I was delighted to see that the French are bringing back national service for those of their young people who are not already serving in one or another jihadi-inspired supranational armed institution.
The scheme is to be voluntary and I am not entirely sure how the young folk will be enticed, given that the wage will be about £700 a month. They’re a little thin on tales of heroic martial victories to inspire the adolescent imagination, if we’re honest, but now is not the time to sneer. At least the French are doing something. At first there will be only 3,000 or so young people learning the famous French military discipline of prendre la fuite, but the government has plans to extend this to 50,000 by 2035.
This is good news for the security of the UK. If you look down the world list of standing armies by size, you will see that the countries with the largest militaries tend to be those who are next door to countries with similarly large militaries — and for that very reason. My hope is that while Vladimir Putin has not imposed upon our country a seriousness towards our defence obligations, perhaps the sight of France remobilising might stir some vestigial panic in our bones, memories of treachery, memories of Agincourt, memories of that shortish, rather ambitious Corsican chap. In point of fact the number of armed personnel in the UK is substantially smaller than it was at the time of the Napoleonic wars and within Europe our military is dwarfed by those of Poland, Italy, Germany, Spain and indeed Belarus.
Barely a week goes by without some superannuated former brigadier telling the papers that the state of, say, our army is beyond parlous and would last about two hours after the first Russians, with snow on their boots, parachuted in. There are about 72,000 troops in the British Army right now, but I believe a substantial number of these people are working in the DEI sector, training our troops not to misgender Dmitri when he drops by with his tactical nukes. You may remember the government, a little under a year ago after Donald Trump’s victory, suddenly deciding that defence was quite an important issue and pledging to spend more money on it. In the past year our armed forces have expanded by exactly 240 people. Words have not been matched by action and we continue to slumber. The latest budget ignored defence almost entirely.
It would not be right to blame the present government for this. The threat to our country has been building for at least 20 years and no administration has recognised it — or, if it recognised it, done anything about it. Of course, it goes well beyond the politicians. A recent opinion poll suggested that 48 per cent of people in the UK would not fight for their country no matter what the circumstances. Not even if a foreign power cancelled their Netflix and Disney+ accounts. I hate these people, I think — or at least cannot quite understand them. Another poll suggested that only 14 per cent of people aged 16 to 17 could ever be enticed into the armed services.
As I have mentioned before, we have become assuaged and cosseted by peace and comparative affluence to the extent that we have adopted our own version of prendre la fuite. We too have spent the past few decades running away from reality and are now left in a situation where our defence budget is less than one fifth of the money we hand out in welfare payments. The twin realities of bankruptcy and hostile actions by our enemies simply have not impinged and so we continue with half of the population hating this country and believing they owe it nothing — the consequence of the traducing, over the years, of our history — and half of the country suckling like mad from the shrinking, spaniel-eared public tit. Perhaps the same half of the country, perhaps not. But it is a state of denial from which we should be awakened forthwith.
You may remember that Rishi Sunak advanced the idea of bringing back national service, albeit on a voluntary basis, shortly before his calamitous defeat on July 4 last year. The government said at the time: “Only by nurturing our shared culture and fostering a sense of duty can we preserve our nation and values for decades to come. This is an investment in both the character of young people and our security.” Cue an outpouring of derision from, kind of, everyone — including, it has to be said, various sections of our armed forces that have perhaps also been dozing gently through these years of peace.
In truth, just such a scheme would provide a cheap way of boosting the size of our armed forces and might even inculcate in the young a sense of history and responsibility towards their fellow citizens, while reminding the rest of us that periods of peace and comfort are the anomalies within our history — and the latest one is surely coming to an unpleasant end.
Bangkok’s elves are all aquiver
You have the advantage over me. I don’t know if the people of Weymouth managed to break into Guinness World Records. Yesterday the town’s citizens were urged to congregate at a pavilion, dressed as elves. Green and red costume, hat, pointy ears.
“It might sound a bit bonkers — but that’s what makes it brilliant!” said Dawn Rondeau-Irvine, who is chief operations officer at something called We Are Weymouth. For sure, Dawn. She added that Weymouth was “proudly known” as the fancy dress capital of the UK. No, it’s not, Dawn. It’s proudly known as Dorset’s rectum.
The record gathering of elves is 1,762, who met 11 years ago in Bangkok. I’m sure the Thais will have been looking on yesterday with great trepidation.
Word games on the Pope’s mobile
Suggestions that the Pope is “infallible” have been disproven with the news that Pope Leo changes his starting word every time he plays Wordle. A quick glance at comparative letter frequencies would suggest that there is a limited number of words that might serve as a useful base from which to solve your Wordle and that to be entirely catholic as to what that word should be greatly curtails your chances of success. But then, Leo believes in transubstantiation, so there’s probably no reasoning with him.
By contrast, Anglican clerics almost certainly stick to the same word each time. Probably xylem or yacht.
Reith regrets
The Dutch historian Rutger Bregman was right to be aggrieved the BBC censored his Reith lecture, taking out the bit where he called Donald Trump corrupt. It seems to me if you’re going to scour European universities for anti-populist post-Marxist vegan professors, you ought to let them say what they think.
In any case, his views do not differ very much from those expressed by Ben Ansell, who has called Trump “a chaotic authoritarian” and his tariffs “dumb”, and who delivered the Reith lecture a couple of years back.
I assume that Zack Polanski or Zarah Sultana will be on the podium next year.
Budget welfare criticism
