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Later, says Snell, the UK claimed – and it was widely reported – that we had installed a magnificent renewable energy turbine in northern Helmand, that would illuminate classrooms. The British army took pride in its ability to counter insurgencies by winning hearts and minds, but in Basra it was, as General Petraeus said, ‘beaten in the field’. Interesting read for general audiences interested in how British foreign policy and action from the late 20th century onwards has exacerbated and in some causes caused international crises.
The undercurrent that Snell pays particular attention to is Blair’s pursuit of unilateral military action, both in Kosovo and Iraq, subverting the international ‘rules-based system’ that had more or less prevailed since 1945, and which the UK was an avowed supporter of. Desperate to do some ‘real soldiering’, and to rescue their position, it was the acute embarrassment of Basra that bounced UK defence chiefs into the next big adventure in Afghanistan, where despite the doleful and enormous lessons of history and the loss of most of an army as early as 1842 (the First Anglo-Afghan War), not a single soul paused to consider the risks or realities. Told through mini biographies of some of the most prominent actors that enabled events of this time: Rupert Murdoch, Paul Dacre, Andrew Neil, Matthew Elliot, Nigel Farage, David Cameron, Jeremy Corbyn, Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. In a remarkable diplomatic career that followed his 1st class history degree at Oxford, Arthur served in Zimbabwe, Nigeria and Yemen, learning Arabic. What we get is fact-based analysis, startling for the simple reason that so many of those facts land so disruptively, and startling for the consistency of the main trajectory, which is how poorly the UK has been served by its leaders in recent decades.Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya are all analysed as more or less disastrous interventions by the UK pursuing deluded objectives with inadequate strategic planning or resource and no stomach to carry anything through to a pre-meditated objective. This masterwork of political analysis is less remarkable for any actual points it makes than for explaining what the author was up to for the three months it took her to resign from Parliament “with immediate effect”. The act pleased no one, neither the Indians, the Labour Party, which considered it a weak compromise, nor a substantial section of the Conservative Party headed by Churchill, which thought it went too far. In terms of the economy, O’Brien deconstructs the links between various free-market thinktanks, Murdoch-owned journalists, and government policymakers which have led to decline. Blair’s motivation for Kosovo was on one level humanitarian, to stop the massacres occurring in the escalating civil war, but on another it was the beginning of his foreign policy ideology.
When O’Brien compares the Mail’s anti-immigrant headlines of the 1930s to its almost identical ones of today, the whole thing becomes downright depressing. Without the UK's marginal but key role, he argues convincingly, the wars in Kosovo, Iraq, and Libya would not have happened and our world today would be safer. The reason for the book’s title and the word ‘broke’, is that there is a terrifying arc, or echo if you prefer, that connects Russia’s attack on Ukraine in 2022 back to the then Labour government’s decision to take military action in Kosovo, followed by war in Iraq in 2003, neither of which were played out according to the ‘rules. He has the sense to see that it was not one grand master conspiracy, but that Britain was broken “sometimes by design” and “sometimes by incompetence”. The journalists, think-tankers and politicians who broke Britain have all delegated the blame for it onto the “wokerati”.
The election of a Labour government at the end of World War II coincided with the rise of sectarian strife within India. However, the title is ambitious for a book that does not go into longer histories of British empire and continues a trend of Anglo-centrism without problematising this, which for me took away from the book.
Meanwhile, Labour’s slender majority in the House of Commons eroded with the defection of the Liberal and nationalist parties following the defeat of referenda in Wales and Scotland that would have created devolved assemblies. It's helpful if you can let us know the title or URL (address) of the page you were looking for, and if relevant the address of the page you found the link on. O’Brien’s revelations about the Murdoch-owned media and the Daily Mail under Paul Dacre certainly deserve to be public knowledge.In a broader discussion, he addresses the incoming new Prime Minister and whether the mooted idea of spending 3% rather than 2% of GDP on defence would amount to much. More-radical members of the party, led by Aneurin Bevan, were growing impatient with the increasingly moderate temper of the leadership. Each colony's unique societies presented different political pressures which could sometimes lead to violence ranging from riots to massacres.
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