Keeping us safe from threats

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Last week, a retired general told us that the UK is 10 years away from being ready for a war with Russia, a war which the political and military leaders of the UK seem increasingly determined to fight. The general’s views were inevitably reported as though it was a bad thing to be so unready for a war which would in the best case destroy much of Europe and in the worst case end human civilization. The military mind always sees an unreadiness to fight a war as being a bad thing, but what if that unreadiness is actually a good thing?

An attempt by Russia to conquer and subdue the entire continent of Europe (which is what a pre-meditated attack on a Nato country implies) would be madness, even if Russia hadn’t already proved how incapable it is of subduing one country right on its borders. It is possible, of course, that Putin really is mad, but his actions to date appear to be due more to miscalculation than insanity. He will surely have learnt something from his misadventures in Ukraine. The only anywhere near rational reason for a decision to attack the whole of NATO would be if he became completely convinced that it was necessary to pre-empt an attack by NATO on Russia. Getting his retaliation in first, in other words.

Now I don’t actually believe that NATO countries want to start a war with Russia (which isn’t the same thing as saying that there are no individual military men or politicians who do), but I’m not sitting in the Kremlin looking at the world through Russian eyes with an intense awareness of Russian history. He might be wrong to conclude that NATO is preparing to attack his country but, listening to the generals and war-mongers, it’s not an entirely unreasonable conclusion for him to reach. So if the biggest danger for us lies in reinforcing his fears, which keeps us safer: stepping up preparedness for war or being so unready that he feels no immediate need to act?

One of the lessons of history is that militarisation and arms races almost invariably lead to war, and can even do so almost by accident. Deliberately choosing not to prepare for all-out war with Russia stands traditional policy on its head, but it also allows us to make policy choices which improve the living standards of people in the UK rather than diverting resources into essentially wasteful weapons of destruction; policy choices which the politicians tell us are impossible. The warmongers tell us that the first duty of any government is to keep its citizens safe, but they don’t encourage debate about the question of ‘safe from what?’ Cutting lives short through war is an obvious danger, but lives are also shortened by poverty, ill health, and poor education. The former is a future danger (the remoteness of which is hard to judge), the latter is happening here and now. There’s a lot more nuance to ‘keeping citizens safe’ than preparing to kill Russians.

There is one potential growth industry

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In order to maintain the fiction that government must always abide by the arbitrary fiscal rules that it itself writes, any additional expenditure in one area must be balanced either by cutting expenditure in another area, or else by increasing revenue. Or so says Sir Starmer. It’s dangerous nonsense, not least because it legitimises the arguments of all those arguing that ‘we should look after our own first’ by validating the idea that spending on refugees and asylum-seekers always and necessarily reduces the money available for homeless people (to choose one example), and especially homeless armed service veterans, a group considered by right-wingers as being particularly deserving. It would still be nonsense, even if it didn’t completely ignore the fact that the reasons for there being so many homeless people in that category are far more complex than a simple lack of cash or housing.

So when it comes to a demand from the military for more soldiers and more equipment, the first things in the government’s sights are, as ever, the old favourites: overseas aid, immigrants, welfare and the pensions triple lock. It is, apparently, entirely ‘obvious’ that those best-placed to bear the burden of paying for additional weaponry and military manpower are the poorest and weakest in society, both at home and abroad. Starmer’s announcement yesterday to divert money from the aid budget and increase the proportion of GDP devoted to preparing for war is hardly a surprise in that context.

The idea that defence preparedness should be measured by the proportion of GDP spent on armaments is, and always has been, a spectacularly stupid one, because there can never be any guarantee that spending more leads to a more effective fighting force. It could be achieved, for instance, by simply doubling the salary of every member of the armed forces. In itself, that might not be a bad thing to do anyway; the pay of junior ranks is not exactly over-generous, so maintaining the numbers involves targeting recruitment at young people living in the most deprived areas. (Recruitment isn’t currently terribly effective either, and whilst outsourcing recruitment might have generated private profit, it hasn’t done much for the numbers.) But increasing salaries wouldn’t make the forces any more useful for war-fighting. Alternatively, they could simply pay more for the equipment that they buy. That might sound like a silly idea, but given the MoD’s history in procurement, it’s one of the likeliest outcomes of an increase in budget. And while paying more for the same equipment (let alone buying equipment which either doesn’t work or is not needed) might help meet the arbitrary target of a percentage of GDP, it doesn’t improve the capability of the UK’s armed forces.

What Sir Starmer did yesterday is what he has been saying for months that he would not do, which is to pre-empt the conclusion of the Strategic Defence Review. Worse still, the reason he’s done it is more about appeasing the madman in the White House than about defending the UK. The working assumption of the military mind – and, it would appear, the Sir Starmer mind – is that the supposed enemy is just waiting for us to drop our guard before launching an all-out invasion to seize land and oppress the population. How likely is that in practice? Assuming for a moment that the enemy really wants to control the UK, invasion is about the least cost-effective way of doing it. Far better and a great deal cheaper in terms of lives as well as money to take over the country from within and install a puppet government, as committed to rule by oligarch as Putin himself is. It increasingly looks like a strategy which has worked beyond his wildest dreams in the US, and brings a bonus in that the puppet government can help him to repeat the trick elsewhere.

On the receiving end of Sir Starmer’s pusillanimity are some of the poorest and most underdeveloped countries in the world, already hit by the body blow of the Trumpian destruction of USAID.  Still, it is, as they say, ‘an ill wind…’, and for a government obsessed with growth there is one group of ‘entrepreneurs’ likely to see an increase in demand for their services – people smugglers. One of the likeliest consequences of aid cuts will be an increase in the number of people seeking to migrate from where they currently live to the richest countries of the world – including the UK – in search of a better life. Whether Sir Starmer’s attack on living standards of the poorest in the UK acts as a sufficient counter-deterrent remains to be seen.

Looking in the mirror

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In August, 1704, an Anglo-Dutch invasion force seized Gibraltar from the Spanish by force of arms, during the war of the Spanish Succession. Like most wars, the conflict was eventually resolved by a series of treaties, one of the consequences of which was that a weakened Spain ‘voluntarily’ during a process of ‘negotiation’ ceded the territory of Gibraltar to England. On that basis, the rock has been ‘British’ ever since, despite a few Spanish attempts to reclaim the territory. Given two and a half centuries to make their mark, aided by a certain degree of migration and cultural dominance, the British authorities got to a position by 1968 where a referendum of the inhabitants opted to remain British rather than see Gibraltar returned to Spain. It never really settled the question though – Spain continues to claim sovereignty on the basis that the territory was stolen from it.

Lest anyone think that this makes the Spanish look like the good guys, there is a not dissimilar history to Spain’s control of a series of outposts along the northern coat of Africa, such as Ceuta and Melilla – seize them first, and worry about getting agreement from the previous owners later. And the issue goes much wider than that – the legal basis for most of the boundaries in Europe is that territory was at some point seized by the current rulers and the new ownership subsequently legitimized by forcing the losers to sign treaties recognising the new boundaries or, in the case of territories swallowed up in their entirety (such as Wales, for instance), simply allowing the passage of time to legitimise the new ownership. It is the way that European states have behaved over centuries. Among the consequences of this long-standing approach are a series of unresolved boundary disputes (including, of course, Gibraltar itself) and most, if not all, of Europe’s independence movements.

In insisting that any peace negotiations with Ukraine should start by recognising the new boundaries created by military conquest (negotiations then being about the terms under which those boundaries are recognised, rather than about whether they should be recognised at all), Putin is simply following the traditional European playbook. Seize territory first, and legitimize it later. That doesn’t justify it, or make it right, it simply underlines the fact that a few decades of relative peace have not provided any sort of answer to the question of how and where boundaries should be drawn if not by the prior exercise of military force. There is no obvious ‘good’ outcome to the current war. Ceding territory to Russia confirms the validity of Putin’s approach, and may encourage further demands in future (to say nothing of what it means for the people in the territories concerned); providing ever more armaments of increasing sophistication and destructive capability to Ukraine in an attempt to enable the recapture of all stolen territory risks an escalation whose consequences could be catastrophic way beyond the boundaries of Ukraine itself. The only certainties are that the death and destruction will continue for as long as there is no resolution, and that there will have to be some negotiation eventually.

Nothing can or should blind us to the fact that Putin is responsible for the current war; resorting to military force rather than negotiation – and consultation with the people directly affected – should never be acceptable. But nothing happens without a context, and the context in which he launched the war is nothing new. The failure to find an alternative and civilised approach to determining statehood, nationality and boundaries, with the support of the people themselves, is never going to be down to one man at one time. There are politicians across Europe who ought to be taking a long hard look at the actions of their own states over the years as well as condemning Putin.

Fighting the last war?

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Generals, so they say, are always preparing to refight the last war. It’s not entirely true, but there is an element of truth to the idea that military attitudes are always shaped to an extent by the last conflict in which they participated. One thing that does seem to hold true, however, is that they always believe that ‘the enemy’ is planning to attack and invade, a belief which justifies their persistent demands for more money and hardware. The current UK government is content to play along with this, at least partly in the mistaken belief that the Scots and the Welsh will understand that they can only be ‘protected’ by remaining part of a state which diverts huge sums into armaments, sums on a scale which Scotland or Wales could never afford.

The nature of this threat to UK territory is rarely elaborated, but generally attributed to Russia or China. Quite why Russia would want to invade the UK (even if the UK’s government wasn’t in the process of turning the country into a basket case) is never spelled out. Russia’s oligarchs find it easier and considerably cheaper to get what they want from the UK by bunging large sums of money at the Conservative Party, and China has no discernible interest in taking over a country more than 4,000 miles away. And if there’s no obvious reason or them to be interested in invading the UK, there is even less reason why they would somehow want to seize on the opportunity provided by independence to invade Scotland or Wales. It’s a form of madness to suggest that they would – and the madness of those in charge of the UK frightens me more than the fantasy of a Chinese invasion of Fishguard.

That’s not to say that there aren’t people (not necessarily states) in the world who want to harm the UK; it’s more about recognising that traditional warfare, whether by air, land or sea isn’t their chosen method, which means that tanks, guns and aircraft won’t help. The ‘inexhaustible’ energy beams which the PM was promoting last week won’t help either (although if they’ve really found an inexhaustible energy supply to power them, there are much better peaceful uses waiting, not to mention a Nobel prize or two and the complete rewriting of physics). Cyber security is more important for our future security than warships or planes, although why we need the predominately offensive capability proposed rather than a merely defensive one is another unanswered question.

But the real question which an increase in military spending doesn’t even attempt to answer is why there are people who want to destroy our society, and whether there are other things that we could do to make ourselves more secure. Not attacking other countries, and not building up an offensive capability to attack other countries might be a good place to start. A rules-based international order in which states agree rules and stick to them is another. Increasing rather than cutting economic aid to poorer countries is a third. It would be naïve to think that there won’t always be alternative world views which seek to impose their views on others, and we will always need a level of protection against that. We’d need rather less protection, though, if the UK wasn’t apparently doing its best at times to recruit more people to their cause.

What 'prizes' does he have in mind?

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One thing of which we can all often be guilty is a failure to understand a different point of view. It’s easy enough to understand why – but things which are ‘obvious’ to one person are not so to everyone else. But however normal it might be, it’s something which politicians in particular need to be careful about. The current Prime Minister is not only not careful about it, he doesn’t even seem to understand that it can be a problem.

There is no doubt that the boost to ‘defence’ spending announced yesterday will be popular amongst Anglo-British nationalists, and there is also no doubt that there are significant numbers of people in Wales (although perhaps rather less so in Scotland) who fit into that category and will be delighted. But in presenting it as an example of the strength and power of ‘the union’, Johnson seems to have completely missed the point that not everyone thinks that way. Worse, his claim that “If there is one policy that strengthens the UK in every possible sense, it is building more ships for the Royal Navy” is based on an assumption about attitudes to the UK’s grandiose notions which rather overlooks the fact that his target audience isn’t those who are already convinced about the union, but those who are not. And in his usual inept and bumbling fashion, he fails to understand that for those opposed to UK military aggrandisement and adventurism, his announcement will weaken rather than strengthen his case - independence offers a way out of excessive and outdated militarism.

Still, shooting himself in the foot by not understanding that not everyone is going to swell with pride at the announcement of further investment in technology to kill and maim is at one with his cloth-eared approach to most other issues.

There was one phrase in his speech which was worrying to say the least. In talking about modernising the armed forces and giving them new weaponry, skills, and techniques, he said that in the future “…the prizes will go to the swiftest and most agile nations, not necessarily the biggest”. I struggle to assign any meaning to that, and particularly the use of the word ‘prizes’, which does not imply that he sees military power as being a route to extracting something from less powerful or less well-armed states in the world by use, or by threat of use, of force. I suppose we were warned from the outset that the Brexiteers wanted to see Britain as a ‘buccaneering’ (i.e. pirate) state, although many of us assumed that they just meant that they wanted the UK to be a state which declined to follow the rules by which others live.

It’s not mere coincidence that the amount of extra military expenditure bears a similarity to the amount which they have been briefing that they intend to cut from overseas aid. That’s another indication of an intention to switch directly from the use of ‘soft’ power to the use of ‘hard’ power; the commitment to spending 0.7% of GDP on aid put the UK among the leading aid givers in the world, and it was in 2015 (under a Conservative-led government, curiously enough) that the UK became the first G7 country to enshrine that commitment in law. The Brexit project has always been about an attempt to turn back the clock, to return to an imagined golden age in which Britannia both ruled the waves and waived the rules. This latest announcement looks like another step along that path, but the assumption that the rest of the world will allow, or can be coerced into allowing, the UK to do what it wants – which was more or less the case in the days of empire - is yet another example of failure to understand that not everyone else shares their view of the world - and in this case spectacularly so.

Inconsistent and incoherent are inadequate words to describe announcing a hopelessly overhyped and underfunded ‘green revolution’ one day and a commitment to an increase in spending on armaments the next. If the government was run using logic and reason, that much would be obvious, but then a government guided by logic and reason wouldn’t have put the UK where it is today.

Putting the past behind us

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I noted last week that there is no such thing as simple objective history; facts and events are always selected and interpreted from one or other point of view.  It’s something that strikes me time and time again looking at the debate over Brexit.  One particular example concerns the argument which I’ve seen over and over from Brexit supporters, angry over the failure of ‘Europeans’ to give the UK whatever it wants (even if it still doesn’t exactly know what that is), which refers to the two world wars fought partly on European soil during the twentieth century.  The argument invariably comes down to how ‘we’ saved ‘them’, twice, and now look how they’re treating us, the ungrateful bunch that they are.

It’s an insular mentality, based on the idea that these islands are somehow separate from and apart from the rest of the continent, only getting dragged into that continent’s wars when it became necessary to do so to prevent German dominance.  Not only is that a comparatively short-term and grossly over-simplistic analysis of the causes of those wars, it also ignores the long previous centuries of conflict during which ‘England’ was as often as not the aggressor, attacking anyone and everyone in pursuit of its own desire for dominance.

Taking that longer view of history, Europe has been fought over time and time again in what, from a pan-European perspective, looks like a series of bloody civil wars as different states each sought to dominate their neighbours.  It is that history of conflict which explains the outcome; a mish-mash of so-called ‘nation-states’ in which the boundaries of nations and states rarely coincide.  The desire to avoid any further repeat has been a significant driver of the attempts, however imperfect they have been, to unite Europe since the 1950s.  It’s a perspective which many in the UK seem never to have understood, and which leaves them bewildered when the rest of the EU pursue objectives other than the purely economic. 

In 1984, the president of France and the German chancellor held hands at a ceremony marking the seventieth anniversary of the outbreak of the first world war, marking the extent of reconciliation between those two countries.  It was a moving gesture.  Contrast that with attitudes in the UK – in 2014, thirty years after that hand-holding act of reverence for the dead on all sides, a plan to invite the German president to jointly mark the occasion on which the British Empire and Germany went to war was dropped because it was judged ‘too difficult’, according to a report in the Sunday Times (paywall).  (The same report notes that the government is now planning to invite the German president to the commemorative service at Westminster Abbey marking the end of that war - but he will be the only head of state invited to join the Queen, reflecting again the way in which ‘the war’ is viewed as an almost uniquely ‘British’ event against a single enemy, in another gross oversimplification of history.) 

There is a continuing reluctance in the UK to see either war in terms other than those of ‘this sceptr’d isle’ against the rest, or as victory for one side and defeat for the other, and it can sometimes be difficult to see where commemoration of the dead ends and celebration of victory and militarism starts.  The UK’s underlying military-based identity and resistance to reconciliation in turn often seems to translate into seeing the EU as yet another fiendish plan by which Germany will come to dominate the European continent (a role which a blinkered view of history says belongs only to Albion).  Seen from that perspective, reconciliation between France and Germany – both of which have been ‘enemies’ of ‘England’ for centuries – is viewed more as a threat to the UK’s position than an opportunity for Europe, and rather than seeking to be part of that rapprochement, the aim must be to smash it apart.  When Basil Fawlty talked about ‘not mentioning the war’, he was really reflecting the fact that a shared, albeit distorted, folk memory of ‘the war’ continues to underpin the attitudes of many British people to Europeans in general and Germans in particular.

I can understand, to an extent at least, why some of these attitudes might be present amongst those who lived during either of the two wars; hatred and mistrust of ‘the hun’ was formal government policy in order to rally the population to strive for absolute victory.  But that demographic accounts for less than 10% of those living today, and many of those would have been children at the time.  I can see how the feelings could have been transferred to many in the immediate post-war generation as well; as someone born in 1951, I grew up around adults saying things like 'the only good German is a dead German'.  But whilst subsequent generations in Europe seem to have been able to move on, it does not seem to have happened at the same speed or to the same extent in the UK.  Can anyone imagine any UK Prime Minister holding hands with the Chancellor of Germany at any war commemoration?  Or the reactions of the tabloids if they did?  ‘The war’ still dominates much of the tabloid discourse about the EU in general and Germany in particular - especially, it seems, when it comes to football - even if it is not always openly expressed in such terms.

Things are changing, though.  The generational difference in support for membership of the EU was striking in 2016, and demographic changes since then make a similar result less likely in the future.  That partly explains why the Brexiteers are so keen that everyone should ‘respect the result’; their chances of winning again are diminishing daily due to demographics alone.  One of my fears about Brexit is that they want to take us back to a time when all other European countries were overwhelmingly viewed as potential or even actual enemies, and where this brave little island stood alone.  The crisis likely to be caused by the sort of Brexit for which they are now working is for them an opportunity to invoke that wartime spirit once again, strengthening and passing on to future generations that sense of specialness and uniqueness which Anglo-British nationalists delight in calling ‘not nationalism’.  And I think we all know which sections of the population will suffer most from the economic crisis which the ideologues plan to use to recreate a sense of deference and ‘Britishness’.

The continuing utter incompetence of the governing party, and its inability to agree on anything, gives me hope, of sorts, that such a future can still be avoided.  Faced with a choice of ‘no-deal’ – which increasingly looks like the only possible result of Tory dissension – and a fresh vote leading to cancellation of Brexit, the probability of the latter is increasing.  That would allow us to turn our attention instead to shaping the sort of EU that we want rather than the one we currently have.  But I’d have even more hope if there were a credible opposition party able to free itself of the attitudes of the past and seek a different way forward.

Defining identity in military terms

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There’s a lot of lobbying going on within the hopelessly divided UK Government at present, with various cabinet ministers engaged in fairly public dissent about a whole range of issues, not simply Brexit.  One of the issues concerns the amount of money being spent on the armed forces, with military chiefs demanding more money.  According to the Sunday Times (paywall), they are also trying to enlist the support of the royal family for their campaign to increase spending.

What particularly struck me was the argument of one unnamed ‘senior source’ who said that “The prime minister needs to recognise that our standing on the international stage is linked to our national identity, which is linked to our strong defence”.  This reinforces a point which I’ve made before on this blog – for Anglo-British nationalists, the armed forces and the glorious (as they seem to see them) victories of the past are a key – perhaps the single most important – element in their whole definition of their own identity.  They’re not the only nation in the world to take an excessive degree of pride in the armed forces and their exploits, but how many other nations actually define themselves in those terms?

It helps to explain why there is such a huge gulf in understanding between the UK and the rest of the EU about the purpose and objective of the EU.  Whilst most European countries regard the wars which have ravaged the continent in the past as unfortunate events which must never be repeated, and therefore want to lock themselves together to prevent any such repeat, the Anglo-British nationalists see those same wars as part of the UK’s past triumphs and want to retain an independent capacity to fight such wars again.

But what sort of national identity is it that depends so heavily on the ability to wage war against its neighbours, and prefers to dwell on the outcome of past wars and prepare for future ones than work with others for a peaceful future?  This is truly the sign of a national identity which has lost its way in the world.

Clinging to the past

Tweet In recent days, I’ve read two editorial pieces in newspapers urging the Scots to vote no tomorrow.  The first was in Saturday’s Western Mail, and the second was in the Sunday Times.  Both echoed the Prime Minister’s comments about the enormous contribution which Scots have made to the UK – and they both equally echoed his failure to explain exactly what Scotland had gained in return for this contribution.

Both also manage to “mention the war”, albeit obliquely in terms of “wars against tyrants” in the one case, and “leading the fight against fascism” in the other.  In recent weeks, others have attempted to use past military activity in a blunter, even offensive way, such as the suggestion by a former general that independence would be a betrayal of those Scottish soldiers who had died for the Union.

There is a more general point here.  Many of those espousing the values of ‘Britishness’ – even when there isn’t a referendum on – have enormous difficulty in doing so without mentioning the war, or wars.  I can understand their general difficulty in defining ‘Britishness’ (I have the same difficulty in defining ‘Welshness’, as it happens), but falling back on past military glories isn’t the easy and unifying answer which they seem to assume. 

Rather than defining an inclusive something of which we can all be part, the inclusion of military actions as a part of the definition always sounds to me more like an attempt to impose their own definition on the rest of us.  And for those of us of a less warlike bent, it is counter-productive; it serves to emphasis the gulf in perception.  It’s very much an Establishment view of the UK’s history and of what it means to be British.

Perhaps the problem lies not in the nature of the definition being offered, but in the attempt to make any sort of definition at all.  I cannot define what it means to be Welsh – of course there are a range of factors involved including geography, language, culture, and, yes, history – but I’m not sure it matters.  If enough people consider themselves Welsh, then ‘Wales’ exists.  The fact that all of those who consider themselves ‘Welsh’ mean something slightly different is, ultimately, neither here nor there.

So – why does anyone need a definition of ‘Britishness’ at all?  It seems to me that the various attempts to come up with one reflect a growing sense of insecurity amongst those making the attempt.  The world is changing around them – the UK is changing around them – in ways which are deeply discomforting to them.  Old certainties are being challenged and found wanting.  And instead of adapting, they are clinging to the past, and demanding that the rest of us do likewise.

But, in the words of a certain relevant song, “those days are passed now”.  Whatever the result tomorrow, things will never be the same again.  Those who want the UK, or whatever is left of it, to continue will need to start looking more to the future than the past.