Britain is now on a “war footing”, we are told. Earlier this year, Nato’s secretary general, Mark Rutte, demanded that European nations start hiking defence spending at the expense of pensions, health and social security. Fail to do so, he warned, and the only recourse would be to “get out your Russian language courses or go to New Zealand”.
In this increasingly feverish atmosphere, it becomes ever more difficult to ask for a bit of perspective, but it is necessary. European elites are panic-stricken after Donald Trump hit the accelerator away from US hegemony, a trend already long under way. Meanwhile, Labour figures openly brief that this could be Keir Starmer’s “Falklands moment”, using Ukraine’s agony to transform the government’s calamitous polling, speaking to a grubby political opportunism. Britain’s current trajectory could raise a much graver menace than Russian invasion: domestic social turmoil and an ascendant radical right that threatens democracy itself.
