View from London: There is nothing patriotic about the Ukraine conflict

The British continue to play war without understanding the consequences for their island. Prince William rides in British tank during visit to NATO base just 90 miles from Russia.

Can you connect these events? Prince Harry visits Ukraine. Prince William rides in British tank. Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, Chief of the Defence Staff, is discovered hanging around Peking talking to various figures. And the last remnant of Britain’s steel industry can only be saved by Parliament.

I can, writes Peter Hitchens, ‘The Daily Mail’ columnist and commentator. But it is the threat to our surviving blast furnaces in Scunthorpe which is the most important. Strong independent countries have big steel industries. They are the sinews of a highly-industrialised nation, one able to build its own defences. We had plenty of such sinews once. They transformed our industrial power into world power and helped to keep us free and prosperous.

Now we have no such sinews. We buy them from someone else. It was revealed last week that British warships now being built are expected to contain large amounts of steel made by France, Germany, Belgium, Sweden and Spain.

If such countries can maintain modern steel industries, why can’t we? I’d say for two main reasons.

The first is we fell idiotically for the promises of globalism. This preaches that it doesn’t matter if you ditch proper industry.

The other is we bowed down before the new religion of Warmism. We let a dodgy set of beliefs about global warming rush us into a series of rash choices which we will have centuries to regret.

A real steel industry without coal is pretty much impossible. How China must laugh at us, as it runs a mighty industrial revolution on its huge coal stocks and builds two new coal-fired power stations almost weekly, as we blow ours up.

This does not just make us silly. It makes us weak. Why do we keep sending officials to Peking? It can hardly be to threaten the People’s Republic with our vanished naval might or the awesome size of our national debts.

And why is Prince Harry in Ukraine and why has his father, the King, gravely violated royal neutrality by cheering on what is, at the very least, the most stupid and counter-productive war since the 2003 Iraq disaster?

There is nothing patriotic about the Ukraine conflict. Britain has no national interest in sustaining or prolonging this crazy, murderous and avoidable brawl, a proxy war between the USA and Russia.

Even the Americans, who strove so hard for so long to provoke a conflict in the region, have grown bored with it. Yet we are spending tax money on keeping it going. This is out of habit, because we have been so used to copying US foreign policies that we do not know how to stop, even when the Americans have abandoned them.

True patriotism would lie in saving our power to defend ourselves. But will we be seeing Charles or Harry denouncing the globalist and Net Zero policies which are turning us into an impoverished weakling? No, that will never happen, Peter Hitchens concludes.

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