In The Bleak Midwinter

Flu. Snow. No small boats for four weeks. Winter always surprises the British. But are such foibles alone enough to be worth dying for? “Would you fight for Starmer’s Britain?”, asks GB News. Enoch Powell baffled Margaret Thatcher by telling her that he would have fought in the Second World War even if Britain had had a Communist Government. He would still have fought for his country. With no Tory roots, that was beyond her. With deep Liberal roots, she thought that wars were about “values”. Her view has prevailed, and here we are.

Would you fight for fiscal drag and for a 50 per cent increase in bus fares? For falling Gross Domestic Product, and for galloping food and fuel inflation? For the failure to guarantee employment rights from day one of employment, and for the failure to cap ground rents at £25 per year? Or for increasing employers’ National Insurance contributions so as to destroy charities and small businesses while making it impossible for big businesses to take on staff or to increase wages, and for forcing working farmers of many decades’ standing who formally inherited their parents’ farms to sell them to giant American agribusinesses?

Would you fight for digital ID and for facial recognition? For the cancellation of local elections, and for the denial of self-determination to the Chagossian people? For the abolition of almost all trial by jury, and for the removal of the automatic right of appeal from the Magistrates’ Court to the Crown Court? For the experimental use on children of puberty blockers that had been banned in sheep, and for the haranguing of teenage boys in place of who knows what in the school day while the girls were doing who knows what else? Or for assisted suicide, for decriminalised abortion up to birth, and for Lord Falconer’s therefore logically inescapable assurance to the House of Lords that “pregnancy should not be a bar” to death at the hands of the State?

Would you fight for a State that had conscripted you? 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. But it would take this country 50 years to reindustrialise for war. De facto American withdrawal means that NATO has effectively ceased to exist. And Russia has taken nearly four years to capture 20 per cent of Ukraine, so it is not going to be parking its tanks on anyone’s Atlantic coast anytime soon, an aspiration that in any case it has never expressed.