Footing?

Al Carns was still a serving Royal Marines Commando and thus prohibited from joining any political party when the last General Election was called, yet he came out of it a Labour MP with a majority of 11,537. Not bad for a former adviser to Michael Fallon, Gavin Williamson and Penny Mordaunt. This is plain and simple entryism, and not by a Trotskyist groupuscule in the corner of a backstreet pub.

But to prepare for a war such as these people desired, it would take this country 50 years to reindustrialise. Yet who deindustrialised it? Moreover, on 1 October 2025, the entire British Armed Forces stood at 182,060 souls. Again, whose fault is that? One or more of the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats, and the right wing of the Labour Party have been in power forever, and the last Conservatives to have been so are taking over Reform UK, if they have not already done so.

De facto American withdrawal means that NATO has effectively ceased to exist, but even the SNP wants war with Russia, and even the Greens and Plaid Cymru are not against it. Yet the country that has taken nearly four years to capture 20 per cent of Ukraine is not going to be parking its tanks on anyone's Atlantic coast anytime soon even it wanted to, and that is not an aspiration that Russia has ever expressed.

Ignore anyone who advocated a military intervention unless you could imagine that person as an 18-year-old in battle. The call for war always comes primarily 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. Yet 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.