The Germany Test

The death of Helmut Kohl has crystallised in my mind the concept of the Germany Test.

From Sunday trading to nuclear weapons, if Germany does perfectly well without something, then so could we.

If it is mass incineration that you want, then we have just seen it.

Had it happened a week earlier, then the Prime Minister would now be a man who makes no bones about the fact that he would never press a nuclear button (a science-fictional question that he is never asked in any grown-up country), while the Chancellor of the Exchequer would be a man who would simply refuse to pay for nuclear weapons.

As Peter Hitchens writes:

It continues to amaze me that we spent a large chunk of the Election campaign discussing the renewal of our grandiose and unusable Trident missile system, which allegedly protects us from enemies we don’t have in a war which ended 26 years ago.

And that we think we are so great and wonderful and important that we can launch wars in Iraq, Libya and Syria.

But we could not even protect the victims of Grenfell Tower from horrible, needless deaths that a child could have foreseen.