General Incompetence

A force of conservatism has argued that we might be better off arming our soldiers properly than spending twenty thousand million pounds for the honour of continuing to be an American nuclear missile base. In a letter to the Murdoch Times, three retired generals advanced the shocking claims that New New Labour is wasting money on something of no real use, and that the originators of the ID card scheme, the Titan jails business, the Heathrow expansion plot and so many other paragons of practicality are "driven more by political considerations than by the true requirements of national defence". This is no doubt deeply irresponsible; and, at a time when the sole nuclear power in the Middle East is under existential threat from home-made rockets and the demographic time-bomb of Arab fecundity, may even verge upon the anti-Semitic.