There is a fascinating tension in the British attitude to war and military matters. When he wrote about England in 1941, George Orwell said his home country was defined by the “gentleness” of its civilisation, and such a “hatred of war and militarism” that flag-waving and patriotic boasting were always the preserve of a small minority. Events over the past 40 or so years have perhaps proved him wrong: from time to time, a widely shared jingoism has been brought to the surface of our national life, focused either on actual conflict – as happened when Britain fought for the Falkland Islands – or some hare-brained proxy for it, such as Brexit. But there is something about Orwell’s portrayal of people with an innate distaste for bellicose posturing that still rings true, across all the countries of the United Kingdom.
Among certain politicians, by contrast, there is far too little of that kind of thinking. Over the past three weeks, the unimaginable awfulness of what has happened in Ukraine and the fact that Vladimir Putin’s invasion is such a matter of moral clarity has encouraged a lot of rhetoric and posturing that has been shrill, banal and full of a misplaced machismo. The war, says one Tory MP, is Boris Johnson’s “Falklands moment”. The vocal Conservative backbencher Tobias Ellwood – a former soldier in the Royal Green Jackets, and now an active reservist – insists that the west’s response shows “we’ve lost our appetite, we’ve lost our confidence to stand up: to stand tall”. And while he and other Tory MPs – including zealous believers in Britain breaking from the EU, suddenly holding forth about the urgent need for international unity – have been making sense-defying demands for Nato to impose a no-fly zone, some of the cabinet have come out with their own very unsettling pronouncements, seemingly thinking that if Putin talks tough, they should talk tougher. When Sajid Javid was asked about the recent Russian attack on a Ukrainian military base only about 10 miles from the country’s border with Poland, we saw the strange spectacle of the health secretary apparently embracing the prospect of nuclear war: “Let’s be very clear … if a single Russian toecap steps into Nato territory, there will be war with Nato.”
With the chancellor Rishi Sunak’s spring statement arriving on Wednesday, a familiar sound is getting louder: Conservatives demanding more money for the military, even though the UK currently spends the fifth-largest annual sum in the world (after the US, China, India and Russia). For well over a decade now, most Tories have been united in the belief that just about every public service is best cut to the bone and subjected to endless lectures about inefficiency. But defence is suddenly a glaring exception: Labour may have credibly identified £13bn of departmental waste since 2010, but that seems to be no barrier to calls for a spending rise of about 25%.
If you want a flavour of the thinking at work, a good place to start is a recent piece in the Sunday Telegraph by the former Brexit minister David Frost. He reckons that “western muscle memory is returning and we are getting back to the principles that helped us to win the cold war”. He says: “We are going to have to spend more on defence and that will mean tough choices.” We all know what those are likely to be: the price of our supposedly central role in a reshaped world may well be paid in social care, education, children’s services and all the rest.
Though he would presumably express opposition to cuts elsewhere, Keir Starmer has joined in the calls for more military cash, which snugly fits the “I’m not Jeremy Corbyn” narrative of his leadership. Given Starmer’s apparent determination to follow the example set by his New Labour forebears, and Tony Blair’s recent offer to help his old party with policy advice, we should be listening hard to what the latter has to say. Last week, he published an essay about the Ukraine crisis. Its most sobering passage ran thus: “When Putin is threatening Nato and stoking fear of nuclear conflict, there is something incongruous about our repeated assurance to him that we will not react with force.” Naturally enough, Blair also wants more money for the armed forces. “We are awake,” he says. “Now we must act.” This the same register he used at the start of the “war on terror”, when he talked about shaken kaleidoscopes and the need to “reorder this world around us”. Hearing it again is not exactly reassuring.
As is usually the case, Boris Johnson’s tone swings between the serious and utterly crass. At this weekend’s Tory spring conference, he and his colleagues parroted the familiar argument that the war demands an end to “woke” ideas and criticisms of British history (which actually sounds like a milquetoast version of Putinism), and he made that grotesque comparison of Ukrainians to Brexit voters. When caught in a more sensible mood, he has also counselled a measure of caution and level-headedness. “It’s very important that we don’t get locked into any kind of logic of direct conflict between the west and Russia because that’s how Putin wants to portray it … as a fight between him and Nato,” he told the Economist last week. “It isn’t. This is about the Ukrainian people and their right to defend themselves.” This line was repeated on Sunday. But around him, there still swirl very dangerous currents.
Back in the 1980s, as Ronald Reagan speculated about a limited nuclear war in Europe and we were warned about the prospect of an accidental nuclear exchange, I grew up with a cold sense of fear. Now a new generation has to face not just those same anxieties, but the existential threat of the climate emergency and the prospect of regular global pandemics. Not surprisingly, there is a growing crisis in childhood mental health: a sign not just of failing public services, but arguably of a system of power and politics that does not ease such visceral fears, instead endlessly inflaming them.
In a situation as fragile as this, belligerent talk can have terrifying consequences. It also tends to highlight the way Westminster’s armchair generals neglect their duty of care to their own citizens. I am now having conversations with my 12-year-old daughter about the prospect of nuclear annihilation. I tell her it’ll be all right, but her – and my – fears are hardly helped by the reckless words we sporadically hear from some of those supposedly in charge.
Yes, the world has clearly changed. Even if liberal values are always damaged and compromised by people in power, that does not mean that they are not still the best hope we have, something Putin’s passage into something close to fascism makes plain. But those same values – not to mention the delicate stuff of geopolitics and diplomacy – demand nuance and calm. Moreover, there is one thing we overlook at our peril: that however much we spend on our military, our social fabric needs to be resilient and secure enough to cope with a new reality of constant shocks and disruptions, and at the moment it is anything but. In this dreadful moment, these seem to be things in danger of being forgotten. I worry about that. I think we all should.
John Harris is a Guardian columnist. To listen to John’s podcast Politics Weekly UK, search “Politics Weekly UK” on Apple, Spotify, Acast or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday
