All this for one northern MP, albeit one who might or might not become our next prime minister. As yet we don’t know who is running; nominations open on 9th July and close on 16th. Wes Streeting effectively triggered the Labour leadership election when he resigned from the Cabinet on 14th May. In his resignation letter he wrote, ‘It is now clear that you will not lead the Labour Party into the next general election and that Labour MPs and Labour Unions want the debate about what comes next to be a battle of ideas, not of personalities or petty factionalism. It needs to be broad, and it needs the best possible field of candidates”.

Yet, having spent the best part of a month claiming he had the necessary support to run, Streeting has now “endorsed” Burnham. Did he do that to improve the quality of the “field of candidates”? Or was it to ensure a focus on the ideas, rather than Streeting’s personality (such as it is) against Burnham’s? I don’t know; possibly Wes doesn’t himself. Maybe Wes doesn’t think he can beat Burnham, so why bother? Better to endorse him with his followers (if he had them) and hope for a return to Cabinet. Streeting, who has done even less outside of politics than Burnham, is either part of an Andy4PM master plan or he’s misplayed his hand and is now a busted flush.

If there is no contest, which is clearly the hope of the likes of Labour luminaries like former transport minister turned Andy4PM cheerleader and ex-Corbynista Louise Haigh. Of course, having pled guilty to a criminal offence under the Fraud Act, Haigh is damaged goods. The Labour Party is riven with factions and a leadership battle would bring them out in force. Whether the public and media warm to Burnham being unopposed is questionable. Back in 2007, even Gordon Brown, whom Tony Blair nominated as his successor, had some competition. John MacDonnell could only secure 29 nominations, insufficient to force a vote but at least there was a debate. Streeting has folded early.

General Election

Whether there is a leadership election, or an attempt at one, or a pretence at an attempt at one lies in the hands of the Parliamentary Labour Party. The bigger question is whether there will be a general election thereafter. Calling a general election is the Prime Minister’s prerogative. Unless there is a moment between Starmer’s replacement as Labour leader and that replacement becoming prime minister, Starmer could call one. (To do so before there is a new Labour leader would quite possibly destroy the Labour Party Starmer professes to love. It would also involve an irrevocable decision, which isn’t his forte).

There is no requirement for the new Prime Minister to call one immediately. Brown didn’t. In 2017 Theresa May disastrously called a snap election within a year of taking over from Cameron (who resigned in 2016 following the Brexit vote.) May lost the Conservative majority but was able to build a working majority with the support of the Ulster Unionists. The lack of a clear majority made the entire Brexit process far harder and May only lasted a couple of years.

May was succeeded by Johnson, following a savage leadership election. Despite May’s assurance to the Queen that Johnson could command a majority in the Commons (a constitutional requirement for a replacement PM), Johnson lost his working majority almost immediately and called a general election in December. That delivered a landslide 80-seat majority. Then came Covid, the wheels falling off the Johnson wagon, the Truss weeks and the Sunak managerialism. Then Starmer got his undeserved landslide.

Will Starmer’s replacement call an election and risk losing the parliamentary majority? While winning an election would give the new prime minister some democratic legitimacy, it could cost him (or her) the power of a massive majority. Labour could even lose altogether.

Reform’s Nigel Farage believes that, hence his calls for a general election. Amusingly, that line is echoed by Lord Case, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3ey093d039o who was the not particularly brilliant Cabinet Secretary for Johnson. I very much doubt Case shares Reform’s agenda and doubt we’ll ever see Farage and Case in agreement again; savour the moment.

Labour’s current polling is consistently behind Reform (currently 5% behind https://www.pollcheck.co.uk/gb-polls ), although Burnham hammered Reform in Makerfield, getting 16 votes for every 10 Reform won. Whether that was a result of tactical voting (which it rather looks like), candidate charisma or just the local electorate (most of whom did not vote) is unknowable. The polls got Makerfield badly wrong – touting it as neck and neck. So did the political parties’ own canvassing. Multi-party politics has broken the statistical tools used hitherto for forecasting elections. That means that the Replacement won’t be able to reliably gauge the probability of winning an election.

Gordon Brown survived three years of taunts before he called (and lost) a general election – at pretty much the latest possible date under the Fixed Term Parliament Act. If the Replacement can’t survive a touch of sharp abuse and run a government, they’ve run for the wrong job. Calling a general election makes no sense. That Lord Case thinks it necessary explains much about the Johnson years.

The Poison Chalice

The Replacement is inheriting a political and economic mess. Government spending is out of control; the rotten state of our armed forces has finally come to light. Fixing that won’t be cheap. Unfortunately gilt yields are at 10-year highs and rising; debt interest alone now consumes 8% of government spending. There is no money and the UK is entering a debt spiral.

So much for the good news.

The bad news is that migration tensions are increasing. One in five living in the UK was born abroad. 5.9 million migrants work in the UK; another 1.5 million (mainly EU) migrants claim benefits (some 20% of the total). Meanwhile, 9 million Britons are economically inactive, including 1 million NEETs aged under 24. It’s a recipe for conflict and division.

Growth has stalled, and unemployment is rising. We’re running out of electricity, which net zero is making ever more expensive. House building is stalled and much new housing is unaffordable – at least for UK residents and voters. Newly elected devolved governments will soon be demanding more resources, and NATO and Donald Trump will continue to demand that the UK spends more money on defence.

Starmer and Reeves failed to deliver meaningful growth because they didn’t grasp that a government cannot order an economy to grow. It might be able to set the conditions if it is wise. Unfortunately for the new prime minister, those conditions are generally thought to be low interest rates (growth costs money, so cheap money is helpful) and low taxes (attempting growth is risky, so it needs rewards). Money would be cheaper if the government budget were balanced, but that would require either higher tax rates (which may not deliver a higher tax take due to the Laffer curve and the currently free movement of capital) or reduced government spending (which is an anathema to Labour and its Union paymasters).

Even worse is what Starmer belatedly realised: the quangocracy created in the Blair years makes achieving any change, let alone improvement, incredibly difficult. The complex web of legislation and multiple agencies with statutory rights to consultation render making any decision slow and implementing it (assuming the inevitable appeal is quashed) even harder. Unless the New Incumbent has the intellect and guts to take a sword to the Gordian knot of British bureaucracy, they will achieve nothing. They’ll just have a ringside seat as the United Kingdom fractiously collapses.

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Don’t Blame Brexit

With the advantage of 20:20 hindsight, one can put a proper perspective on what the Brexit vote really meant.

Remember, Cameron’s government was for Remain, to the extent that he forbade any contingency planning for a vote to leave. (This irresponsible ploy had served him well in the Scottish independence vote). The Liberal Democrats, Greens, Plaid Cymru and the Scottish Nationalists were all pro-Remain, although Labour and Conservative MPs were allowed to campaign on either side. The quangocracy was pro-Remain (not least because many quangos were EU-funded), as were much of the media. And yet the vote was 52% to 48% to leave (on a 73% turnout).

A small but clear majority of the population rejected the establishment’s advice. While commentary at the time focused on slogans on buses or hooky economic forecasts (both debates tiresomely continue today), what no one noticed or thought on was the majority of the electorate rejecting the views of most of their elected representatives. That’s an indicator not just of a thorny, controversial subject but of a political system that is failing.

Ten years on, that failure is now clear and is beginning to bite. Parliament is unable to hold the government to account because the government is unable to control the Whitehall machinery. Every law that is passed (and that is, of course, Parliament’s purpose) adds complexity, delay and cost to an already struggling economy. That stymies growth while requiring more tax to pay more bureaucrats; we’re legislating ourselves into bankruptcy.

We’re about to have our seventh prime minister in a decade. Some ask whether that means that the United Kingdom is ungovernable. Was Brexit, in fact, a revolution? It was described that way at the time, and at least some Brexiteers (including Nigel Farage) saw removing the EU from our law-making as the first step towards delivering a government machine that works for the UK. A decade on, the progress made has been risible, not least, of course, because that’s not in the best interest of the government machine itself, which continues to grow inexorably and unaffordably. From highways to defence to the NHS, the machine is failing to deliver.

Who’s to blame? Look in the mirror; we the electorate have been bamboozled by the blandishments of the political classes. We failed to kick the tyres, let alone look under the bonnet, of the promises assorted parties have made and, broadly, failed to deliver on.

In 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed under the weight of the internal contradictions of a centralised, socialist command economy, revealed by Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring). At the time the UK was Thatcherite, booming, free, liberal and happy. The socialist economic handcuffs of the 1970s were gone; the budget was in balance. Economic liberalism may have overreached itself with the Poll Tax and subsequent riots, but the idea of a return to socialism was far from many minds.

Not least that of Tony Blair, who rebranded Labour as New Labour, invented (but never, ever explained) “the third way” and promised things could only get better. As it turned out, that was a tad economical with the actualité. Having pledged to keep to Tory spending targets for the first two years, he then let Brown start tinkering and socialism crept back into the government machine. Spending increased and there has been a deficit every year since. The financial crisis caused some cuts, but they were small and short lived. The massive (but futile) expansion of the state under covid reversed them and here we are, almost back in the USSR. We’re definitely back to the 1970s: the government has aspirations of taking over industries; it dreams of controlling energy (and other) prices. It’s even contemplating rejoining the EU to boost economic growth.

Currently about half the population (including me) remember the 1970s. We are quite likely to vote against repeating the experience. Unfortunately the other half isn’t. Many have been educated to believe in progressive, socialist politics. As time moves on they will become the majority, making it harder for an anti-progressive party to win. That is the final factor that will make the next Prime Minister decide against calling a general election soon.

Of course, that prime minister will be a socialist and so unable to control spending. That, as no socialist is able to understand, leads inexorably to a rerun of the 1970s and economic collapse. Enduring might teach younger voters to consider their wallets, not their dreams, when they pick their party, but only if the United Kingdom survives the trauma.

The Queen of Sheeba travelled to Jerusalem to assess Solomon’s wisdom, which astounded her, as did the opulence of his kingdom. I doubt she would have been so overwhelmed should she visit 10 Downing Street’s next occupant. The potholes wouldn’t impress her much either.

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Tank Turrets

A main battle tank is designed and built around its gun; all other considerations, such as fitting on railways, are secondary. The evolution of Challenger 2 into Challenger 3 primarily involves changing the gun from a rifled one firing three-piece ammunition to a smoothbore one firing one-piece ammunition. The benefit is that the smoothbore gun has a higher muzzle velocity and a much longer penetrator, which is, therefore, capable of getting through thicker armour than the penetrator fired by the rifled gun in the earlier Challengers. The cost is that pretty much the entire turret has to be redesigned, primarily to enable the much longer one-piece ammunition to be loaded into the gun.

The new turret (which can also fit onto the German Leopard 2 chassis) weighs more than the old one, not least because more armour and the Israeli Trophy active protection system (APS) have been fitted. The APS alone weighs about a tonne and, when used, generates more forces on the turret, which might require further structural steel and more mass. It’s worth it; no tank using Trophy has ever been knocked out by a drone or missile. The decision to buy Trophy was made in 2023 at the end of successful trials.

The increase in weight means that more force is required to rotate the turret and, to a lesser extent, to keep the gun level. Main battle tanks fire on the move, which means that they must be able to keep the gun pointing precisely at the target with an accuracy of something like 1/100th of a degree. They achieve this through the use of gyroscopes, electric motors and two gearboxes, one for elevation and one for traverse. Nowadays, the gyroscopes stabilise the tank’s gunsight lens, potentiometers measure where the sight is pointing relative to the hull and where the turret is pointing relative to the hull (and thus the sight). The computers then instruct the gun to move to align with the sight, which sends a current to electric motors connected to a cog in the gearboxes that rotate the turret and elevate the gun. The heavier the turret, the more electrical power is necessary, which means more current.

With a tank moving at 30 mph (or more) across country and being driven tactically using ground features for cover, the hull moves and tilts a lot; the motors are busy. For completeness and the techno-nerds, even this isn’t accurate enough, as the barrel vibrates too – essentially, a barrel is a rod only held at one end, the breech, inside the turret. The free end (the muzzle) moves differently as the barrel bends and vibrates because of the many forces acting on it. The fire control system therefore also tracks where the end of the barrel (the muzzle) is. When the gunner presses the trigger, the moment of firing is delayed until the muzzle is in the right place – the delay is measured in tenths of seconds.

The core parts of aiming the gun are the traverse and elevation gearboxes. Inside these are a series of cogs that are machined very accurately and made of very hard steels to ensure that they don’t wear. Both gearboxes must be located close to the gunner, as must the gun sight, various parts of the fire control system, intercom connections and filtered air feeds. Tanks may look large from the outside; they’re very cramped inside, so everything is designed to occupy the minimum possible space. Access to many components is often challenging.

Problems

It seems that someone decided that the new turret could use the same gearboxes as the old one, despite its increase in weight – rumoured to be between 20% and 35%. Any sensible person would have first checked the gearboxes could handle the increased torque caused by the increased weight. Either someone got their sums wrong or someone didn’t check. Neither is acceptable, especially in a component that is fundamental to the tank’s value (a tank that can’t shoot straight is a useless extravagance). Remember, the weight increase has been known about since before 2023.

Designing a new gearbox is what mechanical engineers do. Fabricating a new one to the extraordinarily tight specifications required is more challenging, even in today’s world of additive manufacturing, CNC milling and the like; producing a new turret gear will not be quick. Nor will testing; the old gearboxes were introduced in the late 1960s on the Chieftain and are well understood. New ones will take time to establish their durability and reliability.

Of course, all the above is speculation, so I contacted the MOD and RBSL, asking:

1. Was Challenger 3 intended to use the same turret gearboxes as Challenger 2?

2. If so, are those gearboxes now being redesigned?

3. When was the decision to change made?

4. How much heavier is the Challenger 3 turret than the Challenger 2 turret? (Percentage terms would be fine)

5. How long will it take to get new gearboxes manufactured, tested and delivered?

6. How much will this delay Initial Operating Capability?

7. How much of the cost to fix it will be borne by the taxpayer?

I’ve had nothing from RBSL. A MOD spokesperson replied (verbatim).

“Challenger 3 is central to the Army’s modernisation, bringing stronger firepower, greater lethality and better protection for personnel.

We have not made significant changes to the Challenger 3. Any design updates are part of the normal engineering and assurance process as the platform progresses through its design and development trials.

We continue to work with suppliers on ensuring the programme delivers value for money.

Background:

• The MOD has not changed the system performance requirements to Challenger. Any design updates are part of the normal engineering and assurance process as the platform progresses through its design and development trials.

• This is normal engineering practice and is not assessed to impact the delivery timeline for the tanks or the overall cost of the project.

• As the Minister for Defence Readiness and Industry said in May, good progress is being made on the Demonstration phase trials of Challenger 3. Whilst the programme has been impacted by some delays within the supply chain, these trials will prove vehicle performance before manufacture timing is confirmed.”

Which hardly answers my questions. It’s classic evasion, although there are some reasonable deductions to be made.

Translation & Explanation

The reply didn’t say there are no problems with the turret gearboxes, which it surely would have had there been none. So Challenger 3 has a problem.

Whether redesigning the turret gearboxes is a “significant change” is, of course, a matter of opinion or semantics. The turret weighs some 15 to 20 tonnes; the gearboxes perhaps 25 to 50 kg between them. They may be a tiny, insignificant portion of the mass, but they’re still a fundamental component of the tank’s raison d’être.

“Supply chain delays” covers a lot of ground too. It might mean designing, manufacturing and testing new turret gearboxes.

I’m not persuaded that “Design updates” during development are part of a “normal engineering process.” They happen, although in the world of 3D models and sophisticated computer simulations they should not be routine. If the performance requirements have not changed, they have either been misunderstood or poorly written. Why did the programme managers fail to consider the effect of a heavier turret on the turret gearboxes?

There are shades of the struggling Ajax programme here. Increasing the weight on Ajax caused a perfectly sound armoured vehicle to shake itself and its crews to bits. A poorly considered and much delayed upgrade to the perfectly sound Challenger 2 has, it seems, led to avoidable problems that are now causing delays and, quite possibly increased costs. (The “value for money” of a tank that can’t shoot straight is £0, so any money spend on the fix saves the £800 million already thrown at Challenger 3.)

Ajax is manufactured by Genera Dynamics, Challenger 3 by RBSL (a joint venture between Rheinmetall and BAe Systems (Land).) All three of these companies have a long history of delivering military hardware on spec and on time for other customers. The common factor between these failures and the weakest link is the MOD. Another Army procurement fiasco looms and the MOD, its political masters and their media mouthpieces are in cover-up mode. Challenger 3 has been delayed, and with that goes the Army’s capability to halt any Russian aggression in 2030.

Timelines

The Challenger 3 contract was let in 2021 with the tank to achieve Initial Operating Capacity (IOC) in 2027 and be in service by 2030. Last year a House of Commons briefing set out the IOC as being 2027. The date was confirmed by Maria Eagle in a written answer.

Yet in December last year, and confirmed this May, Luke Pollard, the long-suffering Minister for Defence Readiness and Industry, said that Challenger 3 is “currently undergoing demonstration phase trials to prove the performance of the tanks. Manufacturing will begin once the tank’s performance is proven, rather than being tied to a specific deadline. The project team will review the timeline regularly to ensure alignment with delivery milestones, operational needs, and emerging technical risks.”

“Emerging technical risks” is a bit rich for a project that is using existing, proven systems to produce an upgrade to the British Army’s paltry fleet of 148 Challenger tanks. There is no new technology, just integration of extant systems. The technical risks should have been ironed out when the specification was set, long before the contract was let in 2021. No technical risks should be emerging five years after the contract was let.

I have some sympathy for the ministers in the MOD. If their civil servants are as unable (or unwilling) to answer direct, simple questions as the PR spokesperson was mine. They must struggle to get on top of their briefs. Certainly Lieutenant General Anna-Marie Reilley, the general in charge of procuring core capabilities such as Challenger 3, seems unable to answer questions from Parliamentarians completely or accurately, as I wrote here when she obfuscated on Ajax. I wonder how these public servants talk to each other; if it’s in the impenetrable management speak of the e-mail I received, then it’s hardly surprising that projects fall apart on the fundamentals.

The key £800 million Challenger 3 programme now has no delivery timetable, despite “being central to army modernisation”, in the MOD’s own words. Until Challenger, Ajax and a host of other programmes are delivered, our army is a very long way from credible. An army that can’t win a battle is an extravagant vanity project, a bit like HS2.

The current generation of politicians (with a few exceptions, like Rupert Lowe of Restore or Angus MacDonald of the SNP) lack commercial experience and are incapable of holding ministers, generals and civil servants accountable for their failures. Unfortunately the man who must change this is the new minister, Desperate Dan Jarvis, has only ever been a soldier and a politician. Worse, he’s a paratrooper with limited experience of armour. I hope his BS detectors are working. He must corral all those who have been in charge of this project and establish how, in the name of all that’s holy, such a fundamental mistake can have been made and overlooked. Then he should replace them with one person, who will remain in post until Challenger 3 is delivered.

Challenger 3 and Ajax are far from Desperate Dan’s largest problems. There is no money, Even id there was, the MOD seems incapable of spending wisely or responsibly. That hasn’t impressed the Treasury and I doubt it will impress the bond markets should Starmer of Burnham attempt to raise War Bonds. He must therefore rewrite SDR and come up with a credible, affordable plan to deliver useful combat power to NATO. His future (and our security) depends on increasing capability without much money.

Many of his predecessors have tried; none have succeeded. 20 plus years of failure now sit in Dan Jarvis’ in tray. As they say in the Army, “If you can’t take a joke you shouldn’t have joined”. Perhaps he’s hoping that the King of t’North will replace him. That won’t change much; there is no money, the MOD is institutionally incompetent and deceitful. The Realm is not defended and everyone in the real world knows it.

Given that oft quoted line about defence being the first duty of government, it’s pretty clear that our political system is utterly broken.

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SIR JEREMY HUNT’S ambition was to make a million pounds by the time he was 30 and then become a cabinet minister. It took him a little longer, but he achieved it. Now knighted and languishing on the back benches, he’s turned his hand to writing. His second book, “Can We Ever Be Rich Again?” is easy to read, well-informed, and interesting.

He addresses a number of issues such as debt, employment, education and risk, identifying problems and quantifying the impact of his proposed improvements. There are some informative but depressing snippets. For example, he tells us that 30 per cent of school leavers have no GCSE in maths or English. That doesn’t augur well for a knowledge economy. He reveals that the Department of Work and Pensions has no limit on its spending on welfare payments. Its spending on staff and infrastructure is limited and under pressure, with the net result that it is much easier for them to award benefits than to rigorously assess them. His analysis shows that American pension funds invest $1 in startups for every $200 they hold; the equivalent figure for the UK is £1 for every £14,000. (Note that I have not checked these figures, or any of his others, in detail. There are ample references in the book should you feel the urge).

So far, so good. The book outlines the depth of the mire that the United Kingdom is in, which is depressing. Hunt also dismisses the notion that his is a problem across Western liberal democracies, citing equivalent figures from other European countries and US states. It’s abundantly clear that the UK is in a mess and that mess is entirely of our own choosing. Although he was against Brexit, he doesn’t blame this mess on that happy event, not least because the data would not support it. The problems we have are of our own making, that is, of successive governments—some of which he was part of.

His analysis also covers the UK’s strengths. Bizarrely and despite the appalling illiteracy of 30 per cent of school leavers, he cites the English education system as one and particularly our good universities. The financial centre of London is another strength, as is our current leadership (second only to China and the United States) in Artificial Intelligence. Our life sciences database (an unexpected benefit of the NHS) is another. So, he concludes, we could easily become a wealthy nation.

So why aren’t we?

Hunt’s suggestions for fixing the deficit are predictable; improve public sector productivity and embrace AI. He doesn’t explain how he sees the former being achieved, but notes that the Treasury is very powerful and suggests that power should be relaxed. He acknowledges that he failed to achieve that when he was Chancellor; one suspects that he was rather intimidated by some of the intellectual capacity of Treasury mandarins. Sir Jeremy is no intellectual lightweight; he got into Magdalen College Oxford and left with a first in PPE. (Our current Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, managed a 2:1 in PPE from New College Oxford and must be terrified of them. It would explain a lot, but I digress).

The author also avoids, or ignores, the problems of AI’s rising costs and electricity demands, although there is a chapter on energy. That’s not really good enough; the author bases his optimistic assessment on a public sector improvement that has never been delivered and a nascent technology reliant upon a power infrastructure that does not exist. That’s hardly credible.

His explanation of the HS2 fiasco, considered in the chapter on infrastructure, is equally limited and disappointing. He says that the 250mph target speed, which lies at the core of the cost and failure, was non-negotiable as that was the speed necessary to deliver time savings that drove the value for money argument in the Treasury. What he doesn’t tell us is why no one challenged this at the time; the engineering implications of the speed dictated the route, the route dictated the objections and mitigations and those, plus inefficiency, drove the cost. Yet no one said, “No, Prime Minister.” £100 billion later we need to understand why not. Similarly, he identifies why the Treasury models think immigration is a solution to a lack of a skilled workforce, but he doesn’t challenge that assumption (now proven false).

Sir Jeremy started life as an entrepreneur; unlike many in modern government, he has tasted failure and the grind of building something from nothing. He cites Churchill: “Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.” The book is certainly full of enthusiasm for the potential of the United Kingdom, but, as he knows, enthusiasm alone does not solve problems. The answer to the question posed in its title is left dangling in the wind. Perhaps he’ll address it in his next book.

This book is well worth buying. It’s well written and well informed. It contains some juicy and interesting snippets and thoughtful, cogent analysis. Its weakness is that it doesn’t go beyond suggesting small cuts (always expressed in percentage terms) for moderate gains in GDP. That would be excusable in a student economics thesis, but in the real world improvement and growth don’t come from a spreadsheet but from people working hard.

Inadvertently, this book is a snapshot of all that is failing in our country: leaders who are long on theory and short of practical experience. Sir Jeremy wasn’t one of those when he entered parliament; it seems the place is so toxic that he is now. Parliament needs new blood and new ideas if it is to save the country.

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While others will argue about whether the right’s vote split (it probably did, but it made no difference), whether there was tactical voting on the right (there probably was, so the true Restore vote was probably higher), this article is about the purple group on the right – those who don’t vote. Note that there are significantly more of them than there are for any political party.

There are many reasons people don’t vote. I didn’t vote throughout my military career because I thought it wrong for soldiers to have political inclinations; for all the bombast of defence ministers, defence spending was insufficient. A “plague on both their houses” was my line. It’s widely assumed that people don’t vote because of apathy. It can’t be ignorance as there isn’t a dwelling in Makerfield that won’t have had at least three leaflets (one each from Labour, Reform and Restore) on their doormats, plus notifications and polling cards from the local authority. Turnout increased for the by-election, no doubt boosted by the heavy campaigning and media interest.

The turnout figure which I used to derive the Did Not Vote number is calculated by dividing the number of people who voted by the number of people who could have voted, i.e. the number of people on the electoral roll. There are thought to be some 8,000,000 people in the UK who could vote but are not registered. Given that the total electorate is 47.5 million, that is some 15%, or another 13,000 votes in Makerfield alone. Burnham may have won an emphatic 55% of the vote, but that’s just 33% of the electorate and 28% of the population. The King of t’North isn’t as popular as he thinks or the media suggests.

Worse, the did not votes and the unregistered comprise 50% of the Makerfield population, more than the top three parties combined. Burnham’s mandate is an illusion. The whole idea of the UK’s representative democracy is a delusion if half the population isn’t voting. The chart below shows general election turnouts. We’re at a low point if one excludes 1918 (which is reasonable due to low voting by those still in the armed forces – the election was held one month after the end of the First World War).

Remember that this data is based on individuals registered to vote. I’ve been unable to find data on voter registration year by year. In some ways that’s not a surprise, as the annual canvasses of who is living where are performed by county councils, who also hold and maintain the electoral registers. Neither the Electoral Commission nor the Office for National Statistics has pulled together a comprehensive data set. That doesn’t alter my conclusion; public participation in politics is falling. At least 40% of the population did not vote in the last general election; Starmer’s mandate is far less strong than the political class think it is.

Does that matter? Probably not when things are going well. Unfortunately, they’re not at the moment in the UK. The state is failing to deliver, as it has been for some time. The most shocking example is the Rape Enquiry, published recently by Rupert Lowe and Restore. Read it and ask yourself how that can happen in a functioning state. You pay for it. You probably voted for one of the governments that failed to stop it; I know I did. We share the guilt of supporting a system that is patently failing.

In theory failing governments become unpopular and are replaced by competent ones as people change their allegiance. Of course the reality is that most people vote tribally and out of long-term (and often outdated) loyalties. If you’re working class, as Andy Burnham pretends he is, you vote Labour. Middle and upper classes vote Tory. That’s been bunkum for a while and demonstrably since 2016, when the majority voted to leave the EU despite all the main political parties advocating remaining.

That was the moment the disconnect between those in power and those who pay the bills became clear. The subsequent failure of successive governments to prevent illegal migration is another, massive example. Progressive groups and parties (most egregiously Plaid Cymru) embrace migration, as does the Treasury for questionable short-term economic gain; the population opposes it. Those who vote switch parties and even join a party for the first time. Those who don’t vote riot when there is an outrage. This government’s savage reaction to those involved has stoked anger, not deterred it.

The exam question, therefore, is “How does one fix a broken political system?” The supplementary question is “How does one do that in an environment where the media is part of the failing system it supposedly reports on and challenges?”

For the mainstream parties and, to an extent, the Greens, the answer is “More of the same, but better.” For the progressives this means a bigger, more redistributive state with better, tighter control of an ever more centralised government. For the Tories the intent is somehow to return to the free market economics of the 1980s. For Reform at the general election, it was to rebuild a smaller state from the ground up, ending migration and abandoning net zero. That attracted more votes than the Liberal Democrats got, but a fraction of the parliamentary seats – thereby demonstrating that our political system is failing. Post the return of Nigel Farage (which happened while the general election campaign was underway), policy is less clear. Assimilating Tory defectors may or may not have boosted its ability to govern, but it has been at the cost of becoming closer to the political establishment that it originally sought to overthrow.

That drift, plus a personality clash that Zia Yusuf, then the party’s chair, failed to prevent (the prime role of any chairman) and created Restore. The least savoury part of the Makerfield campaign was the Reform Restore battle. Restore is now the only anti-establishment party, that is, the only party that recognises that the current political and governmental machine is utterly broken.

For all the talk of “splitting the right” – a line promulgated by Reform as much as anyone – the Labour Party machine triumphed. In the general election for every 10 votes Reform received, Labour got 14. In the by-election it got 16. In the general election, for every 10 votes the right (Conservatives and Reform) got, Labour won 10.6. In the by-election, for every 10 votes the right (Tories, Reform and Restore) got, Labour (or Andy Burnham) won 12.6. The right vote wasn’t split; the left united round Burnham.

What happens next? There will be a Labour leadership contest. Assuming Starmer stands (as he says he will, but his history of U-turns is well known), that’s going to take some time. Streeting has to stand, not least because his only path to political survival is to be the kingmaker. Other candidates may well enter the fray, as the Labour Party is far from homogenous. Picking the winner is tricky, not least because Burnham has questions to answer about the rape gangs. Whether the winner can then unite a fractious party is questionable. Whether they will call a snap election to win a clear mandate from the people for whatever agenda they propose depends largely on whether they think they can win. Despite Burnham’s Makerfield triumph, the polls remain dire and the economic outlook bleak.

The stark reality is that the big state isn’t working, the economy is on life support and the bond markets are jittery. Burnham’s win increased gilt yields by 100 basis points, or 0.1%, overnight. 25 years of centre-left policy have failed, and more socialism won’t fix it. As Margaret Thatcher said, “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.” That moment is determined by the bond markets, not the doyens of Downing Street. It’s preceded by ever-rising gilt yields. It’s coming.

The loser in this election was the United Kingdom. The possible winner was Restore. From not existing three months ago to coming third is an astounding start. Getting Restore from third place to winning is going to require huge efforts. They’re already underway.

If Restore can impress and attract the Do Not Vote segment their path to power will be easier.

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That’s the problem. While they understand soldiering and politics, they do not understand commerce, finance or science. The army tends not to like those who question; politics requires adherence to the leader’s line – to the point of sycophancy. Neither, therefore, are inclined to challenge the norm nor to take the drastic actions needed. Wallace’s failures are Jarvis’s poisoned chalice of an inheritance. Wallace was able to perpetuate the myth that British Armed Forces are capable and valuable, in which process the very senior officers colluded – even as capable junior officers left the services. Events have now proved that they’re a hollowed out shell delivering PR stunts rather than projecting power. Solving this is Dan Jarvis’s task.

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Whatever the fix is, there is no money – or not much. John Healey, an honourable man, resigned because the Prime Minister failed to fund the additional £28 billion or so that the MOD says it needs. The economy hasn’t improved since Thursday and gilt yields remain high. Reeves hasn’t got welfare spending under control and Miliband’s net zero remains the dominant theme of the Labour Party. Even if Starmer is replaced (temporarily by David Lamy if he resigns after Makerfield), there is no reason to think that the King of the North – a man who has had no career outside politics – would save the economy if he wins the Makerfield by-election and Labour leadership contest he wants to trigger. Dan Jarvis is probably in post until September and quite possibly rather longer. However, there won’t be any more money.

If there isn’t enough money for the Defence Investment Plan (DIP) to deliver on the Strategic Defence Review (SDR), both are now irrelevant. The £13 billion from the DIP will help Jarvis – if the Treasury doesn’t claw it back. The exam question is how to deliver defence capability using the resources one has until the economy recovers, a happy state unlikely until net zero is scrapped and welfare spending brought under control.

Healey’s mistake was to outsource the SDR; Jarvis needs to write a new one based on the finances, and he needs to do that quickly. A fag-packet version is probably enough. The short-term priority is to get the Navy’s ships to work and keep them at sea. In the medium term, order more of the same, to be produced at a higher rate. Stop the RAF’s nuclear ambition in its tracks. Use the cash saved it to meet the next payments due on the (challenging) Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP).

GCAP is an Anglo-Italian-Japanese 6th generation fighter programme. Such a project is at the cutting edge of technology and therefore expensive, which means multinational. Unfortunately that adds management risk to already astronomic technical risk and affordability risks. The Franco-German equivalent of GCAP, known as FCAS, has just collapsed.

GCAP is major part of the possible future of the defence of The Realm, currently directly controlled by the Treasury on the basis that it needs better project management than the MOD can deliver. The last is unarguable, but given the (Treasury-run) HS2 debacle, it’s hard to see that Ms Reeves’ department is any better at big projects than Dan Jarvis’s. The Treasury knows even less about combat aviation than it does about trains.

Jarvis needs to establish whether GCAP is indeed vital. If it is, he must wrest control from the Treasury, recruit and retain project managers and then back it to the hilt, ensuring that the UK taxpayer receives paybacks if international sales succeed. If it isn’t, he should simply delete the requirement and spend the savings on the Typhoons and building war stocks of air-launched missiles.

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The Army, supported by many sections of the press, has gone totally drone crazy. They base their argument on lessons from Ukraine and conclude that armoured vehicles are obsolete. As an ex-paratrooper, Jarvis probably believes this. Before he cancels the Army’s “heavy metal”, he should answer the question of how an infantryman can survive on a battlefield without protected mobility – that is, an armoured vehicle. The Israelis (who have never lost a war) use armour all the time. The Ukrainians (who have yet to win one) were invaded by an armoured force, and, lacking armour themselves, they have struggled to recapture the land they lost. Drones have a role, and quite a large one, but they are not a complete solution. (An article for another day).

Jarvis’s biggest problem is the ministry itself and the career structure of the civil servants and officers that fill it. Put simply, they change roles too often, meaning that decisions are delayed or changed or badly made. At the same time, nobody is held accountable. He should demand that any procurement project has one person in charge, from inception to delivery. That person takes the rap or receives the kudos. It worked for the F-16 (the world’s most successful fighter aircraft) and it worked for the Merkava (the tank the Israelis built at short notice when a Labour government declined to sell them Chieftain – plus ça change). He should instil a spirit of mission command, telling his team what outcomes he expects, in what time frames and with what resources and then leaving them to get on with it.

His fag-packet SDR should compare what the government have pledged (and the taxpayer thinks they have paid for) to what the armed forces deliver. We promised NATO two divisions; we can perhaps furnish them one weak armoured brigade and a vulnerable heliborne one. It’s time to confess (our weakness is hardly a secret) and to get real. Only then can Jarvis increase the defence capability.

In support of confessing and getting real, Jarvis should set out unambiguously where the defence budget is spent. It includes spending on Armed Forces pensions, the entire cost of the nuclear deterrent (which consumes 8% of all defence spending and 34% of capital expenditure). The 2.6% of GDP figure also includes wider defence related things, such as GCHQ, MI5 and MI6 (totalling some £6 billion a year). Jarvis should change all this and focus on outputs: ships at sea, serviceable fighter aircraft, etc. Were I him, I would have a board showing this in my office, with officers required to update it daily.

The focus on outputs leads naturally to the focus on headquarters. Private Tommy Atkins sits at the bottom of a military command structure that leads from the major general commanding the division he’s in, past a brigadier to a lieutenant colonel, to a major, to a lieutenant, to a corporal, to Tommy. (Other ranks, like sergeant and captain, are not typically tactical commanders – which doesn’t mean that they’re not vital. For more information see my book.)

Continuing the pretence that we have two divisions, one can reasonably ask why we have another 38 major generals, six lieutenant generals and two full generals. The other services are as bad. A major warship is usually commanded by a Commander. (A rare case of military jargon making sense). We have 20 or so warships (including submarines), of which perhaps half are seaworthy. The Royal Navy (including the Royal Marines) has about 1,100 officers in the rank of commander and 134 officers who outrank that. Sure, some are needed to run training and supporting establishments, some to make the MOD work (ha!) and some in headquarters (HQs). We have an awful lot of HQs, full of many officers commanding the same units.

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Aside from the puzzle palace of the MOD in Whitehall, there are the Permanent Joint Headquarters (PJHQ) and Commander Allied Maritime Command (MARCOM), both in Northwood. Then the Army, Navy and Air Force all have their own headquarters. Then there are HQ Allied Rapid Reaction Corps in Gloucester and the Standing Joint Expeditionary Force HQ (also in Northwood). The Joint Expeditionary Force is an anomalous thing. It evolved in 2012 largely from the (UK only) Joint Rapid Reaction Force. (Joint in this case means a combined army, navy and air force organisation), which came “under pressure” (meaning running out of people) following the UK’s commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan. Other nations were roped in and there are now ten member states, all of whom are also part of NATO. Quite why NATO needs to operate two headquarters to ensure that its member armed forces can train together is far from obvious. Of course HQ JEF needs generals and staff. If HQ JEF no longer existed, the assets it sometimes commands would still exist in the NATO command structure. Jarvis should bin HQ JEF. He should then look at the rest of the HQ and command structure with extreme prejudice.

If Jarvis had the nous to ensure that the MOD keeps any savings that it makes, and ensured that in such a way that it will survive a change of Prime Minister, he’s got a basis for rebuilding British defence capability without breaking the bank. But he must start with candour, with his officials, with the Treasury and, above all, with the British public.

He must tell them that running out of money and a strategic default is probably a threat to the country second only to nuclear war. He must explain that we cannot meet our NATO commitments and will have to scale them back while we rebuild the armed forces and the dysfunctional ministry of defence. He should point out that the UK cannot fight a war of attrition, like the one in Ukraine, and probably does not want to in the Baltics (or anywhere else).

Jarvis should look closely at the Israeli model of reserves, specifically looking at the economic impact of part of the workforce downing tools and picking up weaponry. There’s no point in us winning on the battlefield if we trash the economy. (World War Two debt was finally paid off in 2006, more than sixty years after we won it.) Israel’s national debt is around 69% of its GDP and it has no deficit. The UK’s is 103% and we run a £100 billion plus deficit. Israel can survive a brief economic downturn; we can’t.

Therein lies the real challenge for the next government. The United Kingdom has put itself in a position of endemic strategic weakness. Running down the armed forces is part of it, but the wholesale destruction of the economy is what has really done for us. If Jarvis can turn the MOD round, there is hope for the UK. If he fails the question might become whether the UK is worth defending.

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The real question is, why wasn’t he sacked when the risible Strategic Defence Review (SDR) was published last year?

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Healey was Shadow Secretary of State for Defence from the moment Starmer became Labour’s leader, back in 2020. In his four years in that role he must have discovered that all was far from well in the Armed Forces and the Ministry of Defence (MOD). The crumbling façade of the Potemkin village that is British military power was obvious then, yet when he became Secretary of State he failed to grip anything. The Ajax (and other) procurement fiascos continued and he outsourced the conduct of the Strategic Defence Review to Lord Robertson, who was Blair’s Secretary of State for Defence for 13 months in 1997, before shuffling off to be NATO Secretary General. Robertson is long on politics, short on delivery, and the MOD is failing to deliver, as it has done for decades.

The MOD, both uniformed and civilian, is not fit for purpose. It wasn’t in 2023, and Healey has done nothing to fix it. Indeed, arguably, he’s made it worse by expanding the role of the Chief of the Defence Staff (CDS, as the military head of the armed forces is known) and given him a staff. Yet more people flitting about the MOD’s many corridors is unlikely to solve the many problems that it has. These include (but, sadly, are far from limited to) the following:

The four nuclear deterrent submarines are under extreme and unsustainable pressure. One, HMS Victorious is in a planned, long refit, which is as it should be. (This is necessary because she’s already three years past her 25-year design life. The substantial works are intended to be completed in 2027). One is on patrol, as it must be. One is in post-patrol maintenance and/or workup for its next patrol. The fourth has been tied up in Faslane for 18 months. While Royal Navy PR makes much of “record breaking patrols” – now routinely over 200 days when around 100-120 days is the optimum – the reality is that we are perilously close to not having our Constantly At Sea Deterrent (CASD) constantly at sea.

Nor can we protect the missile submarines as we should. This is a job for an Astute-class boat; however, precisely none of the five £1.5 billion Astute-class nuclear submarines are at sea or seaworthy, as they are all in refit, repair or maintenance. A plan to fix the maintenance backlog was announced in January 2026; the unanswered question is why it hadn’t been created five years sooner.

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The surface fleet is little better. It now has just five functioning frigates, of which one is in refit. Two of these will be tied up with Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) in the North Atlantic. That leaves just one for the carrier group and one either rotating between these tasks or available for other operations. Of the six Type 45 destroyers, three are having a propulsion upgrade – a process that should be complete in 2028. One of the three seaworthy ones is in the Mediterranean, and one is about to go into maintenance. For a maritime power we don’t have much in the way of a seaworthy navy, which means our capabilities are cut to the bone.

All is far from well with the Army, too. Supposedly it will commit two divisions to NATO to deter Russian expansion. It has just one combat division that has never exercised and can only really field one brigade. It’s woefully short of artillery, tanks and armoured infantry carriers. To top it all, it also has the Ajax fiasco, to which it seems to have committed a further £250 million to produce Ajax 2. Even if Ajax 2 works to specification, the entire concept of the vehicle is flawed. The £6 billion it has cost would have been better spent on warship maintenance (somehow the Navy is very short of dry docks).

The Air Force is as bad. It lacks sufficient airborne early warning aircraft, its Typhoon fleet is aging and its F-35Bs can’t yet operate the Meteor missile. Of course, if the Navy’s carrier strike fleet is at sea, up to half of the F-35Bs will be at sea with it. The RAF is buying more, including a dozen land-based F-35As which, for reasons never disclosed, will be tasked with carrying American B-61 tactical nuclear bombs. If the RAF, or the MOD, intends to deter Russian aggression in Eastern Europe by delivering buckets of instant sunshine, we’ve rolled the clock back to the worst bits of the Cold War. Nuking an advancing Russian force is likely to be seen by the Russians as a first strike on the motherland. That’s the road to mutually assured destruction – unless our ballistic missile boat breaks, which is increasingly likely as they are run ever harder.

To be fair, the parlous state of affairs that Healey took over was not of his making. His predecessors and the Admirals, Generals, Air Marshalls and civil servants that advised them have much to answer for. The Wallace-era SDR was proved so wrong that it was rewritten (they called it a “refresh”), but nothing sensible or substantive was done. Many of the culprits now sit on the green benches. Healey could, reasonably, have conducted a review based on actual capability, mapped that to needs, blamed his predecessors and got busy restructuring.

Healey’s successor has a poisoned chalice; he has to transform the MOD with (effectively) no money and without besmirching our pathetic excuse for a Prime Minister. Starmer cares more about keeping Miliband tied into his cabinet. That explains the £8.5 billion per year capital budget allocated to Red Ed to destroy the economy via net zero. Of course, as the incomer will also be well aware, Starmer may be replaced; whether a new leader is any more connected to financial and military reality is an open question.

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The FT reports that Burnham is open to increasing borrowing to fund defence, but of course the cost of that is up to bond investors, not him. The Treasury’s Debt Management Office are the people who actually sell government bonds and therefore talk to bond investors. It may well be that their conversations have convinced them that the impact on the interest rates demanded will be large and bad if the MOD is given a blank cheque. That, of course, would stuff the economy, wipe out growth, take the country further into the debt spiral and closer to the arms of the IMF.

Unfortunately we have a government of economic illiterates who are unable to prioritise, unwilling to impose cuts and can’t run a bath. That won’t change if the self-styled king of t’North arrives at number 10. For all his self-promotion, he’s been a professional politician all his life. Fixing the government, the economy or even just the MOD will take more than a selfie and a soundbite – Burnham’s typical output.

A competent new Secretary of State would lead an immediate defence capability review, having explained to assorted senior officers that there is no money, at least until the government balances its budget. He or she will have some conversations with NATO about what capabilities we can provide; if they’re short of what is promised, no one will be surprised (although they might be astonished by British candour). The new person would then set some priorities and allocate resources as required. The defence review would be couched in terms of capability outputs, not financial inputs.

A cunning new Defence Secretary would make the point that the MOD isn’t the only ministry with a chronic inability to turn taxpayers’ money into effective service. As the Armed Forces are now pretty much at rock bottom, there is little risking in implementing rapid and dramatic change. They could therefore argue that the MOD will be an exemplar for government reform and that in return for not demanding exorbitant sums for exotic weaponry, they need a free hand and the political support to restructure radically, rapidly and ruthlessly.

How that might look is an article for another day.

At one level Healey’s resignation changes nothing in the spendthrift MOD or in the lacklustre government. In another way his principled approach shows the utter, craven lack of moral courage of both his predecessors and the senior officers who advised them. Which is rather depressing.

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Expenditure on combat power broadly falls into three categories: hardware and infrastructure like ships and docks plus the maintenance thereof; pay and accommodation for service personnel; and training and munitions – fuel, spare parts, missiles and bullets. There are interlinkages – a warship without dockyard time to maintain it is simply floating scrap. A tank without a trained and current crew is a target and a jet without missiles is simply a shiny toy. Although the MOD is very cagey, which is partly (but not entirely) excusable on national security grounds, it’s no secret that an awful lot of the hardware that the taxpayer purchased is short of maintenance and trained crews.

Recent events exposed the Potemkin village that our armed forces have become when the Royal Navy struggled to deploy a single warship to Cyprus. It’s partly due to military tendency to keep hardware on the books in various states of disrepair, hoping that when funding became available they can be brought back to readiness quickly. Sadly and inevitably, sufficient funding never comes. Which is why we now have just five frigates to cover the tasks that were rightly thought to require sixteen. There are thirteen new frigates on order; some have been launched and are fitting out, others are in construction. However, their in-service dates are not known; the government seems reluctant to commit to one – possibly because of the funding uncertainties of the DIP. And all the time the remaining five, all of which are close to the end of their lives, plug away. Until something breaks, and then there will be just four.

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That something could be the crews; the Royal Navy has a recruitment and (particularly) retention problem – unsurprising when the advertised life on the ocean wave is replaced by life tied up in a naval base. Unless you’re a submariner on the Vanguard-class missile submarines, whose length of patrols has increased to six months or so, and sometimes more. Although the pay is high, it places a great strain on the sailors, stuck in a metal tube working 6 hours on, 6 hours off. Their connection to the outside world is limited to one email from family once a week.

Most navies reckon that submarine patrol lengths of around three months are sensible. While Royal Navy PR churns out guff about record breading endurance, this is not a choice. The Navy is being forced into it because one of the four missile submarines is in deep refit and, according to the usually reliable Navy Lookout, another boat has been tied up alongside in Faslane for 18 months, leaving just two boats to keep one at sea. The ever-lengthening patrols are a function of the maintenance required on the submarine not at sea, plus the work-up time. The harder they work, the more maintenance is necessary. This is an availability death spiral.

There is speculation that the Navy is being forced to compromise on the overarching principle of ballistic missile submarine operation, which is to hide. The current submarines were designed for three-month patrols. Squeezing in rations for an extra three months (or more) for the 135 sailors on board is non-trivial. It may be that partway through the patrol the missile boat surfaces to replenish. That’s no way to run a deterrent.

Why is the Navy in such a mess? The Cameron government saved itself £750 million by delaying the construction of the Dreadnought Class by five years, which necessarily requires extending the Vanguard’s service life for at least five years too. Old machines are less reliable and fixing stuff on a missile boat is never simple. HMS Dreadnought, the first in class, is also being built at a leisurely pace; steel was cut in 2016 but the keel was only laid down in 2025. She will be in service in the early 2030s Until the the Vanguards must soldier on.

The delays to HMS Dreadnought may have been due in part to the problems with the Astute Class attack submarines, which are built in the same facility. Herein lies the challenge for the government. If it wants to deliver more sea power, it needs more warships, which means it needs more warship-building capacity. That could lead to expensive discussions with BAe Systems and Babcock, the prime contractors for all current warships. The MOD might be adept enough to pull off a deal with their subcontractors, which include Cammell Laird in Liverpool, A&P Group in the Northeast and Southwest and Spanish-owned Harland and Wolff in Ulster. Or it might not.

The simple reality is that the MOD is an awful customer – it was its vacillation and delays that put Harland and Wolff into administration last time round. Building or expanding a shipyard is capital intensive and takes time; any company contemplating this would want a surety of workflow to justify the considerable risks. This government’s delay of the DIP undermines such confidence. Neither does its looming insolvency; however, the case for more warships is compelling. There is little doubt that they would add much-needed capability and directly contribute to the security of the Realm. Such national benefit is less obvious from spending on the other armed forces.

The Royal Air Force has a long history of a disconnect between its rhetoric and its capability. The travails of the Tornado F3 (its radar didn’t work for over a decade), the delays to the Typhoon, whose early versions lacked the ground attack capability that justified its procurement, are well known. Most recently, its failure to purchase sufficient vital airborne early warning aircraft (we have just three Wedgetails, insufficient to maintain a 24/7 capability) is typical. Yet it managed to apply pressure to spend £1 billion on the less-than-vital New Medium Helicopter to replace its less-than-vital and ageing Puma fleet. (It is not the role of the British Armed Forces to keep Leonardo’s Yeovil factory in business). That £1 billion would have gone a long way to covering the cost of the missing two Wedgetails.

For reasons absolutely no one can explain, the RAF is also purchasing a dozen F-35As (another £1 billion or so, which would have solved the Wedgetail deficiency) to give it a nuclear capability, with American-owned B-61 bombs. These weapons are crude and require the aircraft dropping them to almost overfly the target (they avoid overflight by performing a high-g manoeuvre known as “the idiot’s loop”). That may or may not compromise the F-35A’s stealth, which is a worry.

The real question is: who or what is the intended target? The B-61 is a tactical weapon with yields ranging from 0.3 kilotons to 400 kilotons, that is, from 2% to 2600% of a Hiroshima. At the upper end, that’s a city trashed and a huge step towards the Armageddon of mutually assured destruction. At the lower end the effect on the target would almost certainly be better achieved by precision bombing or a few cluster bombs, avoiding all the hassle of nuclear fallout and escalation. (What may seem like a tactical weapon strike to an air marshal in a bunker will feel indistinguishable from a strategic strike for those unfortunates near ground zero).

The RAF lost its strategic nuclear role in 1969 when the Polaris submarines came into service. Their tactical nukes went in 1998, a little after the Cold War ended. While having a nuclear role may have given Air Marshalls some status and access to conversations they wouldn’t otherwise be in, that’s not a justification for the enormous costs of maintaining a nuclear strike force securely for decades (or more, one hopes).

The RAF’s ability to defend our airspace, its primary purpose, is compromised by the F-35B, which has still not yet been certified to carry the long-range Meteor air-to-air missile. Instead, it has the older, shorter-ranged AIM-120 AMRAAM. The delay is partly due to the fact that the only other F-35B operators are the US Marine Corps (which prioritises ground attack) and the Italian Navy, which has few. Meeting the needs of the RAF is not a high F-35 development priority.

The F-35 serves alongside the Eurofighter Typhoon, which the RAF hopes to replace with the Tempest – an aircraft still under development by a multinational consortium with Italy and Japan. Tempest offers many capabilities (easy to do in the development stage) and is getting to the expensive phase of building and flight testing. That was supposed to happen in 2025, then 2026 although it has now slipped to late 2027. As of 2025, the MOD had already spent £2 billion on Tempest, with other international partners stumping up similar amounts. The problem with internationally developed weapons is that there are differences of opinion and an increased possibility of changes of direction, all of which add cost and delay. (The world’s most successful jet fighter, the F-16, was designed by one company. It first flew in 1974 and came into service in 1978. It’s still in production today and over 2,500 are in service.)

Funding Tempest is going to be tough. It offers fantastic capability (on paper) when it comes into service, perhaps in the late 2030s. Until then, the defence of UK airspace will rest on 75 F-35s (some of which will be at sea if an aircraft carrier is working, and 12 will be tied up with the nuclear idiocy) and whatever Typhoons are serviceable. The RAF currently has 107 Typhoons in service although how many of them are serviceable at any one time is unknown. The Typhoon is still in production, although the RAF declined to purchase more of the up to date Tranche 4 aircraft. The RAF Typhoons are ageing; two thirds of its fleet is Tranche 2 and the rest Tranche 3. They will need to serve until 2040, or later if Tempest is delayed.

Whether a 4th generation fighter (like the Typhoon, F16, F15 and F18) can survive in a modern air-defence environment is debatable. The chances of survival increase as the defences are degraded by 5th generation stealthy aircraft, such as the F-35, and 6th generation Tempest (if it gets built and works). However, if the primary role of the RAF is to defend UK airspace, it won’t need to penetrate enemy air defences and the prime advantage of stealth will diminish. The trade-offs between the technical risks and combat capabilities of Typhoon and Tempest are far from clear. It’s unfortunate that the most recent Strategic Defence Review was so risible.

If the RAF is caught on the horns of the dilemma of choosing between funding future capability or maintaining current ones, the Army has an ostensibly simpler problem. Its current capability is pathetic, memorably described by General Sir Richard Barrons (one of the SDR’s authors) as only being able to “seize a small market town on a good day”; l the army lacks capability, equipment and leadership. It also lacks the necessary clarity of purpose that underpins any well-structured organisation. It fails to tell the truth to power and only looks in the mirror when it’s wearing rose-tinted spectacles.

Supposedly the UK will provide two divisions to NATO in time of war. While we have two organisations called divisions, they are not equipped for war with Russia, have never trained together – indeed no UK division has exercised as a complete entity since the Cold War – and are in spectacularly low states of readiness. The busiest bit of the army, the light cavalry, operates in Eastern Europe in a modification of a vehicle procured urgently for Afghanistan. While the RAF prepares for a war involving tactical nuclear weapons, the Army’s light cavalry – its only functioning reconnaissance courtesy of the disastrous Ajax programme – can’t operate on a nuclear-contaminated battlefield (or a chemically contaminated one for that matter).

The army will have about 140 Challenger 3 tanks, enough for one armoured brigade. Unfortunately two divisions are equivalent to at least six brigades. Its infantry will either ride in Warrior, (which needs an upgrade), Boxer (which has wheels and no turret – I don’t think that a bad thing; others disagree), or Ares, a version of the troubled Ajax. If we’re to send NATO two divisions, we’ll need some 500 more tanks. That’s £10 billion and change.

The Army is fresh out of 155mm artillery, although it’s getting 72 RCH guns (enough for one weak division) starting in 2028. It’s also procuring MLRS missiles to give it about the same number of launchers, which would make the one division strong in artillery. Against those procurement successes (defining success as eventually purchasing the right piece of kit, albeit rather too late), is the Ajax fiasco and the lunacy of its multiple projects to buy a new rifle.

The tough question is, what is the Army for? If the Navy and RAF are doing their job, we should never be conducting land warfare on UK soil (unless the IRA kicks off again or the Welsh and Scottish nationalists tire of politics). The Army’s primary role, therefore, must be expeditionary, supporting allies fighting a common enemy. That may be through NATO or outside it. The expeditionary bit imposes significant logistic challenges.

In the Cold War these were largely overcome by basing a third of the Army in Germany (that force was pretty much the size of today’s entire Army, although it delivered about ten times the combat power and was ready to fight at six hours’ notice). If the primary threat is Russian aggression towards the Baltics, tanks in Tidworth aren’t much use. Tanks in light preservation in Ashchurch are even less useful, yet that is how the Army now operates. Most of its combat vehicles sit in air-conditioned hangers while their crews languish in barracks without their primary weapon. Known as Whole Fleet Management, it only makes sense to someone with a financial spreadsheet who is clueless about soldering. Introduced in 1999, it has contributed little to readiness; that it has gone on so long says nothing good about the upper echelons of the Army.

Like many, the Army has now gone drone crazy, justifying this with lessons learned from the Ukraine war. Perhaps (it’s an article for another day). However, the British Army lacks the manpower to suffer the losses the Ukrainians have; we’re not set up for a war of attrition. Given the current recruiting problems (not entirely the fault of Capita, now Serco), we never will be. The British Army would be better advised to look at the Israeli Army – it’s never lost and has fought (and is fighting) modern wars too.

All of which means that were I running the Treasury, I would release funds for shipbuilding and additional funds to accelerate it. I would challenge some of the brightest minds there to talk to industry about expanding warship production rapidly, making it clear that the only funding available would be for a warship purchase, not a state-owned dockyard. The RAF would get maintenance funding, and I would delete its nuclear ambition as cost-ineffective and an ill-advised step towards Armageddon. Further funding for Tempest would be subject to some serious risk analysis and questioning. As the extra Wedgetails are essential, I would stump up the £2 billion for them, although that cost won’t be incurred immediately and would more or less be covered by scrapping the nuclear bomb plan.

As for the Army, it would get nothing until it produced a satisfactory explanation of how it delivers one-tenth the combat power of the similarly sized Cold War force in Germany. That was run by one lieutenant general, five major generals and about 20 brigadiers. Today’s army has two full generals, six lieutenant generals, 40 major generals and 150 brigadiers. WTF do they do all day, and how does that defend the Realm? I would ask them in rank order, top to bottom. Failure to produce coherent, credible and immediate answers would lead to P45s.

That won’t be popular, but that’s not the point. We have no money and the SDR failed to deliver a coherent plan. While a military attack might overwhelm us, none is on the immediate horizon. Spiralling debt costs due to an out of control government budget will one day trigger the bond markets into flight from UK government bonds; that will destroy the country overnight.

Spending £18 billion that the government does not have on the highly wasteful MOD hoping for substantial improvement in the armed forces via an ill-defined policy might be such a trigger. Expect the DIP to be cut savagely, or the country’s borrowing costs to rise further, taking is one step closer to the economic abyss.

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First some facts.

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The UK produces about one per cent of global CO₂ emissions on a territorial basis, meaning that the gas is emitted here. This total therefore excludes the emissions created by the UK’s imports of food, manufactured goods, services backed up or delivered on servers based overseas and electricity. As a net importer, our impact on emissions is therefore greater than the one per cent, but that’s how Net Zero’s architects chose to measure it.

Fact Two: only about 12% of the UK’s primary energy is in the form of electricity; the rest is oil (40%) and gas (35%). About one quarter of the gas is converted to electricity, but that’s not the main point. The UK depends on fossil fuels, as the chart below (from government data) shows. 2024 is the latest data set.

The UK will need lots of oil and gas for decades to come. If the government won’t let us produce it locally (and this one won’t), then we must import it. If the UK’s electricity grid were totally renewable, as Mad Miliband, his acolytes and sponsors (Vince Dale) intend to deliver by 2035 (fat chance), the UK’s emissions would fall from 1% to 0.8%. Further reduction would require all 23 million homes in the UK to convert from natural gas to either heat pumps or hydrogen, both of which would require many, many more green power stations to deliver the necessary electricity. Net Zero requires around 30 Sizewell Cs, or equivalent (as explained in my book). If we want Net Zero by 2050 we must commission a Sizewell C a year, every year. We’re not being built so net zero won’t happen.

Worse, we now rely on imports for around 15% of our electricity. Whatever else net zero has “achieved”, we depend on interconnectors to Europe to keep the lights on.

Fact Three. There is no money. The UK’s national debt is over £2 trillion and the interest alone is £100 billion a year (some 10% of the tax take). That lack of funds is a problem, as the cash cost of Net Zero is well over £3 trillion, according to the Institute of Economic Affairs. Some sources, such as the Climate Change Committee, claim this is cheaper than the cost of doing nothing, which means accepting the costs of the adverse impacts of climate change. Such figures falsely assume that the one per cent reduction in global emissions arising from the UK’s Net Zero stops climate change. It does no such thing, as the rest of the world isn’t on our pathway; the remaining 99% of emissions aren’t going anywhere. The CCC cabal also ignore the reality that building stuff now requires credible financial commitments now. If the government is struggling to find a paltry £15 billion a year for defence (as it is), how will it fund the £150 billion a year that net zero will cost every year for the next 25 years? UK sovereign bonds (which finance the national debt) already pay a hefty moron premium because the UK has too much borrowing and not enough economic growth.

Fact Four. Energy underpins all human activity. Reducing energy availability or increasing cost makes staying alive harder and more expensive; cold killed 2,500 people in 2024-25. Increasing energy costs impact every part of the economy (as Iran’s hissy fit has demonstrated), which triggers inflation. That increases interest rates, which leads to economic stagnation (we’re there) or decline (we’re there too).

Fact Five. Questioning the utility, affordability of likely impact of Net Zero does not make one a climate change sceptic. Whether anthropomorphic climate change exists or not, there are two broad approaches to a changing climate: attempting to prevent the change or mitigate the anticipated impacts. Whether Net Zero is an attempt at prevention or mitigation, it is reasonable to question whether it will work, whether it is deliverable and whether it is affordable.

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The Spectator debate on binning net zero was valiantly chaired by Isabel Hardman, who strove to keep it on the discussion of net zero, not climate change. It was proposed by Liam Halligan, supported by Peter Lilley. They produced factual arguments on costs, economics (Halligan is an economist after all) and efficacy. They were well received by the audience, who, pre-debate, were 70% in favour of binning net zero.

Their opponents were Bob Ward, Policy and PR director of the Graham Institute (a climate change think tank and lobbying group) and Shrahar Ali, former deputy leader of the Green Party. They focused on the lurid, looming catastrophe of climate change. Despite Hardman’s efforts (preceded by a tinkling of Isabel’s bell), they didn’t address the practicalities and costs of delivering Net Zero.

Ali conceded it would require fundamental economic and societal transformation, which he saw as a necessary thing anyway. He glossed over the nature of the societal changes, unsurprisingly as they’re not pretty. Ward was almost swivel-eyed with fury – no doubt he saw himself as Jesus among the money changers in the Temple. His argument was essentially ‘Anthropomorphic climate change exists because I say it does and net zero is necessary because it is and it will work because of (unspecified) science.’ The audience was underwhelmed; the closing vote was near identical to the pre-debate one.

The Any Questions discussion arose from the audience question of whether converting Lincolnshire farmland to solar parks made sense. The chair, Ali Forsyth, allowed George Monbiot to open the panel’s responses, although Reform UK’s Richard Tice got in an early response of “No!”. Monbiot rambled, as is his wont. Ali failed to keep him on the underling food security vs food debate.

That’s a shame; the reality is that Lincolnshire fenland is the most productive agricultural land on the planet. Converting 1,000 hectares to a solar park provides a little energy at the cost of losing 10,000 tons/year (or more) of wheat. That must come from somewhere – and that means from new farmland created from savannah or rainforest because all the other farmland on the planet is already in production. Yields in the Amazon basin or African savanna are much lower, perhaps two to four tons per hectare, so the area taken into intensive agriculture will be much higher, perhaps 5,000 hectares of rainforest or 3,000 hectares of savannah.

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Strangely, none of the green lobby ever mention this – especially not Vince Dale, whose fortune is built on UK solar energy. Miliband and Dale (presumably in search of a seat in the House of Lords) have been making much about an economics report produced by the Confederation of British Industry’s research department. The report was commissioned by and produced with the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit , which is yet another lobbying organisation. The document suggests that net zero is worth £100 billion a year and underpins over a million jobs. Big numbers generate impressive headlines. Behind that lie 40 pages of jargon infested banality plus a technical annex of another 20 pages. I’ve read them both, which wasn’t much fun.

Although this masquerades as research, it is a propaganda piece. At no point does it ask where the £100 billion a year comes from (I suspect it’s you), nor indeed does it consider where the capital expended goes. It starts with the blithe assertion of Prof. Jim Skea, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the most senior climate scientist on the planet, that “It’s chemistry and physics that if you want to stop global warming, you have to achieve net zero emissions.”

That’s bollocks; climate change existed long before we used fossil fuels. Even if we achieved a global net zero, which seems unlikely in any meaningful timeframe, all the non-emissions factors that change climate would still be driving climate change, as they have for the 4.5 billion years that planet Earth has existed. The technical annex reveals (sort of) the methodology for calculating the employment and value added claims. Short version, they got an AI tool to aggregate data from corporate websites. They’ve been running this methodology for a while but updated it this year to “include refinements to the taxonomy and classification approach, expanded coverage of net zero-related activity, and enhancements to firm identification. Taken together, these developments provide a more comprehensive and up-to-date view of the net zero economy.” Effectively, I suspect that means that any firm whose web page mentions any effort at combatting climate change will be included in their count.

The chart below shows employment by sector from the ONS. (Data on employment is usually pretty good, as it derives from HMRC data and most companies seek to keep HMRC off their backs by paying tax). The CBI / ECIU paper claims over 300,000 people directly employed in net zero. That’s odd, as the ONS data is that just 500,000 people are employed in energy (all sorts), mining and water supply (orange column). I fear that the report’s claim that 3% of all employment is in net zero is bunk.

The UK’s economy is around £2,500 billion of GVA. £100M is just 4% of that. Again, it’s not clear how this figure was arrived at (and yes, I have read the technical annex closely). The report seems more interested in “demonstrating” that net zero jobs are high earning ones. It doesn’t consider the possibility that it could be because of an army of overpaid economists, consultants and civil servants producing puff pieces like this rather. It’s unlikely that the (very few) engineers and (rather more) labourers actually building the infrastructure are paid more to deliver designs and concrete to a wind farm than they are to deliver designs and concrete to HS2.

The document demonstrates how risible and bereft of thought the entire government mandated and taxpayer funded net zero industry is. The demonstrable facts remain:

1. The UK’s definition of net zero is flawed.

2. The energy we rely on to live comes predominantly from oil and gas.

3. Building solar parks on farmland destroys virgin land elsewhere.

4. Even if the world followed the UK’s lead and delivered net zero, climate change would not end, as the non-anthropogenic drivers would still be there.

5. The drive for net zero is destroying the entire economy through ever-increasing electricity costs. Economic collapse would destroy the UK’s society.

Unfortunately socialists can’t deal with facts or numbers. Few politicians have the guts to speak the reality – that net zero is idiotic. (Richard Tice, to his enormous credit, is one politician who does speak up and challenge the net zero mafia. Rupert Lowe’s Restore has also committed to abandoning Net Zero. ) Sadly Parliament is stuffed with MPs who accept the eco-orthodoxy without daring to challenge it.

As energy costs bite and the direct cost of the UK’s absurd net zero target becomes clear, as it will when the lights go out, the people will rightly turn on the government. Those individuals, parties and organisations that have forced this net zero upon us, without a substantive debate, will be pilloried. Those organisations that pushed the net zero line (that’s the BBC) will be held to account. Companies that have sacrificed profitability to boost net zero will have interesting conversations with their shareholders.

On the upside, civil engineering companies that can build sea defences, dams and conventional power stations will be busy, as will (at last) Rolls Royce and their small nuclear reactors. Hopefully Ed Miliband will have more time to master eating bacon sandwiches and, best of all, Vince Dale will be bankrupt and silent.

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While Ben Habib and Rupert Lowe (the parties’ leaders) have not always agreed about stuff, they were both strong members in Reform’s pre-Yussuf days and both fell out with Nigel Farage on matters relating to leadership style and immigration policy. This is not a formal merger, although I suspect many from Advance will join, support or work with Restore – which will help. It’s a good thing for the country and a very principled step by Ben Habib.

If any of those who hope for, or demand, Restore to step aside in Makerfield, unite the right and give Reform a clear run in Makerfield remain in la-la land. Firstly, nominations have closed, so it’s impossible to withdraw or be removed from the ballot paper, even if the candidate dies.

Reform has structural problems, leadership issues and has tilted towards the Tories in terms of MPs and policy—the latter being developed by the excellent-in-all-but-one-way Danny Kruger MP. The one way in which Mr Kruger is not excellent is that he’s part of the problem; the Tory Party delivered much of the national debt, much of the failed infrastructure and, above all, much of the uncontrolled immigration (known as the Boris Wave for a reason). The United Kingdom’s problems are not soluble by policy tweaks; they demand complete structural change. That’s what Reform was originally offering; now it’s playing policy wonk tunes to gain power while leaving the decrepit structure intact. That will solve nothing—fixing the government machine requires major surgery, offered by Restore. You don’t treat cancer with a sticking plaster and an aspirin.

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Seeking to attract voters by referring to the risk of Andy Burnham as prime minister merely boosts his credibility while emulating William Hague’s failed rhetoric of “12 days to save the pound” in the 2001 general election. It didn’t work. Blair won and things continued not to get better. Why didn’t it work? Because it was manifest nonsense. If he wins, Burnham becomes an MP. That makes him eligible to fight for the leadership of the Labour Party; it doesn’t make him the winner. Starmer isn’t standing down; there will be a battle. Starmer’s acolytes are already fighting it while Burnham struts, pronounces and poses in Makerfield, part of his Manchester fiefdom.

Moreover, if Burnham wins, he has no new policy mandate. He’s stuck with Starmer’s manifesto (such as it is) unless he calls a general election. He says he won’t, but he would say that; the right to call a surprise, snap election is any prime minister’s most powerful weapon and only a fool would compromise it. Whether a Burnham-led Labour Party would win in 2026 is an open question. They might go for the Sunak option, reasoning that a loss in 2026 will be less total than one in 2029, not least because Reform (and Restore) have yet to be match ready.

Of course, the soaring national debt and the interest thereon increasingly drive policy and constrain everything the Prime Minister does and increasingly occupy his time. (Lack of money is already delaying policy – like the Defence Industrial Plan). Replacing Rachel from accounts won’t change that. Burnham may have a track record as Mayor of Greater Manchester (a political edifice created in 2015). He was once a Secretary of State for Health. He has never worked outside of the Labour Party. He’s the epitome of everything that is wrong with this country’s politics.

Burnham will win if he gets the most votes. There is, or was, a strong Labour vote and a strong Leave vote. Although that baffles some political commentators, a Labour and Leave is quite common—for example, in Wales. The Labour Leave voter is, generally, old Labour, i.e. a pre-Blairite. Like many, if not most, Labour voters (as opposed to party members), they’re probably dischuffed with the current government. They’ll never vote Tory; they might have voted for the pre-teal Tory Reform, but as the Welsh Senedd elections showed, they won’t vote for Teal Tories.

While the Reform candidate is proper Reform and came second to Labour in the general election, it was by 6,000 votes. Josh Simmons (who won) was, like Burnham, also a product of the political machine with a bit of time advising Meta. He’s more Corbyn/Starmer than Blairite—but Corbyn doesn’t attract old Labour either. Turnout was 53% compared to the countrywide 60%; much of the Labour vote stayed home.

Quite possibly the stay-at-home vote is the one that will decide whether the man styled the King of the North (shouldn’t that read King of t’North?) gets to Westminster or not. How they’ll vote is unknowable—and there have been astonishingly few polls conducted. The Survation poll, about the only one published, is based on extensive modelling on a sample size of 504 (from a constituency of some 77,000 voters). That’s a massive extrapolation, fraught with statistical risk. The poll is now old, conducted 18th to 22nd May, before hard campaigning began.

The bookies reveal that many, many more people are betting on Labour than anyone else, with odds of 3 to 1 on (and shortening). Reform is at 3 to 1 against (and drifting). Restore is 25 to 1 and drifting—having been as high as 8 to 1. If you’ve avoided the bookies all your life, an explanation of odds is here . The short version is that among those who punt, Andy Burnham is a very strong favourite and has a 75% chance of winning.. The investors who make up the bond market will have done their own research and already factored a Burnham win into the price of UK debt, which has hovered around 5% since the election was called. Other factors are stronger drivers than the (alleged) Burnham danger. That said, remember that for every bookies favourite who wins on a racecourse, two don’t (which is how bookies make a profit).

While the outcome is uncertain, the Restore vote will be the key measure. It’s the first time it has stood in a Westminster election, so this will establish a baseline. It’s important for Restore, Reform and the country.

If you live in Makerfield, please vote. The country needs the data.

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There are, or were, some seats where a donkey with the appropriate rosette would be elected. Broadly, northern working class constituencies voted Labour; southern shires plus the less industrial bits of the north went Tory. The West Country went Lib Dem (to be different), as did various odd or self-regarding places in the rest of the UK. Scotland went SNP and, until this year, Wales voted Labour, never Tory.

The key skill for a wannabe politician was therefore to get selected for a safe seat, usually achieved by overt keenness and a lot of brownnosing to get a shot at a marginal or unwinnable seat. A decent performance there, plus more brownnosing, some patronage or nepotism (ideally both) and a bit of backstabbing would then get the ambitious wannabe into a safe seat. The electorate wasn’t involved and party members in constituencies seldom had wide discretion. The House of Commons slowly declined from several hundred MPs who put the interests of their constituents first to an array of toadies who can only recite the party line (particularly if some helpful researcher writes their speech for them, or ChatGPT does). The interests of their career trump addressing the problems of their constituents.

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The political map changed after the Brexit referendum. The “red wall” started to crumble as Labour Brexiters (of whom there are plenty, outside Westminster) saw that Corbyn’s offering was weak and voted for Boris. Boris’s army of toady incompetents failed to deliver (and worse). It’s now apparent that the entire system of government, nominally led by the House of Commons, is rotten to the core. It’s not just Brussels that stinks; Westminster is a foetid swamp of egos, spite, failed ambition and jellyfish in jobs requiring a backbone.

This decay was confirmed in 2024 when Richard Tice’s Reform got eight votes for every seven that the Liberal Democrats did but just five seats to the Liberal Democrats’ 72. The pre-Farage Reform campaigned on the premise that the government system was screwing the voter. It played well on the streets (I know; I was pounding them myself), and it attracted people from across the political spectrum – apart from the progressives and the careerists. The result proved the theory.

Farage’s return was (arguably) a boost to the campaign, although it was well underway before he came out of retirement. Post-election, he set about “professionalising” the party, which started with cancelling the manifesto Reform had stood on and campaigned for. He went on to recruit Zia Yusuf as the party chair. (A strange choice, the banker turned tech multi-millionaire is young and has never stood for election – usually political chairs have experience and credibility). Zia failed to prevent or remedy the breach with Rupert Lowe. Reform’s actions since the bust-up have been disgraceful, vindictive, petty and personal. Rather than being cowed by the assaults, Rupert Lowe stood by his principles and set up a new party, Restore. At the time of writing, it has more members than the Liberal Democrats.

Now we have the spectacle of Nigel Farage whining in the Mail (and anywhere else that he can get published) that Restore will split the anti-Burnham vote and only Reform can save the country from that. Farage can huff and puff, pontificate and sneer (not his most attractive line) and whinge as much as he likes. It won’t alter the fact that it was his party’s actions – in which he was, as leader, complicit at the least – that led to Restore being founded.

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Under Farage, Reform focused on how to win power and concluded it is best done by recruiting disgruntled Tories. Perhaps, but Reform’s conversion from political iconoclast to teal Tories contributed to its pathetic performance in the Senedd elections (as did rotten candidate selection, as I wrote here). Restore (in its Great Yarmouth Party guise) hammered Reform in the Council elections. For every person who voted Reform, two voted Restore. It may be a small battle in the grand scheme of British political warfare, but it’s telling.

Here’s another stat: when I announced on my Reform Facebook page that I was switching to Restore, fewer than 100 of my over 10,000 followers complained. Many say they have followed me to Restore. I see some of them at the Restore branch meetings, which are rather better attended and more fun than the Reform ones. I know of no one who has left Restore for Reform.

Of course, Reform survived my departure. I was replaced by an ambitious Tory defector; therein lies Reform’s failure – it has been subsumed by the political establishment and therefore has no hope of challenging it. Put simply, Reform is interested in seizing power by whatever means possible (very much like Streeting and Burnham). Restore exists to fix this country, which starts with dismantling the incompetent state. We anticipate abuse and obstruction, but we’re thick-skinned. And determined. And highly competent.

Farage’s diatribes postulate that only Reform can save the country from Burnham. Clearly if Burnham loses, his leadership aspiration is on hold. That still leaves Streeting, Rayner, Miliband and (probably) Torsten Bell. They share a surfeit of ambition, a shortage of ability and a lifetime career inside the toxic Westminster bubble; they make Starmer look good.

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Burnham is unlikely to win a big majority in the strongly Brexit, long-time Labour seat. Few people like being the platform for the naked ambition of a talentless self-publicist. Scraping a seat in the House of Commons would be a disastrous start for the (self-styled) king of the north’s leadership campaign. Every vote that isn’t for Burnham damages him. Restore’s canvassing in Makerfield has now covered the entire constituency (some 40,000 homes with 76,000 voters) and shows the race very close. They also note that their support base includes people who haven’t voted for years. This impacts the polling companies’ models; the widely publicised Survation poll that placed Restore at 7% extrapolated from a mere 500 adults and is statistically risible.

It’s a little presumptive for Farage to think that only Burnham can win the leadership contest; politics is a dirty game and there are many (apparently) in the Parliamentary Labour Party who don’t think this is the time for a contest. While Burnham pounds the Makerfield pavements, you can be sure that the Starmer machine is working overtime to deny him the 81 Labour MP signatures the nomination papers require. Even then Burnham must beat Starmer and anyone else who can garner the 81 signatures. The process is long, and opportunities for mishaps, backstabbing and shafting abound. Burnham can’t be that confident; he hasn’t yet resigned as Manchester mayor (salary £114,000 – more than an MP but less than a PM).

Farage’s Reform has a problem with its messaging. It campaigned in Wales along the lines of ‘Vote Reform to get rid of Starmer’. It failed. Now in Makerfield he’s calling for people to vote Reform to prevent Andy Burnham (the person deemed most likely to topple Starmer) from getting to Westminster. What has changed in Reform thinking in just two months?

His call for Restore voters to vote Reform is utterly tone deaf; Restore only exists because of the deficiencies of Reform and the toxic actions of Nigel and his henchmen. He chose that path – no one else. Since Nigel’s return, Reform has lost Rupert Lowe, two chairmen, several Westminster by-elections and the Senedd elections. It may be flush with money (vital now that it occupies two floors of Millbank), but it’s losing members to Restore. There is now a distinct possibility that Reform will be beaten by Restore in Makerfield.

Farage and Reform are under pressure; a party whose leader makes bad decisions and then doubles down on them is unstable. There is a blackout on why David Bull is no longer party chairman. He was brought in to shore up relations between the centre and the members after Zia Yusuf had a hissy fit and resigned. Bull didn’t repair much of the damage done by Yusuf’s regime. I can’t see the latest chair, veteran MP and general bruiser Lee Anderson building bridges or charming egos and donors. Reform is not a happy ship.

Farage reckons he gets about 70% of his decisions right. That sounds reasonable, possibly even humble for a political overachiever (and Nigel Farage is certainly that) until you note that the best KC in the country presented with the strongest possible case to argue will never rate his chances above 70%. Why? Because those are the statistics; funny things happen in Court. Bad things are happening in Reform; they have been for some time and it’s not funny.

There will be a lot of noise, much poison and a lot of cant from Reform between now and polling day on 18th June. (Restore doesn’t trust the press, so won’t often talk to them). The Makerfield electorate are blessed with a number of candidates with a range of ambitions, track records and affiliations. I’m confident that they will make an informed choice.

Whoever they elect is joining Parliament under unfortunate circumstances at a tricky time for the country, the Prime Minister, most political parties and (most important for whoever is elected) the people of Makerfield. We must trust that they chose wisely.

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Project Grayburn is the programme to find a replacement for the army’s SA-80 rifle. There are also Projects Troubler, Cairns and Shamer to replace machine guns and sniper rifles. That’s an awful lot of projects dealing with dismounted infantry’s firepower.

Background

The SA-80 is the personal weapon of all infantrymen and most of the rest of the Army, plus the Air Force (which includes the RAF Regiment) and Royal Navy (home of the Royal Marines). The SA-80 was first introduced in 1985, replacing the much loved Self Loading Rifle (the SLR, or “That Rifle”). The SLR replaced the legendary Short Magazine Lee Enfield, introduced at the turn of the last century. The initial versions of the SA-80 had major design flaws and manufacturing faults, which took a while to iron out. It’s now a reasonably adequate weapon.

The SA-80 introduced three major innovations compared to the SLR. Firstly, SA-80 had an optical sight with four times magnification, which transformed the infantry soldier’s ability to acquire targets and kill them. The sight was only issued to infantry; the rest used iron sights, essentially the same as the SLR (or any other rife without a telescopic sight).

Secondly, the SA-80 is very short thanks to a bullpup design, which puts the magazine behind the trigger and eliminates the stock. Short weapons fit more easily into the back of armoured vehicles and are handier in house to house fighting. The downside is that they are less effective with a bayonet – the infantryman’s weapon of last resort.

The final innovation was selectable automatic fire (when set to automatic the weapon continues firing until the trigger is released or it runs out of ammunition). Automatic rifles were not new to the world but were to the UK. Most other NATO countries equipped their infantry with automatic rifles, often known as assault rifles, as did the Soviet Union (in the guise of the legendary AK-47 and the not quite so ubiquitous AK-74). In contrast, the British SLR fired one round at a time. The SLR was based on the Belgian FAL (fusil automatique léger – the clue is in the name) with the automatic fire specifically removed.

Automatic fire in an assault rifle was and remains a controversial subject. If you miss with the first round, you will probably miss with the rest of the burst. Automatic assault rifles merely increase ammunition consumption with no additional battlefield benefit, as one hit on a person is generally enough to incapacitate. The infantryman must also carry more (heavy) ammunition, which will slow them down. An infantryman who runs out of ammunition can only fight with their bayonet; they’ve become the idiot who takes a knife to a gun fight.

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Calibre

For the SA-80 the weight penalty of automatic fire was avoided by reducing the calibre from the NATO standard 7.62 mm to the (other, American) NATO standard 5.56 mm. A 5.56 mm round (the cartridge plus the bullet) weighs half as much as a 7.62 one, a reduction of over 4 kilogrammes for the average infantryman.

Switching to 5.56 mm forced the infantry section’s machine gun to change calibre too. (Infantry works in groups of eight men, called a section—unless you’re American and call such a group a squad.) In the SLR era, each infantry section had a 7.62 mm machine gun, the GPMG. In the SA-80 era the GPMG was replaced by the 5.56 mm Light Support Weapon (LSW). The LSW shared the SA-80’s bullpup layout and optical sight. It had a slightly longer barrel and a bipod, making it slightly heavier than an SA-80 but around 4 kg lighter than a GPMG. Like the SA-80, it was fed from a 30-round magazine. One LSW was issued per fire team (a section is split into two four-man fire teams); one GPMG was replaced by two LSWs.

The GPMG was belt-fed with rounds linked together by clips. Additional belts could be clipped onto the end of the belt without interrupting the GPMG firing, which is important. Changing magazines on the LSW takes several seconds, during which it can’t be fired . The LSW gunner isn’t even looking at the target; he’s looking at his magazine. Somehow this was not thought to be a bad thing at the time.

The SA-80 equipped infantry section lacked firepower compared to its predecessor and, as it turned out, the opposition. Events, particularly the Afghanistan War, demonstrated this; in 2003 the LSW was replaced by the belt-fed 5.56 mm Minimi under an urgent operational requirement (UOR) It has a higher rate of fire but still lacked sufficient range. UORs purchase equipment for the armed forces in minimum time with minimum scrutiny. They’re predicated on the assumption that the Army knows what it is talking about. In the case of the Minimi (and several other UORs of the Afghanistan era) it demonstrably didn’t.

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Physics

That’s due to basic physics and was entirely predictable. The chart below shows the kinetic energy of various bullets as they leave the gun. The performance of a bullet is largely determined by its weight and the velocity at which it exits the barrel; the more, the better. The lighter 5.56 mm round has much less kinetic energy (i.e. killing power) than the 7.62 mm. For infantrymen in the back of an armoured vehicle dismounting to clear a house or fight at close quarters, that’s perhaps not a problem. It is a huge disadvantage for an infantryman closing with the enemy on his feet, as happened in Afghanistan. The equivalent Russian bullets are included for comparison.

Note also the 5.56 mm SA-80 is outgunned by the world’s most widely available assault rifle, the Kalashnikov AK-47, much used by the Taliban. If you love trivia, you will enjoy knowing that the Russian 7.62 mm round is smaller than the NATO one because of the difference in the way they measure the calibre of a rifle. The Russian measurement of a barrel’s diameter, which is what the calibre is, runs from the bottom of the groove to the bottom of the opposite groove; the NATO measurement excludes the groove.

The range problem persisted; Newtonian physics is immutable and immune to wishful thinking. In 2009 British Army introduced the beguilingly named Sharpshooter rifle, which is 7.62 mm calibre. In 2018, it accepted reality and replaced Minimi with the old GPMG. The British Army section now comprises one GPMG, one 7.62 mm sharpshooter and five SA-80, two of which have 40mm grenade launchers.

Concurrently, the 6.5 mm Creedmoor bullet became a military bullet when it was adopted as a sniper round by some US Special Forces. The Royal Marines and the army are now upgrading their L129 sharpshooter rifles from 7.62 mm calibre to 6.5 mm Creedmoor, even though, as the graph shows, the benefit over 7.62 mm is marginal. Some now advocate 6.5 mm as the ideal calibre for the SA-80 replacement.

Those advocates overlook the inconvenient truth that the Creedmoor safety template is larger than the 7.62 mm one; many ranges that are safe for 7.62 mm are not safe for Creedmoor. The danger is the bullets landing on civilian land beyond the range boundary. Fixes might be expensive or compromise training or both. The Creedmoor crew also forget that we already have 7.62 mm manufacturing plants and stockpiles. Building war stocks of 6.5 mm and the plant to make it won’t be cheap.

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Finance

There is no money. Courtesy of the bond markets, there’s even less now than there was when the Defence Industrial Plan arrived in the Treasury. They will rightly question whether the need to replace SA-80 (the premise of Project Grayburn) is genuine and urgent. Certainly the 5.56 mm round has been found lacking on the battlefield and certainly having two calibres of ammunition is an expense and an inconvenience, particularly if the calibre is flawed. So the need is genuine.

It might be urgent, but if the Army were wise, it would argue the economic attraction of eliminating 5.56 mm ammunition from UK stockpiles, which simplifies logistics and reduces costs. Returning to a 7.62 mm army would save money and increase effectiveness. While the Creedmoor chorus will (rightly) claim that their darling is better, particularly at long range, the reality is that most infantry fighting is at closer ranges. The expense of introducing a new calibre for a marginal gain in an extreme case is prohibitive, so Creedmoor is out, as is 5.56 mm.

The answer to Grayburn is to pick a 7.62 mm assault rifle from the plethora currently available and put an optical sight on it (without doubt the best bit of the SA-80). That would deliver a better weapon and, with a bit of creative accounting work, at a nugatory cost.

Unfortunately the Army is not wise. Project Grayburn seeks a weapon that will also have a carbine (shorter barrelled) version for some non-infantry soldiers and another version for cadets. Why? – They have entirely different needs. While some, indeed most, non-infantry soldiers have the space available to have the same weapon as the infantry (possibly without the optical sight), some don’t, notably tank crews and helicopter pilots. There aren’t many of them (about 2,000), and they’ll only be doing dismounted combat if they have had a bad day of battle and been shot down or blown up. If they can’t find space for the new rifle, give them a Glock pistol or let them use an Uzi sub-machine gun (both 9mm calibre, already in service).

As for the cadets, there is little merit in developing a version for them. Either they learn to shoot using .22 rimfire (non-military) rifles, or they get whatever the rest of the Army has in 7.62 mm calibre. Or they carry on with the cadet version of the SA-80 that they currently have. There is no merit in a cadet learning to shoot on a service rifle; if you can shoot straight with one rifle, you can shoot straight with them all. Learning to operate a new rifle doesn’t take long and it will be covered in basic training anyway; not all recruits have been cadets.

With Grayburn reduced and almost cost free the Treasury mandarin could turn to Project Shamer, the search for a new sniper rifle. In the infantry world snipers are very high status – their combination of fieldcraft and marksmanship is the very essence of being an infantryman. A battalion of 600 typically has eight sniper pairs (no one moves alone on a battlefield). The current rifle is ageing, apparently.

The British currently have two sniper rifles, the L115 and the L118, both manufactured by Accuracy International, who have been supplying British Army snipers since 1985. The L118 and L115 both evolved from earlier versions. Surely this evolutionary process can continue. The requirements are specialist, and the volumes are low. If there is no compelling case for change, remanufacture what you already have. Project cancelled.

That leaves Projects Cairns and Troubler. The former seeks a replacement of the venerable GPMG in the mid-2030s, and the latter wants a lightweight machine gun in 5.56 mm calibre now. The GPMG works well, as it has done for decades. There are some machine guns that claim efficacy at longer ranges, but a dismounted infantryman should not be in combat at long range. The age of its design is irrelevant; the Bundeswehr’s MG3 machinegun, still in service today with no replacement in sight, is based on the World War Two MG42, itself an evolution of the MG34 (designed in 1934). There is no money, and there is no operational need. Why are highly paid procurement staff wasting time (and our money) on seeking a solution to a non-problem? Project Cairns should be cancelled.

Project Troubler seeks a lightweight 5.56 mm machine gun. The very existence of this project demonstrates that the Army has learned precisely nothing since it’s failed procurement of the Minimi, withdrawn from service less than a decade ago. The GPMG exists and works. Sure, it’s a bit heavy, but soldiers (including me) have been hauling it around for decades. Dismounted infantry should do more press-ups and squats (which cost the taxpayer nothing) and spend less time seeking flawed solutions to non-problems. Project Troubler must also be cancelled. Whoever produced or supported the requirement should be sacked; the Army isn’t (or shouldb’t be) a refuge for idiots.

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Getting Real

How is it that these ridiculous projects exist? Who approved them? Why are they still employed by the taxpayer? There are clearly enormous problems in the core of the MOD and in the military parts. Until they’re resolved, throwing cash at the MOD is pointless.

The SDR and its spending plan should be cancelled. That might not deter Russia, but it would cheer the bond markets, which are rather more vital to our national security than our weakened, neglected and mismanaged armed forces. We could assuage President Trump’s demand for more NATO firepower by ordering more frigates more quickly (we have good ones already in production).

A competent government (ha!) which cared equally about defending The Realm and spending taxpayer’s cash wisely would initiate a new review called “Getting Real”. It would identify and resolve the weaknesses in the MOD’s staff and structure that are exemplified by these absurdities. A sensible government would be implementing a profound review of the MOD. How is it that we have two full generals, six lieutenant generals, 40 major generals and 150 brigadiers when the entire army has a strength that could be commanded at war by just one lieutenant general, five major generals and about 20 brigadiers? Why is it that the military experts are seeking to reintroduce a light machine gun concept that has already failed? Above all, who (precisely) has learned the lessons of the Ajax farce, or any of the other myriad procurement failures?

The awful truth is that the MOD could barely be more ineffective. The good news is that means that any radical reform is low risk; The Realm can hardly be less defended than it is – we can’t even keep the Red Arrows airborne. That’s the perfect opening for a bold minister of defence, trusted and supported by the prime minister and able to convince MOD civil servants and officers (not just the senior ones) that the status quo is unacceptable, improvement is an imperative and it starts now. Cardwell did it after the debacles of the Crimean War, inter alia, ending the purchase of commissions. After the Boer War, Haldane (the best Prime Minister we never had, according to contemporaries) completed and extended the Cardwell reforms, delivering the best army in the world – as the Kaiser’s troops found out the hard way at the Battle of the Marne, where the British Expeditionary Force broke the Schlieffen Plan and denied Germany the quick win in the West that it needed.

I don’t see any Cardwells or Haldanes in the current Labour Party. John Healey is, I’m told, a good man – but he’s achieved nothing. Like his boss, he turns the handle on a broken procedure pump and is surprised when the results are disappointing. The SDR will not reform the MOD, so all that will happen is the government will be throwing good money after bad.

The real current threat to the nation, the bond markets, won’t like that. As the Blairites didn’t sing (but should have) “Things ain’t going to get better…” Brace for tough times.

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It’s therefore hugely amusing to see Reform rolling out arguments for Restore not to put up a candidate for the Makerfield by-election. So far the various authors have suggested that Restore is too small (wrong – over 130,000 members in about one month, already more than the Tories and the Lib Dems); too focused on East Anglia (wrong, over 400 branches covering all the country); or acting against the national interest (wrong, the country is stuffed and it needs high quality people in Westminster to fix it, not careerist politicians.)

It’s instructive that Nigel Farage’s Reform now believes that it has a right to win and that only Reform UK is there to serve the national interest. This arrogance, about which I have written before, was Reform’s undoing in Wales. It blew what was a genuine chance of winning a majority in the Senedd and came a distant second to Plaid Cymru. It came first in just five (of 16) constituencies; for every nine people that voted for Reform, 11 supported Plaid. Reform’s campaign started late and their candidate selection was repeatedly delayed and corrupt.

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Reform UK may be better led in the northwest than it is in Wales (low baseline!). It is far from clear that Reform is capable of winning a by-election. Its recent track record isn’t great; it lost the Senedd by-election in Caerphilly, then it lost the Westminster by-election in Gorton (also in the Northwest). Both campaigns had huge support from Reform members plus the benefit of Reform’s expensive canvassing software. Yet Reform lost both elections, badly. True, Sarah Pochin MP won the Runcorn by-election (also in the northwest) way back in May 2025 by just six votes, but that was then and this is now.

In contrast, Restore has only stood in one council election. All nine of its candidates romped home comfortable winners, each with at least twice the votes of the Reform candidates. It’s Restore that has the form and momentum. Restore is already selecting a local candidate for Makerfield; its members across the country are already making plans to go and help campaign. A fair few of those members used to support Reform, many of whose supporters are a bit low (or so they tell me when I meet them at Restore meetings, which have more people turning up than the Reform ones I used to attend).

Of course, it’s far from clear that Andy Burnham (assuming he gets the numbers) will command the support of all branches and factions of the Labour Party. Whether the Streeting gang, Ange’s acolytes or even Miliband’s minions will turn out to support Burnham’s election campaign is questionable. The Greens and Lib Dems will be there to offer a home for the disillusioned Labour vote, which might also stay home. Indeed, his hubris is comparable to Nigel Farage’s.

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Our devious, process obsessed Prime Minister would be best served by some other party winning. He’s got a massive majority so one MP more or less is neither here nor there. If an anti-Starmer candidate lost a safe Labour seat, other plotters would have pause for thought. If Andy Burnham must resign as Manchester’s mayor before he stands and he then loses, it’s entirely possible that he would not be re-elected in Manchester – no one likes a loser. Or a traitor, come to that. Indeed, the NEC might not allow him to run to be mayor – our Prime Minister is vengeful and, frankly, Burnham is a man who needs kicking when they’re down. Like all careerist politicians, he’s easily replaced – one of the few things the UK is not short of is ambitious lefties lusting after power.

Stepping back, the United Kingdom’s political leadership has been failing for decades. Poor policies ineptly implemented have delivered the economic hole that we’re in. The global financial crisis didn’t help and the lavish Covid handouts made it even worse, but the rot had already set in. It’s systemic; consider HS2. The ambitious plan to connect the nation by high-speed rail went massively over budget; the £100 billion spent will save 20 minutes on a journey from London to Birmingham. The ineptitude is staggering and arises from the inability of politicians to hold civil servants accountable. The management structures, reporting lines and control mechanisms are inadequate. The government machine is not fit for purpose. It needs radical reform.

It’s instructive that Streeting thinks the UK should rejoin the EU, something even the intellectually challenged Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy recognised as a dumb assertion. Andy Burnham thinks the same – and he’s hoping to get elected in a seat where 65% voted to leave the EU.

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One of the most compelling arguments for Brexit was that leaving the EU would make mandarins accountable solely to Parliament and the MPs sent to Westminster by their constituents. With the EU layer of government gone, poor policies that damaged the UK could be altered without reference to Brussels. The United Kingdom’s governance would be driven solely and exclusively by the needs of the UK and the entire government machine would have no other purpose or constraint.

Unfortunately the toxic Tory combination of May and Boris compromised the UK’s exit deal; our government structures remain largely unchanged. (The number on the public payroll has increased, though.) Richard Tice kept Reform going (after Nigel retired from politics to make money) just in case it was needed to deliver a real Brexit and to get government working. That’s what we in Reform (then) fought the 2024 election on.

Reform has now drifted closer to the establishment. That’s partly due to its recruitment policies (Jenrick, Braverman, Krueger, etc.) but also because the establishment now believes that Reform could win. So it’s cosying up. (In Wales the Tories largely carried out a reverse takeover of Reform through the abused candidate selection process, whhc is why I left).

Reform has become less radical and more timid and has flip-flopped on policy. Rather than undertaking root and branch restructuring of the ridiculous welfare system, Reform gets trapped into wasting time arguing about the two child benefit cap. The real questions should be why parents need benefits and why people are having children that they can’t afford to bring up. Fix them and you don’t need a cap (and the bond markets will be happier).

Similarly, the pension triple lock is unjustifiable, yet Reform sticks by it. Taxing the young to pamper the old was a Tory policy, as was cutting welfare (largely paid to the young of working age) to cover unfunded pensions. This makes electoral sense; pensioners are thought more likely to vote than the young. But the triple lock is economic suicide as well as socially iniquitous.

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With Reform moving into conservative territory in order to put Nigel Farage in No. 10 (as Reform often now frames their mission), there is a desperate need for a party to point out that the government machine is inept and iniquitous and stand on a platform of change. That party is Restore Britain.

Reform fights dirty and routinely pays the man not the ball. They need to be careful about that; while questions continue to be asked about Nigel Farage’s personal funding, it is a matter of record that Rupert Lowe, a successful banker, donates his parliamentary salary to charity.

At the time of writing, Burnham hasn’t announced his intentions and Streeting has yet to submit a challenge. It could all be a silly left-wing squabble. At most it will set the scene for which, if any, socialist career politician will replace the chief apparatchik as prime minister. Whatever the outcome, it won’t save the country from the economic doom loop that it is in. History shows us that Labour can’t control the government machine. Thatcher’s Conservative party could, but today’s Tories aren’t of the same calibre (no matter how hard Kemi tries).

The looming fight between Reform and Restore is therefore existential for both parties and this country. I’m among an increasing number of former Reform activists and ex-candidates who were appalled when Rupert Lowe was treated so badly and am now delighted to be in the happy ship Restore. We’re here to fix the country for our children, not further our careers. First past the post, winner takes all fight with Reform and sundry lefties.

Bring it on!

PS, if you want to do something about the sorry state of the country you could join Restore Britain. Click here.

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In declining to resign our current Prime Minister is providing a gripping psychodrama as the upper echelons of the Labour Party manoeuvre to secure their advancement to his job. At the time of writing, no one has actually challenged Starmer; either they lack the necessary explicit support of 81 MPs or they don’t want to be the one to wield the knife (thought to be a fatal mistake for any Westminster leadership campaign).

While we’re in this period of phoney war, bond market investors are getting anxious. The 10-year gilt yield has risen from around 4.8% on election day to 5.1% this morning. On 7th May £1 bought US$1.36. Today it’s worth US$1.34. Investors are selling UK bonds to buy US ones, which is the classic risk reduction move and is what (largely) accounted for Liz Truss. For sure Starmer and his chancellor Reeves have failed to deliver much in the way of growth or debt reduction (10-year gilt yields were a mere 4.1% on election day); they hail from the more economically sensible end of the Labour Party. The narcissism of those seeking to topple Starmer is already costing us money.

Oddly, none of the media pack have asked Wes Streeting why he thinks he would do a better job than the lacklustre incumbent. As his background is student unions, lobbying groups and local labour politics, they’re unlikely to get a straight answer. (That’s unsurprising; Streeting is thought of as a Blairite, and Saint Tone never defined his “third way” – which turned out not to exist; you can’t be a little bit socialist). Streeting’s track record running the NHS is currently unknowable; he spent more money but the problems with junior doctors remain, as do the ludicrously long wait times.

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Other touted runners include (red) Angela Rayner, who may or may not be the darling of Labour’s left but struggles to correctly complete a tax return. She so cares about working people that she pushed through a bill that reduces the number of people in work. Some tout Ed Miliband, the man who can’t eat a bacon sandwich, lost a general election (to Cameron) and committed the country to net-zero and the world’s most expensive electricity (which he still claims will deliver growth). He would be an interesting choice, but as Starmer was hiring yesterday’s people like Gordon Brown and Harriet Harperson, maybe yesterday’s people are the new fad.

And then there is Andy Burnham, the mayor of Manchester, where he is halfway through his third term. He sees himself as soft left and was in government under Blair (Burnham voted for the invasion of Iraq) and Brown, ultimately as Secretary of State for Health. He’s never had a life outside politics, which may explain his extraordinary view that the UK is too much in hock to the bond markets. He even thinks that the bond markets will have to “fall in line” with government policy – he clearly learned nothing in his six month stint as Chief Secretary to the Treasury. Every mention of the possibility of this self-publicising, innumerate loudmouth becoming prime minister increases bond yields.

Other MPs and ministers are mooted as candidates by the press, but these are the key ones. The immediate battle for Streeting is to get a leadership contest underway before Burnham wins a by-election, which is by no means certain. This, of course, plays into Starmer’s hands – he has myriad faults but he has a gift for manipulating process, which in his lawyerly way he considers sacrosanct when convenient. Thus, the idiotic decision to appoint Mandelson as US ambassador was justifiable as due process was followed. Even the parliamentary investigations followed that line, obsessing about process and influence, not who countenanced the demonstrably flawed Mandelson for a crucial job usually filled by an experienced, professional diplomat.

The obsession with process, not outcome, is a feature of modern government. As you sit in A&E waiting for treatment, you know the outcome of NHS policy is unacceptable; that the budgetary and spending processes that led to it were perfectly followed is scant comfort. If a perfectly followed process delivers an unacceptable outcome, the process has failed and must be changed. This is blindingly obvious in the world of business, but few in Parliament (and vanishingly few in the Parliamentary Labour Party) have spent much time in the world of commerce.

The net result? We pay a moron premium on the national debt. The money spent servicing that comes from taxation; it therefore can’t be spent on health or defence or potholes. The higher the moron premium, the less money for public services at any given level of taxation. The Reeves solution of increasing taxation stifles growth. That increases the moron premium and things fail to improve.

Before we disappear over the cliff of a debt crisis let’s step back, admire the view and reflect on how we got here.

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The last time the UK government spent less than it raised in taxes or, as business people would say, traded solvently was in 2001 when Gordon Brown was Chancellor but stuck to the previous Tory (John Major) government spending plans. Then it all went wrong as Blair’s “Third Way” turned out to be socialism dressed up to be trendy. The global financial crash was partly caused by economies awash with cash but nothing to invest in, having exported much of the US and UK’s capital intensive industry, such as manufacturing (machines cost money), to Asia. With it went employment and taxable corporate profit.

Over the same period, the number of people employed in central government rose from 2.3 million to 4 million today. The past 25 years have seen massive centralisation, the hallmark of a socialist state. At the same time MPs, whose job includes challenging the state’s spending of their constituents’ funds, have become professional politicians and theorists. In opposition their information comes from think tanks; in government it also comes from civil servants. Few MPs have the experience or intellectual rigour to challenge what they’re told (there are exceptions; successful businessmen Rupert Lowe, Richard Tice and Angus MacDonald spring to mind). The status quo, the ever-increasing and centralising state, has been accepted as the norm.

Unfortunately the socialist dream of a state that cares for its citizens “from the cradle to the grave” (as Beveridge put it in his 1942 report) continues to fail. Beveridge promised to tackle the five giants of want (meaning poverty, not greed), disease, ignorance, squalor, and idleness. That’s not been the trajectory for the past quarter of a century. Why?

In part it’s because hitherto at most elections the British people have had a choice between socialism (Labour) and a managed economy (one nation Tories). The last free market government ended in 1997. Crony capitalism became the norm, and governments sought to manipulate the electorate through sin taxes and the nudge unit. The parallel emergence of careerists led to groupthink, often containing logical fallacies that no careerist politician dared challenge. Diversity good; firm borders bad. Equal rights good; investigating Muslim rape gangs bad. International free trade good; leaving the EU bad.

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It was this last one that upset the unstable political apple cart when the nation, for various reasons, voted (against the advice of the government and the opposition parties) to leave the protectionist trade bloc, which is the European Union. That was a decade ago; it still defines and divides British politics. Westminster and Whitehall still don’t grasp that the Brexit vote was a complete rejection of the political and economic status quo. While they can and do yap about the economic costs of leaving (pick a number of your choice), they have done nothing, precisely nothing, to address the public’s rejection of the established political process.

Post the 2016 vote the public has seen nothing to reassure it. After May’s fiascos, Johnson’s antics, the covid overreaction and disaster, the scrabbling for a stable Tory leader and the subsequent election of Keir Starmer, little changed in the Westminster bubble, bar one thing. That thing was the rise of Reform, effectively from nowhere.

In 2024 Reform campaigned on the general theme of the state being incompetent and the government machine being in serious need of restructuring. That returned five MPs; more than 80 Reform candidates came second. Overall Reform received 4.1 million votes, almost 20% more than the Lib Dems, who got 72 seats. Notwithstanding the vagaries of the first-past-the-post system, the outcome (in terms of power and seats) of the general election failed to reflect the vote.

To anyone outside the Westminster bubble it is no surprise that the government (and the establishment) got a further kicking at every available opportunity. Labour lost by-elections and got thoroughly trounced in the local and devolved assembly elections. The surprise was how well the nationalists did. In Wales at least, it was as much due to the ineptitude of Reform (as I explain here) as a surge in desire for independence.

Starmer’s response to the predictable trouncing at the ballot box was typical of him and the problems of the current crop of politicians. He rightly made the point that there is a process to become leader of the Labour Party, that if anyone wants to trigger it, he’ll fight and that as no one has yet amassed the necessary signatures, there is nothing to discuss. What he failed to do was inspire his party with oratory (because he can’t) and then exploit his massive majority to destroy dissent. He didn’t sack Streeting for disloyalty and failing to focus on his job. He hasn’t sacked anyone for failing to deliver on policy – potholes, expensive energy and the lack of houses being built. Starmer frequently sacks non-politicians on a whim. He doesn’t seem able to sack underperforming ministers.

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In part that’s because the Labour Party has many factions, all of whom believe in socialism of one form or another. Starmer’s undeserved majority includes many across the socialist spectrum, although it’s probably more left-leaning than the Blair-Brown governments. It’s the nature of a political party leader’s task that they must embrace all factions, but Starmer is focusing on this too much. Not only does he have a huge majority to ram through policy, he also has MPs who know that they’re possibly toast at the next election. They’ll therefore support anything that defers their day of reckoning with the electorate. He has pretty much carte blanche.

Yet Starmer says he won’t block Burnham from standing in the forthcoming Makerfield by-election, triggered by the resignation of Josh Simmons (damaged by a scandal involving him falsely accusing journalists of links to the Kremlin) to create an opening for Andy Burnham. That’s weak; Starmer has great power on Labour’s National Executive Committee (who approve all candidates) and could easily have made the argument that Burnham has committed to the people of Manchester to serve as mayor until the next mayoral election in 2028 and that for him to short change them smacked of putting personal ambition above serving the public.

It is, of course, by no means certain that Burnham will win in Makerfield. Electoral Calculus was forecasting a Reform win, although their methodology doesn’t include either the Burnham factor or the Farage one. Makerfield is 97% white and 68% Christian, so the Gazan Greens probably won’t thrive. It voted leave by 65%. In the General Election Labour won with 46% of the vote; Reform came second with 32%. On the face of it, Markham is a tough place for the pro-EU Burnham, despite his quiet Catholicism.

Reform UK seems twitchy; they have an expensive habit of losing by-elections they should have won on paper (Caerphilly and Gorton & Denton, lost to Plaid Cymru and the Greens respectively). Despite their protestations to the contrary, all is not well in Reform. Their wholesale acceptance of Tory defectors didn’t play well with the membership or on the streets. They’re already blasting former Reform MP Rupert Lowe’s Restore, fretting that if Restore stands a candidate it would split the anti-Labour vote. It’s an argument for another day; had Reform remained an agent for changing the rotting British state, Restore would not need to exist.

And the United Kingdom desperately needs change to its economics, the politics that drive them and the process that selects lacklustre MPs then promotes them far beyond their abilities. People can win a local election by standing on a pro-Gaza platform, despite foreign policy being outside of local government’s remit and Gaza’s problems making the Schleswig-Holstein question seem trivial. Our politics are dysfunctional.

Replacing Starmer with some other ambitious socialist career politician won’t change much. Streeting might be more articulate, Burnham more bruising and Rayner more “working class” but none of them is any more up to the job than the current apparatchik. The only thing that any Labour leadership election contest will achieve is an increase in the moron premium during the protracted process. Increasing interest rates leads us further down the economic doom spiral.

Streeting, Burnham and Rayner going on ego trips will harm the country, whatever the outcome. It would be better if they didn’t bother. It’s a low baseline, but sticking with Starmer is the least bad option.

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Of the six Type 45 destroyers, two are undergoing an upgrade, two are in maintenance, HMS Dragon is defending Cyprus (when not repairing her freshwater systems) and the other, HMS Duncan, is in work-up following maintenance. That's all we have; the Prime Minister may want to put together a European operation to assist the United States in clearing the Straits of Hormuz, but he hasn’t got the warships. All our mine hunters are in the UK at the moment as the Navy transitions to integrated ship and drone mine hunting. Starmer might not be prime minister for much longer, but that won’t solve the lack of warships.

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Achieving this level of rundown without a public outcry is an astonishing PR achievement. No doubt some PR type or behavioural economist will research quite how the Navy withstood parliamentary and public scrutiny. For what it’s worth, my theory is that no one wants bad news – especially if it’s expensive – so everyone wanted to be lied to. (See also pension Ponzi schemes, the deficit and net zero).

The root of the Navy’s problem was the abject failure of any government to order replacement frigates in time; none were ordered between 1996 and 2017 – a dereliction of duty by multiple First Sea Lords and Ministers of defence (of all political flavours). Frigates are now on order; indeed, the first two (of eight) Type 26 (HMS Glasgow and Cardiff) have been launched and are fitting out, a process that takes years. Three more are in construction and two more on order. Two Type 31 Frigates (HMS Venturer and HMS Active) are also in the water fitting out, with two more under construction. That will eventually give the Royal Navy a total of 13 frigates by the end of the 2030s. It probably needs more and it definitely needs them more quickly.

That’s a challenge, as dockyard space is at a premium. Expanding dockyard capacity is expensive and risky but is probably necessary if the nation is to rearm. Of course, there is no money. Rachel Reeves wasn’t planning on rearmament, so the Defence Investment Plan is parked in the Treasury pending some fundraising miracle, balancing of the budget or decision on what to cut – which was never going to happen before the May elections.

In the interim various parts of the MOD are lobbying for more money and blithely continuing as before, which (helpfully for senior officers and top civil servants) glosses over the reality that they are part of the problem. Thus we saw the stealthy emergence of Ajax 2 as the alleged solution to all the Ajax problems. (It isn’t, but few in the MOD care, as I wrote here.) Note that the £6 billion cost of the failing Ajax programme would cover the cost of a dozen Type 31 frigates or six Type 26 ones. (The Type 31 doesn’t have the super-expensive anti-submarine warfare capability of the Type 26).

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On top of that, some people and organisations are creating problems that don’t exist, presumably in the hopes of lucrative contracts. One of the most egregious is the concern that the United Kingdom lacks an anti-ballistic missile (ABM) system. We’ve never had one. We’ve never needed one. ABM systems are hugely expensive. Why would we buy or develop one?

Ballistic missiles move very quickly, and the more sophisticated designs manoeuvre as well. Shooting them down is difficult; very difficult. Israel is one of the few nations that does have an operational ABM, David’s Sling, developed with America. It’s designed to destroy incoming missiles from Iran and the Houthis in Yemen, which it does. However, the missiles being fired at Israel are relatively crude in as much as they are slow (if you can call travelling at more than five times the speed of sound slow), lack multiple warheads and don’t manoeuvre. That gives David’s Sling time to compute the missile trajectory and dispatch an Arrow missile (or two) to intercept it.

The Arrow missiles kill incoming warheads and missiles by hitting them, and they can do that even when the missiles are outside of the earth’s atmosphere. David’s Sling and the Arrow missile work and have protected Israel from ballistic missiles hitting its population centres. (It may let missiles that are off track through, saving expensive Arrow missiles for the incoming warheads that are on target.)

Clearly David’s Sling is brilliant. Finland has bought it and other countries are interested. Germany has purchased the Arrow 3 missile from the system, now installed, and hopes to put it and is pressing to put that at the centre of the European Sky Shield Initiative, which fifteen countries (including the United Kingdom but not France) are part of. The ESSI continues the Obama-era NATO missile defence system, which petered out.

Then there is the already existing American THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) system, which has been in action in the current Iran confrontation. THAAD is deployed by Saudi Arabia and the UAE. THAAD is mobile, so there may well be additional American THAAD batteries in the Gulf area and Israel at the moment. Like David’s Sling, THAAD is designed to defeat intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBM), not intercontinental ones (ICBM), as ICBMs are significantly harder to intercept. They’re faster and most now have multiple warheads capable of manoeuvring independently, so one missile becomes (say) 10 targets, some of which might be dummies.

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Fortunately for us, interception is not necessary in the world of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) and the nuclear deterrent. The UK has a significant nuclear arsenal and maintains it at sea 24 hours a day every day of the year (as it has done for decades). We have the capacity to deliver complete destruction to any power foolish enough to strike us with any nuclear weapon, including those launched by ICBM. As no rational actor would take such a step, we don’t need ABMs.

There are flaws in that theory. A rational actor might not believe that the UK’s Prime Minister would order a retaliatory strike. Today they might have a point; Starmer’s record of decision avoidance is lamentable. However, he’s also ruthlessly vindictive – ask Olly Robbins – so nuclear retaliation is not unthinkable in the way that it would have been had Michael Foot ever become prime minister.

Secondly, the possessor of nuclear-tipped ICBMs might not be rational. The threat of Iran’s mullahs possessing ICBMs (which they are developing and their ally, North Korea, already has) plus nuclear warheads (which they are – or were – also developing) suddenly threatens the entire MAD-based deterrence posture. Do they hate us that much? Do they think we won’t retaliate? Do they care if we do?

In such circumstances an anti-ICBM capability might be justifiable. Some already exist. The Russians have the Gazelle, which only protects Moscow. The United States has the snappily named Ground Based Mid-Course Defence, which protects against North Korea. The American RIM-161 Standard Missile 3 (carried on the US Navy’s Arleigh Burke destroyers) has destroyed ICBM targets, although it needs radar support from other systems. The UK’s Sea Viper (on Type 45 destroyers) might get close. The Chinese probably have something; the Indians are rumoured to be developing one too.

But what is the threat? Iran’s nuclear missile aspirations have taken a pummelling and the North Koreans seem rational. Fat Boy Kim is probably also constrained by neighbouring China, as the fallout from a retaliatory strike on Pyongyang might drift their way. The United States, Russia, China, India, Pakistan and Israel are unlikely to launch at us. Nor is France. MAD continues to work; throwing vast sums (that we do not have) at hugely complex and expensive anti-ballistic missile systems makes no sense, even if they can be made to work perfectly.

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The list of British military deficiencies is long, depressing and expensive. Even if money were available, there is no quick fix. If the perceived threat is Russia, a country well versed in the logic of MAD, our nuclear deterrent is enough. Spending money on conventional weaponry has a greater deterrent effect, as the Cold War showed. (If a state can’t win a conventional war, its choice is Armageddon or peace).

This is where Starmer is so wrong when he courts electoral gain and proclaims the Iran war is “not our war”. Beyond the Iranian attacks on British sovereign territory, Israel and the United States are shedding blood and expending treasure to eliminate the emerging long-range nuclear threat from Iran. If the mullahs are not rational or have a different logic, that emerging and now (hopefully) snuffed-out threat was a threat to the UK. Our depleted armed forces couldn’t have done much to help, but Starmer’s grandstanding offended key allies whose expertise we may need as we rearm.

Rebuilding our armed forces will take time, huge sums and, above all, a focus on spending wisely, which, as the Ajax programme continues to show, is a rarity. Like France, we have a nuclear deterrent. Like France, we don’t need ESSI. We don’t need ABMs.

We desperately need frigates.

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I steered away from him, slowed and drove to the police station. There I went to the desk sergeant and told him what had happened. I explained that I was an army officer and had thought the policeman was an IRA terrorist. I added that the policeman was lucky to be alive and apologised for giving him a fright. I never did receive a speeding summons.

I recount this anecdote to share the mindset of British servicemen during the Ulster troubles. We were targets for the IRA, who were running a campaign against off-duty personnel and had recently killed a soldier at Litchfield station. We got on with our lives, which were mostly spent on military bases. If we were off base we were conscious of the possibility of being attacked, either by a gunman or a car bomb. We never went off base in uniform and routinely checked underneath our cars for bombs. Personal security was a constant, low-level concern.

British Jews find themselves in a similar plight, but much worse. The possibility of death lurks everywhere, all the time. Unlike service personnel, they don’t have the safe havens of military bases; they must live in the community, be it at school, shopping or at work.

The British armed forces are generally approved of by society; people are supportive. In contrast, antisemitism is rife and much of British society supports the “Palestinian cause”. Back in the day we were fighting the IRA and winning; today antisemitic extremism is on the rise. In 1990 we had Margaret Thatcher, a decisive leader who was very firm on terrorism. Today we have Starmer.

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Wednesday’s attacks demonstrate multiple failures in the British state, in our society, in our leadership and in ourselves. The attacker was bord in Somalia. He arrived in the UK as a child and holds a British passport. He had been referred to the Prevent anti-extremism programme. Beyond that, he had already served time in jail for a violent attack. It’s not clear why he was granted refuge and a passport. Clearly he’s not been an asset to our society, no matter what the immigration tribunal thought.

There has been a large influx of Somalis; the number in the UK has almost doubled since 2010. Their integration is not going well; 2.4% of the prison population are Somali nationals (which of course excludes those Somalis who now have a British passport). The incarceration rate for Somalis is higher than all but Albanians, Afghans, Jamaicans, Iraqis, and Iranians. And yet still they come in expectation of a passport.

Many of our current leaders, and wannabe leaders given the forthcoming elections, are of the left and have long supported Palestine and hated Israel. They go on marches and chant “from the river to the sea” or “Death, death to the IDF” while holding signs saying “Globalise the Intifada”. Their wishes are coming true; that’s what happened in Golders Green – two British people stabbed because of their religion. I hope the numpty pensioners clogging up the courts due to their love for Palestine Action are proud of themselves.

This is the problem with the left; they adopt causes, turn them into doctrine and then believe in them to such an extent that they can’t be questioned. Thus, net zero, Marxism and the Palestinian cause. Lefties assume the moral high ground and recite policies as mantras. The “Two-State Solution” is sacred to lefties; they forget that Yasser Arafat turned it down in 2000.

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The awful truth is that all Palestine wants is to butcher Israelis, and they are supported in this abhorrent endeavour by Iran. That’s what led to the murderous assault on 7 October 2023, which inevitably led to Israel’s invasion of Gaza. The Israelis found Hamas command centres, weapon stores and the like built under hospitals and schools.

That’s the reality of Gazan Palestine; it uses its own sick and children as human shields for its murder squads. That’s the nature of the state that our own government chose to recognise. Actions have consequences. The Jewish blood on the streets of Golders Green and Heaton Park is part of an escalating level of violence against British Jews; that is, against Britons.

This violence is, literally, a terror campaign being conducted by Muslims, at least some of whom were born overseas. Unlike the Irish Troubles or most twentieth-century terror campaigns, the global intifada lacks a coherent set of objectives, or at least ones that are deliverable by the United Kingdom. Absent a political aim, Golders Green and other Palestinian/Islamist atrocities are beyond terrorism; they’re deranged and savage assaults on a peaceful British community. Absent a coherent infrastructure they will be incredibly difficult, if not impossible, for the security services to penetrate. The murderous campaign is unlikely to end anytime soon. The King’s Peace is in peril; what are we going to do about it?

Firstly, we need better leadership. We need practical pragmatists, not “progressive” idealists. We need leaders who are prepared to be unpopular, to speak the uncomfortable truths. In the case of the murderous antisemites that should include the facts. Jews have been welcomed to the UK since Oliver Cromwell. So were the Huguenots and so have countless others, including Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs and Muslims (particularly post Indian partition). Unfortunately the ill-defined Blairite nirvana of multiculturalism was a delusion and isn’t working. There’s one underlying rule expected of any migrant or immigrant community, which is that they adhere to British law and tolerate other faiths. This must be taught in all schools, preached in all religious assemblies and enforced rigorously.

On the Palestinian issue we should not be recognising the state (which doesn’t exist). We should be open to any solution that delivers lasting peace and reasonable life chances for all. If the two-state solution isn’t viable (and after nearly 80 years it’s pretty clear that it isn’t), the world needs another approach. We need leaders who can start that conversation and, more importantly, demonstrate impartiality.

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On migration we need someone prepared to take control of our borders by whatever means necessary. The granting of British nationality is a privilege, not a right – regardless of what a human rights lawyer says. That privilege should perhaps be rescindable in the event of criminality. Essentially the trade-off will become between maintaining Britain’s long established support for refugees and the maintenance of order on our streets. This government seems to think the problem is British anti-migration protestors; most of the rest of the country knows the problem is the migrants (and the government machine).

That rather simplifies the choice of which box to tick in next week’s Senedd elections; those parties that approve of the Nation of Sanctuary are importing violence. It’s a stupid dogma adopted by the progressives of Welsh Labour, Plaid Cymru, the Lib Dems and the Greens. Those who value safe streets for all Britons should vote otherwise (which in Wales means Reform, as the Tories are dead – mostly having defected to Reform).

Ultimately defeating terrorism is about refusing to be cowed and not giving in to fear. That’s not done by marching and waving placards; it simply requires keeping calm and carrying on. After the 7 July 2005 London bombs everyone commuted home and came back the next day. A fortnight later, after a failed bomb attack and subsequent lockdown, it was the same. Actions speak louder than words; a few Islamic suicide bombers were not going to shut down the City of London.

So how do we defeat these deranged antisemitic murderers? On a personal level, I have decided to show my support for British Jews by eating in Israeli restaurants (about which more on another day). You could do the same.

The shameful reality is that British Jews, whose families have lived here for generations, are besieged. Increasing numbers are emigrating to safety in America and Israel. They feel safer in Israel, at war, under frequent attack and existential threat, than in London. Notwithstanding the Iron Dome missile shield, other Palestinian attacks in Israel are all too frequent. The difference is that a British Jewish family in Israel is in a supportive environment, like the one that surrounded British servicemen. In London they’re not. That a family of Britons can feel so vulnerable in their capital city is a very sad indictment of what our society has become.

I am appalled. Aren’t you?

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For a start, we were never invited to fight in it. As subsequent events have shown, we don’t have much of a navy. We have a bit of an air force, although our jets use a different air-to-air refuelling system to the US and Israeli ones. Our Typhoons aren’t particularly stealthy, and our F-35Bs must carry ASRAAM air-to-air missiles externally, which degrades their stealth too. (ASRAAM isn’t cleared to be carried in the F-35B weapons bay, which is smaller than the one on the F-35A and F-35C. Long story; another article for another day.) As there is no intention to put troops on the ground, what’s left of our (now mediocre at best) Army wasn’t needed. The remaining excellent bit, our Special Forces, daren’t go lest Lord Hermer sues them for doing their job. Starmer’s first sentence was misleading. At best. As usual.

In fact Starmer (and Hermer and Miliband) sabotaged the initial American strikes by refusing them access to Diego Garcia and Fairford. That meant much longer flights for B2 stealth bombers, which in turn will have lowered their availability and prolonged the initial phases. If anything, Starmer put us in the war on the Iranian side, perhaps proving that only losers support losers. Rather than announce this as his decision, he hid behind Hermer’s interpretation of human rights law, which he claimed constrained his actions as prime minister. (They didn’t last year). Remember that if and when President Trump raises tariffs payable by UK exporters. In the light of Starmer’s betrayal of the United States, why wouldn’t he approve arms sales to Argentina and make mischief in the Falklands?

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In any case, we have been peripherally pulled into the conflict as our other allies in the Gulf need help shooting drones. Worse, the ungrateful Iranians struck Cyprus, which it seems was undefended. The net result was a rush of jets, helicopters, missiles and (eventually) HMS Dragon to provide air defence (and work for the local shipyards).

Then came the blocking of the Straits of Hormuz – an entirely predictable Iranian retaliation to complete military overmatch. While the UK economy is not much fuelled from the Gulf, the world is. Oil and gas prices have risen dramatically and that is causing economic hardship in the UK, as I see every day when I fill up my truck and watch what would have been my pay rise head for oil company and Treasury coffers.

Penury is not generally thought to be in the national interest, although it’s the inevitable consequence of Reeves in No. 11 and socialism more widely. The Iran conflict is hurting our allies and interests in the Gulf, driving up energy prices which feeds into inflation. That’s hurting the UK economy already and it will get worse. The Iran war affects the UK; it’s not some peripheral thing. We have no influence in its prosecution due to a lack of military power exacerbated by Starmer’s folly in refusing the US the support it needed and, based on previous actions, expected. The Labour Party’s dislike of Israel, recognition of the Palestinian state and what passes for Starmer’s diplomacy have actually turned the UK into a mere spectator in a conflict that is shaping the UK’s economic performance for the next few years.

Politicians all know the Clinton electoral maxim “It’s the economy, stupid.” Starmer’s actions have materially damaged our economy, thereby worsening Labour’s already parlous electoral state (itself largely caused by believing in socialism and net zero). Labour needs to find votes elsewhere. Where better to get them than the Palestinian-supporting electoral niche, many of whom are Muslim? Hence the “not our war” lie.

Of course, Starmer’s Labour is not the only progressive party to have worked this out, or to be suffering from a belief in climate activism, net zero and (above all) socialism as a path to economic security. Thus, the Greens, the SNP, and Plaid Cymru are all pro-Palestinian. Some boroughs have what is effectively the Gaza Supporters Party (appellations vary and there are some independents too) running for a district or council predominantly on a pro-Palestinian ticket, despite the fact that no local government can do anything about Palestine. That doesn’t stop local politicians debating it, wasting time and public funds that would be better spent collecting rubbish or filling pot holes.

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Ken Livingston’s Greater London Council (GLC) was the same. It declared London a “nuclear free zone” (whatever that meant) and neatly scooped up the anti-nuclear vote, which was substantial back then and was drawn far wider than the Labour Party. His pronouncements and waste of council time on the nuclear weapons debate so infuriated Margaret Thatcher that she abolished the GLC in 1986.

Although the GLC’s abolition didn’t much harm London residents, fifteen years later Blair resurrected it as the Greater London Authority, shortly before he created the Senedd and Holyrood. The Scots, Welsh and Londoners haven’t seen much of an increase in the quality of the services they pay for since the creation of these talking shops; vanishingly few problems are solved by creating more politics.

As Firorello La Guardia, (mayor of New York 1934-45), said, “There ain’t no Democratic or Republican way of sweeping the streets” – so why do political parties get involved in local government in the first place? In theory, it would be perfectly possible, reasonable, and logical to run for a town, borough, district, or county council and elections with no political branding. Local people would stand as individuals and the electorate would select the ones they thought most likely to spend the rates wisely. Indeed, some 10% of councillors are independent, and 35 of the UK’s 370 or so councils have independents as a leader.

There is no evidence on whether they are better or worse run than those under party control. There is no great agreement on how to measure “well run” either, nor indeed much in the way of correlation between a party’s performance running councils and their performance running Westminster. The relationship between central and local government is messily complex, not least in the calculation of central government block funding for the devolved administrations under the Barnet formula, which was introduced in 1978 as a one-off calculation prior to the 1979 devolution elections. As Milton Friedman said, there is nothing so permanent as a temporary measure (see also income tax and comprehensive schools).

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What is clear is that a government machine that stretches from town halls to Westminster is poorly supervised by politicians at every level. (If you disagree, book a GP appointment, count potholes and look at education outcomes). For all the vast sums that central and local governments spend, little is achieved, and those elected to oversee it fail. In central government the national debt rises; in local government infrastructure crumbles (local government borrowing being more constrained). Either way the taxpayer is not getting value for money. Politicians are failing.

That’s unsurprising; most of them have little experience of the world of commerce. Far too many flit from university to quango to political activism to being elected. They owe their income to their party and they know to toe the ideological line. This will be especially true in the next Senedd, whose members come from a closed list with the party dictating who is on the list and in what order. Resigning from a party means leaving the Senedd, losing one’s pay, free house in Cardiff and personal staff. There’s no by-election; the next on the list steps up immediately and automatically. Don’t expect many resignations on principle in Cardiff Bay in the next five years.

For all the hyperbole, the elections are unlikely to change much unless Reform wins an outright majority in Holyrood or the Senedd (or both). That’s now a long shot, which means that the most likely outcome is a continuation of the rule of the progressives, with the concomitant further decline in living standards and efficiency. That being so, many will ask what the purpose of the elections is. They’ll ask even louder if they see money that should be fixing roads, schools and hospitals going to promoting Palestinian causes or furthering diversity. They won’t get an answer though.

The governance of the United Kingdom is failing at every level and in every way. While the parties blame each other, often in a manner that would be considered infantile in a primary school, the national debt rises, growth diminishes and politicians fail to deliver on their manifestos. Our government is rotting from the top and Starmer is the epitome of all that is wrong. Should the much-anticipated Labour electoral collapse materialise, many think and hope that he will be forced out.

Labour leadership selection is complex and time consuming. Should Starmer resign the Deputy Prime Minister would step up. That’s David Lammy. Be careful what you wish for.

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That wasn’t all we covered; anti-terrorism was high on the agenda (about 20% of the British Army was still combatting terrorism in Northern Ireland). However, that didn’t fill the void that the end of the Cold War brought to professional soldiers like me. Post the Gulf War, cuts were in the offing and there was an understandable worry about what the purpose of the Army (in particular) was. We didn’t know then that we’d be sent to the Balkans, Iraq (again) and Afghanistan.

By tradition the last session of the course was a glimpse ahead into what new foes we might face. It was given by a senior intelligence officer. He drew our attention to Islam, a religion spread from the Atlantic to the Pacific. A billion believers, some 20% of the then-world’s population. 300 million or so Muslims spoke Arabic as a first language. He pointed out that their standard of living was significantly lower than ours and that their religion did not sit easily alongside secular western culture. He suggested that some Muslims might act to redress that.

His point was, of course, that there are always threats and that military intelligence officers should keep abreast of them. When things go wrong in the world they go wrong quickly. Quantifying threats is always tricky, and it’s getting harder. A threat comprises intention and capability. Capability is relatively easy to measure for formal warfare, although there are still mistakes like the notorious “bomber gap”. Intent can be deduced at the nation-state level (that’s what diplomats and spies are for). Gauging the intent of subnational movements is far, far harder. Identifying potential lone actors is even worse; MI5 does a fine job. Unfortunately it’s not hard to make a bomb, buy a knife or turn a car or lorry into a deadly weapon, particularly if the perpetrator embraces martyrdom. The simple, stark fact is that Islamic extremists do just that.

So when a cadet seeking to be commissioned into the RAF was suspended for saying that Islam is the greatest threat to the UK’s security, he had a point. People can argue about what else constitutes a security threat. A bond market crash, Russia, China, Iran and this entire government are all up there, along with Ed Miliband and the eco-loons. Which is the largest or most serious? Who knows - it’s a matter of opinion?

It’s true that the vast majority of Muslims are not radicalised, but they are not saintly. Muslims comprise some 7% of the UK’s population, but make up 18% of the UK’s prison population. The 257 Muslims in custody for terrorism comprise 68% of the convicted terrorist population. (Most of the rest are far-right). Certainly the prison population and incarcerated terrorists are disproportionately Muslim.

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Then there is the public perception. According to census data, in 2011 the population was about 5% Muslim; that proportion has increased by 50% or so in a decade. Some, many or most of them are well integrated, speak good English and work hard. But some don’t. Muslims are not universally well integrated into UK society. Some deliberately separate themselves, the burqa being an obvious example. Too many have been involved in the child abuse rings of Rochdale and elsewhere. That this failed integration is putting pressure on the UK’s cohesion is clear. Disintegrating countries are not secure. Again, the officer cadet had a point.

He (or she) also demonstrated a fair bit of moral courage in making the statement; officer cadets are well educated and think before they speak. A wrong answer in selection and their dream of being a jet jockey is over. The cadet was suspended for challenging a consensus and having the guts to question power. That says an awful lot about the RAF officer selection procedures. (You may recall that they have been caught discriminating against white applicants in 2023, such is the drive on meeting diversity targets).

That attitude of preferring those parroting the perceived RAF line over those with moral courage to speak out (a fundamental requirement of leadership) is typical of the rot that has pervaded the armed forces for too long. You may recall that the RAF can’t guard the perimeter of its airfields against eco-loons. No one was sacked, as I wrote last year. The Station Commander is still in post, being replaced in July and no doubt continuing her ascent of the greasy pole. It’s all of a one with the Army’s Ajax programme, the ludicrous outsourcing of selection and recruitment and the Navy’s inability to keep ships at sea.

The Cadet has had a spot of luck; they’ve been suspended from a process designed to turn them into a uniformed apparatchik, not a military leader. They’ll find better, more rewarding employment elsewhere.

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On 24th March, Lieutenant General Anna-Lee Reilly, the Director General Core Delivery for Defence Equipment & Support, faced the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) in Parliament. One of the subjects of discussion was Ajax, the army’s £6 billion new reconnaissance vehicle. In a ministry famed for its inability to buy stuff on time, Ajax stands out as a disaster without equal.

I have written extensively on the MOD procurement disaster that is the Ajax programme, not least because I was quite heavily involved in the early stages of it as both a soldier and an expert consultant. (Spoiler: none of the analysis or operational research concluded that the answer was a 40-tonne behemoth). Following massive delays and quality problems, the latest problems arose when an exercise had to be stopped last year due to the crews becoming ill.

With £6 billion at stake (the equivalent of a dozen Type 31 Frigates and change), the PAC was keen to establish the cause. The General told them that Ajax was fine when it was operated within specifications, but if the tracks weren’t kept tight (i.e. within specification) problems would occur. She revealed that the Army was now working with General Dynamics towards Ajax 2, which would have rubber tracks and automatic track tensioners. She anticipated trials later this year.

Intriguingly, that’s the first anyone has heard of Ajax 2. Conservative MP Ben Obese-Jecty has submitted a written question asking precisely what Ajax 2 is. The answer is due on 13 April. It’s the 17th today: no reply has yet been published.

The committee was quite kind and didn’t press the general further. One member, decorated and retired Colonel Lincoln Jopp MP, asked whether the specification was wrong or the crews had not been properly trained. The General evaded and replied that the exercise was quite long and that the troops involved had lost experience of operating in armour due to the time the Army had spent campaigning in Iraq and Afghanistan.

That sounds like blaming the crews to me. It also sounds like obfuscation.

General Inconsistencies

For a start, the Army left Iraq in 2011 and that war involved armoured vehicles. It left Afghanistan in 2021 and that too involved armoured vehicles, including the Scimitar 2, the tracked reconnaissance vehicle that Ajax will supposedly replace. There may have been some skill fade given covid and cuts, but people who served as troopers in Afghanistan are now corporals, that is vehicle commanders. They will have had (or should have had) extensive training for that and again extensive training on Ajax before they took them over.

Secondly, while Exercise Titan Storm was scheduled for about a month, that’s hardly “quite long”. Moreover, Titan Storm was a far wider exercise spread across southern England. The Ajax bit on Salisbury Plain was shorter, and the damage to soldiers arose from just 10 to 15 hours in the back of an Ajax. That’s not a long time for an armoured soldier to be in their vehicle; if anything, it’s a short day. The General should know this from personal experience; in her youth she spent a couple of years as the workshop manager to the team of mechanics supporting an armoured reconnaissance regiment. That included time at war in Iraq, but perhaps she’s forgotten the basics.

I contacted the MOD and asked why a problem caused by a lack of training was to be solved by a vehicle modification. A Ministry of Defence spokesperson said:

“The safety of our people is of paramount importance. Issues with Ajax are not the fault of soldiers and clearly the experience for many soldiers using Ajax has not been good enough. An extensive safety investigation into Exercise Titan Storm has now concluded and we are working through the findings. We will provide a full update to Parliament on the review and the next steps for the Ajax programme.”

Which is far from illuminating. The MOD’s spokesman is hiding behind a forthcoming statement to Parliament to be made by Luke Pollard Minister for Defence Readiness and Industry. However Lt Gen Reilley’s statement that “After various safety reports, we are now very clear that Ajax, when maintained and operated as designed, presents no safety concerns.” Is pretty definitive.

The question becomes why Ajax was operated with loose tracks, i.e. out of specification. Either the crew didn’t keep them tight (tightening tracks is a routine maintenance procedure for all armoured fighting vehicles) or Ajax has a propensity to loose tracks. If the spokesperson is correct that soldiers (i.e. the Ajax crews and/or the soldiers who trained them) are not to blame, the tracks must be becoming loose very quickly. That’s a design error or specification error. The general rather hinted at that as she went on:

“However, we now need to work with General Dynamics and Ministers to make sure that we can get Ajax back into service in a measured way, where we can assure that safety, and assure our position.”

Why do ministers need to be involved? If it’s a training problem, as the General implied but the spokesperson denies, ministers have no role. If it’s a specification problem or a manufacturing problem it should be covered by the contract. That’s a matter for lawyers, not Ministers. Unless of course, the Army or MOD made a hash of the specification and are now having to pay for a fix, throwing more of our good money after bad.

The entire Ajax fiasco is littered with oddities. How is it that during over 42,000 km of trials the track tension problem either did not manifest itself or was not noticed? Why was Ajax’s Initial Operating Capability (IOC) declared prematurely?

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Track Facts

Armoured vehicle tracks are surprisingly complicated and have a very tough existence. On Ajax they comprise some 80 individual links, which weigh about 25 kg each. The drawing below comes from one in my book on land warfare.

The idler wheel, return rollers and sprocket are bolted to the hull. The sprocket also has a connection to the gearbox and engine, as it delivers the power into the track by a cogwheel that engages in slots in the individual track links. The idler wheel, return rollers and sprocket have no suspension but do have rubber tyres to reduce vibration. The road wheels are also rubber-tyred and connected to the hull. They carry the entire weight of the vehicle and do have suspension. Clearly any vibration in the track will be transmitted to the hull.

The crew live inside the hull; any vibrations in the track will pass through the wheel attachments to them. Imagine sitting in a dark metal box with several people hammering on the outside while it bumps about and you get the picture. This is not new; soldiers (including me) have been sitting in the back of armoured vehicles for decades. Motion sickness is sometimes a problem, but sound (or ultrasound) damage, which seems to be what has happened to Ajax crews, is well outside of the norm because it is designed out.

A track link on the ground is static, even if the vehicle is moving. The Ajax’s seven road wheels pass over it, each delivering a load of two to three tons. Once the seventh wheel has passed the link starts to rise and then goes round the idler wheel. During that time it accelerates to twice the vehicle speed. If the Ajax is travelling at (say) 30 mph, the track link accelerates from 0 to 60 mph in two hundredths of a second, pulling some 130 g. When the link gets to the front of the vehicle it goes round the sprocket and slows from 60mph to zero in an equally short time. It is then laid on the ground and the process repeats. On top of those loads, the sprocket is putting the power that moves the Ajax into the track, some 300 horsepower on each side.

This places a huge load on the track link and the idler, which is bolted to the vehicle’s hull. The track tension varies as the vehicle moves over uneven ground and the road wheels go up and down. With time the track link stretches, the idlers, sprockets and wheels wear and the track slackens. It has more freedom to move, causing more vibration and noise. If a track gets too loose it might jump off the wheels, or even break.

Dealing with a thrown track (as it is known when a track comes off the wheels) means hard work for the crew getting it back on. If a track breaks, the end acts like a whip and is potentially lethal. (On Scimitar broken tracks often flipped vehicles onto their roofs.) Every armoured vehicle crew keeps a very close eye on the amount of slack in the tracks for reasons of self-preservation.

Maintaining Tension

Track tension is usually gauged by the top of the track’s location in relation to a reference point on the hull. This can only be done on hard level ground (known as ‘hard standing’); if the roadwheels are not level, the track slack at the reference point will be misleading.

Ajax has side skirts, which are metal sheets that enclose much of the track system. Side skirts reduce dust and prevent things like rubble or broken branches from throwing the track. Side skirts also contribute to the vehicle’s protection. To view the top of the track one must remove the skirt, which usually pivots downwards. Opening the skirt takes a couple of crewmen a couple of minutes. Ajax has very thick (and heavy) side plates, which makes this essential task more difficult. It shouldn’t make it impossible.

The track is tightened by moving the idler wheel, which is mounted either on a screw thread or at the end of a hydraulic piston. A few minutes’ work with a (huge) spanner, grease gun or hydraulic ram tightens the track until the slack is correct.

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A well-designed tracked vehicle should be able to operate with the tracks remaining sufficiently tight for a couple of days. The tension duration is controlled by the design of the track tensioner and the operating procedures. Both these would be included in the specifications, which would have been issued by the MOD on behalf of the British Army, specifically by one of Lt Gen Reilly’s predecessors.

Ajax was based on an existing vehicle (ASCOD) but it’s much heavier, so the entire track system was redesigned. Perhaps the track tensioner wasn’t? If not, it’s not surprising that it can’t keep the track taut for the required time. That would be a design or specification error and definitely “not the crew’s fault.” It would still be inexplicable, though, as Ajax had some 42,000 kilometres of testing. A weak track tensioner would surely have shown up. That it didn’t implies the trials were flawed.

What is certain is that no vehicle should be having these problems post IOC. The civil servant responsible, Chris Bowbrick, has been sacked, or rather “removed from post” – the sacking of senior civil servants (or generals for that matter) being as rare as unicorn tears. That still leaves the Army with a vehicle that doesn’t work and a trials process that failed. Somehow Lt Gen Reilley has been persuaded that the solution is to adopt composite rubber tracks and automatic track tensioners as the Army transitions to Ajax 2 (whatever that is). She hopes that trials on composite tracks will start late this year.

That makes no sense and isn’t consistent with her previous answers. If the track tension problem was due to poor crew training, why is it necessary to spend yet more money the government doesn’t have on (Gucci) composite tracks? A quick revision course is all that would be needed. Learning to tension a track correctly takes less than half a day and £0 capital cost.

The responsibility for Ajax has now been transferred to the (new) National Armaments Director, Rupert Pearce. A hotshot businessman, Pearce was CEO of the green energy company Highview Power and satellite communication company Inmarsat. He has no experience in defence or turning organisations round. His failing directorate has an astonishing 28,000 staff purchasing most of the MOD’s equipment – (his remit doesn’t cover the nuclear bits).

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Ajax’s tracks came up at his initial discussion with the defence select committee in January. Pearce (again appearing alongside General Reilley) said “…There has been an evaluation in the past about installing rubber tracks. At the moment, Ajax does not have rubber tracks; it has metal tracks, which are seen as operationally superior.” So the Reilley solution produces an operationally inferior vehicle which, according to Reilley, isn’t necessary as the tracks weren’t the problems, the crews were.

General Cowardice

Elsewhere in his January evidence Mr Pearce alluded to a culture where people were afraid to speak the truth to power within the MOD. He said “It is evident from the report of Mr Sheldon KC that there were opportunities in the development programme that were missed because it was difficult to speak truth to power.” (Sheldon published a report into Ajax in 2023). And there Pearce has hit the nail on the head; the MOD and armed forces are full of people afraid to speak the truth to power or, moral cowardice (as we would have described it when I taught at Sandhurst).

The Army’s leadership is riddled with moral cowardice – it’s not just Ajax. The 300 or so complaints of sexual assault are currently being investigated, and the weakness of those investigations speaks of a hierarchy that is rotten, as I wrote in November. Organisations in which people fear speaking truth to power are doomed to failure, as the Army is currently demonstrating.

Organisational culture is set from the top. Like fish, organisations rot from the top; stopping the rot requires senior leadership change. The longer you wait, the worse it becomes. The Secretary of State for Defence, John Healey is, I’m told, a decent man. But he’s been in post for two years (and was shadow secretary of state for defence for four years). He must realise the problems, yet he does nothing.

He should be sacking generals (and admirals and air marshals). Probably all of them. He should be asking why we have so many headquarters to supervise so few forces. He should open a whistle-blower campaign to find out which idiot is responsible for the Ajax track tension disaster. But of course he won’t. He’s a career politician serving under a prime minster who can’t even sack an energy secretary. Driving reforms through takes someone who has led real businesses in the real world.

It will be interesting to see how long Mr Pearce can endure the stench of a rotten ministry. His chunky salary (£400K plus a £250K bonus) will ease the pain, but he’s not senior enough to solve the problems, which start with Lt Gen Reilley and her ilk. No sensible government, particularly one as cash-strapped as this one, would spend any more on defence until the organisation had been made fit for purpose. Healey has the position to do that, but not the ability. Pearce might have the ability but lacks the mandate. It’s a classic UK government arrangement, with failure designed in.

Rather like Ajax.

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All this has been achieved with minimal losses to Israel and the United States and, crucially, thousands fewer Iranian civilians killed than the despotic Mullahs butchered in January. The current truce proposal may or may not come to fruition, but the outcome surely is what success would look like. The markets agree with me; the oil price is falling fast on the spot markets. It’s still some 50% above the pre-hostilities level, but it’s also 15% to 20% below its peak. The price now is about the same as it was when Russia invaded Ukraine; western economics survived that and they’ll survive this.

As I have written before, the BBC suffers from the Bowen perspective. It’s not alone; the contagion is widespread. President Trump is an anti-establishment figure as well as being (by dint of being The President of the United States) the most powerful man on earth. He is therefore a threat to the globalist government machines of America and most of Europe. Threatening them also threatens the media barons who have become influential on the back of advancing their flawed agendas. They, rightly, see President Trump as a danger to their world view, not least the alluring delusion of the “rules-based international order” (RBIO – I’m tempted to call it Rubio, but lefties don’t do irony!).

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Before the current US/Israeli actions, Iran was on the cusp of having both nuclear weaponry and the missile hardware to strike anywhere on earth. The Islamic Republic’s regime was secure and remained in power, not least because it could and did brutally suppress its own population. That murderous brutality is surely against the concepts of the RBIO, although none of the Mullahs have been indicted and the UK hasn’t even proscribed the Iranian Republican Guard Corps (IRGC).

Worse, Iran’s Hamas proxies had committed the murderous barbarism (contrary to RIBO rules) of 7 October. Iran’s Hezbollah and Houthi proxies also attacked Israel with impunity. The latter occasionally attacked shipping in the Red Sea, lengthening western energy supply lines from the Gulf. Israel’s offensive in Gaza destroyed Hamas – which chose to fight rather than surrender, thereby rendering the wide scale destruction of Gaza inevitable. Despite the sneering of Bowen and the Guardianistas, it was President Trump who brokered the ceasefire (which still holds, as the BBC won’t tell you).

Last summer’s strike on Iran set back its nuclear programme. The mullahs restarted it and now the programme and its supporting infrastructure are being (probably have been) destroyed.

Note that RBIO didn’t stop the Iranian restart; RBIO didn’t stop the Mullahs slaughtering their own population in January. Negotiating a settlement with Iran on nuclear stuff has been tried since Obama (lefty super darling) and was last attempted by Mrs Biden’s minion, Sleepy Joe. It never worked. Yet the anti-Trump press pretends that doing nothing was an option. Presumably they would contend that the use of nuclear weapons might be argued to be a crime against humanity and thus precluded by RBIO, so Israel and the world have nothing to fear. “Yeah, right,” as they say in Tel Aviv.

Back in the real world, in February, Israeli intelligence enabled the assassination of much of Iran’s leadership. That’s not attempted regime change, it’s decapitation – in any war it’s often advantageous to damage the opposition’s commanders. Some argue that the operation has handed power to the Iranian Republican Guard Corps (IRGC) leadership. Maybe it has, but IRGC commanders are also mortal and their locations vulnerable.

In response, Iran did what it always does – fired missiles at Israel and its allies, lashed out at neighbouring Gulf states and closed the Straits of Hormuz. (Those strikes on the Gulf states included hitting desalination plants – something that the RBIO chorus led by Starmer and his ilk has yet to act on.) Iran is now running out of ballistic missiles, and many or most of them are intercepted. It still has drones, but they too are vulnerable to being shot down, as the Royal Air Force is demonstrating. Crucially, Iran’s responses have failed to shift the US and Israel from their objectives. They have therefore failed.

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What Iran may have regarded as its trump (ha!) card, choking off 20% of the world’s oil, didn’t work either. Why? Because neither the United States nor Israel depends on it. The entirely predictable price spike has hurt, particularly in the UK. However, it’s not a knockout blow to the protagonists. As some 40% of oil flows through the Straits of Hormuz are bound for China, inflicting a squeeze on their physical supply has no downside for the United States. Reminding India, another major consumer of Gulf Oil, who the real world superpower is probably appealed too.

Many commentators push the view that President Trump is an idiot who changes his mind and always chickens out. They confuse his Truth Social posts as strategic pronouncements rather than tactical noise – quite possibly intended to confuse the opposition (which includes the sneering media and now Kier Starmer’s government). They also forget that the Israelis, who can never afford to lose a war and therefore never have, are exceptionally good at intelligence gathering and analysing that intelligence.

Following the debacle of the 1973 Yom Kippur War the Israelis particularly guard against groupthink. (The Tenth Man Rule, if you’re interested). US military professionals are working closely with Israeli military professionals to deliver the systematic destruction of Iranian military infrastructure, political leadership and, if necessary, other infrastructure.

If the aim of the action was to remove the threat of Iranian nuclear missiles, it has pretty much worked. It will be complete if and when the enriched uranium and other fissile materials have been handed over to the International Atomic Energy Authority (or some other trusted Western organisation – like the US Marines) and removed from Iran. While it is true that last weekend’s rescue of a downed aviator was a tad expensive, it is not impossible for US and Israeli forces to raid and snatch the fissile material. Like all such operations, it would be risky, but not impossible. Those military risks must be balanced against the risks of Iran cheating on any deal, if one emerges.

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The war has not been cheap; anti-aircraft missiles cost at least $1,000,000 each and the US aircraft losses have cost close to $1 billion. Despite reasonable concerns about the supply of high-tech weaponry, US stocks have held up and Israel seems not to have (yet) run out of the Arrow 3 missiles that underpin their David’s Sling anti-ballistic missile system. Similarly, the American THAAD systems deployed around the Gulf seem to have held up both physically and logistically. It would be reasonable to assume that both systems will be replenished and repaired during the ceasefire. The Iranians might also replenish a bit, although with their factories trashed it might be hard. Moreover, I’m sure US and Israeli drones, satellites and agents will be watching and noting activity and adding them to the target list. If or when the ceasefire collapses, it will be open season on Iranian military infrastructure again.

President Trump cares deeply about his blue-collar voter base. He has already reshaped US support for Ukraine from an expense into a profit line – European nations pay for weapons shipped there. He’s signalled that NATO cannot rely on the largesse of the US taxpayer without building up its capability. (Embarrassingly, the UK’s only warship in the region – HMS Dragon – is broken after a rushed deployment. It’s possible that HMS Dragon was one of only four functional warships in the entire Royal Navy, which sort of makes President Trump’s point. If the Europeans want the Straits of Hormuz open, President Trump thinks they should chip in some warships. It’s possible that he also thinks that Iran should pay a fee to the US for its oil reserves or share them with the US. Who knows? President Trump’s initial negotiating positions are (sensibly) maximalist.

His phrasing is brutal, but that does not make his sentiments unreasonable. The United States has supported Israel against the malign forces of the Islamic Republic and has received precious little help (I exaggerate) from European countries, most of whom are also NATO allies. The United Kingdom actually sabotaged American efforts through the denial of RAF Fairford and Diego Garcia for “offensive” operations. Starmer did the same with his recognition of the (non-existent) Palestinian State and his attempted sale of the Chagos. President Trump is unlikely to forgive that. Starmer has comprehensively and wilfully damaged the UK’s interests through his delusions and desperate need for domestic electoral support. “Interests” is too non-specific – Starmer’s actions have actually delayed UK growth. Working people (including long-suffering HGV1 drivers) are poorer.

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President Trump has one other avenue for saving the American taxpayer money. The United States provides billions of dollars’ worth of weaponry to Israel, typically over $2 billion a year. In March 2025 President Trump approved $25 billion of arms “sales” to Israel via the Foreign Military Sales (FMS) process. Under FMS, weaponry may be paid for by the recipient or the US Government. A secure and peaceful Israel would need neither the American hardware nor the massive discounts.

Which just leaves the prices of crude oil, refined oil and liquified natural gas (LNG). These are determined by international markets, which match supply and demand. Generally there is a global oversupply of crude oil; other producers will probably start pumping more, increasing supply to meet demand. The complication is that tankers currently stuck in the Persian Gulf aren’t available to transport it. Those that emerge might be unwilling to re-enter such a volatile region, and changing routes will cause complexities in the supply chain. It will settle, but the crude oil spot price will remain volatile.

Refined oil is more constrained. 10% of the world’s oil refining happens in the Persian Gulf and that’s closed. The market is complex; reorganising a supply of (say) diesel that used to come direct from the Gulf is not straightforward. Moreover, at times of tight supply, cargos can change ownership and destination en route.

That, of course, drives supply down as shipping times increase when tankers are forced into U-turns. The UK has about enough refining capacity to produce its refined oil needs from crude oil and little of the UK’s crude comes from the Gulf. (We would, of course, be in an even better position if Starmer could get Mad Ed Miliband, his idiot energy secretary, to open up the North Sea, but our lacklustre prime minister can’t even manage that).

The LNG market is more complex. Qatar is the world’s third-largest producer, delivering about 20% of the world’s supply. The US and Australia are bigger producers, and the US supply is growing quickly. LNG carriers are also trapped in the Gulf, which complicates distribution in the same way that it does for oil. There are no backup gas pipelines in the Middle East, and of course the Nord Stream pipelines from Russia were destroyed by Ukraine. The good news for the UK is that Qatar only supplies about 2% of the UK’s LNG, so that can easily be replaced.

Following the destruction of Nord Stream, some European countries now rely more heavily on Qatari LNG. Much of this is imported via the UK’s three LNG terminals, which are working at 100% capacity until 2029. There is ample terminal capacity in southern Europe, but the pipework connecting them to northern Europe is constrained. North European gas prices will therefore stay volatile for a while. The UK is not well placed for that due to its shameful, chronic shortage of gas storage. Of course we have the North Sea fields, which provide 30% to 50% of our gas needs (subject to the whims of Mad Ed). Much comes by pipeline from Norway too. Of the LNG exports, the largest source is our former close ally and largest trading partner, the United States of America.

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In summary, Iran is militarily defeated and has no hope of winning a war against the world’s superpower and Israel (home of the world’s most successful armed forces). Its attacks in the Gulf have cost it allies and its attempt to strangle the world’s oil trade has failed. While it is true that increasing scarcity of supply (and shipping) will bite further and the price of petrol at an Iowa gas station is a concern in the United States, that’s not an existential threat to the United States – or its president. The combination of Israeli intelligence and US firepower is an existential threat to Iran and their negotiation position is weak.

Europe’s failure to support the United States will cost them dearly in tariffs and support for NATO. The United Kingdom’s fall from grace is compounded by the exposure of the inadequacy of its military, its ludicrous energy policies and its deluded Prime Minister – currently on a press tour round the Middle East (at our expense) when the dogs in the souk know that the UK has little military capability (and less anywhere close), a bankrupt economy which pays a hefty moron premium to service its out of control debt and a leader (a term used loosely) who has lost the confidence of his party and his electorate.

The only people who don’t see this are the UK’s mainstream media, who have allowed their disdain for President Trump to blind their already distorted worldview. The unpopular, failing government desperately seeking favourable press coverage is chasing its media tail, rather than focusing on the national interest. Id doing so, Kier Starmer has inflicted terrible damage on the UK.

It’s time for regime change here.

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The chart below illustrates that trajectory.

In the last quarter century the State’s headcount has increased by 20%. That, of course, means that there is an increased demand on the public purse (your taxes) to cover the State’s payroll, plus another to cover the pensions. Sure enough, in 1999 government spending was 35% of GDP; today it is 46% (IFS data). That spending can only come from taxation or government borrowing, and successive governments have increased both. Of the £14 billion of government debt issued last month, £13 billion was spent on debt interest. (ONS Data).

The second aspect of the chart is the shift of public employees from local government (which delivers stuff) to central government (which doesn’t). In 1999 there was less than one central government employee for every local government one. Today there are more than two. This explains what the dogs on the potholed street can tell you: despite spending ever-increasing amounts on an expanding army of public servants, the service delivered is deteriorating.

The government is taking more money and employing more people to deliver less stuff. The tax take has increased to the point of being a brake on the economy. Rachel Reeves’ policies have triggered capital flight and a worker exodus. The UK’s lamentable growth (among lowest in the G20 and the G7). Were the UK a company, it would be calling in an administrator.

Those who hold the UK government bonds that constitute this debt have no interest in a default, which would cause them a total loss. So they will likely continue to buy debt as it is issued to both roll over the accumulated borrowing. (The average maturity is 13 to 14 years, so every year the UK’s Debt Management Office has to sell some £220 billion of gilts to finance repaying mature bonds, plus about another £130 billion to cover the annual deficit). As the UK’s economic outlook deteriorates, the interest rates demanded by the market will rise.

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The economists present saw three routes out of the UK’s debt hole. Good luck, which they rated a 10% probability; runaway inflation (50%); or some financial crisis triggering default or an International Monetary Fund (IMF) intervention (40%). They noted that the IMF lacks the funds to bail the UK out.

Of course the solution to the problem is for the UK to start growing its economy. Even Rachel Reeves understands this; the only sensible thing in the Labour Party’s election manifesto was its commitment to growth. Delivering growth requires investment capital and bank finance, above all for the UK’s SMEs, which provide some 60% of employment and 50% of private sector turnover in the UK.

Unfortunately, as the speakers revealed, UK SMEs are being starved of capital in general and bank lending in particular. Most SMEs, indeed most UK companies, don’t have access to equity funding, so bank lending is crucial. And yet since the 2008 financial crisis, UK bank lending to SMEs has fallen from some 2.5% of GDP to about 0.5%. At the same time the banks’ holdings of UK gilts have risen massively and unhealthily. The bank’s capital adequacy is now very exposed to UK bond yields. If they rise, as they are, the value of the banks’ assets and cash-equivalent holdings fall. That in turn means that they can lend even less to SMEs.

This is entirely caused by the banking regulations, known as Basel 3. This agreement regulates banking, with the intention of ensuring that banks are adequately capitalised, manage their lending risks sensibly and therefore don’t crash. The original Basel agreement was introduced in 1988 and updated to Basel 2 in 2004. Key measures include the risk of default on the lending book and the amount of cash (or cash equivalents like UK government bonds) at hand. Basel 3 increases the capital and cash requirements as a proportion of the bank’s lending. In effect that compels a bank to lend less and to lend less riskily. As SMEs (companies with fewer than 250 employees and a turnover under £44 million) are generally regarded as inherently risky, the banks have lent to them less because the Basel 3 regulations make it impossible.

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Over-regulation was one of the key reasons cited for the poor performance of the UK. One American banking expert, Professor Jill Ketina, suggested that the UK needed more banks, rather than a few monoliths too big to be allowed to fail, plus a handful of challenger banks. She pointed out that Texas had many small banks (termed “community banks”) that were fundamental to the Texan oil-boom economy. Small banks can fail without risking systemic collapse.

Regulations are broadly doomed to failure when they seek to regulate a market in detail. Regulations take time to develop while markets, particularly financial markets, can invent products more quickly. Thus, new banking regulations won’t, indeed can’t, remove emerging systemic risks. Worse, regulation protects market incumbents who can afford lobbyists and PR machines to maintain the status quo and stifle competition. Over-reliance on the perceived efficacy of banking regulations contributed to the 2008 crash.

(As an aside, the UK’s oldest bank, C Hoare & Co founded in 1672, is still run as a partnership. The partners have unlimited liability for losses, which they tend not to make! Almost 20 years ago the current CEO, Alexander Hoare, said, “…for many, many years governments have regulated to protect consumers, but what they’ve really protected is an oligopoly of not-very-efficient banks and given consumers very little choice.” C Hoare & Co survived the financial crash without requiring a sous from taxpayer. Hoare’s wonderful memoir, Impact Banker, is out now. Read it.)

Make no mistake, the UK’s dire economic situation stems from a consistent lack of growth. That in turn comes from denying the engine room of the economy access to capital, a consequence of ill-considered regulations, for which the responsibility ultimately lies with Parliament. As most modern careerist politicians have little experience of finance (or much else for that matter), they rely heavily upon their civil servants for briefings on the decisions they must make.

Unfortunately, those civil servants almost certainly lack experience of banking or the commercial world, as they too are careerists – there is very little churn of non-civil servants into top jobs. While the various quangos that run the finance industry are by definition quasi-autonomous, their masters remain in the Treasury. Despite the evidence, the civil service and the whole public sector believe in prescriptive regulation. (So of course does most of Westminster; politicians exist to pass laws, and laws become regulations).

The economic orthodoxy has become one of seeking a managed economy, with a large state machine, concomitantly high taxes, low growth and ever more regulation. The conference was pretty much unanimous that this approach has put the UK in a self-inflicted death spiral. The actions required to change the UK’s trajectory are (in theory) straightforward: a smaller state (requiring less tax) and a balanced budget (meaning no more borrowing). The last person to attempt this trajectory change in the UK is Liz Truss.

She gave a frank and forthright presentation on the dysfunctional split of the UK economy’s managers: the Bank of England, the Treasury and the Office of Budgetary Responsibility (OBR). They operate in splendid isolation from each other, simply looking after their remits. Thus, on the eve of the Truss mini-budget, the Bank blithely announced a £40 billion quantitative tightening (QT) programme without first notifying the Treasury. (QT is generally loss-making, so the Bank’s actions would have needed cash from the Treasury, who knew nothing of it.)

It also transpired that the Bank was aware of the Liability-Driven Investment (LDI) problem but had not deigned to share that information with the Treasury. The LDI schemes got themselves into a doom loop when the bond markets started to adjust to the new budget. That doom loop triggered forced sales of UK bonds, which the bank had to hoover up while the bond yield soared. While the Bank is independent of the Treasury and Westminster, it’s exceptionally strange that it didn’t consider the implications and timings of its actions.

There was some disagreement between the assembled economists as to whether the Bank’s independence was real, was a good thing or was fixable. After so much agreement watching veteran economists going at each other hammer and tongs was uplifting entertainment. There was no consensus on whether changing the management structure of the Bank or giving it more or less autonomy would fix the UK’s economic problems.

That those problems derive from an incompetent, unaffordable large state is self-evident to anyone who can count. Reducing the size of the state is, unfortunately, politically difficult – not least because the “progressives” (as some socialists now style themselves) have captured the vocabulary. Any attempt to cut the wasteful state is trumpeted as “austerity”, which in itself is treated as a synonym for inhumane.

Worse, progressivism is embedded in British universities, with some 60% to 80% of staff “left wing” or progressive. The general population is thought to be about 10% progressive activist. As the civil service and large companies recruit graduates, it seems inevitable that the progressive agenda, already deeply embedded in industry, media and government, will become the majority view in the key organs of the economy, but not the population. It may well have already happened - which would explain a lot.

Whether the economically literate parties (those of the right) can win power in such an environment is an open question. Whether they could then force through the necessary changes is equally unknown.

The certainty is that if they don’t, the UK’s future is bleak.

This article was commissioned buy the The Conservative Woman, who published a shorted version. The full version above appears here with their gracious permission.

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