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.
