Front-Line Services, Essential and Otherwise

Daveybloke, the Cuddly Conservative, has pledged to continue the Tory tradition of reverence for the arts of war as he poked a tentative toe or two into the Afghan quagmire and, in a radical break from New Labour's attempts to spin the war as one of choice and occupation, declared it a war of necessity and obligation instead. Daveybloke proclaimed that he and Our Boys were there to "help the Afghans take control of their security", whereupon Daveybloke and the boys can all go home together. Daveybloke received his baptism of inconvenience when his flight was diverted because somebody overheard somebody planning to kill somebody; this is what Britain's leading liberal newspaper calls "a taste of the threat from the Taliban". Daveybloke informed Our Boys that a terrorist attack on a foreign country nine years ago is the reason for Britain's military presence in Afghanistan, besides the necessity of being prepared to invade Pakistan at a moment's notice. Daveybloke buttered up the boys with a paraphrase of an American poet who proclaimed that "it's not the politician that brings the right to vote, it is the soldier, it is not the poet that brings free speech, it is the soldier, it is not the journalist that brings free expression, it is the soldier"; this accounts for the prevalence of democracy, free speech and free expression in military dictatorships across the world. Daveybloke also doubled the boys' pocket money and promised to ensure that the armed forces would receive the kind of support they enjoyed in Britain during the good old days of Hun-stomping and Argie-bashing. There is, in Daveybloke's estimation, "huge respect and support for what the military does", but Daveybloke solicited the boys' support in creating "a new atmosphere in our country, an atmosphere where we back and revere and support our military", whose services may soon be required in assertively restoring social harmony where the need for public spending cuts has not been sufficiently emphasised.