Hybrid Attack

Sometimes you just have to laugh. That was the only response compatible with the maintenance of sanity when Tony Blair sent British troops into battle in Iraq without the necessary protection against weapons of mass destruction because he knew full well that Iraqi WMD did not exist. And even before we learned that the Army had ceased "all nonessential training exercises" to save a few quid, that would have been the only such response to this, as it still is.

Note the lack of reference to the Skripals, although not even in Salisbury had a Russian been alleged to have shed his passport like a snakeskin, to be picked up by whoever found the one in Leipzig. But Ukraine certainly did blow up the Nord Stream pipeline, leading to absolutely no recrimination on the part of Friedrich Merz. It staged the first terrorist bombing in the history of Monaco. It shot dead Andriy Portnov outside his children's American school in Madrid. It nearly caused an ammonia nitrate explosion when one of its naval drones exploded off the coast of Romania. One of its air defence missiles killed two farmers in a Polish border village, as established by a Polish investigation with which Ukraine refused to cooperate. Its drones' incursions into Finland and the Baltic states are routine. Germany, Spain, Poland, Finland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia are members of NATO. Ukraine is not. And that is before we mention the Ukrainian rent boys who set fire to properties linked to Keir Starmer.

Meanwhile, Benjamin Netanyahu has not disowned the strong support of his son and close adviser for the Argentine claim to the Falkland Islands, a claim that Israel materially supported when it was last pressed by force of arms. The United States, which has only ever recognised de facto British administration of the Falklands rather than de jure British sovereignty over them, is also poised to come down once and for all on the side of Donald Trump's close ally, Javier Milei. Section 219 of the United States-Israel FUTURES Act and Section 224 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2027 back up each other in "integrating" and "fusing" the American and Israeli military-industrial complexes, so that there will now officially be Israeli spyware all over the American bases on our territory including Ascension Island, feeding back to Buenos Aires. Then again, since the British Government cannot decide whether or not it wanted the oil in the North Sea, why would it care about the oil around the Falklands?

Yet from here to Diego Garcia, and spit with contempt at anyone who supported self-determination for the Falkland Islanders but not for the Chagossians, the American bases on British soil are vital to Trump's war on Iran, while the British sovereign bases on Cyprus are crucial both to that and to the Israeli wars on Gaza and Lebanon. Kick out those American bases. Now. Then move on to our Sovereign Base Area on Cyprus, which serves only to provide an excuse for intervention in the Middle East, and which significantly endangers the Cypriot population, so that we should cut our losses as has always been a British strength, by handing over that territory to the Republic of Cyprus. That has always been the preference of its small permanent population, who are Cypriot rather than British citizens but who had to stay put in 1960 because we refused to compensate them properly for their property so that they could start again elsewhere on the island. What a relief. And if we are disloyal for not giving enough support to Trump's war on Iran, then why is Trump refusing benefits to the widows of the fallen on the grounds that, calling to mind Vladimir Putin's "special military operation", there was not officially a war?

Astonishingly, it is not from any of those that we are to be defended to the tune of three per cent of GDP, with the only argument being as to how to reach that target. Did you vote for that? No one did. But those talking about tax avoidance do indeed understand the difference between that and tax evasion. Tax avoidance is legal and tax evasion is not. What practice is which, is a matter for the House of Commons. It can move the boundary, and it does so regularly. Since it could do that for this, then it could do that for other things, as it should. And the Right used to want to cut benefits and many other things so as to cut taxes, which it argued passionately and in detail was fundamental to economic growth. But now it wants to make those cuts only so as to increase military spending. That would just be moving public spending around, and it might very plausibly call for higher taxation.

Who would fight for Andy Burnham, or for Kemi Badenoch? No one who had been given any choice in the matter, which is why we are heading towards conscription. Although that debate is to be welcomed. 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 from the liberal bourgeoisie, which 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.

And if it is not conscription, then it is forced labour. You do not need work experience for an entry level job in a supermarket, and in any case there is no job at the end of one of these so-called placements at Sainsbury's. That company may no longer be owned outright by its eponymous family of gargantuan donors to all three parties, but that family retains an interest, so it stinks to high heaven that that company is to be sent 10,000 unemployed youths who will be compelled to work for it instead of Christmas temps, and to be paid only the Universal Credit that supermarket staff also claimed on an enormous scale. The State will be subsidising Sainsbury's at least twice over, and giving it free advertising into the bargain by presenting the arrangement as an act of corporate civic responsibility. I cannot remember anything more brazenly corrupt. But apparently it is either that or being fed into Volodymyr Zelensky's meat grinder. If not both.

No descendant of Burnham, Badenoch, Starmer or any of the rest of them will ever experience either fate, any more than, having been identified in primary school as a potential future NEET, any of them will ever be given a secondary school curriculum designed by and for the local vape shops, phone shops, nail bars, tattoo parlours, carwashes, mini-marts, Turkish barbers, and American candy shops. Nor will they be paid less than the minimum wage, with their employer given nothing more than a slap on the wrist when found out, a slap against which it had probably taken out specific insurance, as the auditors or the privatised utilities did against nominal fines.

Instead, they may well follow Burnham to Cambridge. Has it suspended James Orr, who appears to do little or no academic work while even his second full-time job as Head of Policy for Reform UK was a cover for his real occupation of soliciting illegal donations? Until Channel 4 News came on, then Cambridge had had a good day yesterday, having turned out to be able to tell the sex of a fruit fly, and to see why that mattered, even if it could not yet pull off the same trick with a human being. That continuing inability is of a piece with the inability of the Labour Party to resist workfare, conscription, and the know-your-place curriculum for plebs. Such is the legacy of Gloria Steinem, if not on her own, then for what she personified. She was positively proud of her role in the CIA's development and deployment of identity politics to subvert the material realism and the class consciousness of the Western Left. And here we are.