Category Archives: Politics

Britain, Economic, Government, Politics, Society

Starmerspeak and the dangers that lurk

THE UK LABOUR PARTY

POLITICAL language, observed George Orwell, “is designed to make lies sound truthful …and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

Euphemism, ambiguity, and “sheer cloudy vagueness” are deployed by politicians, he said, to conceal their true intentions and lull the people into a false sense of security.

Orwell wrote those words almost eight decades ago, yet they are as true today as they were then. Indeed, in Sir Keir Starmer they may have reached their apotheosis.

Labour party’s manifesto – in which Sir Keir’s photo appears 33 times – is a veritable typhoon of pure wind.

He presents himself as a man of action, saying “the time for reviews is over” – then proceeds to announce some 16 new reviews into everything from health to defence.

Wealth creation is ostensibly a key priority, yet he would saddle business with a slew of new rules and obligations, while simultaneously driving wealthy foreigners away by abolishing non-dom tax status.

Sir Keir says he puts “country before party,” yet throws red meat to Labour activists with spiteful measures such as stripping elderly soldiers who served in Ulster up to 50 years ago of their legal immunity from prosecution, and, of course, the tax raid on independent schools.

Labour’s “green revolution” is also a sham, Starmer falsely claiming that renewables will be capable of fulfilling our energy needs by 2030. That’s just six years away. Even if he covered half the country in wind turbines, we would still need oil, gas, and nuclear to keep the lights on.

Yet the most glaring falsehood in this tawdry document is that Labour’s “agenda for change” can be funded with just a few minor tax rises.

An extra 13,000 police offices, 8,500 mental health staff, 6,500 teachers, 1.5million homes, nationalising rail, a new state energy company – where’s the cash coming from?

Estimates of the size of Labour’s fiscal black hole vary, but most analysts believe it to be in the tens of billions. Sir Keir claims the shortfall can be covered by economic growth. The reality is that taxes and borrowing are certain to rise.

He has ruled out increases in income and corporation tax, national insurance, and VAT, but there are plenty of other options, such as raiding pension funds (again), wealth, fuel, and property taxes, extending capital gains tax, and much more.

Instead of being told what’s coming down the line, voters are being shamelessly fobbed off. In his novel 1984, Orwell gave deceitful political language a name – Newspeak. Starmerspeak is its modern-day manifestation.

Despite Sir Keir’s unwillingness to give straight answers, he’s on course to win with a “super-majority” – especially if traditional Conservatives are foolish enough to switch their vote to Reform UK.

Their anger and revolt are entirely understandable, but Reform is a sideshow. They must weigh the desire to punish their own party into oblivion against the consequences of propelling a self-professed socialist into government with virtually no checks and balances.

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Britain, History, Iran, Israel, Middle East, Politics, Saudi Arabia, Society, United States

Middle East history. It needs to be understood.

MIDDLE EAST

Ancient indifferences are reshaping the Middle East and forging unlikely new alliances

GEOPOLITICAL statements come no more obscure than one given earlier this week by an Israeli news site.

A member of the Saudi Arabian royal family had reportedly told the broadcaster Kan that, in his view, Iran had started the Gaza war by instructing its proxy group Hamas to attack Israel on October 7.

Tehran’s attention, according to this nameless royal, was to thwart the imminent normalisation of diplomatic relations between Israel and the Saudis.

This is so important because it symbolises the extraordinary transformation under way in the politics of the Middle East. For a Saudi royal to express such a view – that a Muslim country instigated the conflict for the purpose of spreading discord – would have been unimaginable only a few years ago. But that’s not the only way in which the winds of change are resettling alliances in this volatile region.

Five days ago, the ayatollahs of Iran inflicted their first direct attack on Israel since they came to power in 1979.

For some 45 years, the Islamic Republic has plotted the destruction of what its Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei calls “the evil Zionist regime”. But it has left the actual attacks to its proxies, such as Hamas and Hezbollah.

This fresh assault did almost no damage, thanks to the defensive coalition that shot down almost all of the weapons directed at Israel.

The US and UK played a role in this. But they were joined by two other countries for whom defending the Jewish state would have been fanciful until recently: Jordan and Saudi Arabia.

For most of the time Israel has existed, Saudi, as one of the leading Muslim nations and home to the holy city of Mecca, has been its implacable foe. But now it is on the verge not just of tolerating Israel but becoming an ally.

Similarly, back in 1967, Jordan actually invaded Israel – a disastrous move which lost it the territories of East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Yet now Jordan, too, has stood alongside Israel to protect it from Iranian bombs. This newfound cooperative spirit continues apace: it has emerged that both the Saudis and the United Arab Emirates had passed helpful intelligence to America to use in Israel’s defence, with Jordan further agreeing to let the US and “other countries’ warplanes” use its airspace, as well as sending up its own jets. The rise of Iran – and its chilling proximity to a nuclear weapon – has driven old foes closer.

Iran now dominates a vast region from its borders with Iraq, through Syria and Lebanon, to the Mediterranean. Through its Yemeni proxies, the Houthis, and its own navy, it is causing chaos and major disruption in the key Red Sea trade route.

And it has turned the Palestinian cause into a strategic vehicle for its own ambitions through two other proxies, Hamas (Gaza) and Hezbollah (Lebanon). This chaotic and meddlesome statecraft has appalled other Muslim countries.

The story of the Middle East used to be “Israel versus everyone else”. However, that is no longer true. To understand how all this has come about, you need to go back to the very roots of Islam – and the schism within it. In 610AD, Mohammed unveiled a new faith. By the time he died in 632AD, he and Islam were all-powerful in Arabia, and within a century it had subjugated an empire stretching from Central Asia to Spain.

But as history teaches us, Islam was split over who should succeed the Prophet. One faction argued the leadership should be passed through his bloodline. They became known as Shias, from shi’atu Ali, Arabic for “partisans of Ali”, who was Mohammed’s cousin and son-in-law.

The others, the Sunnis (followers of the sunna, or “way” in Arabic) said leadership should be determined on merit.

Ali was elected as “caliph” (spiritual leader) in 656AD but within five years was assassinated, enshrining an enduring split.

Fast forward to 2024, and about 85 per cent of the world’s 1.6billion Muslims are Sunni, while 15 per cent are Shia.

Two countries now vie for the leadership of Islam, Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran. Since the mullahs seized power in Tehran 45 years ago, the divisions and mutual hatreds have only grown.

As a minority within Islam, the Shiites have historically been treated as subordinate in Sunni-dominated countries. But there has been a significant growth of the Shiite population in Gulf nations. This has increased anxiety among Sunni rulers over the growing power of Shia Iran.

In Gulf states such as the UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, and especially Saudi Arabia, the Shia threat – in other words the threat from Iran – is seen as existential.

Egypt, too, which has had a peace treaty with Israel since 1979, is also an arch enemy of the mullahs. In Israel’s 2006 Lebanon war with Hezbollah, Sunni countries were, behind the scenes, willing Israel to triumph, just as it is said now that Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia want Israel to destroy Hamas in Gaza.

The rapprochement of some Sunni countries was embodied in the 2020 Abraham Accords which normalised relations between the UAE, Bahrain, and Israel, and later Morocco and Sudan.

There is logic, then, to the deepening alliances between Sunni states and Israel. The Arab nations understand that while Israel has no ambitions to dominate its neighbours, Iran seeks to control all of the Middle East.

What’s indisputable is that if you don’t understand this split and history, you can’t understand the Middle East at all.

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Aid, Britain, Defence, Economic, Government, Politics

Defence spending is lacklustre. Structural reforms are needed.

DEFENCE SPENDING

Intro: Why do we still send millions to China when we desperately need that money to defend ourselves against countries like… China?

WHEREVER you look, Britain’s adversaries are on the offensive. Russian hegemony and aggression shows no sign of abating. China’s military jets breach Taiwan’s airspace almost on a daily basis, and with its unprecedented defence spending, Beijing’s ambitions evidently stretch further. Iran’s proxies attack British ships in the Red Sea while Tehran is on the verge of gaining nuclear weapon capability. The security threats we face are the greatest in a generation.

In geopolitics, the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. And the UK, hands meekly by its side, is yet to muster any credible response. Despite a recent increase in spending, our Armed Forces are still reeling from 30 years of cuts and disastrous unwinnable wars that have steadily eroded our conventional capability. We are shockingly under-prepared for this more contested world.

At the outbreak of the Falkland War in 1982, the Royal Navy had 43 frigates and 12 destroyers. It now has 13 and six respectively.

Russia regularly deploys spy ships to tamper with our undersea cables, yet neither of the two specialist ships needed to protect them have materialised, despite being announced in 2021.

The British Army has shrunk to its smallest size since the Napoleonic era. Of serious concern, there is a £17billion black hole in the Ministry of Defence’s ten-year procurement plan. By some estimates, if Russia invaded a NATO member – a very real and distinct possibility – our stockpile of ammunition would last just eight days.

Most scandalously, the foundations of our defence, our Trident nuclear deterrent, has been appallingly neglected. Just two of the four submarines that deliver our continuous at sea deterrent are functional. They are so stretched that our Vanguard submarines are being sent on longer deployments than ever before. Submariners now have to spend five months continuously at sea – three months more than in the past. The next generation of Dreadnought submarines set to replace our old and creaking fleet is well behind schedule.

The dangerous and humiliating collapse of our nuclear deterrent is a catastrophe waiting to happen unless we urgently grip this crisis. A reckoning is inescapable.

The cost of sustaining Trident is cannibalising the rest of the UK military budget. We have no choice but to increase defence spending to three per cent of GDP to deliver the uplift we need to defend ourselves. If Greece and Poland can do it, why is it beyond the UK’s reach? Most in Parliament agree; that’s the straightforward part.

What’s much harder to explain is how to fund this increase when money is tight. Hard trade-offs will need to follow.

Strong defence rests upon a strong economy that can fund military upgrades. To provide the type of defence we need the UK will need to relentlessly pursue pro-growth, supply-side reforms. This will include liberalising planning to build more affordable homes, roads and factories, reforming welfare to get abled bodied people back into work, and cutting regulation that stifles entrepreneurs and small firms.

We cannot continue shovelling more money into increasingly bloated public services. The UK must drive through radical reforms. The security of a nation depends on having a strong military capability.

Strong economic growth will not appear overnight. We cannot wait until tomorrow to tackle today’s crisis. The choices are stark: either taxes are raised hitting an already squeezed middle class, borrow more upon the trillions we already have as public debt, or divert spending from elsewhere.

We mustn’t add to the national debt with interest payments at already astronomical levels, nor increase taxes when the tax burden is at an unacceptable high. Neither should we divert existing spending on the NHS or policing.

Instead, we should cut the foreign aid budget, and redirect that money to defence. While the aid budget does provide vital resources for alleviating extreme poverty that we should continue to support, a significant chunk of our “development” spend is incoherent, wasteful, and not necessary. It’s beyond ludicrous that we send hundreds of millions of pounds to nuclear powers China, India, and Pakistan.

Almost a third of our foreign aid budget goes on the ballooning costs of supporting asylum-seekers in the UK. If we ended the abuse of the system by economic migrants and closed the farcical asylum hotels, billions of pounds could be freed.

Another third goes to multinational organisations such as the UN and World Bank. An estimated 15 per cent of that aid is spent on managing humanitarian crises, the rest we have little control over.

Only ten per cent of the total expended by the Foreign Office on aid goes specifically and directly to deal with humanitarian emergencies. Other uses of taxpayers’ money include nebulous spending on “open societies” and “research and technology”.

Halving the aid budget would free about £7billion a year and immediately push defence spending above 2.5 per cent of GDP. When growth returns, or a crisis unfolds, we could make carefully targeted increases in overseas aid spending.

In a world of difficult choices, we should view our contribution to global peace and security as primarily through hard power and free trade. After all, the expansion of global commerce has been the biggest alleviator of extreme poverty.

There’s an argument, too, that we should also bring back “patriot bonds” which enabled citizens to invest in their security during the World Wars. We should stop guilting City investors out of putting money into our defence industry through warped environmental, social, and governance regulations. Instead, they should be encouraged to support British manufacturing jobs, and our military.

We need to continue reforming our defence procurement systems to ensure taxpayers’ money goes much further and bring an end to the indignity of the MoD having to beg the Treasury for money every year. Nonetheless, billions could be saved in procurement efficiencies if proper structural reform was carried out.

In the words of Churchill, we appear “decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift”. If we continue to dodge the difficult political decisions that need to be made, they will only come back as greater crises in the future.

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