The airwaves are full of ministers and ex-ministers claiming that they take full responsibility for the £7 Billion Afghan farce. How nice. How proper. How reassuring. But in what way do they do so?
Will Afghan families come and live in their houses, or even next door? Will their Parliamentary and ministerial salaries and pensions be docked to help pay the bill? Not blinking likely.
Will they, like the disgraced War minister John Profumo, in 1963, go off and busy themselves with charitable works until the end of their days? You must be joking.
‘Taking responsibility’, in modern British politics, means an uncomfortable few minutes in Parliament and maybe a moderately tough interrogation on Channel 4 News. If they are former Cabinet ministers, they can then hide in comfortable obscurity. If they are prime ministers, they can go on to become extremely rich.
His Majesty’s government opened the nation’s gates to thousands of Afghans because they idiotically exposed them to danger. They did this after using them in a wholly futile war, which we should never have taken part in.
As if they were fornicating rock stars trying to keep their dalliances secret, HMG used our money to obtain a super-injunction to prevent this newspaper from reporting what they had done. They spent our money, to keep us in the dark.
This was a vast official lie – an enormous government pretence that things had not happened which had.
Taliban fighters pose for a photograph in Kabul, Afghanistan
As so often in this country, secrecy was not deployed to keep information from our enemies (the Taliban already knew most of what was hidden). It was enforced to keep truth from the British people, who must pay for it and endure its enormous consequences for many years to come.
A stupid mistake was made to disappear, by improper use of the courts and outrageous, wrongful use of money extorted by the tax authorities from you and me, under the threat of imprisonment if we do not pay. I repeat, we paid so that our government could hide from us just how much we were paying.
We pay heavily and endlessly for the lies of others. Then they lie again so we don’t know this has happened. And they erect, in secret, a terrifying legal threat to ensure that nobody talks.
No doubt we’ll all be doing our tax self-assessment with extra enthusiasm this year, in tribute to this insulting ingenuity.
If we did not still have free media in this country – and they are alas much less free than they were 50 years ago – this would just have happened in silence, forever.
Why did they do it? On Tuesday, Parliament’s longest-serving MP, the Tory Sir Edward Leigh, said: ‘Part of the original sin was our intervening militarily and then scuttling out.’
He then asked the defence secretary, John Healey, a clever question: ‘On a wider point, may I take it that we have learnt our lesson and have got over the liberal imperial itch of the Cameron and Blair eras to intervene militarily in ungovernable countries such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Libya?’
Mr Healey somehow slid past that question in his response to Sir Edward. No wonder. They have not got over it at all.
Courtney Wright, aged 12, thought it would be a good idea to wear a Union Jack dress to her school’s ‘culture day’ but was removed from the proceedings
The government, and much of the Tory Party, still itch to drag us deeper into the Ukraine war and, if possible, into Iran’s conflict with Israel as well.
I am pretty sure that there are senior figures in politics, the military and the civil service now planning to entangle us in a shooting war against China over Taiwan.
For the ‘liberal imperial itch’ continues to plague a large part of our ruling class, and the only way they have found to soothe it is to apply large quantities of high explosives.
If you want a lasting lesson from this episode, then here it is.
Britain should stop trying to be Great and jingoistic abroad, and should instead concentrate on being Good and truly patriotic at home.
Stop making craters in other countries. Fix the potholes in our own country.
We ceaselessly make ourselves unhappy, poor – and increasingly less British – by Leftist warmongering, usually carried out from Uncle Sam’s jacket pocket because we can’t get out there on our own.
We do this in the name of patriotism. The valorous ghosts of the Second World War glory are summoned up by people such as Sir Anthony Blair and Lord Cameron. But are they as patriotic in practice as they like to claim?
The more we go to war, the more politically correct we become.
Despite repeated campaigns to inculcate ‘British values’, actual Britishness shrinks daily under an unending state-sponsored assault of Equality, Diversity and Multiculturalism.
Our previous culture, education, laws, religion and behaviour – which 60 years ago were conservative and patriotic – must all be diluted or altered or even made shameful.
This is done in the name of tolerance. But we don’t get tolerance. We get a new intolerance, beautifully summed up this week by the treatment of poor Courtney Wright, aged 12.
On Tuesday, Parliament’s longest-serving MP, the Tory Sir Edward Leigh, said: ‘Part of the original sin was our intervening militarily and then scuttling out’
She thought it would be a good idea to wear a Union Jack dress to her school’s ‘culture day’ dedicated to ‘recognising and celebrating the rich cultural diversity within our school community’. Not hers, though.
She was removed from the proceedings and was not allowed to deliver her speech, which was intended to celebrate those British values of fairness and politeness.
Everyone is apologising now because, once again, the free media have revealed what happened. But that’s only public relations. Her removal was the real policy.
So untie this knot. Why is it that, while a child can be publicly humiliated for wearing our national flag to a state school, we still go to war as if we were Edwardian Britain, with the crowds cheering the troops.
Why do those troops fight abroad under the flag that’s denounced at home? Sir Edward is right. This policy is liberal first and imperial a bad second.
So why do conservative patriots keep supporting such wars?
These adventures we take part in nowadays are Left-wing. They are supposedly aimed at helping ‘democracy’ take root in the Sahara or the Syrian or Iraqi deserts, or in the desolate mountains of Afghanistan. It never does.
All these expeditions have failed because they were bound to. For they were aimed at forcing other people to change the way they lived, just as much as our long-ago colonial expeditions were.
Perhaps the stupidest of all was the attempt to persuade Afghans to live according to the ideas of Hillary Clinton and Lady Cherie Blair. Imagine the response if the Taliban tried to impose the burqa on Essex.
There was also an attempt to force Afghans to give up growing opium (which Britain grows legally on the slopes of the Chilterns) and instead cultivate mint.
Who did we think we were? We were entirely off our heads. And it was this wild fantasy that led straight to this week’s wild scandal.
There are plenty of medium-sized nations, which were once empires, such as Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria and Spain, that have now grown out of fantasies that they are still great powers.
And there are those, such as Australia, which never tried to be great powers at all, but just sought to rule themselves. They live happier, more prosperous and more harmonious lives than we do, and I suspect they do not regret it. Why not copy them?
