I fear Mr Wintour doesn't realise himself just how far we have fallen. I am afraid I tend towards Will Hutton who tweeted:
Britain is not a mini super power, the conceit in today’s Integrated defence review, boosting our nuclear arsenal + “tilting” to Asia as the US’s little Sir Echo. We’re a medium sized European power who must make common cause with other European powers. Anything else is delusional
— Will Hutton (@williamnhutton) March 16, 2021
The idea we are going to buy more nuclear missiles and send our aircraft carriers into America’s backyard is faintly ridiculous. The US military will be rolling their eyes at the prospect of our forces ‘cadging’ stuff from their quartermasters in order to scrape along, as we did almost constantly in Afghanistan, Iraq and Kuwait. We will simply get in the way.
I wonder if Joe Biden was consulted about it?
The British army can barely muster a division and is only around 70,000 men. Tony Blair struggled to put anything together for George Bush after 9/11 and our military was quite a bit bigger then. The government says its commitment to 'defend Europe' remains strong but a report in The Mail the other day claims some of out tanks and armoured vehicles date back to when Elvis Presley had a Christmas No 1 in the early 60s!
The cross-party Commons Defence Committee raised fears that the UK’s armoured forces were at ‘a very serious disadvantage and warned in a new report that the Army’s current capability was so ‘obsolescent and outgunned’ that it could cost lives. It's not clear to me how we would be able to 'defend Europe.'
China will be laughing at us. Their economy is seven times ours and growing faster. It is forecast to overtake the US in a few years.
We are making commitments that we cannot afford, economically or diplomatically and it comes on the day a leaked recording of Foreign Secretary Dominic Rabb is published saying we need to do trade deals with nations with poor human rights record.
The EU links its trade deals to human rights. They use trade to raise the bar. We are doing the opposite
The difference is clear. Whereas the EU, with Germany at the centre, really is a global trading colossus with some leverage, and are prepared to sell their goods expensively - and not just in money terms but in market access, we just want to get stuff cheap.
And to add to the sense that the nation is shifting slowly to the right (I don't accuse the government of being fascist but we are heading that way) the new Policing Bill went through first reading yesterday with a big majority. It contains a lot of worrying elements that limit the right to protest even if just one person finds it annoying and gives the Home Secretary sweeping powers to change the law without bothering to ask parliament. Even Theresa May spoke against it although later she voted with the government.
Dictatorships always start off like this don't they? Someone thinks (a) that they have all the answers (b) that democracy is too slow and cumbersome and (c) the country is crying out for harsh discipline. At some point it all begins to turn sour.
As I said, I don't accuse Johnson of being a fascist but he is certainly not a social-democrat and is being used by others. I'd call him a useful idiot but he isn't that useful.
