Saving Private Johnson

Why the Youth Don't Want to Fight for King and Country

If there’s one thing the British political class will never abandon, it’s the martial spirit. Age cannot wither it. No defeats or reversals. Politicians may claim to want peace, but they sense that war is what once made the country great, and might make them great too. In their heart of hearts many of them relish the opportunity that war provides to step out of the humdrum world of domestic politics and do something genuinely serious, meaningful and Churchillian, on the ‘world stage’.

Tony Blair got a taste for it during the Kosovo War, which he never lost, regardless of the outcome. The feckless David Cameron swanned into the Libyan War in 2011, desperately seeking the gravitas that has persistently eluded him. ‘What more do I want?’ he told the diarist Sasha Swires, with whom he went on holiday to Cornwall even as Gadaffi met his gruesome end. ‘ A great day on the beach, I’m with my old friends the Swires and I’ve just won a war.’

Not exactly the most Churchillian statement, but you can’t expect much more from a man for whom humanitarian intervention, like politics, was a game that he could play - knowing that he would never feel whatever negative consequences might ensue from it. And if Libya descended into violent chaos from which it has yet to emerge, why should he care? He’d done his bit, and it was thrilling while it lasted.

All British contenders for prime ministerial office understand this thrill, even the most ludicrous. Thus China hawk Liz Truss rode around in a tank, signalling her willingness to ‘go to war’ against China or like, whoever. Liz’s principled advocacy of Taiwan didn’t stop her lobbying for an arms company seeking to sell weapons to China - if nothing else, she could multi-task.

And now none other than Boris Johnson has responded to General Patrick Sanders’ call last week for a ‘citizen army’ with a fatuous - even by his standards - article in the Daily Mail professing his willingness to obey the ‘kitcheneresque finger.’

‘ No sooner had I posed myself the question — would I sign up to fight for King and country?’ the Great Man proclaimed proudly, ‘ - than I had the answer. Of course I jolly well would.’ Of course he jolly well would, except that he jolly well can’t because he’s too old for military service, if not for military cosplay, and he jolly well didn’t when he was young enough to actually serve.

Johnson’s long-distance love of khaki is not entirely new. Even before he slunk out of office, reeking of other people’s party vomit, he thought he had found a pathway to seriousness in Ukraine. So he went off to Kiev to take part in dangerous photo operations, and then dressed up in camo with Ukrainian troops training in the UK - cue more photo ops with grenades and rocket launchers.

Such fun, as Miranda’s mother used to say.

Britain: A Great Nation

It’s easy to be repelled by such grotesqueries, but we should also be wary of them, because the heroic parts they want to play are written into the national script of the movie Britain: A Great Nation that repeats itself for every generation like old Sunday wartime movies, in a slightly attenuated form. Every Prime Minister knows this, and this is why so many of them want to play the leading role, and why they see Churchill’s bulldog countenance staring back at them when they look in the mirror, even in Chipping Norton.

And to play that role there must be a dastardly villain, and not just some run of the mill upstart Johnny Foreigner, but ‘dictators who kill their own people’ (and aren’t our allies). They must be anti-democratic authoritarian supervillains who want to sweep across Europe, use weapons of mass destruction in 45 minutes, or seek, as General Sanders warned darkly last week, to destroy ‘our systems and our way of life.’

Some might conclude, on the evidence of the last few decades, that the British political class is well on the way to destroying our systems and way of life all by itself, without any help from Putin or Xi Jinping.

But the movie Britain: A Great Nation doesn’t allow for reflection, self-criticism, or self-doubt. In this movie, we are always the knight who goes out into the world to slay dragons, or help others slay theirs. It’s a noble pursuit, or would be, if it was true.

But the problem that General Sanders, would-be Lance Corporal Johnson, and the other scriptwriters have, is that many of the generation who would normally be expected to play the role of extras in the battle scenes, seem averse wish to the ‘whole nation undertaking’ that General Sanders would like to see unfolding across the country.

A YouGov poll found this month that more than a third of under-40s would refuse conscription even in the event of a world war, and that 30 percent would not serve in the event of an invasion of the country. What has happened? Have the young been taken over by Russian bots? Is it Instagram? Or wokery, as Johnson suggested? Even Johnson the human fridge-magnet, bemoaned the 'growing moral squeamishness of the kids themselves’ and speculated about its possible causes:

They say that Generation Z are dubious about the ethics of the most recent conflicts in which the UK played a significant role — Iraq and Afghanistan — and do not therefore blaze with martial ardour at the thought of being engaged in the next one.

This was as close to an insight as anyone was likely to find in Bunter’s fluff-piece - instantly eclipsed by an attempt to fat shame the young for being ‘more Colonel Sanders than General Sanders’.

It should go without saying that young people do not need to be lectured on such matters by Johnson. Nor do they need lessons on decadence from the man who partied with the son of ex-KGB men; who turned the highest office in the land into a drunken karaoke session for his entitled insiders in the midst of a pandemic, and then went on to lie repeatedly about it until it was no longer possible for him to get away with it.

The least you can say about such behaviour is that it is not Churchillian. But the problem that people far more serious than Johnson have, as they seek to transform the young into a ‘pre-war generation’, is not just the absence of any moral principle in one of the country’s leaders, but its absence throughout a series of ill-conceived and often brazenly-dishonest wars in which Britain has willingly participated through this grim quarter of a century.

To put it mildly, these wars have tarnished our knightly armour, and there is nothing at all that the current crop of leaders - let alone the likes of Johnson - can do to make it shine again. Consider what happened last week, when the International Court of Justice (ICJ) presented its interim ruling that ‘there is a real and imminent risk that irreparable prejudice’ may be perpetrated on Palestinians under the genocide convention.

Though the court didn’t actually accuse Israel of genocide, it paved the way for that possibility. And it also found that Israel’s invasion of Gaza ‘had resulted in a large number of deaths and injuries, as well as the massive destruction of homes, the forcible displacement of the vast majority of the population, and extensive damage to civilian infrastructure.’

The UK’s reaction to that interim judgement was…nothing at all. Yet on the same day, Israel made allegations that 12 employees from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), were involved in the October 7 Hamas attack/massacre. Without the slightest hesitation, the UK halted its contribution to the financial assistance on which UNRWA depends. Bear in mind that UNRWA employs 13,000 people in Gaza, and is the only organization able to meet the humanitarian needs of the population even in times of ‘peace’, let alone now.

Other facts are also worth bearing in mind: that the 12 people accused by Israel of involvement in October 7 have either been sacked, left UNRWA or died; that Israel has killed 152 UNRWA employees; that the elimination of UNRWA from Gaza is a war aim that Netanyahu and the Israeli right have wanted to achieve for some time.

None of this mattered to the US, and therefore it didn’t matter to the Sunak government, which immediately and unquestioningly followed the US lead. This is not a ‘mistake’; it is active complicity in the savage military assault that has killed more than 25,000 Palestinians and reduced the Gaza Strip to a humanitarian catastrophe.

In the midst of that, the UK cuts off aid to the one organization working to alleviate this disaster, on the basis of unsubstantiated claims against a tiny minority that UNRWA itself has already begun to investigate. There is nothing good or noble or moral or well-intentioned about any of this. It is cynical realpolitik. And the fact that the majority of 18-24 year olds in the UK support the Palestinians suggests that young people recognise this perfectly well - even if the likes of Douglas Murray try to smear them for their ‘naivete’ or antisemitism.

It’s difficult to separate this anti-militarism from the UK’s participation in the horrific global violence unleashed by the US following 9/11, from the anti-militarist sentiments that worry General Sanders and Johnson. Too many eggs were broken in these wars that left no omelettes. Too many people were killed for no good reason. Too many lies and falsehoods were told by politicians who never paid any price for them. And at no point has the British public been invited to reassess and think seriously about the broader context in which these wars evolved, or consider the strategic miscalculations behind them, or the other options that might have been pursued to avoid them, or what interests Britain itself may have had in its botched responses to our world of endless ‘threats’.

Such things are not part of the script of Britain: A Great Nation. And so now, when the UK’s discredited rulers want the young to prepare to fight Russia, or China, while allowing Israel to batter Gaza, you can’t be surprised if they don’t believe you.

This is a country where poor schoolchildren go without school meals or attend crumbling schools without proper heating; where there aren’t enough doctors or nurses or ambulance drivers or social care workers; where more than ten million people go hungry every week, and fourteen million mostly young people are trapped in insecure, over-priced rented accommodation.

In short, it’s not a country that cares too much about its young people even in peacetime, and so when some of the worst leaders it has ever had ask the young to fight for King and country, you can’t be so many young people have concluded that they won’t do it.