Sore at not having been promoted to Secretary of State for Defence from her present position with no policy role, Lord High Admiral Penny Mordaunt, who ought to enter all rooms to the sound of Sir Joseph Porter's Song, has managed to get herself into the Daily Mail anyway, by flogging the dead horse called National Service. As if they would turn up. Or as if the Armed Forces would want them to.
Ben Wallace's military credentials are barely less questionable than Mordaunt's. But ignore anyone who advocated a military intervention unless you could imagine that person as an 18-year-old in battle. In Ukraine as in every case, the call for war is coming from the liberal bourgeoisie. That 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 needed 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. Britain is not.
George Galloway often points out that our armed forces could fit comfortably into Villa Park.
ReplyDeleteYet they quake at the mention of our name in the Kremlin and in the Forbidden City. Of course they do.
DeleteWhy would we want them to?