Tag: Russia

Dependency on Foreign supplies compromises UK security

Perhaps the biggest cost of globalisation that has never been factored into the equation (or more likely it has deliberately been left out), has been the issue of what happens when a Country becomes dependent upon supplies of goods or services that come from another Country, or Countries that may not always have interests that are mutually aligned or have like for like benefits with the UK at their heart.

The best example of where dependency can compromise the security of a country or of the interests of that country is very current and comes in the form of the dependency that Germany has on Russia for its supplies of natural gas.

During the Ukraine crisis (late February 2022), Western Countries excluded Russia from the SWIFT International Banking System as a punishment (also known as a sanction) for invading Ukraine. Yet Germany had a special dispensation to not do so, as it would not have been able to continue paying the Russians for gas supplies, if it had continued to be involved.

Whilst Germany was most compromised by becoming dependent upon Russia for energy supplies, the reality is that as a Country, the UK is far too dependent upon other Countries for the supply of essential goods and services too.

For as long as this situation exists, and for as long as we have politicians in control of the UK who either cannot or will not take tough decisions on energy supplies or the supply of anything that is essential to us as a matter of course, we will remain at risk of high-level compromise with countries that supply us and can therefore bribe us, as our security as a Nation will remain exposed.

Advertisement

The Establishment is pulling out all the stops to maintain the narrative that everything is fine

In the Terence Trent D’arby (Sananda Maitreya) song ‘If you all get to Heaven’, sits the immortal line ‘Old men’s cigars puff up the wars to protect their fuck ups again’.

Whilst one of the alternative truths growing considerable traction in recent years has been that the United States has in effect created wars around the globe, simply so that the corporate interests that fund the politicians can keep profiting, the reality is that war has been used as a very costly distraction and as a way of taking attention away from the public, from what is really going on around us all at home.

As I write this in early 2022, Russia has just invaded Ukraine. It is already clear that Western Governments are going to use the crisis as a way to cover up the damage that they are responsible for. Prolonged mismanagement that has led to all the problems that we are facing now.

When people at the top have gained so much through a system that exists on the basis that it exploits the greater part of the population without them realising that they are being used, it is in the interests of those people at the top to ensure that the  truth never comes out a) so that they don’t get blamed when it fails and b) so that no one will attempt to stop them doing all that they can to return the whole system to how it previously worked – even when they are too stupid to realise that it is now impossible to do.

Truss in Moscow: Why big her up and say she must have got it right because the Russians are putting her down, when its more likely they have realised she’s just another clown?  

Incompetent Politicians don’t change their spots. Nor do they grow a set of angelic wings, just because they have hopped on a plane and started swanning around media opportunities with Foreign Leaders, bigging themselves up with tough sounding statements and behaving as if they are completely in charge.

Yet to hear and read the comments that many are making about Foreign Secretary Liz Truss’s visit to Moscow this week, it sounds very much as if our journalists and commentators think this is precisely the case.

Russian Foreign minister Sergei Lavrov’s retort that facts ‘bounce off’ Truss and saying that speaking to the wannabe prime minister was akin to ‘the deaf talking to the blind’, doesn’t exactly take us into unfamiliar territory.

In fact, under the Johnson regime during the Covid Pandemic, an honest assessment of any kind where any of our Ministers leading this Government is concerned is likely to sound very similar if not exactly the same.

For some reason, because a Russian minister has said this, there now exists some lapse from any kind or reality. It has solicited a robotic response that where Truss in Moscow is concerned, this view simply cannot be true.

In fact, the journos and commentators have gone further still, and suggested that such a response tells us that Truss is doing her job right and not letting the Russians push us around. [head in hands]

Regrettably, few seem to comprehend the danger of allowing politicians of the poor quality that our current politicians, defined by a lack of a relationship with reality as they are, to head off and attempt to generate headlines from World events that are all about themselves. Rather than being anything to do with the true breadth and depth of what they are trying to involve us all in, Doing so, on no more than a whim.

As I wrote here recently, the UK isn’t equipped, resourced or politically stable enough to get involved in foreign wars that have nothing to do with us directly OR indirectly in any way.

Indeed, it is the very same political class from which our ambitious Foreign Secretary is drawn, who have been systematically responsible for dismantling our Armed Services over decades. Yet they continue to parade around and evangelize that in the sense of all things military, we still have the might and power of the days of Empire. When the truth is that the UK is not able to offer any thing like the same thing, and their stupidity has a horrible habit of unnecessarily costing British lives.

There is no question of the threat that the Russian Chinese Axis provides both militarily and economically.

But these two belligerent powers are not afraid of the West today in any way. Rather than allowing our politicians to keep doing the ‘Big I am’, we would do well to be asking why.

The Chinese and the Russians have been playing strategic games with us for years now. Using methods and means that our own political strategists don’t even understand. Our government advisors certainly offer no counter solutions that our fearful political class would be willing to embrace.

The bottom-line reality of all this is that we should not take Russian talk of using nuclear weapons to make what we believe to be a rhetorical point, any less seriously than we did the news that the United States had actually done so against Japan at the end of the Second World War.

It is after all highly feasible that the story gaining traction about Covid being generated by a lab leak in China has far more deliberate and sinister overtones at its base. That both the Chinese and Russians – who are working ever closely together – know that an invasion of Ukraine, Taiwan or both, could all too easily provide them with the leverage to harness and then remove any military or economic threat that the West currently has against them.

The Russians and the Chinese know and understand that our Politicians are all words, and not action. They know that they will run away from whatever frightens them. Because leadership and dealing with the everyday challenges of crisis and conflict and what they bring with them in the moment, are not abilities that our glory seeking politicians possess. As such standing up to them effectively is not even a choice.

This political class are right up to their necks in the problems that the UK already faces. We are in no position for Liz Truss, Boris or for any of them to go to work creating any more.

In the weakened state that the UK is now in, not least of all because of the Johnson Governments’ wholly unnecessary response to Covid, we should at least try to find the humility to accept that it doesn’t matter how wrong the attitude and approach of a foreign power may be. The chances are that they are not taking the UK seriously, because above all else they have worked out that we are being led by clowns.

We should not risk British lives or resources to fight a war that is not ours in Ukraine today

The Romans said, ‘If you want peace, prepare for war’. And whilst generations of politicians have ignored this idiom at their peril, its true meaning and the counter consequences of this sage advice are still continually ignored by those who rule us.

Despite the media obsession over Boris Johnson’s Lockdown Parties this week, there is plenty of news coming from around the world and from across the UK itself that should be reaching us all in a much clearer and defined form.

Turbulence within the US Stock & Bond Markets aside, the biggest story that should be getting a lot more airtime, thought and discussion is the massing of Russian Military Forces at the border and the potential invasion of Ukraine – which sources suggest could be about to take place at any time.

The most recent revelations from No.10 have told us much about the way our haphazard Government works. And with this in mind, we should all perhaps be significantly more concerned that behind the saga of the Prime Ministers coming fall and the celebratory ending of Covid ‘Plan B’, the UK has already been sending military equipment to support Ukraine. Further still, that this apparent generosity may be about to be increased with the deployment of UK Military Personnel and Resources to other Countries that Border Russia – if not actually Ukraine itself.

Whilst the rights and wrongs of the debate surrounding whether there is anything legitimate about what the Russians have already done in Crimea and what they may be about to do in Ukraine may already be clear, our Politicians must face reality.  

For years now, Russia and the Chinese Communist Party have been building on their plans to remove or destroy the power hegemony that has been the post-war preserve of the West

Meanwhile, the weak minded and incompetent politicians that we have running the Country have obsessively functioned on the basis that all problems and their solutions revolve around the use or removal of money.

In terms of horizon scanning and watching for the problems that are coming that may affect us right across the World, their self-interested addiction to secure immediate headlines and curry public opinion to get ahead of the polling curve has in effect, left the UK – in many ways – strategically vulnerable and dangerously exposed.

Over the past two years, the way that the Johnson Government has chosen to deal with every problem that Covid and their response to it has created has been simply to throw money around.

Through the execution of a philosophy that looks remarkably like ‘gifts and gongs buy everyone’, the quasi-corrupt approach that has been adopted has only been countered by cuts or reductions in areas of public interest that are away from the media gaze.

Out of sight, out of mind is all well and good if there are no consequences involved. But this and previous Governments from all political sides have been systematically shedding Military personnel and reducing our conventional Military capabilities purely on the basis of what a ‘standing’ Army, Navy and Air Force financially cost.

In the odd moment when some of our better journalists have shed light on this process, we have been deliberately led to believe that the world has changed so much that future wars will only be cyber related. That boots-on-the-ground fighting is already a lost cause.

This delusion is of course one that having non-leaders who are obsessed with headlines, polls and keeping their seats has vacuously created. It does not at any point allow for the certain reality that crippling our infrastructure is only ever likely to be a first step in what could be a war that follows and that real deterrents against future oppression require the presence of realistic amounts of conventional as well as cutting-edge equipment, as well as the presence of trained and ready-to-go women and men who are ready to fight and certainly not pandered to appease the woke.

Yes, the UK could almost certainly rearm and push thousands of young people into military training if we had no choice but to engage in a new conventional war at any time.

But fighting wars is dependent upon a much bigger logistical, financial and political picture before we even begin to consider the realities of our relationships will be affected and what the fallout will be for us with other Countries around the World.

The truth is that because of our hapless politicians we have been caught napping. This is no time to be squaring up to Russia or to China, and especially so when the UK has been taken so very far away from self-sufficiency by their stupidity that the level of politics at play makes it simply too dangerous to risk getting voluntarily involved.

The chances are growing that there will be another war that will involve Russia and China. The reality is that with the questions over Ukraine and Taiwan, it could kick off very soon.

Good politicians would be reading the room as it is – both in terms of what our would-be foes are doing, and as far as our overall military capability is involved.

The picture for the UK militarily today is bleak. It is likely to take years of development and manufacturing to build up our Armed Forces to the capability of both defending the UK whilst also giving us adequate capability to engage meaningfully in conflicts abroad.

With self-serving and fear-driven attitudes and political obstructiveness as endemic throughout public life as they are, the biggest threat to us saving ourselves anytime soon is that we aren’t ready to fight any prolonged conventional conflict.

Until such time as we are, we should be bringing our resources and personnel home, rather than giving the impression to the World that we can and will do anything meaningful to help others – when the reality is that any military engagement now is something that we can currently ill-afford.

By all means Boris, send equipment and weapons to help our Ukrainian Friends – IF we can afford it financially. But don’t go thinking that will have no consequences or possible fallout.

Throwing dead cats around and talking up foreign wars might offer you a fleeting lifeline of protection against the headlines when your political career and legacy is failing.

But like everything else you and this political class have already managed to fuck up, you could be about to open up a door to a very different kind of reality that holds with it a future that none of us are going to like or enjoy anything about.

UK security is best served kept in our own hands. The EU would only increase risk to itself by burning the bridges between us when they benefit disproportionately from what we already give

To hear Theresa May and her coterie of die-hard Remainist Ministers speak, you would think that the UK is backward in just about every respect and incapable of making its way in the World without the stewardship and direction of a load of unelected bureaucrats shouting demands at us from an office across the English Channel and somewhere in the EU.

With the history we have – some of which will still be within the living memory of the Politicians who surround her – it is as amazing as it is sickening that people elected to the highest positions of power in the UK, could have not only adopted, but are hell bent on convincing everyone else of the validity of this view.

Yet this is where we are, and for as long as people who can only prioritise themselves are able to influence our destiny as a Nation, there remains a risk that they will take the UK and our people to places that we never belonged.

Security is once again a multifaceted and complex issue relating to Brexit which many of us do not understand.

In reality, we should never need to do so as we should be able to trust our decision makers to have a complete and objective view of everything which has happened, is happening and of course, that which either wont be or simply hasn’t yet come into view.

Regrettably they don’t.

This means that we are yet again being sold a story of our place in the World which is thoroughly demeaning. One that is only ever intended to convince us wrongly, that the UK risks finding itself out in the cold and that we have a dependence on the EU which has never ever had any reason to exist.

Defence & The Armed Forces

The EU now has very ambitious and documented designs on developing a Euro-Army of its own. A clear sign that the plan for a United States of Europe is clearly manifesting itself and one which makes clear that it would be foolish to believe that the phyrric freedoms that Theresa May is trying to tell us she has won, would continue to exist for very long.

Militarily, the World is an increasingly dangerous place. The Russians are already testing borders around Eastern Europe itself, but are also parked on our doorstep, even testing the airspace which is above the UK itself.

Meanwhile the USA and China are on a competitive journey both in trade and in places like the South China Sea which in less than a decade could escalate to a level which leaves military action the only way it can be resolved.

With the seemingly limitless level of chutzpa that the EU leadership already employs, it is clear that their own ambition for power and control and to be seen as a de facto world player will soon get them into significant trouble if they are ceded power over so much military power.

If we were to be tied in on the Terms of any form of Remain or May’s Brexit Withdrawal Agreement, it is almost certain that we would be dragged in and inevitably involved in anything that the unelected bureaucrats with power over 28 different Countries decide that they we and other Member States would be required to do.

The only way that we can guarantee complete control over the use of our Armed Forces and the choice over what future wars we may or may not wish to become involved with is to Leave the EU without an unnecessary and avoidable deal. We must take back control of everything with the first step being the reestablishment of trade with everyone – i.e. Leaving on WTO Terms.

Intelligence

On the gathering and use of security intelligence, Theresa May and her Remain-bent supporters are selling the UK very short too.

We have one of the best security and intelligence services in the World. We were at the forefront of intelligence service development and many Countries – not least of all the USA – have developed their own abilities based on the ground breaking and innovative work that we have done historically here in the UK.

There is and has never been any need for the UK to operate in any way other than alone.

We have always shared data with our allies and we survived very well indeed before the EU and its fearful disciples came along.

It is ridiculous to believe that we can improve the security of the UK by removing borders and harmonising everything that we do and have with foreign powers.

Those Remainers who read this and suggest that simply remaining would have meant that everything would stay the same as it is now are being either ignorant or disingenuous at best.

The evolution of the EU is and has only ever been one way. That is the centralisation of power of all kinds in Brussels and the removal of localised – ergo Nationally identifiable structures which could be used to initiate a democratic claw back by Nation States or in any other way get in their way.

Remember that it is not we the UK who are threatening to withdraw cooperation with the EU once we have finally rescinded our Membership.

It is the EU that is creating the problems.

It is the EU’s desire for overall control which is overriding the continuing benefits of working together sensibly.

It is the EU that has so much more to loose.

Cyber Security

Whilst the topic still remains without great attention from the media, it is the area of cyber security where the benefits of our continuing to work alone and without the dilution of other misleading interests that tell us the UK must continue to steer its ship and be happy standing out in the World alone.

We face threats of a technological kind, leveled at us from World players who in conventional military terms are not even on the risk list. Yet in terms of their current and developing abilities to access and potentially disrupt vital infrastructure at the touch of a button, they may already have the power to affect this and other Western Countries in ways which could only be more severe if we were to experience the fallout of a full scale nuclear war.

Joking aside, countering such threats is not something to be all communal about and leave to people who have no interest in the people and businesses of the UK.

We simply cannot trust the EU to protect us from the threats that we are already working against in the UK and have been for a considerably long time.

Terrorism

Terrorism is the final thing that we hear scare stories about that are used as a basis for our Independence to be denied. Yet returning our own borders is a much safer option for us to ensure that both malevolent would-be terrorists, foreign actors and arms shipments will be continually denied and not made more likely by the mission creep of the EU to abolish any form of meaningful self-government, its policy and rule.

Yes, we must continue to collaborate with our friends wherever possible. But giving them control over our future security is foolishness in the extreme. We must take back all power that has already been granted to foreign powers and share whatever we can when it is possible, whilst accepting that it will always be best to keep security as a key policy for our own Government to determine and decide.

 

Image thanks to unknown source (From the Film ‘War Games’)