Britain, Government, Politics, Society

Sir Tony Blair

OPINION

THIS day was always going to come. Convention dictates that all British prime ministers eventually join the Order of the Garter – even the ones, like James Callaghan, that nobody actually voted for.

And let me make it clear that I have no loyalty or political affiliation to the Labour Party: in large part I’m a centrist who believe ministers should keep the ship of state afloat.

Certainly, like most people, there are aspects of Mr Blair’s behaviour that I find objectionable: his multi-billion money grubbing empire acquired from dodgy dictators after leaving office; his refusal to accept the Brexit result.

Despite that, though, there is also much to admire. He was the Labour leader who understood the concerns of Middle Britain, instead of dismissing them – as the Left so often does – with a sneer.

This open-minded, pluralistic approach allowed him to sell liberal policies to an essentially conservative nation.

The Labour of old redistributed wealth through vicious taxation, especially in the middle classes. New Labour under Tony Blair focused on growing the economy. Prosperity, this business-friendly party understood, increased revenue.

Instead of demonising aspiration, Blair openly celebrated it. He promised with political vigour to be “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”. Police numbers rose by twelve per cent during his premiership.

But equally he recognised that crime would never fall unless he also tackled deprivation and hopelessness.

Where Blair really stood out was in foreign policy. Few young people today understand how, before the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, the spectre of Irish republican terrorism hung over the streets of Belfast and London alike.

After 9/11, Blair saw Islamism for the threat to liberal democracy it was, cracked down on domestic extremists and asserted abroad the values of freedom, tolerance and the rule of law.

There are many that disagree with him on Iraq. I respect the principles these people hold but I continue to believe that Britain did the right thing in overthrowing Saddam Hussein. True leadership seldom wins friends.

More recently, too, he has been a voice of reason on the pandemic. He was an early advocate of mass-testing and for the vaccinated to be exempt from lockdown. Many lives – and businesses – might have been saved if ministers had listened.

Tony Blair created a fairer, more tolerant country at home and stood up for desperate people overseas. Whatever his flaws and mistakes, that is the legacy of a statesman. It is right that his achievements be so recognised.

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China, Defence, Government, Politics, Society, United States

China’s hypersonic missiles and its threat to the West

HYPERSONIC MISSILES

UNTIL very recently, few people outside of the military, intelligence and security services and the defence industry, had heard of hypersonic missiles or had an inkling as to what they were or their significance.

The revelation that China has tested such a missile – and that it was nuclear-capable – has sent shock waves around the world. The fact that it missed its presumed target by up to 24 miles brings scant comfort.

While the US is continuing to develop its own hypersonic missile, Russia has already tested them and even North Korea has claimed to have test-fired one. China is not alone but it has shown it is far more advanced than the West suspected.

Washington and other world capitals are now waking up to the implications of Beijing possessing a missile that can circle the globe at five times the speed of sound – and can sneak under the radar of US anti-missile defences.

The missile, carried on a “hypersonic glide vehicle”, was launched into space by rocket boosters (like those that launch spacecraft) in August. When they run out of fuel – typically within minutes – the boosters detach and fall away, and the glide vehicle continues to orbit the Earth at nearly 4,000mph, under its own momentum.

Although slower than ballistic missiles, hypersonic missiles fly at much lower trajectories – more like cruise missiles – so are easier to manoeuvre and harder to track. Such a weapon could help negate American defence systems. They are designed to destroy incoming ballistic missiles which soar high into space before descending on their target.

Certainly, China’s achievement is a game-changer in East-West relations. For a generation, the West has been used to China manufacturing more and more of what we buy as consumers. More than a quarter of manufactured goods, for example, bought in America are made in China. But when it came to high tech items, not least in the defence sector, the assumption was that the US still held a distinct edge over China.

In the space of just a few weeks that complacency has been rocked to its core. Even before the disclosure of the Chinese hypersonic test, the Pentagon had warned that Beijing was heading for global dominance because of its advances in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and cyber capabilities – and that gap was growing.

ANTI-BALLISTIC MISSILE SYSTEMS

THERE has been anger within the higher echelons of the Pentagon at the slow pace of technological transformation in the US military.

What the advent of hypersonic weapons does is shatter faith in anti-ballistic missile (ABM) systems because these are our guarantee against a surprise attack by a nuclear-armed rival. China’s new hypersonic missile launch puts the West on notice that its technological advantage is an illusion.

ABM defence systems, such as the American Patriot, point up at missiles incoming in a supersonic arc through outer space from launch pad to target. Targeting a low-flying hypersonic missile which harnesses AI to dodge defences is a vastly harder prospect.

Since the 1980s, America has invested billions in anti-missile defence. It was started by President Ronald Reagan who believed effective defence against ballistic missiles would reduce the risk of nuclear war – making disarmament and peace possible.

Sadly – as so often in history – scientists have found ways around apparently invulnerable defence systems. German tanks bypassed the incredibly sophisticated French fortifications that made up the Maginot Line in 1940 by diverting through Belgium. Now hypersonic missiles effectively undercut America’s anti-ballistic Maginot Line mentality.

CHINA’S UPSWING AND STRENGTH

BACK in the 1980s, the architect of China’s extraordinary economic upswing, leader Deng Xiaoping, advised future Chinese leaders to ensure their country rose “unobserved”. Deng recognised that China must bide its time until it reached full spectrum domination, from the military to the economic spheres. That meant avoiding antagonising rivals and neighbours.

Today’s leader, President Xi Jinping, is more inclined to exploit China’s new heavyweight standing. From border disputes with India to bullying breakaway Taiwan, Xi has been flexing his muscles. Indeed, Taiwan is the most likely flash point between the superpowers. President Xi is bent on reunifying the Chinese-speaking island democracy, while, after his humiliating retreat from Afghanistan, President Biden is determined not to look weak over Taiwan.

What if Beijing thinks American public resolve is just bluff and makes a land grab for the island? Miscalculation leads to world wars. In the 20th century, the democracies led by Britain and the US came out on top in two world wars. The Americans guided the West to a peaceful defeat of Soviet Communism in the Cold War.

But past glories do not guarantee future victories. Nor do decades of mutual nuclear deterrence between Washington and Moscow mean that the growing number of other nuclear-armed states will show the self-restraint of the Cold War era.

Any war between nuclear-armed states is too horrible to contemplate – or should be. But the development of hypersonic missiles and new AI weaponry raises the terrible spectre of Chinese Dr Strangeloves calculating the chances of emerging from their bunkers into a post-atomic desert as the world’s only superpower.

When Mao said that the Chinese would outnumber all the other survivors of any nuclear war 60 years ago, the then Soviet leaders thought he had gone mad and promptly cut nuclear cooperation with his regime.

Maybe today’s vastly more powerful and technologically sophisticated Communist China has escaped from Maoist thinking. But if it hasn’t, it is fast acquiring the futuristic weaponry to put its founder’s chilling words into practice.

Worst case scenarios are never certain. But planning for the best case is never wise. China’s military modernisation is going at hypersonic pace. The West will be worried. It must catch up – and fast.

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Arts, Books, First World War, History

Book Review – The Searches: The Quest for The Lost of The First World War

LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: Half a million families were left with the agony of not knowing where their loved ones lay under the battlefields of World War I – among them Rudyard Kipling, who lost his son John – but their devotion unearthed amazing tales

HIS MOTHER’S recollection was vividly clear. The young lieutenant stood tall and straight in the doorway, immaculately smart in his Irish Guards uniform. He was just 17 – two days away from his 18th birthday – but duty was calling, and so proudly he was off to the Western Front in France, in September 1915.

As John Kipling left the family home in Sussex, he called out: “Send my love to Daddo.”

“Daddo” – Rudyard Kipling, one of Britain’s foremost men of letters, poet, novelist, holder of the Nobel Prize for Literature – did not see his only son off because he was already in northern France, a journalist and foreign correspondent sending back despatches.

Six weeks later, John was dead. He had just written a letter home, telling his parents the assault he was about to take part in would end the war. (It didn’t.)

He had signed off: “Well so long, old dears, love John.” That was the last they ever heard from him.

On the third day of the Battle of Loos, he was leading his platoon over open ground when machine guns opened- up from the German line. No one knew for sure how he died. His body could not be found. Officially he was not dead but “missing”.

For “Rud” and Carrie Kipling, it was a special sort of torture – hoping against hope John was still alive, a prisoner perhaps, or lying in some remote hospital. Their pain never really ended. There was no grave they could visit, no focal point for their grief, no closure.

The trauma left Rud a broken man, dried up and drained, his vigour completely gone; he wrote no more novels but devoted his immense skills and talents to the mission of the War Graves Commission, to find and honour the missing.

It was he who chose the biblical words that became the national language of remembrance: “Their name liveth for evermore.” And for the headstones of graves whose occupants were unidentified, the simple “Known unto God”.

The story of the Kiplings is at the heart of Robert Sackville-West’s deeply moving and emotive book on the quest for those soldiers who went missing and were never found.

There were some 500,000 heart-broken families in the same position as Rud and Carrie, bereaved but cast adrift.

Of those half-million who died in this way – nearly half of all British Empire war dead – about 180,000 were buried as unknown British soldiers. A greater number, however, like John Kipling, had simply disappeared, blown to pieces, or drowned in the mud of no man’s land.

Desperate for any information, men of influence such as Rudyard Kipling were able to use their high-level contacts in the military to try to find out what had happened to a lost loved one. He even had leaflets printed in German asking for the whereabouts of his son, which were dropped by the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) behind enemy lines.

Others, such as the distraught but determined Lady Violet Cecil, whose 18-year-old son George was last seen lying in a ditch during the retreat from Mons in 1914, travelled to the battlefield while the war was still raging to search for her boy.

DESPERATION

GEORGE’S remains were eventually uncovered in a mass grave of 94 British soldiers, their faces and features brutally beaten and disfigured beyond recognition. George was identified by his initials on his vest and by the exceptional size of his feet. Three buttons from his tunic were sent home to his mother.

For most mothers there was no such consolation. Whenever trainloads of wounded men arrived home, there would be lines of women holding up photographs and pleading: Have you seen my son, husband, brother?

Documenting all these grim and sad stories with compassion, Sackville-West writes of relatives “tormented by knowing so little about their loved one’s last moments. How had they been killed? Had they suffered?”

He rightly lauds the Graves Registration Commission and its successor, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, for acknowledging this desperate desire to know, for their recognition that each of the dead was an individual and that relatives needed the reassurance that the graves were tended and properly cared for.

Photographs of headstones were taken and sent to those who could not get there in person – “consolations of death at a distance,” as the author movingly puts it.

Thousands, however, did make it to the now quiet battlefields, paying their respects at a graveside. “I came all the way from home for this,” one little old lady in a black bonnet said at her son’s grave. “Now I can die in peace.” There were tears in her eyes as she spoke, and likely in others too as they read her story.

The persistence of relatives was astonishing.

Lieutenant Eric Hayter died, shot through the head, in March 1918, and his father was told there was no sign of his body. A year later, Hayter senior received a letter from a German soldier who enclosed a map showing where Eric had been buried by the Germans. A search followed, which was unsuccessful. But Hayter continued to visit the battlefield in France, digging up land owned by a local farmer where he believed Eric had fallen.

He then tried to buy the land to erect a memorial, but the farmer said no. So, in 1924 – more than six years after his son’s death – he purchased a nearby plot for a nominal sum from a sympathetic local countess and was digging the foundations there when, amazingly, 3 feet down, he came across a body.

Regimental buttons, badges of rank and five gold teeth confirmed who it was. Father and son were reunited.

The Kiplings had no such reunion. John’s body was eventually found, though not for another 70 years, long after his father’s death in 1936.

A diligent researcher at the Commonwealth War Graves Commission spotted an entry in the register of an unknown soldier dug up in no man’s land near Loos. The body had been reburied as “an unknown lieutenant of the Irish Guards”. The coincidence was too great.

John Kipling’s name could now be taken off the Menin Gate memorial to the missing. He had been found.

If Rudyard had been alive, he might have pointed to the final words of perhaps his most famous poem, If:

“Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!”

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