Blood-soaked rodeo

Ben Wildsmith

There is nothing quite so unsettling as hearing the current generation of politicians projecting moral certainty as the rationale for their actions.

After everything we’ve been through over the last few decades it’s challenging to accept on face value their earnest pronouncements about protecting ‘our’ values and serving the cause of liberty.

It’s not our first rodeo; in fact, we have been trampled by the bucking bronco of their murderous dishonesty so frequently that we can barely sit upright on our horses.

So, when London and Washington announced eye-watering increases in defence spending this week, it was to populations who have every right to question the morality behind those decisions.

The UK, you will recall, has recently abandoned HS2, its only recent investment in large-scale infrastructure.

Bankruptcy

We in Wales, having contributed to it for no obvious return, watched the government write off our cash as the project was deemed unaffordable. Our councils are teetering on the verge of bankruptcy and slashing services. Our taxes are the highest they have been in modern times.

We have pledged, none the less, to fund Ukraine to ‘do what it takes’ in its war with Russia. Given the near impossibility of Ukraine winning a war with Russia, there are only two potential outcomes to this.

Our money will be spent prolonging the war, at incalculable human cost to the Ukrainian people, or else NATO joins the war and the world as we know it passes into history.

The bean-counting utilitarian arguments upon which our government so blithely relies when it is denying essential services to its own people do not, seemingly, apply to its foreign policy.

At home, there is no magic money tree, everything must be ‘costed’ and if that means your granny has the heating turned down in her care home then wise-up, bucko, because we live in the real world.

When it comes to unwinnable conflicts, though, limitless resources can be found and justified on moral grounds alone. We are ‘standing with’ the Ukrainian people, right behind them until there are so few left that a grubby compromise is brokered, and our arms companies pay out their dividends.

Our proudly virtuous country is, of course, also supplying weaponry to Israel. As Rishi Sunak was explaining the inviolability of Britain’s commitment to international law, mass graves were being uncovered in the ruins of Palestinian hospitals, the bodies within having their hands tied behind their backs and bullets through the backs of their skulls.

This week, the same Rishi Sunak claimed victory for his bill to deport refugees to Rwanda, a bill that deems that country to be safe in contravention of legal findings and despite proof that it shot refugees dead only five years ago for the crime of asking for better food.

Caricature

Still, Sunak stood and spoke, his voice a caricature of dignity, his record an inventory of disgrace. Without a mandate, he presumed to speak for us, to impoverish us further in the pursuit of conflicts over which we refuse to negotiate.

Are we to believe that the traumatised residents of Gaza will somehow become more moderate as a result of what is being visited upon them, that the thousands of orphaned and homeless children there will grow up to reject the philosophy of Hamas and embrace Israel as their friend?

Is Russia going to respond to temporarily sterner Ukrainian defence by seeing the error of its ways and resolving to become a nice, cuddly social democracy?

Is the youth of Europe happy to be conscripted into an extinction-event war without our governments even exploring the possibility of a negotiated settlement?

As blood-soaked warhorses ran amok through London on Wednesday morning, the myth of British decency ran with them.

The day before, St. George’s day, the union flag was once again waved by Tommy Robinson’s drunken fools as they spat the last gobs of nationalist bile at their own police force.

Wales has never been part of that flag and I have never been so glad of it.