‘We can’t afford to feed our own people but we can afford to bankroll a war in Ukraine against Putin’ Really?
The UK Prime Minister’s visit to Ukraine’s President climaxed by him admitting that he got the maths wrong about the war. Trouble is, Boris is not the Churchillian character neither Mr Zelensky nor the British public needs. And where is all the military kit ending up?
The Prime Minister has always indulged himself in the idea of him being Churchillian. So why doesn’t he play this wartime role now and initiate food and fuel rationing when Britain really needs it like never before? And can we really be sure about the sincerity of his military endeavours in Ukraine which surely are going to reach a tipping point soon? ‘We can’t afford to feed our own people but we can afford to bankroll a war in Ukraine against Putin’ is just going to become a harder and harder narrative to adhere to in the coming months.
The British public have never really understood the Ukraine war. The minutia of this conflict leading up to February 24th never reached the more high brow elements of our press like BBC’s Panorama for example, which if looked at might change the level of our involvement there. Bluntly, the war there has been going on since 2014 where the Ukrainian government shelled Russian-speaking citizens in an internal conflict which was sparked by Joe Biden’s administration – which assisted in the overthrow of Russia’s man who led the country at the time. At exactly the same time, the EU offered Ukraine a special status, which for Putin was the final last straw. He immediately annexed Crimea then and was led finally this year to invade the country to stop what he calls a ‘genocide’ in two regions which are Russian speaking and are now more or less under his troops’ control.
When we, the West, support such campaigns as meddling in other countries internal politics as the U.S. did in 2014, then we should accept the consequences, right?
This minor, almost peripheral detail of the events between 2014 and February this year, has not featured in the coverage of the Ukraine and has misled the British public to believe that Putin is a madman who has to be stopped.
Even if that were true, we should now be asking ourselves, can we even afford it? And if we believe the absurd stories which our intelligence communities are capable of conjuring up – like Putin is near his deathbed – then surely there is a dichotomy of common sense there also.
Boris’s trip to visit President Zelensky should worry us, not least of all in that he has accepted that the war could last for years – which confirms only that when he participated in it from the off, he clearly thought the west could win in a matter of weeks. What is also worrying is the lack of checks and balances on military hardware which we are sending to the Ukraine.
What has come out of it is that he wants to play a Churchillian role and engage the British army to train what is reported to be 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers. Let’s be clear. So far, the unprecedented amount of U.S. military aid – a record 50 billion dollars which has yet to arrive there – is not believed by military boffins to be enough to beat Putin. Is that the message? Or worse, your own soldiers aren’t up to the task?
And so Britain’s contribution so far, around 1.5 billion pounds which amounts to really hardly anything at all in practical terms, has more or less been wasted.
But it’s the war itself, which Boris and his nemesis the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in Brussels want to drag out for as long as possible, which is crippling our economy. And it is Boris who has no solution other than to ‘keep buggering on’ as Churchill would have put it. Boris sealed the Brexit deal with Brussels on paper but he has not delivered it to the British people in practical or financial terms and so is the Ukraine war a distraction to his failure to govern?
Even on preparing the country for a mother of all recessions, linked to the Ukraine war, he is failing. He is not preparing British farmers to produce more wheat which is a real threat in the coming months, as just one example. He is also not interested in reducing income taxes which we are told will help curb inflation. He has no silver bullet for British businesses like those who make fertilisers and who are going bust due to high gas prices. We are heading into one of the greatest recessions since the last war and our leader is in the Ukraine playing the dapper role of a British premier who has the entire empire at his disposal and who thinks that Britain is still the sole super power of the world.
Just in the recent few days there has been a distinct, if not measured, change in some corners of the British broadsheets whose big thinkers are starting to accept that we can’t win the war in Ukraine, but can only draw it out. This, in my view, is being led by the U.S. broadsheets. Some are joining up the dots and realising that to throw money at it, like a lunatic using cash as a raw fuel to throw on a fire to keep warm, will have dire consequences. We are funding Putin’s war machine by sending cash and military equipment to Mr Zelensky simply as this keeps the war of attrition going – but these rules of ‘attrition’ stack up in Putin’s favour as the British public suffer more and more.
Another point about the coverage of Ukraine is how we have failed to acknowledge that the country always had a reputation as being one of the most corrupt in the world, certainly in the broader terms of what we call Europe today. Corruption, during wartime, is like bacteria in a cesspit on a hot summer’s day. It breeds at a deathly speed and we shouldn’t be so naïve as to think that our own military equipment and that of America’s is even getting to the battlefield and not being sold on the black market to despots and terrorist organisations in Africa and the Middle East. Even CNN, a stoic if not fanatical supporter of the Democratic party which Joe Biden is the leader of recently voiced its concerns that the U.S. government literally has no way of tracking the latest colossal shipment of military hardware which begs the question: should we not have checks and balances in place to verify that all of our military contributions to Ukraine actually arrive and are used on the battlefield? Should that not be a priority for Boris if we are to agree to him continuing to fuel the war which is likely to bring our nation to its knees in the coming months? If Boris is asking the British people to endure perpetual suffering as more and more people ditch their jobs as they simply can’t afford to put petrol in their cars, or flock to foodbanks in greater numbers due to spiralling supermarket costs, then shouldn’t we at least enact our own levels of accountability on the Ukrainian government? If the British people are not ready to ask the government the tough questions about the Ukraine – like those of corruption and the presence of neo-Nazis or whether or not there really was a U.S.-backed coup d’état in 2014 which is the basis of Putin’s invasion – then at least we should ask where, for example, are the 120 British armoured vehicles which left Britain a few weeks ago. Keep buggering on should not transpire to keep being buggered by the Ukraine war which we, the West, can’t win as we got the maths wrong in the first place. Javelin missile for 30,000 dollars anyone? One previous owner, never used.
