No-one is going to mistake me for a British nationalist – I’m a Scottish nationalist. And yet whatever British nationalism I have in me has been rekindled. Britain really is a country with an amazing history and, for all its flaws, has made enormous contributions to art, politics, literature, economics, engineering, science, philosophy and much more.
So to see our ‘leader’ debase himself and the nation at the feet of Trump had all the British hairs on the back of my neck standing to attention. It was stomach-churning. It was humiliating. It was infuriating. The only thing that made it worse was listening to the governing classes describe this humiliation as a great strategic success afterwards.
What I want to argue here is that those foreign policy governing classes have outright betrayed the nation and should be stopped from any further betrayal (not that it will happen…). The people who drove us into this humiliation retain control of the steering wheel and are showing no signs of contrition or humility over what they have done.
They are the Atlanticists and they wilfully and knowingly left this nation defenceless on their long, uninterrupted watch. They were all raised and groomed by the US State Department – the range of ways that the US has traditionally wooed and twisted the heads of UK security and foreign policy ‘experts’ is legion.
This is a class of person who think that New York is their second home. They are much more invested in what opera is playing at The Met than they are with the lives of people who live in British former manufacturing town. They wouldn’t admit it, but they thought of the UK as a region of the US, and they were very happy for us to be that region.
They were responsible for our defences and they sold us out to a foreign power. We’d call it treason if that nation had been Russia or China, but we call it ‘realpolitik’ when it is the US. And yet the outcome was no different really – we are a pathetic little bit-part player which almost any nation with a Navy would have a fair chance of successfully invading if the US didn’t lift a finger to help.
We have no coastal defences and most if not all of our military hardware has been procured with the primary purpose of supporting the US military on its foreign adventurism. They now demand we all sacrifice again to spend ever more on weapons. Why? Because they wasted the money we gave them on shit we don’t need like aircraft carriers and nuclear weapons.
These are utterly useless when it comes to defending your own sovereign territory and even the deterrent effect of nuclear weapons can easily amount to zero since the other side know that a foreign nation controls the delivery system.
Their control then was complete so their culpability now is complete
They acquiesced with everything. The entire internet is based on architecture run out of a company registered in California which is regulated by the US Government. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers could be taken over by Trump and Musk with minimal effort.
Let’s say the US wanted to invade Britain (for the sake of argument). They could turn off the internet for 48 hours. Forget whether the army has failsafe communication strategies, none of our civil defences would. We’d have no properly functioning hospitals, no fire service, no police, probably no phone lines. We’d be done for.
I pick this as an extreme example, but is the point not that a nation state should be able to sustain itself and its base-level security in an extreme circumstance? If you have sold out that ability, what does that make you?
There is some private debate in security policy circles but no real dissent. It is untouched by democracy and is run by what is really a shadow state, a network of spooks and military and think tanks and lobbyists and arms companies and civil servants (but not like normal civil servants) and foreign power networks. If a politician suggests any form of change in the system (Robin Cook, Jeremy Corbyn), they will be disposed of quickly.
Unaccountable, untouchable, all-but outside the democratic system, there was one justification for their status – that they kept us safe. But they didn’t. They sold us out. And they did so knowing that it was unsafe and posed enormous risks to the future of this nation state.
The US was never really a reliable or stable partner, but any pretence of that should have been questioned from the outbreak of the Tea Party movement onwards. Certainly by the time that John McCain picked Sarah Pallin as a presidential running mate the writing was on the wall. Had he won we were one old-man-in-cancer-remission away from an extremist running America.
Trump One cemented that knowledge. Trump Two confirmed it beyond doubt. And yet still they sold us out, cowered, told us they knew best when they now very, very clearly didn’t. Their control then was complete so their culpability now is complete. They are to blame for both sides of the era-defining televised collapse of the Western alliance as Trump and Vance humiliated Zelenskyy.
They are to blame for the fact we can’t stand up to Trump however appalled we are by what we saw. But they are also to blame for Zelenskyy. Because (and I do no more than whisper it because I know where my loyalties lie on this) Trump was right. An opened-ended security guarantee involving the US in Ukraine is a terrible idea.
Let’s just say what this is; this is a permanent commitment to start World War Three if Putin broke the terms of a ceasefire. Who on god’s earth wants the US permanently stationed in Ukraine holding Europe by the balls? Who wants one stray shot from one distracted soldier to cause the US and Russia to declare war on each other?
Atlanticists, that’s who. They have used Ukraine as a puppet to degrade Russia (they thought) and to do that they kept telling Zelenskyy he could have total victory. He has therefore toured the world with completely unrealistic demands that even Biden knew were to be dismissed out of hand. It was the British Atlanticists at the forefront of creating that situation. You know, to keep the US entwined in Europe, ‘for the good of us both’.
And now the people who betrayed their nation are the people who are supposed to create the new order. They should all be removed from post forthwith. Like anyone I can sometimes resort to hyperbole, but it is not hyperbole to say that Kim Philby never did harm to the UK’s strategic interests like this lot have. We’re a joke. A joke that now has to beg for its own security.
They created a Britain in which Starmer’s leverage was a tea-and-scones for subservience deal
Their delusion about our place is complete. One of their number wrote an article at the weekend saying ‘yes the free world needs a new leader and it should be Keir Starmer’. Dear god Starmer isn’t in my top ten list for people who are fit to lead Britain never mind the free world. The credible, serious contenders for leading the ‘free world’ right now are Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Claudia Sheinbaum. I’m not convinced there is even a credible European candidate. That says a lot.
People like me could see all of this. I’ve been talking you through all of these arguments for quite a few years now. But the UK is lost now and the people who got us lost are still leading. I wish I could say an independent Scotland offers a fast way out of this but not under ‘I’ll just say Scottish soldiers in Ukraine because that sort of sounds right don’t you think?’ Swinney.
If I thought he’d thought about this enough to tell us whether he means the troops of an independent sovereign nation (is Scotland ready to declare war on Russia?), a ‘Nato Alliance’ (does Swinney thinks there will be one?), as part of the British army (in which case what’s it got to do with him?) or as part of a European army (eh, when exactly?), I’d ask him.
But in 2012 the SNP was conquered by the same unthinking idiocy that has stripped the UK bare naked on the world stage and has left us begging an orange-painted moron to save us. So the SNP is as bereft of having a clue as the rest of them. It’s a sorry, sorry state of affairs.
They created a Britain in which Starmer’s leverage was a tea-and-scones for subservience deal. We give Trump scones, he demands obedience. That’s what Starmer got. No concessions, no deals, nothing whatsoever apart from he sold the only perk he had going (tea with the king) and got not not a bean back in return.
And so they celebrated Starmer’s total abject failure as an amazing success. And they demanded that we strip this United Kingdom of any domestic social mission to re-empower them by handing them unlimited financial power. And they bullied the emaciated and security-services-riddled British press into pretending this wasn’t the greatest humiliation of Great Britain since the so-called ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 (where a German invaded and we said ‘thanks mate’).
And do you know what’s about to happen? We’re about to go along with it. We’re going to take the people who betrayed this country and increase their power. After all, they bought tickets to La Boheme in November and they’ve got their Columbus Circle hotel accommodation booked and everything.
We can’t let a transatlantic rift get in the way of that. We really better pretend none of this happened. For their sakes.