Breaking Britain

“… the policy that sustained the general fear addressed existing sensitivities, soothed them with questionable historical references and well-anchored prejudices, and combined the whole with other factors such as envy or jealousy…”

Border Guarding as Social Practice Muriel Blaive and Thomas Lindenberger Spektrum Volume 4

I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again — the English love a Monarch and since the present Queen, sweet old lady that she is, has been pasteurised by the media and since the Prince of Wales is such a nonentity then Johnson stops a gap. The people can laugh and love with him, his errors of taste match their own. …I’m the King of the castle and you’re a dirty rascal… Who better than Boris Johnson to cut Britain down to size? Britain can roar as loud as it likes and the rest of the world won’t have to listen. With its gay Union Jack and its men in grey on the battlements, its doors locked and its treasure hidden, the castle squats on the beach behind a new dug moat of muddled waters. When you look round the back you see the castle is tattered and crumbly but the grey men on the battlements still manage things nicely as Adam Ramsey points out in OpenDemocracy,

“… the City in London and the housing bubble in the south-east suck in investment, wealth and youth, and blow out debt, austerity, stress and regret… …Westminster’s imperial detritus — Bermuda, Gibraltar, the Cayman Islands, the British Virgin Islands and the Channel Islands — form the wheel turning Earth’s main money laundry…”

The heart of the British State if you treat financial services as a case apart is the manufacture and sale of arms. The knuckle-duster: BAE, Polaris, Monarchy. The clockwork logic …if we don’t someone else will… pulls the State into ever more dirty business. An article in the Guardian quotes a British technician working on Saudi planes bombing Yemen …without us they wouldn’t last more than a week… There you go. The privatised munitions industry bottom line is …if those w*** want to kill each other modern-style they will have to open their wallets… Cynicism disguised as realism can’t be kept abroad it spreads up the arm and into the body politic. Soon the civil population is targeted, if no hope youngsters want to knife each other on the wicked city streets then the home county Brexit Army says …let them get on with it.

BAE is in the same place that ICI was between 1939–45, called in on all high counsels to manage influence by tailored arms sales, like the USA selling newer generation planes to Israel than to Arab states. In olden days selective influence was cruder, Reagan got warplanes delivered to Israel’s enemies by telling Thatcher to export Tornadoes. Russia lazily distributes good hands in the Caucasus. The Turks are onto it with their drones and YouTube shows as if from long long ago Azeri soldiers marrying quick before going to the front, trains with scribble on them and weeping mothers at gravesides. In the dank video-game landscape of Nagorny Karabakh, boys from Doncaster and Smethwick observe fall of shot.

Outside Polaris, the Navy has been a good service hard done by with its fatuous leaking aircraft-carriers. Who do these people think they’re kidding? You couldn’t grade the whole Navy up to the standard of the Silent Service, there are too many duds. Look at that recent close shave. An officer boning up next days docking manoeuvre behind a curtain — doesn’t give much confidence for aggressive reflexes in the Aegean or Black Sea.

And the Monarchy? The oath of loyalty by which military lives are forsworn is to the Monarchy. At St James’ Palace sprigs of easy birth lounge. Landed families, airs and graces, horse guards. The knightly tradition persists — bored when not hunting or fighting. Knights became cavalry, the love of horse flesh, scorn of tanks called “toys”. Fighting generals moved like old-time kings. In the Normandy bocage Montgomery took a whole field to himself for his caravan. Other generals send out aides-de-camp (we keep that french) …push on and find me somewhere comfortable and defensible to sleep… whose aristocratic noses turn up chateaux, …I can smell a castle twenty miles away, it’s the pattern of land you see…

The Brexit Army is modelled on mediaeval lines: it has its occult financial backers (Banks and Co.) its wicked Bishops (Rees-Mogg, Duncan-Smith), its blond-haired rumbustious not quite English King (Johnson), its irrepressible ranker pretender (Farage) and its man with bottom (Cash). In medieval armies there were men of gentle birth and (watching their backs) the serjentrie, hardened and ruthless. At Sandhurst it’s …you don’t call me sir, sir… and …let me tell you five ways to die sir… The Brexit Army has a pool of two and a half million Forces retirees, a ready-made camaraderie looking for lords to serve. Many find Farage suits. Many more are in harness to the security industry in all its amazing mix of paramilitary costumes. At the top they merge with early retirees from State Security working for firms like Hakluyt, suspiciously charity loving private enterprise spies. Their man Rosenfeld has moved in to be at King Boris’ elbow, to keep his door. Thru him the CANZUK network goes live, the go-fast estream at passport control: Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, United States — the proper people.

When Norman french kings perambulated and battled, the twelfth century battlefield sprawled and dribbled blood from Jerusalem to the Tweed, from Toulouse to Chester. The Channel Islands are what’s left. The Brexit State could carry on from the Channel Islands if push came to shove, there is just about room and their unprotected mobile phone systems provide a keyhole for geolocation to target individuals. But they won’t take their Army with them …go sell matches, get on your bikes, emigrate…

The image begins to form. No longer (or only partly) an unsinkable aircraft carrier for the Yanks but a sort of bobbing half-virtual buccaneer. The yobbish side of wealthy Eton louts writ large, giant size cut-out pirates with their scrotum scratching underlings, … the law’s what we say it is, officer… There is a plan (Cummings?) Central and Southern England set out as parkland on what was CAP subsidised food farming land. The parkland turned into lavishly landscaped gated settlements for the well to do. Think Gainsborough meets Clockwork Orange. Listen to Rachel Wolf, paid to run around the country listening to people worse off than herself. She works for Public First. She co-wrote the 2019 Tory manifesto. She has expressed her responsibility in Politico,

“…what we heard was a sense of wounded civic pride. People are deeply proud of where they live, and it is the primary source of their identity. They feel embarrassed and angry about what is happening to their towns. Shops are closed, the cenotaph has graffiti on it, people often feel unsafe. The pandemic has accelerated an existing decline. When the town opens up again, what will there be to do? In a lot of places, there is an event, a local fireworks display; an event in the park; a well-known market that has disappeared. No one knows why. (invisible hand Rachel innit?) People can’t park in the centre and the buses are an expensive, irregular joke. If the government wants to show it really understands people and places, it is going to need to use its vast plethora of funds the levelling up fund, the towns fund, the safer streets fund to invest in the physical fabric of places, and in supporting shops, events, and culture. Bluntly, it needs hanging baskets…”

Hanging Baskets or perhaps, why not, flying fish? The way to make British mouths water is to show them a lump of Rock Salmon and to make their eyes water — a battleship. Don’t get me wrong, it affects me the same — that’s how I know it works. It is the relation of fish to the Navy not to the economy that counts in the slogan — our fish. The slippy as curia Civil Service barons pledged to King Boris know he wants show, sparkle, adventure to be the mark of his reign. They use fish to be getting on with. Our Fish. But between asserting and earning your sovereignty you must have battle.

There is one to hand, the long cast shadow of D-Day when USA troops come over didn’t they which became the Atlantic Bridge in Cold War days and lo! — it has been updated. USA 2nd Fleet’s director of operations Commander. Troy Denison says,

“… the Atlantic has changed dramatically over the last 20 years. It’s not what it used to be. We treat it as contested waters now…”

Civilians must hold on to the idea that when Commander Denison says the Atlantic he means the Atlantic as seen thru the military industrial prism. There are other possible Atlantics. The sea does not have a name: during exercises off Scotland the Cetinicadae, (an ancient Celtic tribe become underwater spirits) were damaged by NATO sonar but off Spain dolphins are attacking yachts — nature updates too.

The new barons are making the most of it. The Permanent Under Secretary at the Ministry of Defence Sir Stephen Lovegrove tells a Commons Committee,

“… the threat is getting greater weekly. We have recently seen much more activity by Russian warships in British waters, potentially hostile attempts to get into our supply chain and the continuation of violent extremism. We know what the threat is, and we are very much driven by a desire to meet it with modern technology and in more places more often across the world. We have a sense of wishing to be more actively deployed, thinking more about our posture than our contingent structure. We are driven by the desire of the Prime Minister and the Government for the UK to reassert itself on the world stage… “

The battle of sovereignties, flags, continues on its own specialist terms, absorbing coin, while the business of the globe is carried on by multiple diasporas (family, tribal, commercial). Brexit Britain is weakened prey, naturally Russian sharks are cruising — after all they have place-men already comfortable. PUSMOD tells us that in the Integrated Defence Review the Home Office …will have its moment… so we may see if they can get at the Russian place-men hid by ranks of City Clubmen and hired gorillas.

At the other end of the immigration scale are Bootsy and Snudge army camps for dusky over-age Channel hoppers. They learn English thru the wire fence at Pennally, …you can’t film my wife… says a stalwart of the Brexit Army in his run down leisure clothes, mum and the kids bobbing into shot alongside. What to do with them? It’s a thorn in the heel of Brexit. It means irreversible change in the long run even with the doors shut. …they’ve eaten out the hearts of our cities. Why do they want to come here? Why don’t they stay at home and mend their countries? Then we wouldn’t have to send soldiers there. It’s that bloody language of ours — they won’t learn French… The Empire has come home, Dolgelly as the Hindu Kush, Perry Bar as Uttah Pradesh. The thin white line with the highest income differentials in Europe. Societies like that don’t last long without compulsion.