FORCES

A guest article article by a by a mellasine-ious poaster

As readers of Larry’s Mag know, Britain’s problems are overwhelmingly self-inflicted, the downstream consequences of bad domestic policy choices.

Take Mad Vlad Pootin’s invasion of Ukraine. Yes, hollowing out the armed forces to fund America’s misadventures wasn’t ideal. But even if the FORCES FORCES FORCES were on 1990s funding, able to field an armoured division, put ships to sea without the gearboxes exploding, and generally look like a serious country it wouldn’t have changed the key point: Ukraine wasn’t in NATO.

And more importantly, a bigger Army, Navy and Air Force would have done precisely nothing to prevent (or even meaningfully soften) the inflationary surge that followed Russia’s disconnection from European energy markets. That shock hit Britain through energy prices and policy fragility — not through a shortage of battalions.

What would have helped is access to the staggeringly rich deposits of natural gas under England’s green and pleasant fields. The Tory failure to allow the creation of a onshore gas industry throughout their 14 years in government was a typically spineless move, downstream of the choice to not repeal the Climate Change Act or any of the institutionally left wing legislation such as the Human Rights or Equality Act. Britain is a country where the fields and head roads are paved with £50 notes, and yet our policymakers believe it is ‘unfair;’ to bend down and pick them up.

Instead, successive Tory Prime Ministers chose to pretend that Britains place in the world was not being diminished by strangulating regulatory, consultatory and economic policy. If Sweden’s comparative advantage was to style itself as a “humanitarian superpower”, Britain’s would be to become a gold-plated regulation superpower.

The Victorians wowed the world with Bazalgette’s sewers and Brunel’s bridges. We would wow them with our Bribery Act compliance binders and “world-leading” decarbonisation targets proudly leading by example, straight off a cliff.

Naturally all this destroying of growth can work up quite an appetite for relaxation. Whenever British politicians want a break from the uncomfortable day job of ruining the country, they flee abroad to international conferences to either do nothing or commit British taxpayers money to the third world. Sir Never Here Kier is the best example of this, visiting more countries abroad in his first 18 months than Tony Blair managed in the first seven years of the century, this is a man who according to Tim Shipman remains uncontactable from about Friday afternoon till about 9:00 AM Monday - such is his Stakhanoviite work ethic

Here’s the clear, obvious failure mode if (or when) a future Prime Minister Nigel Farage hoves into view. Before he’s even in office, Reform UK starts wasting scarce time and political capital on “having a foreign policy” and “getting serious about defence” — all to impress people who were never going to vote for him anyway.

Unfortunately, a more open-minded debate about what Britain’s foreign and defence policy is actually for, doing the bare minimum on NATO, avoiding the Middle East like the plague, not signing up to American bellicosity towards China, and privatising the Army, doesn’t come with obvious political dividends. But that doesn’t mean Reform should swing the other way: promising endless spending that mostly enriches BAE’s shareholders, or trying to court a slice of the electorate that no longer really exists.

Enough voters care about domestic policy to build a winning coalition. Chasing the armchair generals — or the thousands of ex-officers and civil servants who’ve helped hollow out Britain’s capacity to influence the world — is a losing game.

In simple terms: if you want influence abroad, you need hard power. Britain’s spent the last decade enthusiastically stapling lead boots to its own economy, a compliance state that strangles enterprise, mass immigration that keeps wages and cohesion in a permanent churn, and Net Zero implemented in the most productivity-hostile way imaginable. That makes “serious foreign policy” a bit of a non-starter.

And you don’t fix those macro problems so we can afford a foreign policy later. Fixing them is the point. It’s what voters actually feel, in their rent, their bills, their wages, their public services.

So Reform should be deeply suspicious of any sudden urge to “get serious” about foreign policy. Nine times out of ten it means: photo ops with think-tankers, uniform fetishism, moral posturing, and signing Britain up to vaguely-worded commitments that cost real money and deliver precisely nothing, except a warm glow in SW1 and a dividend stream for defence primes.

Win power on the domestic programme. Don’t get dragooned into other people’s crusades.

Now for soft power.

After Rachel Reeves has spent all our money on asylum hotels, pay rises for useless public-sector workers, and shopping trips to Paris for Mauritian officials, there’ll be a fresh temptation to blow whatever’s left down the back of the sofa on “soft power”.

But “soft power”, as imagined by the lizards in the Cabinet Office and Foreign Office, is mostly a sham. And while the online American right talks up London’s decline with a shameful degree of hyperbole, Britain’s image abroad is increasingly shaped by what foreigners can already see — unfiltered — on social media.

Fixing Britain’s PR is downstream of domestic policy. You don’t repair the brand with grants, brochures, and a new slogan: you repair it by making the country look and function like a serious place again — deporting the millions of illegal migrants waved in under the uniparty (each a six-figure lifetime fiscal cost), shutting down the money-laundering vape shops and “barbers”, and stripping back the blizzard of statutory duties that leave councils unable to do basics — like keeping the streets clean and planting daffodils.

Reform may feel vulnerable to accusations of unseriousness on foreign and defence policy from the uniparty, because it is the only Joker they have left. Being a C-Suite executive at a company that went bankrupt can sound more impressive than never having a job of that calibre at all but let’s not confuse activity with accomplishment

The fact is that there is no money left and it has been spent horrendously. More defence spending, when procurement is such a horrendous mess, is throwing precious money after bad. Fixing procurement is not solely an issue for the MoD, but wider government - and attempting to fix defence procurement took far too much of the time and attention of Dominic Cummings, who ultimately lost his battle in No 10 to a gossipy woman and her small dog who happened to have the cock of the PM.

Reform needs to campaign — and actually plan — around the core issues: immigration, Net Zero, and getting the economy growing again. Everything else is just Westminster cosplay.

Because the moment you start chasing “credibility” on foreign policy and defence, you’re basically buying drinks for people who despise you, with money you don’t have, in a bar you don’t even want to be in like being on the worlds shittest stag do. It’s a con: endless committees, solemn photo ops, and yet another “strategic framework” written by a man called Giles who hasn’t met a voter since the iPhone 6.

Win on the stuff that’s wrecking daily life. Fix borders, bills, housing, wages, productivity. Do that and the rest follows.