In an exclusive interview with The Independent, Sir Alex Younger, the former head of the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, says that the United Kingdom needs to rearm. He is right.
As he says, the threat from Vladimir Putin’s Russia is real. “Putin and Trump together have done their best to persuade us that the rules have changed,” he said. He captures the sense of unease that Britain, having “for many years been completely free of any form of existential threat”, has allowed itself to assume that war is something that we can choose to take part in or not – rather than something that may sometimes come to us and for which we have to be prepared.
