Now Gordon Be Thanked Who Has Matched Us With His Hour

Yesterday was Britain's first-ever Armed Forces Day, decreed by the Glorious Successor in order to reward the sacrifices of the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Marines and presumably the Metropolitan Police in a more efficient and humane fashion than the bad old ways of giving them adequate training and equipment or hospital treatment or war pensions. Despite this typically effective action from General Gordon, a report by the National Security Commission has called for "boosting the armed forces from 98,000 to 120,000 personnel and the creation of a new stabilisation force to tackle situations like postwar Afghanistan and Iraq". Besides helping to keep unemployment down, such a measure would be consistent with the New New Labour principle which has yielded such magnificent results in all our other crises, from banking to political disaffection to such fripperies as health, education and public transport; namely that the answer to any given problem is to persist in the behaviour which caused the problem in the first place. The report also claims that Britain, in its role as moral arbiter to the lesser breeds and peacemaker-general for the World Cop, is still obliged to march hobnailed over the spirit of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty provided that it can do so cheaply. The Glorious Successor apparently spent the day in Kent, refusing to discuss spending cuts and denying that overstretch hampers Britain's defence capability. Since any overstretch in Britain's armed forces at the moment results from attacking others and not from defending ourselves, this is undoubtedly true.