simon smith

Britain Is Under Attack on Multiple Fronts. The Government Cannot Respond. Here Is Why. Keir Starmer wrote the preface to his own Strategic Defence Review. His first duty as Prime Minister, he declared, is to keep the British people safe. Lord Robertson, the man Starmer appointed to conduct that review, has now said publicly that he is failing that first duty. We are under-prepared. We are under-insured. We are under attack. We are not safe. Those are not the words of an opposition politician. They are the words of the government's own reviewer, driven to break cover because the investment plan his review recommended was left on the shelf. Tom Tugendhat's assessment at Policy Exchange this week completed the picture. No integrated short range air defence protecting critical national infrastructure. No contracts or budgets to repair airfields if damaged or destroyed. Undersea cables carrying the vast majority of intercontinental data being systematically surveyed by Russian naval vessels. No NHS mass casualty plan. The Cold War infrastructure that provided one was dismantled in the late 1990s on the assumption it would never be needed. We now find ourselves in a world where it is needed and the infrastructure is gone. Charles Moore writing in the Telegraph is right that Britain has rarely faced greater danger and that our leaders remain woefully complacent. Where his analysis needs to go further is in explaining why. The complacency is not accidental. The paralysis has a cause. A government that cannot proscribe the IRGC because it fears the electoral consequences in specific constituencies cannot make the defence decisions Robertson recommended for the same reason. A government that dare not define the Islamist threat because it fears for its Muslim vote cannot enforce a single standard of policing, cannot name the grooming gang demographic, cannot stop the marches that built the permission structure for five attacks on the Jewish community of north London in six weeks. The domestic political constraint and the strategic defence failure share the same root. Electoral demography has made this government structurally incapable of acting in the national interest on either front simultaneously. Robertson described corrosive complacency. The more precise diagnosis is structural paralysis. The coalition that brought Labour to power in 2024 includes constituencies whose priorities are in direct conflict with the national interest on immigration, on Islamism, on Iran and on defence spending. Every decision that would make Britain safer carries a domestic political cost that the coalition will not bear. So the decisions do not get made. The SDR sits on the shelf. The IRGC remains unproscribed. The threat level rises to severe. And the Prime Minister visits Golders Green two days after elderly Jewish men were stabbed in the face outside their synagogue and calls it appalling. Russia is probing undersea cables and airspace. China is infiltrating higher education and infrastructure systems. Iran is directing proxy attacks on British streets and conducting assassination attempts against British citizens. The Islamist recruitment pool grows with every year of uncontrolled immigration from states whose official ideologies include eliminationist antisemitism and a hatred of the West. All of this is documented, assessed and known. The intelligence picture is not the problem. Lord Robertson used the words under attack. He is right. Britain is under attack on multiple fronts simultaneously, external and internal, strategic and civic. The government that should be responding to that attack cannot do so because the electoral coalition that keeps it in power will not allow it. A nation whose government cannot act in its own national interest because of who it depends on for votes is not a nation under complacent leadership. It is a nation under captured leadership. And that is a harder problem to solve than buying more missiles.

This week marked the end of the Parliamentary session. Here’s how we’ve delivered for Defence, and delivered for Britain 🇬🇧 All in 60 seconds (ish).