Why should anything necessarily
cost less than “defence”? Never mind defence against Russia, which cannot subdue a small and adjacent corner of Ukraine, much less invade our own island fortress at the other end of Europe, an aspiration that it has never expressed? That is before mentioning the idea that we were under threat from Iran. If we were under threat from anywhere because we had not spent enough on “defence”, then why have we not already been invaded?
The triple lock delivers an internationally pitiful pension from an age that would provoke civil unrest in any serious country, but which it is now proposed to increase even further. Heaven forfend that money should go to the people who spent it, and thus into the consumer economy that employed the young even amidst those endless increases in the pension age. Those increases have also caused much of the explosion in claims for working age sickness and disability benefits, both among the old who were being damaged physically and therefore often mentally by being kept in the workforce, and among the young who were being damaged mentally and therefore often physically by being unable to join it or to progress in it.
If you want more wars, then you want an awful lot more both of physical disability and of lifelong mental illness. But the benefits for those go straight back into the real economy. Not so the money to the military-industrial complex, as President Eisenhower called it. 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 from the liberal bourgeoisie, which 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 needs 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.
In any case, this entire debate ought to have been changed completely by the proven complicity in the scandal of the nuclear test veterans of everyone who had risen above a certain level, military or civilian and including all Ministers, at the Ministry of Defence or its predecessors since 1952, as well as the complicity of every Prime Minister from
Winston Churchill onwards. They are never asked about their financial ties to the arms industry, but whenever our own well-paid or well-pensioned top brass insist that for the twenty-second highest population in the world, the sixth highest military spending was still not enough for those generous benefactors, then they should at least be reminded, and the audience informed, that in the financial year 2024-25, the Government
wrote off £6.6 billion of public money, with £1.6 billion of that being mismanagement and cancelled projects at the Ministry of Defence for which every other Department of State has been ordered to make yet further cuts. On that grounds and on that of the nuclear tests, they should be told to wind their brass necks in.
Andy Burnham may still be Catholic enough to recognise it as part of Advent, but 15 December would be a bit too close to Christmas for a day of national mourning. Nevertheless, this year it will be the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of the neoliberal age in Britain, the Budget of 15 December 1976, delivered by Denis Healey on behalf of Jim Callaghan to the delight of Margaret Thatcher and Geoffrey Howe, who considered that the fox of their backbench and indeed frontbench critics had been shot. The only notable thing about the 1979 General Election was the sex of the new Prime Minister. Everything else had changed two and half years earlier, and has carried on under all three parties ever since. Burnham is right about that, even if it is remarkable for a man with his record to say it.
Since there cannot be a “free” market in general, but not in drugs, or prostitution, or pornography, or unrestricted alcohol, or unrestricted gambling, then there must not be a “free” market in general, which is a political choice, not a law of nature. Enacting and enforcing laws against drugs, prostitution and pornography, and regulating alcohol, tobacco and gambling, are clear examples of State intervention in, and regulation of, the economy. But unlike the Conservative Party, which merely thinks that it is and acts as if it were, the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats are constitutionally committed to the “free” market. It was in 2000, under Tony Blair, that the introduction of the R18 rating effectively legalised hardcore pornography. As with the downgrading of cannabis to a Class C drug between 2004 and 2009, and as with the mercifully failed attempt to set up supercasinos while successfully permitting gambling companies to advertise on radio and television, such was wrought by the replacement of Clause IV, which Thatcher identified as her own greatest achievement. Cannabis was reclassified by one of Burnham’s mentors, David Blunkett, while the gambling measures came from another, Tessa Jowell. Neoliberalism, indeed. And a man with Burnham’s record, indeed.
Pornography had been legally prohibited and practically unknown in the Soviet Union. But post-Soviet Russia was flooded with it, to placate the young male population during the larceny of their country by means of the economic “shock therapy” that created today’s oligarchs. “Sex work” of various kinds has always been encouraged when the young men have needed to be stupefied, and it still is. The corporate capitalist pornogrification of our own society is no accident. In welcoming the endorsement of Bonnie Blue, Reform UK picked its side. The same side as the Green Party, which like Nigel Farage wants to legalise all drugs, and which like Reform supports the war in Ukraine, of which Marta Havryshko writes:
“No!” the woman cries. “May you be damned!” You can hear the despair in her voice, as masked men grab her husband, then bundle him into a waiting van. Within seconds, she’s alone, weeping in the middle of the street. This is Odesa, but scenes like it, captured on phones and posted online, hammer Ukrainian cities as relentlessly as Russian missiles. Since Putin’s full-scale invasion began, over a million Ukrainians have been conscripted to defend their homeland. And, as voluntary recruits have dried up, the army has begun resorting to the same methods faced by that couple in Odesa. People even have a term for it: “busification”.
The process is brutally simple. Draft officers, often accompanied by police, snatch military-age men off the streets, before delivering them to recruitment centres. There, many are pressured through threats, intimidation, and physical abuse to pass military medical examinations and sign draft papers. Men with serious conditions — including HIV, tuberculosis and even cancer — are routinely declared fit for service. Whether they like it or not, the recruitment officers must meet quotas; the only question is who fills them. Yet with Ukraine’s wealthy elite reluctant to heed the call, Kyiv’s recruitment crisis is becoming a class crisis too, one that could cause chaos long after the guns fall silent.
Ukraine currently mobilises around 30,000 men each month — yet many never make it to the front. Some flee training centres at the first opportunity, while others are later discharged as medically unfit. By autumn 2025, according to official figures, roughly 300,000 servicemen had gone AWOL or deserted. The numbers have become so politically sensitive that the authorities now keep the data secret. But the direction of travel is clear: Ukraine’s pool of willing fighters is shrinking. As a result, coercion has moved from the margins to the very centre of national life.
Straightforward coercion, however, is only part of the story, as mobilisation becomes a social scourge too. Today’s Ukrainian army is, increasingly, an army of the poor. Members of the upper-middle class — and especially the political and economic establishment — possess the resources, connections, and influence necessary to shield themselves from military service. Through a combination of legal work-arounds and bribes, they can avoid donning uniforms for a range of reasons, from illness, to having several children, to caring for disabled relatives. Others are exempt because they’re university students or academics, or work at strategic companies, particularly those linked to the defence sector.
A significant portion of Ukraine’s cultural and academic intelligentsia belongs to this privileged group. Many have received exemptions from military service while continuing their professional activities uninterrupted. In return, the state expects ideological loyalty and intellectual labour in support of the war effort. This includes promoting “decolonisation” narratives that often amount to anti-Russian ethnonationalism. It also means deliberately ignoring the deep penetration of far-Right groups into the military, and remaining silent about the normalisation of Nazi symbols within parts of the armed forces. But, most importantly, it means justifying coercive mobilisation as a necessary instrument of national survival in what is routinely described as an “existential war”.
A substantial number of Ukrainian intellectuals have willingly embraced this arrangement, placing themselves in the service of state interests while convincing themselves that they’re fighting on the “information front” in a war for independence from Russia. Others are motivated by more pragmatic considerations: preserving the privileges that come with exemption from military service. Still others remain loyal out of fear.
Fear, after all, is not an abstract concern. The costs of dissent have become increasingly visible. A recent example is the Ukrainian-Canadian political scientist Ivan Katchanovski, who became the target of a public campaign of denunciation by Ukrainian and Western scholars over his interpretation of the war. Katchanovski has argued for a more nuanced explanation of the conflict — one that looks beyond Russian imperialism and Putin’s ambitions to include the role of the Ukrainian far-Right, Nato, and a post-Cold War security architecture that excluded Moscow. Rather than confronting these arguments on their scholarly merits, many of his critics simply accused the scholar of spreading “Kremlin propaganda”. Whatever one thinks of Katchanovski’s views, the episode sent a clear message: questioning dominant wartime narratives can carry serious professional and reputational consequences.
Meanwhile, justifying mobilisation, regardless of how coercive, violent, or degrading it may be, has become a central task of Ukraine’s liberal intelligentsia. In May 2026, for instance, the prominent historian and public intellectual Yaroslav Hrytsak argued that patriotic appeals and financial incentives alone are insufficient to sustain effective mobilisation in the country. In his view, society must also rely on fear and moral condemnation. As an example, Hrytsak invoked Britain’s experience during the First World War, when women handed white feathers to men who didn’t enlist, publicly shaming them as cowards.
What is striking is that Hrytsak offered no criticism of this practice, despite its deeply controversial legacy. The white-feather campaign stigmatised not only those unwilling to fight, but also veterans, disabled men, the seriously ill, and countless others who were unfit for military service. Yet in contemporary Ukraine, this history is increasingly presented not as a cautionary tale but as a model worthy of emulation.
In reality, of course, the public shaming of men who avoid military service is already deeply embedded in Ukrainian public discourse. For example, the popular singer Alyona Alyona, who represented the country at the 2024 Eurovision, mockingly referred to such men as “Mama’s little boys” and publicly defended the harsh measures employed against draft evaders. Oleksandra Ustinova, an MP, has similarly attacked men who leave Ukraine to avoid service, arguing that the current civil penalties should be replaced by criminal prosecutions. Yet there’s an irony here. Ustinova’s own draft-age husband left Ukraine for the US after Russia’s invasion in March 2022, bought a house and a car there, and has shown little intention of returning.
There are other ironies too. In September 2024, Yaroslava Kravchenko, a celebrity TV host, published a report on male artists who had left Ukraine under the telling title “Those Who Escaped from Ukraine”. Like many women who publicly denounce supposed draft dodgers, Kravchenko herself enjoys unrestricted international travel for both work and leisure. Many other female celebrities are in the same boat. Women, after all, remain exempt from the travel restrictions imposed under martial law — restrictions that prevent millions of Ukrainian men from leaving the country regardless of their personal circumstances, political views, or willingness to fight.
This asymmetry lies at the heart of growing social tensions. Those who champion moral condemnation often do so from positions of relative safety and freedom. They can cross borders, pursue careers abroad, and retain control over their own lives. The men they shame cannot. From the very first days of the war, Ukraine has cultivated the image of the ideal man: self-sacrificing, strong, courageous, and unfailingly committed to defending his family, his home, his nation. He is prepared, if necessary, to give his life for this cause.
His opposite is the ukhyliant — the draft evader. In the dominant narrative, he is portrayed as a coward who’ll resort to any means necessary to evade what is presented as his “natural” masculine duty. Public shaming of such men has become normalised, routine, and Ukrainian media has played a significant role in this process. Flippant headlines like “Draft Dodger Stopped by a Bear at the Romanian Border” or “Grandma Draft Dodger: Odesa Man Dressed as an Elderly Woman to Cross the Border” have now become commonplace. And though Article 35 of Ukraine’s constitution theoretically guarantees the right to alternative service for conscientious objectors, that right has effectively ceased to exist. A recent investigation into the “Skala” regiment alleged that some men who refused to serve were beaten into compliance.
All the while, some Ukrainian feminists have directed their criticism at draft evaders while largely overlooking a wartime system that casts men as protectors and women as those in need of protection — precisely the gender hierarchy feminism claims to oppose. This flirtation with militaristic nationalism has left many feminists blind to the women whose lives are shattered by busification. Behind every man dragged into a recruitment van, then tortured or beaten to death by draft officers, let alone killed at the front, stands a mother, a daughter, a wife, bearing the fear, grief, and trauma that follow. But because their suffering complicates the dominant wartime narrative, this reality is largely met with silence.
A similar silence greets another group of inconvenient women — those who have become active in the grassroots struggle against forced mobilisation. Gender in Detail, Ukraine’s leading gender website, has had remarkably little to say about the women standing in the way of busification. These women are threatened, attacked, prosecuted, and publicly shamed for defending relatives — or complete strangers — from recruitment vans. The courage of these women, from teenage girls to pensioners, can be seen in countless videos confronting recruitment officers and the police. Their courage is visible, their suffering documented. Yet their invisibility, in the end, is political.
That, of course, raises a broader question. With the frontlines mostly stagnant, and with the meatgrinder war annihilating Ukraine’s demographics, why is the government so intent on continuing with busification at all costs? Ukraine no longer appears to have the final say over its own future. That decision is increasingly shared with — or subordinated to — its Western sponsors, who view Ukrainian men less as citizens than as expendable military assets. The EU’s plan to refuse protection to Ukrainian men of draft age exposes this logic. By denying them refuge, Europe is effectively forcing them back to the front. Their bodies have become instruments in a larger geopolitical project: bleeding Russia. That’s further suggests that the war has become a Western proxy war against Putin. In return, Ukraine’s venal political elite, led by Volodymyr Zelensky, enjoys Western political protection — whatever the moral and legal problems with busification.
There’s another question here too. If Ukraine is being bled dry for Brussels, why not end militarisation altogether? Unfortunately, those who suggest this path, advocating diplomacy or negotiations, are marginalised. When Yuliia Mendel, Zelensky’s former press secretary, told Tucker Carlson that the Ukrainian president had sabotaged peace talks with Russia, much of Ukraine’s mainstream media and a number of prominent liberal commentators responded not with debate but with a coordinated effort to discredit her, branding her a purveyor of “Russian narratives”.
Liberal intellectuals share responsibility for silencing these unwanted voices. Yet neither the state nor its intellectual allies can suppress these realities forever. Beneath the surface, they are fuelling growing resentment and social anger. Every attempt to silence grievances only deepens the sense of injustice, and if the pressure continues to build, it may eventually spark a political and social explosion.
There are signs of this already. In the village of Ozero, for instance, locals blocked a military recruitment vehicle, smashed its windows, and freed a mobilised man. Elsewhere, confrontations between recruitment officers and civilians have involved dozens of people, often escalating into verbal abuse and physical violence. Attacks on recruitment officers with knives, shovels, and clubs have become increasingly common too. As the military’s manpower crisis deepens, mobilisation grows more coercive — and public resistance more intense. The way things are going, no amount of “intellectual mobilisation” will be enough to contain public fury.
