Rishi Sunak is talking rubbish to win votes. He warns today that the next few years will be among the most terrifying and “transformative” the country has ever known. Britain faces the “most dangerous threat” to its security from “colluding authoritarian states” since the end of the cold war.
Such threats are politics at its cheapest. Every war indulged in by Britain over the past 30 years has been self-willed and aggressive, not defensive, waged against overseas sovereign states. There may have been reasons for such aggressions, but they have had nothing to do with defence, except arguably in the Falklands. The last real threat to Britain’s territorial integrity was from Hitler in 1940-41. Since then, collective European security against a supposedly aggressive Russia certainly allowed western Europe to prosper, and Britain to gain from that prosperity. But Russia’s military threat was, as it always has been, to its immediate neighbours. There are many other “threats” to Britain – commercial, migratory and electronic – but they are not military.
When forced against a wall, British leaders have always slid into shielding their belligerence behind a veil of “values”. A post-imperial rhetoric has allowed every global conflict to be somehow Britain’s concern. Some have been humanitarian, as in Kosovo, Lebanon and possibly Ukraine. Most have been grasps at political glory, from Cyprus and Suez to Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. Almost all have cost billions, killed tens of thousands and ended in defeat. It is hard to see any that advanced the cause of British values.
Sunak now declares that the UK must face up “to an axis of authoritarian states” – China, Russia, North Korea and Iran – if it is to “succeed in the years to come”. He demands that these countries not be allowed “to undermine our shared values and identities”. But they are not seeking to do that. He does not have the power to stop them, nor are they anything to do with Britain’s defence. In reality, Sunak’s intention has been simply to taunt Labour for not promising at once to raise defence spending to an arbitrary 2.5% of national income – which he too has failed to do.
By all means let us preach, teach and trade, but this half-hearted British interventionism – “punching above our weight on the world stage” to Boris Johnson – has wasted billions over the years on posturing, on glamorous ships, tanks and planes. Yet Britain cannot even afford an Iron Dome defence system to protect against drone attack, as used in Israel and Ukraine.
The collusion of authoritarian states which Sunak so fears has been strengthened by Nato’s counterproductive economic sanctions against Russia. As was predicted, sanctions have strengthened economic ties between Russia, China, India and Iran. Fostered by the fatuous thesis that they would bring about the downfall of Vladimir Putin, they have instead hurt western economies and eroded support for Kyiv.
No credible European leader would seek to scare their people by threatening them that the next few years will be “the most dangerous yet”. They would not call on them to pay higher taxes and sacrifice public services to impose their values on the rest of the world. They would see their job as to uphold those values at home, period. So should Britain.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
