War is the Drift of the State

By now, everyone realizes that the war in Ukraine has become a war of attrition. As BobBaer put it weeks ago, Russia is running shells through artillery pieces and moving a kilometre or less a day through brute destruction. Ukraine demands arms in enough volume to allow them to retake their territory.  The West gives them a fraction of that, enough to control the pace of defeat, and to drag that out. There’s tacit agreement between Putin and the West that this war will go on for years, that war will rule the global economy and climate policy, and that warmaking and war preparation will stay “the health of the state.”

 

Yesterday, the analyst of land warfare Jack Watling described the extent to which Ukraine has been trapped into attritional warfare. Towards the end he writes, “The final process of attrition for Ukraine is economic, and in this realm there can be no doubt that it is running out of money, while Russia can withstand western sanctions. Soon it will be essential for economic relief to sustain the government in Kyiv. Alongside the military considerations outlined above, therefore, ending the attritional struggle in Ukraine is ultimately a question of how much Nato members are prepared to invest in Russia’s defeat.”

 

The answer about NATO investment is “as little as possible.” “Fighting to the last Ukranian” remains the strategy. Reversion to the mean is the default answer, meaning back to the cold war, famine, and global poverty.

 The visits of EU leaders--and the invitations to Ukraine to apply for membership--make it impossible for Putin to back down. 

 

The UK's Boris Johnson didn't want to be left out. Same message.

 

The Westerners insure a Cold War standoff slated to go on for years.

The war comes as a forty-year free-money period comes unglued. Day after day, the Financial Times headlines deepening business alarm.  Will Hutton summarized the dying paradigm in the first paragraph of his Observer column, which appeared on the same day as Watling’s.

This is not the 1970s all over again, notwithstanding the apparent similarities – oil shocks, recession, seasons of discontent, inflation. What we are living through is something more profound. It is the painful unwinding of the dysfunctional Thatcherite economic model, driven by credit, consumption and property prices, so careless of investment, productivity and good, high-performance workplaces. Its end started with the financial crisis, accelerated with Brexit and is now sealed by the economic fallout from Ukraine.

He goes on to point out that this government has no economic plan, and also, that such a plan is beyond the capabilities of this government.

 

I said to Andrea yesterday in Crux Easton that the Tories have spent 12 years making the majority of their people poorer. 

“That’s always been the Tory strategy.” 

“Going back to the 19^th century?” 

“Before that.” 

“Since the Civil War in the 17^th?” 

“Yes, exactly since the Civil War. Since the Roundheads rose up, the poverty of the people has been the Tory strategy.”  

 

More people now say this about the Tories--that their goal is the poverty of the British people. The other consensus is that Labour has no alternative.  Party leader Starmer couldn't see Zelenskyy, so had a photo op with British NATO troops talking about Labour's restored patriotism. Kier and Boris are in full agreement.

 

The policy in the “West” is drift, and drift is the foundation of war.

 

Anything better will depend on mass mobilization, aiming at a positive alternative system.  Hutton again:

But just as Thatcherism emerged out of the 1970s, a new philosophy right for our times must emerge now. Its building blocks are still hazy but already apparent. The trillions of ESG (environmental, social and governance) savings need to be mobilised in partnership with government to pursue great national missions – levelling up, rebasing our energy system and grid to achieve net zero, opening up space, transforming our cities, building in new resiliencies, backing our science.

 

Yes. And this will only happen if policy agency shifts from the current leadership pretty much everywhere to regular people, who've set themselves up in organizations now largely invisible.   This is kind of great.

"This is a different brand of activist — young, mostly female and mostly from Eastern Europe — who believes that the Ukraine war is a brutal manifestation of the world’s dependence on fossil fuels. They have joined two causes — antiwar activism and climate change — to take full advantage of this moment when the world’s attention is focused on Ukraine. And to make their case, they confront Europe’s leaders face-to-face."   

They are great, and this needs to spread. It seems small, but only direct action is going to derail what's happening now.

Denying Reality

What is it like to have gone from Trump's America to Boris's Britain in the middle of a pandemic? It was surreal.  Two years later, it's constantly getting more so. By that I mean the British state seems to have a poor grasp of reality, and is working hard to keep it that way.

I'd just gotten back to London in June 2017 when  Grenfell Tower caught fire and burned all night, killing 72 of its residents.  On June 17th, four days later, we visited a friend who lives nearby and spent time at the already very large memorial (hence the photo).  

In a few weeks, we knew the causes more or less: the council had bought flammable cladding because it was cheaper, and turned the building into a torch waiting for a match; they followed no fire protocols, another likely cost saving; responsibility had been deregulated and outsourced; repeated resident complaints and warnings had been deliberately ignored. The white council government of the richest borough in Britain continuously ignored a tower of people of color in its midst by cloaking it in magic incinerator metal. It was an obvious case of malpractice issuing from structural racism that the government was rendering an unspeakable fact years before it seized on the menace of critical race theory.

Today is the 5th anniversary of the fire. There have been no official findings of cause, no convictions, or even indictments.  What has emerged, as the Financial Times piece put it, is "a disregard for safety within parts of the construction industry and a compromised regulatory regime that allowed Britain to become a dumping ground for dangerous goods."

I'd been following the decline of British higher ed since the fee tripling and central funding cuts implemented by the Cameron-Willetts regime in 2011. But Grenfell was the moment when I decided Britain's decline would be obvious to everyone, and that something would happen.  I didn't think of it as a point of no return.  Now I do. 

The Johnson government isn't failing on a few issues where its defunct Thatcherism or right-wing backbenchers are holding it back. It is failing on every front. 

Just on Saturday:

• Farming: the government is not replacing EU subsidies lost to Brexit, and has cut them 20% this year.
• Food policy: the government is diluting the Dimbleby Report, authored by the Tory co-founder of the Leon restaurant chain, rejecting "expanded sugar and salt taxes" to fund fruit and vegetable consumption by low-income families. The obesity crisis will continue and probably worsen.
• Immigration: a high court judge ruled the plan to deport migrants to Rwanda to be legal.  This plan is an obvious self-inflicted humiliation to Britain's international reputation, such as it still is, combining casual cruelty, neocolonial dumping in Africa, bumptious illegality, and financial incoherence, all wrapped in Monty-Python absurdist packaging.  Even the crown, in the person of Prince Charles, has been unable to suppress its disgust. And yet first flight is to leave today, with 8 migrants. 
• Northern Ireland: the government is nullifying large parts of its own treaty with the EU to extend its denial of the reality that it put a custom barrier between Great Britain and the island of Ireland.
  
• Education: more strong applicants are being excluded from their first choices of university, even as marketization has degraded the distinctive alternative universities like Birkbeck, Goldsmiths, and SOAS.
• Research funding: UK universities have all but given up on managing to stay in the 95 billion euro EU framework program that they wanted to keep in spite of Brexit.
  
• Economics; the government has no actual plan either to "level up" the North or to expand the economy or to create high-wage, high-skill jobs.  It is responding to warnings of widespread food and fuel poverty by promising tax cuts.
  

Intelligence requires foresight, which means seeing the bad effects of what you are about to do before you do it, and not years later, when it's way too late. But the failure of Brexit, the lethal Covid response, the attacks on cultural institutions, migrants seeking refugee status, universities, Black dissent--all the old unforgotten enemies going back to empire--has only hardened the government persisting in the obviously stupid on the basis of dim political calculations that their own people don't credit.  And the hard-core TOry reprobates drive the discourse, which is familar from the U.S., which also has oriented its entire political system around the coddling of its most backward elements.

The actual British people aren't like this. The gap between governments and people is rightly described as wide. And yet these people as voters did put this government in and show no sign of mass repentance and change. 

Meanwhile they may turn the burned tower into a 24 story garden. We do remember the dead and the creativity of the local responses to the living. I dearly hope the latter can spread.