

There is no such thing as a defensive strike. That is a preemptive strike, which is an attack. Keir Starmer declared Britain's intention to launch such attacks on Iran, and either Iran or Hezbollah possibly sort of attacked RAF Akrotiri, although not so as to have killed or injured anyone, nor even to have damaged anything much, if at all. If "British territory has been bombed", then barely. And clearly, no one regards the Sovereign Base Areas on Cyprus as a British Overseas Territory in the ordinary sense, the internally self-governing home of a permanent civilian population that had been there for generations. That is what the real ones are or, in the case of the Chagos Islands, ought to be.

There was a referendum in 1995 on independence in Bermuda, in Gibraltar in 2002 on Spain's territorial claim, in the Falkland Islands in 2013 on Argentina's territorial claim, and in 2021 on the governance system in Saint Helena. But there could never be a referendum in Akrotiri or Dhekelia. Those are just military bases. Of an all-volunteer military with certain occupational hazards when its Government signalled the intention to attack another state. If they really have been fired on, then it was by people doing exactly what Starmer had said that he was going to do to them. They were wrong, because so was he.

Under the 1960 Treaty of Guarantee, the United Kingdom was to "guarantee the independence, territorial integrity, and security of Cyprus". It failed to do so against the Turkish invasion of 1974, and it has failed to do so ever since against the cultivation of "the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus", which has been been flooded with settler colonists from Turkey who dismissed Turkish Cypriots as "Turkish-speaking Greeks", who have often taken the homes of Greek Cypriots, and who, in line with the changes in Turkey, are increasingly Islamising what had been the most secular place in the Muslim world.

Never having defended Cyprus, as the Hellenic Navy is now doing against the Persians right when universities are cutting Classics, those bases have become an active threat to it as targets of the nearby enemies that Britain insisted on making. They are not even a tripwire, since no tripping is considered necessary. Whenever the Epstein Class wants a war, then there is a bogus threat to them. In 2003, Iraq was supposed to have had weapons of mass destruction capable of deployment against them within 45 minutes. And here we are again.

Ever since the end of the Cold War, it has always been "the most dangerous time since the end of the Cold War". Our Armed Forces are so tiny, so badly paid, and so badly equipped, that even when you remembered that we counted things like military pensions, the Coast Guard, the Met Office, and the BBC World Service, then someone is still being paid on an enormous scale. Such is the British way. The arms companies are very good at kicking back to politicians and at employing retired top brass. For only the twenty-second highest population in the world, the sixth highest military spending is still not enough for some people, because they are the hired megaphones of corporate greed. In any case, a huge proportion of that figure is Trident, which we have instead of tanks, fighter jets, and indeed personnel for our own country, never mind for anywhere else.

De facto American withdrawal means that NATO has effectively ceased to exist. Instead, we need bilateral non-aggression treaties with all other European countries including Russia and indeed Ukraine, with the United States, and with Canada. We need non-aggression treaties with the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and with the Collective Security Treaty Organisation, and preferably with each of their members bilaterally. There should be no foreign military bases on British soil. Military force should be used only ever in self-defence, and only ever with the approval of the House of Commons, the composition of which therefore needs to be changed dramatically.

BAE Systems should be 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 the spirit of the Lucas Plan. Armed neutrality never includes the nuclear weapons that are purely offensive. Instead of Trident, an extra £70 billion should be given to each of the Royal Navy, the British Army, and the Royal Air Force. This would not entail depriving anything else of funding. As a sovereign state with its own free-floating, fiat currency, the United Kingdom has as much of that currency as it chooses to issue to itself, with the fiscal and monetary means to control inflation, means that therefore need to be under democratic political control in both cases.