Put Away Childish Things

Back in the days when New Labour was led by Tony Blair and the other lot was led by Michael Howard, deeply disillusioned former Cabinet Ministers from both sides implored me not to write, even in jest, that our most unaccomplished 16-year-olds should be conscripted directly into the Israeli Defence Force, on the grounds that, "if the wrong person reads that, then it will happen." They were not joking. 

But Sir Nick Harvey now proposes to end the practice of recruiting boy soldiers, which for some reason we assume the right to carry on having, just as we assume the right to retain weapons of mass destruction and even to acquire more of them, in both cases wondering why we are not taken seriously on the matter.

Colonel Tim Collins is scornful, including in the following terms: "It is true that our European allies have ceased to recruit under-18s, but they don’t have armies – they have aggressive camping organisations that have no expeditionary capability." That will come as news in Francophone Africa, among other places.

But the French, among other "European allies", not to say the Canadians, were right all along about Iraq. It is no surprise that Colonel Collins cannot forgive them for that. His reputation depends on a disastrous war which  turned out to have been based on an entirely false prospectus and which has made the country in question even worse off than it was before. It is beyond me why anyone would pay him the slightest heed on any subject.

Especially since he is on record as wanting to abolish the Royal Air Force, pursuant to the openly stated aim of his Henry Jackson Society (which is very close to The Commentator and to the Murdoch papers, themselves at least well on the way to staging a coup within amateurish, easy-prey UKIP) to create a single EU defence "capability" under overall American command, but under the day-to-day control either of Germany or of France, depending on which happened to be in favour at the Court of Commentary at the time of writing. We have already flogged off Search and Rescue to a private company based in Texas.

Within that, it would seem that Britain's only role will be to provide boys as cannon fodder. How long before our most unaccomplished 16-year-olds are conscripted directly into the Israeli Defence Force? Or ought I not to write that, lest the wrong person read it and it happen?