What A Blast?

After all that, Jonathan Reynolds cannot guarantee that the blast furnaces at Scunthorpe would be kept going. No fuel, apparently. All right, the coking coal mine at Whitehaven would not have been up and running this week. But the mentality is only too obvious.

10 years ago this October, when Scunthorpe was also under threat, the then new Leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, proposed renationalisation. He was howled down as a loony and worse. In recent days, the same fate has befallen his comrade in the Independent Alliance, the MP for Birmingham Perry Barr, Ayoub Khan, when he asked the Prime Minister to deploy the Army to clear the refuse that was endangering health on the streets of his city, where he remains a sitting councillor. Now that is going to happen.

Speaking of the Army, we are governed by people who want vastly increased military spending, over and above what was already the sixth highest in the world for only the twenty-second largest population, yet without the guaranteed ability to make steel.

In Estonia, we station troops as a kind of tripwire because under no other circumstance would Britain fight a war to defend places in Eastern Europe of which many people here had never heard and which very few could identify on a map. An attack on those countries would have to involve shooting at our own troops. So we put our troops there in order to be shot at. But Estonia has taken to piracy, seizing ships that were no threat to it, but which it claimed, perhaps accurately, were part of the Russian "shadow fleet" for dodging sanctions. 

Notice that the people who are most against tariffs are keenest on sanctions; most against trade wars, they are keenest on real wars. They are dragging us towards conscription, and bemoaning that the sons of certain ethnic minorities might be problematic from that point of view. Yet at the same time they insist that it is those boys' white working-classmates who have been "radicalised" and what have you. Anyone would think that they had it in for both of them, and that, as surely as when the slave trade financed enclosure, there was One Struggle.