Allison Pearson

Steve Scrase Verified account @StevenScrase · 12h

There was indeed a time when senior military commanders served a vital, unyielding constitutional function.

During the Second World War, Field Marshal Alan Brooke (Chief of the Imperial General Staff) famously spent half his waking hours standing up to Winston Churchill, bluntly killing off catastrophic strategic whims with hard arithmetic. In 1982, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Terence Lewin was indispensable to Margaret Thatcher during the Falklands: providing unvarnished, lethal military counsel, establishing the War Cabinet’s operational parameters, and telling Downing Street exactly what was required to win—not what the Treasury wanted to hear.

The creation of the unified Chief of the Defence Staff (CDS) role in 1959—championed by Lord Mountbatten and solidified in the 1964 creation of the unified Ministry of Defence—had an initially defensible purpose: stopping the Admiralty, War Office, and Air Ministry from fighting tribal turf wars over procurement and duplicating budgets in the Cold War nuclear era.

What the role has degenerated into, however, is a corporate shock absorber for Whitehall.

The decisive death blow came with the 2011 Levene Reforms. Those reforms stripped the individual service chiefs—the First Sea Lord, the Chief of the General Staff, and the Chief of the Air Staff—of their constitutional direct access to the Prime Minister. Instead, power was concentrated entirely in MoD Main Building, split between the civilian Permanent Secretary and the CDS.

From that moment on, the CDS ceased to be a fighting commander and became a corporate executive in ceremonial dress:

• Managing decline instead of deterrence: Rather than resigning on principle when sovereign capabilities are butchered, successive Chiefs of the Defence Staff have functioned as the Treasury’s compliance officers—signing off on shrinking the Army to 72,000, retiring frigates with no replacements, and gutting ammunition stockpiles.

• The PR buffer: Their primary operational utility to Downing Street today is public relations. A politician cutting defence looks reckless; a four-star commander in gold braid sitting on a BBC sofa nodding along and calling for "efficiency and innovation" gives the cuts an institutional hall-mark.

• Bureaucratic capture: They are steeped in civil service managerialism, promoted through Whitehall committee rooms rather than operational combat command, resulting in a culture where producing another glossy "Strategic Review" takes precedence over maintaining physical artillery barrels.

We have created an administrative caste of peacetime generals who spend their tenures writing glossy Strategic Defence Reviews and absorbing political flak, while signing off on the hollowing out of our combat mass.

If our military leadership refuses to resign on principle over an unpatrolled seabed, a hollowed-out surface fleet, and a regular army cut to 72,000, then having a Chief of the Defence Staff is purely ornamental. Abolish the Whitehall boardroom, restore independent authority to the individual service heads, and stop sending four-star managers to run PR for state failure.

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Laurence Fox Verified account @LozzaFox · 17h

We will never forget their sacrifice.

#RemembranceDay

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History Girl Verified account @HistoryGirlBW · 1d

The flowers of Remembrance. Hour after hour an unceasing pilgrimage of bereaved mothers, wives, daughters, and sweethearts lay floral offerings on the Cenotaph. Armistice Day, London, 1920.

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Daniel Hannan Verified account @DanielJHannan · 14h

“Somme,” wrote a Prussian veteran. “The whole history of the world cannot contain a more ghastly word.”

Four hundred thousand British and Allied troops, and a similar number of Germans, lost their lives, without any noticeable gain or loss of territory. It was that territory, pock-marked by artillery, filled with toxic gas, devoid of any living thing except enemy patrols, that later inspired Tolkien’s description of the approach to Mordor:

“Here nothing lived, not even the leprous growths that feed on rottenness. The gasping pools were choked with ash and crawling muds, sickly white and grey, as if the mountains had vomited the filth of their entrails on the lands about.”

It wasn’t only the lansdscape that he recalled. “My ‘Sam Gamgee’ is indeed a reflexion of the English soldier,” he later wrote, “of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and recognized as so far superior to myself.”

Sam is, indeed, the archetypal British NCO: Uncurious, loyal, imperturbable and almost impossibly brave. He turns out to be the true hero of the story, yet he has come from the unlikeliest of backgrounds.

This point is made especially powerfully in the film version. In a scene that doesn’t appear in the book, noble-hearted Faramir asks Sam if he is Frodo’s bodyguard.

“I’m his gardener!” replies the little hobbit, in a way that is supposed to be dignified, but comes across as comical. When they eventually part ways, Faramir, now overcome with respect, tells Sam: “Truly the Shire must be a great realm, Master Samwise, where gardeners are held in high honor.”

The director, Peter Jackson, was making explicit something that Tolkien had left as subtext. Before coming to the scarred and poisonous mud of Mordor, Sam had been surrounded by fecundity. After a lifetime of tending to living things, he was suddenly encircled by death.

My great uncle, Cpl. Bill Hannan, fought at the Somme at the same time as Tolkien. Like Sam, he was a gardener, dragged from his flowerbeds to the filthy sumps and shell-craters of the battlefield.

Unlike Sam, he never made it home. His name is carved into the great memorial at Thiepval, along with those of 72,000 other British and South African soldiers whose bodies were never recovered from no-man’s land.

Almost every British family was touched, as mine was, by the tragedy. My old school lost 749 students, a number which I still struggle to take in. Like so many schools, many of its present buildings were erected as monuments to the slain: We were educated, I now realise, in a semi-mausoleum.

At the time, of course, it barely registered. Few adolescent boys have much sense of mortality. Now, the remembrance services that slid past me as a schoolboy move me to tears.

Year after year, we meet, go through the same rituals, recite the same consoling phrase: “We will remember them.” Though the last of the veterans died some years ago, and though it won’t be long before the last person who knew the fallen is also gone, we will remember them.

Though the slain survive only as names on family trees, faces in yellowing photographs, letters notched in marble, we will remember them. Those tram-drivers and locksmiths and miners, those common men who did uncommon deeds, those gardeners whom we hold in high honor. We will remember them.

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Ashley Marie Verified account @_withashley · 2d

Abdul El-Sayed is now saying he won’t work with Democrats & is starting his own party.
He ran as a Democrat, used the primary process, & accepted Democratic support to get elected. Now that he has the office, he’s walking away from the party that put him there.
He needed the Democratic machine to win he no longer needs it to hold power

You can’t make this up

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