Comment: fundamentally unserious

By Richard North - April 17, 2024

In a very small way, the forces of rationality seem to have secured a small victories lately, firstly with Victoria Atkins’ stonking response to the Cass Review and then with the High Court response to Katharine Birbalsingh’s refusal to lift her school’s prayer ban.

In the latter issue, there is the unresolved question of whether, as Birbalsingh remarks, it was appropriate for a family to receive £150,000 of taxpayer-funded legal aid in order to bring the case in the first place.

That aside, while both issues are undeniably important – and more so in the sense that it was vital that they have achieved a modicum of success in their [partial] resolution – the cartoon above makes its equally valid point.

With the world engulfed in multiple conflicts, and the possibility of a nuclear war a very real prospect, it should not be the case that so much time and energy have to be devoted to such issues, when we need to be focused on issues which have a more direct bearing on our collective survival.

Another victory – a rather small one this time – comes with the attempt in Brussels by the mayor of the local municipality to close down the National Conservatism conference.

Although Farage – who was apparently speaking at the time the attempt was made by the local police, acting to execute a court order – has been indignantly squawking about the action, the reality is that what were probably excruciatingly tedious proceedings have gained far more publicity than they would otherwise have enjoyed.

As for Farage, as so often he grabs the wrong end of the stick with both hands, arguing in the Telegraph that the “nasty Brussels police have just proven Brexit right”.

Actually, this is nothing to do with Brexit. It has everything to do with the local peculiarities of Belgian municipal governance, where the continental style of mayor – on the French model – has much more power than British counterparts to make nuisances of themselves.

And when it came to the “nasty police”, the Twitter pics show a rather urbane senior police officer who did, after all, allow the conference to proceed pending a legal challenge.

I rather suspect the outcome would have been very much different if the London jobsworth plods had been involved. And, if there is a sinister aspect to all this, it is the reaction of Labour’s Wes Streeting on learning of the action.

This, incidentally, was during the second reading debate on Sunak’s tobacco and vapes Bill, which is perhaps another example of parliament fiddling while Rome burns. But this, it appears, is Sunak’s “big idea”, the one he wants to take home as his heritage.

If not just the nation but the entire world is on the brink of war, one might have thought that Sunak, at the very least, would be making a detailed statement in the House, on the international situation. The contrast with 29 August 1939 rather makes the point.

As it stands, all we have from a distinctly lacklustre prime minister is the news that he finally managed to place a call with the Israeli prime minister, some 36 hours after originally intended, and spent his time urging Netanyahu to exercise restraint over his intended retaliation against Iran.

Given the UK’s peripheral involvement in the crisis, though, it is very hard to think how things might have been much different. Nevertheless, knowing of Iran’s role as the most prolific sponsor of global terrorism, the thought that the UK might now be at increased risk of a terror incident is unavoidable.

Yet, all we’ve had from Sunak so far is a 1,000-word statement to the House on Monday when the big deal was that he was “shortly” to speak to Netanyahu “to express our solidarity with Israel in the face of this attack, and to discuss how we can prevent further escalation”.

In the conclusion to his statement, Sunak warned that the threats to stability were growing, “not just in the middle east but everywhere”. We were, he said, “meeting those threats, time after time, with British forces at the forefront”.

He continued:

It is why our pilots were in action this weekend. It is why they have been policing the skies above Iraq and Syria for a decade. It is why our sailors are defending freedom of navigation in the Red sea against the reckless attacks of the Iran-backed Houthi militia. It is why our soldiers are on the ground in Kosovo, Estonia, Poland and elsewhere, and it is why we have led the way in backing Ukraine, and we will continue to back it for as long as it takes.

In closing, he then declared that: “When adversaries such as Russia or Iran threaten peace and prosperity, we will always stand in their way, ready to defend our values and our interests, shoulder to shoulder with our friends and our allies”.

The idea that we will continue to back Ukraine “for as long as it takes” – can only qualify as the most vacuous of BS, especially in view of the UK’s stance on the provision of air defence systems.

Tellingly, only one MP brought up this issue in the subsequent debate. This was the Tory, Jason McCartney, who simply observed that “what we saw over the weekend shows the importance of investing in air defence systems to defend civilians from hostile regimes”.

This had Sunak claiming credit for supplying Ukraine with “AMRAAM and Starstreak missiles” – the former being air-to-air missiles adapted for ground firing, apparently sent over the winter of 2023/24 when then defence secretary Grant Shapps declared: “Now is the time for the free world to come together and redouble our efforts to get Ukraine what they need to win”.

This, it turns out, though, was a rehash of a promise made in October 2022 when “hundreds more air defence missiles” were promised to Ukraine, “including AMRAAM rockets”.

Compare and contrast this with Zelensky’s lament where he describes the loss of the Trypilska thermal power station which was flattened last week during a wave of Russian missile and drone attacks on energy infrastructure across Ukraine.

“Eleven missiles were aimed in its direction. We shot down the first seven. The four remaining ones destroyed the thermal power plant. Why? Because we didn’t have a single missile. We ran out of missiles to defend Trypilska”, Zelensky complained.

Obviously, something here does not quite match with Sunak’s complacent, self-congratulatory assertion. But not only was he allowed to get away with it, yesterday in the Commons it was business as usual.

As well as the smoking debate, MPs dealt with rail manufacturing job losses, the prohibition of the sale of horticultural peat and solar supply chains. Neither Ukraine nor defence got a look in.

All of this reinforces the feeling that we are now part of a fundamentally unserious nation. The front pages of today’s papers are split mainly between Birbalsingh and the smoking debate, with only the Guardian offering a story on Iran, conveying a warning from an “Iranian diplomat” that Netanyahu aims to trap the West into war across the Middle east.

Once more, Ukraine barely gets a mention, and one must go to Reuters for news of the war on the ground, which seems far from up-to-date – or the Financial Times.

This makes it all the harder to deal seriously with a serious subject, when no-one seems particularly interested, and even readers here struggle to stay on-topic. We are running the risk of losing the sense of what is important to our own survival, drifting into a nightmare without even attempting to save ourselves.

Ben Wallace says we can send a message to both Russia and Iran “that no more will we tolerate their behaviour”. Yet that message is barely a whisper, drowned in a cacophony of trivia.