Don't Be Tanked Up

You do not care which country Soledar or Bakhmut is in. You just don't. Nor should you. Quite apart from what sort of "commander" a 26-year-old might possibly have been, what did Andrey Medvedev think that he was joining when he joined the Wagner Group? Good luck to Norway with him in their midst. Good luck to all of us, since Norway is a member of NATO. But we are still wrong to arm the other side.

As it has been startlingly frank in saying, an Army that was already struggling to recruit has been done immense harm by the Government's use of it to break the strikes. Yesterday, the Government admitted to having spent more than the cost of a settlement on prolonging the rail dispute as part of its wider strike-breaking strategy. All future industrial action on the railways has now, by its own admission, been imposed by the Government for political purposes.

Armed Forces that draw heavily from the working class have been pressed into the service of those purposes, backed up only by laughably obvious fake quotations in certain newspapers, with fictional members of the public claiming to prefer this or that service when it is delivered by "Our Boys". Those same media outlets' usual coverage of the Forces is that they have "gone woke", but they seem to have decided that they liked the unions even less.

Something comparable is happening in those liberal Right media which emphasise their liberalism rather than their right-wingery. When those media's idol, Tony Blair, was Prime Minister, then the Police used to have "Vote Labour" emblazoned on their marked cars, and the Government gave them breathtaking new powers, even attempting to allow them to lock people up for 90 days without so much as charging them with anything. Yet look at The Guardian this week.

And now, a variable number of the Army's few remaining tanks is to be sent to Ukraine. The Army's response is dressed up in "Oh, well, we have to do our bit", but it states bluntly that it does not have the tanks to spare. All eyes are on German consent to the redeployment of the tanks that Germany had sold to Poland. Why would Poles want to aid the heirs of Stepan Bandera? They would not, and they do not. In Galicia, Poland intends to press its claim to the region centred on one of its principal historical cities, just as it is Hungary that has a thousand-year claim to Carpathian Ruthenia. At a recent football match, Viktor Orbán wore a scarf depicting the map of Hungary from before the First World War. We must take no part in this.

We are heading for a hung Parliament. To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.