Routine Rotation

There is going to be digital ID after all, as the only way to enforce the ban on under-16s from social media, a ban devised as the latest excuse to impose the identity cards and then the digital version that have been the solution in search of a problem since Michael Howard was Home Secretary in a tabloid bidding war with his Shadow, Tony Blair.

They have had identity cards in France since time immemorial, but then we are presumably no longer complaining that dinghy-catchers from there were fleeing a safe country. Britain must also be desperately unsafe now that the USAF has withdrawn from USAF Fairford, raising the question of what that base was any longer for. After all, the American military presence on our shores was supposed to be as vital to our security as the intelligence relationship with Israel that sanctioning the West Bank settlements has apparently destroyed. Not so long ago, the Dukedoms of Edinburgh, York and Sussex were all effectively vacant, leaving the east of this island in fear of an imminent Viking invasion. But this is far worse, extending to the whole Realm.

Although you never know, it may be too late for all of the American bases to be closed by Thanksgiving, which would therefore have become an annual holiday in celebration. But there is plenty of time to make that happen by the Fourth of July. After all, we are to have the Britannia Shield, as Blair would have called it. I mean, really? Kemi Badenoch cannot think of a better name than that? Oh, well, it looks as if it is going to be a literal shield, no doubt with Britannia on it and probably made out of plastic, to be carried around the country and held up theatrically to the sky as if in defiance of some enemy or other, thereby providing an item for the difficult middle of local news bulletins, between the big story and the weather forecast. All very That's Life. Perhaps it should instead be called Esther's Shield?

August Hanning seems to have passed on everything that the BND knew about Russia or Iran, and the Germans are professionals rather than James Bond or Johnny English wannabes, so the fact that we are all still here would seem to blow out of the water both the existence of the threat and the efficacy of its supposed deterrents such as Trident, NATO, and indeed the erosion of civil liberties by such means as digital ID. In that last, what will be the role of the Artificial Intelligence to which were to ascribe personhood while denying it to the unborn child, or to the terminally or chronically ill, or to the inconveniently disabled, or to the schoolgirls of Minab, or to anyone at all in Russia, or to Christa Pike, whom God has kept in this life to call the United States, and those elsewhere in West who would restore the death penalty, away from the capital punishment for which the only ever theological argument was that it was permissible if there were no other way of protecting public safety, as is clearly no longer the case, if it ever was?