I’m not hostile to the idea of the UK apologising for its role in the transatlantic slave trade, and if you skim through the Caricom report, there’s actually some reasonable stuff in there.
But the word reparations is very commonly understood to mean monies paid by defeated nations to compensate for war damage.
And we even have a number (helpfully calculated by the University of the West Indies and the American Society of International Law): £18.8 trillion.
Just 8 times Britain’s total GDP.
As I posted on the other thread, Britain has become the global cuck, with Chagos the other example.
The fact that commentators inside the UK seriously entertain this shows a country that’s completely lost its self-confidence.
We’ll all be faced with a choice soon. France has already experienced it in the Sahara and Sahel, and lost decisively. Pay money - essentially protection money, but call it reparations or whatever - or see all those former colonies become geopolitical and financial satellites of China.
It’s Chinese promises of largesse and investment that has given these commonwealth territories the confidence to do what they’re doing.
This is how it must have felt being the Dutch of Spanish in the Caribbean in the 1700s, as the British started picking apart their empires island by island.
Stopping China from gaining influence in the West Indies isn't worth spending our money on.
That might be a problem for the USA it really isn't for us.
Of course, the Russian dead and injured aren't from Moscow and St Petersburg. As seems always to be the case in Russia, it is the poorest provinces that are bearing the cost of the center's ambitions.
But Russia doesn't have an unlimited supply of young men.
In June, 98,600 people were born in Russia. So, rounding, we're talking about 49,000 male babies.
They're losing 30,000 people per month - killed, captured and wounded - in Ukraine.
If you compare this to the British losses on the Western Front in the first World World War, you're looking at around 40,000 male babies per month, against 20,000 casualties.
So, in the First World War, the British were losing the equivalent of half a month's births on the battlefield. The Russians, in Ukraine, are at 60%.
Ukraine has similar demographics of course, from a smaller base, with people oversees to boot - which is probably why many are downbeat on their prospects in most offensive phases, now the Russians have seemingly ridden themselves of the highest amount of incomptence.
Russia very rarely loses wars on the battlefield. Much more often, it loses them on the home front. That has to be Ukraine's grand strategy here too. The Kremlin is overheating its economy because of war efforts and in the short term that will also bring some popularity but there will be a price to pay (literally) as inflation increasingly bites, as it will.
Obviously, with a Trump presidency, Putin need worry less about Western retaliation to war crimes in terms of support for Ukraine, sanctions and so on, and presumably that's his plan: bomb Ukraine more. But it's not worked so far and people are resilient in such situations.
And anyway, by the spring offensive it will be a question of which way will President Vance go. (Assuming Putin doesn't have the dirt on him too...CCTV of his sofa?)
Vance has been even more vocally anti-Ukraine than Trump.
Whilst there's no great threat to the UK, I'm pretty sure that Putin could invade us after Guy Fawkes night, and seize London. The Russian navy is no great shakes, but ours is almost an absence in force. It wouldn't hold of course - the Russians would have to fall back under a wave of soup thrown by odd people and beardy types clapping them far too firmly on the back. But, you know, just saying.
No chance. The last Russian naval victory was in the age of sail. Pathetic as our defences are after years of Tory neglect, the Royal Navy and RAF would sink their rustbuckets easily. The Ukranians have swept them from most of the Black Sea with no Navy at all..
Suppose you string out the RN in a big long line and imagine that each ship can defend say 20 miles of coast - we're still well short. The RAF has some crazily small number of combat aircraft.
Look, I can't really judge, but it seems quite clear to me that we spend billions on the illusion of having a defence whereas the reality is that we have almost none at all.
The Russian Navy never had much force projection.
Their surface navy (the bit that still floats) is covered with big, liquid fueled missiles. Which exposed very nicely when hit, as the Ukrainians demonstrated. Similar reasons to why their tanks throw their turrets…
Their one carrier is completely broken and can’t sail. And before you start the jokes, we have a carrier at sea. The F-35 on board are generations beyond anything Russian.
Their sub fleet is out of service.
Their amphibious landing capability is now next to nil.
So they can’t get to the U.K., can’t defend themselves on the way here and can’t land anything when they arrive. Aside from that…
Oh, and you don’t defend the U.K. by creating a picket line round the country (every 20 miles etc). As Nelson pointed out when he was in charge of the Channel Fleet, that’s not how it works
Ok, so just for the hell of it, what would you suggest would happen if Putin decided to try to seize London? RN sweeping the waves, and nothing more to be said?
His navy, such as it is, would be sunk in the Skaggerack.
So a first strike by NATO? Just 10k Russian troops on a holiday cruise and you sink them? I know such scenarios are outlandish and unrealistic, but say it was just a thousand Russian special forces - seize a Scottish airbase, fly in more troops. It wouldn't work - it'd be a horrible defeat for Russia, but the line between it working and not working is very far from where it should be.
You think there are 10,000 Russian special forces troops still alive and not tied down in trying to keep the Ukrainian invasion going?
Well I said ' a thousand'.
This is starting to sound like those comic Internet threads where the Argentina crash land Boeing 747s of troops on the Falklands.
As demonstrated at Kyiv airport and elsewhere, unsupported and unresupplied “special forces” just turning up are dead meat against even vague resistance.
Special forces aren’t magic ninjas. They are specialist recon, mostly. With a very small scale ability to undertake heroic, knife-in-your-teeth operations.
Ok lets step through this
1. Could Putin find 1k special forces troops? 2. Cold Putin find some barges or the like with those troops on them to nip into a Scottish port? 3. Could those troops swiftly find and seize and airport? 4. Could Putin fly in more troops? 5. Could the assembled force push south and seize quite a lot of things?
To all of the above the answer is probably yes.
Happily
6. Could this be sustained?
Is a fairly clear 'no'.
We are now at The Alien Space Bats version of Operation Sealion.
The ASBs were invented by the late, great Alison Brooks, an authority on invasion plans for the U.K.
Their place is to posit/explain insane actions by invaders and the opposition.
Such as “the Army, RN and Airforce took a three day holiday. Until the Germans got ashore. To be sporting.”
Ah - the 1914 and 1939 argument. They worked out well.
In 1939 if the Germans had chosen a very high risk invasion then it's far from clear that they may not have succeeded.
The idea of Putin attacking the UK is obviously daft, but being blindsided is dafter still. I don't believe for a moment that you imagine that our armed forces are up to the task of defending us. They should be, but they aren't. Much of the shortfall is just horrible budget mismanagement, the rest mostly ghastly management generally, and some element is underfunding.
It is always worth remembering that anything touched by Whitehall or the British government turns to shit. There’s little reason to think our national defence is too different. In WW2, it was when the weight of industrious minds in the private sector entered the military and wider war effort that performance turned around.
The biggest thing, perhaps, in war is morale. Meaning something more than just being OK with life - a kind of thinking aggressiveness.
During the fall of France, a commander of a squadron of modern fighters - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewoitine_D.520 - lacked only the guns to arm them. He was almost violent in his insistence that it wasn't his job to get them armed into combat. Equally, commanders of field guns refused to use them against tanks - not our job....
At the same period, there was a meeting in Manchester about a possible German invasion. The commander of the heavy AA batteries around the city reported thus
- He'd setup the guns in their subsidiary anti-tank role. Could he please have some more anti-tank ammo?Heavy AA guns were generally very good for this. The famous German 88mm was an AA gun that got pointed at tanks. The Germans were only planning to bring very light tanks for the invasion. A heavy AA shell would have gone through them. Literally.
- He'd also setup to use the guns for long range bombardment. Using the men in his unit who'd served in the artillery, they'd setup firing tables and practised.
Wasn't it Alan Clark who said that in 1940 most French chose the pleasures of food, wine and adultery to the risks of war ?
Of course, the Russian dead and injured aren't from Moscow and St Petersburg. As seems always to be the case in Russia, it is the poorest provinces that are bearing the cost of the center's ambitions.
But Russia doesn't have an unlimited supply of young men.
In June, 98,600 people were born in Russia. So, rounding, we're talking about 49,000 male babies.
They're losing 30,000 people per month - killed, captured and wounded - in Ukraine.
If you compare this to the British losses on the Western Front in the first World World War, you're looking at around 40,000 male babies per month, against 20,000 casualties.
So, in the First World War, the British were losing the equivalent of half a month's births on the battlefield. The Russians, in Ukraine, are at 60%.
Ukraine has similar demographics of course, from a smaller base, with people oversees to boot - which is probably why many are downbeat on their prospects in most offensive phases, now the Russians have seemingly ridden themselves of the highest amount of incomptence.
Russia very rarely loses wars on the battlefield. Much more often, it loses them on the home front. That has to be Ukraine's grand strategy here too. The Kremlin is overheating its economy because of war efforts and in the short term that will also bring some popularity but there will be a price to pay (literally) as inflation increasingly bites, as it will.
Obviously, with a Trump presidency, Putin need worry less about Western retaliation to war crimes in terms of support for Ukraine, sanctions and so on, and presumably that's his plan: bomb Ukraine more. But it's not worked so far and people are resilient in such situations.
And anyway, by the spring offensive it will be a question of which way will President Vance go. (Assuming Putin doesn't have the dirt on him too...CCTV of his sofa?)
Vance has been even more vocally anti-Ukraine than Trump.
Whilst there's no great threat to the UK, I'm pretty sure that Putin could invade us after Guy Fawkes night, and seize London. The Russian navy is no great shakes, but ours is almost an absence in force. It wouldn't hold of course - the Russians would have to fall back under a wave of soup thrown by odd people and beardy types clapping them far too firmly on the back. But, you know, just saying.
No chance. The last Russian naval victory was in the age of sail. Pathetic as our defences are after years of Tory neglect, the Royal Navy and RAF would sink their rustbuckets easily. The Ukranians have swept them from most of the Black Sea with no Navy at all..
Suppose you string out the RN in a big long line and imagine that each ship can defend say 20 miles of coast - we're still well short. The RAF has some crazily small number of combat aircraft.
Look, I can't really judge, but it seems quite clear to me that we spend billions on the illusion of having a defence whereas the reality is that we have almost none at all.
The Russian Navy never had much force projection.
Their surface navy (the bit that still floats) is covered with big, liquid fueled missiles. Which exposed very nicely when hit, as the Ukrainians demonstrated. Similar reasons to why their tanks throw their turrets…
Their one carrier is completely broken and can’t sail. And before you start the jokes, we have a carrier at sea. The F-35 on board are generations beyond anything Russian.
Their sub fleet is out of service.
Their amphibious landing capability is now next to nil.
So they can’t get to the U.K., can’t defend themselves on the way here and can’t land anything when they arrive. Aside from that…
Oh, and you don’t defend the U.K. by creating a picket line round the country (every 20 miles etc). As Nelson pointed out when he was in charge of the Channel Fleet, that’s not how it works
Ok, so just for the hell of it, what would you suggest would happen if Putin decided to try to seize London? RN sweeping the waves, and nothing more to be said?
His navy, such as it is, would be sunk in the Skaggerack.
So a first strike by NATO? Just 10k Russian troops on a holiday cruise and you sink them? I know such scenarios are outlandish and unrealistic, but say it was just a thousand Russian special forces - seize a Scottish airbase, fly in more troops. It wouldn't work - it'd be a horrible defeat for Russia, but the line between it working and not working is very far from where it should be.
You think there are 10,000 Russian special forces troops still alive and not tied down in trying to keep the Ukrainian invasion going?
Well I said ' a thousand'.
This is starting to sound like those comic Internet threads where the Argentina crash land Boeing 747s of troops on the Falklands.
As demonstrated at Kyiv airport and elsewhere, unsupported and unresupplied “special forces” just turning up are dead meat against even vague resistance.
Special forces aren’t magic ninjas. They are specialist recon, mostly. With a very small scale ability to undertake heroic, knife-in-your-teeth operations.
Ok lets step through this
1. Could Putin find 1k special forces troops? 2. Cold Putin find some barges or the like with those troops on them to nip into a Scottish port? 3. Could those troops swiftly find and seize and airport? 4. Could Putin fly in more troops? 5. Could the assembled force push south and seize quite a lot of things?
To all of the above the answer is probably yes.
Happily
6. Could this be sustained?
Is a fairly clear 'no'.
We are now at The Alien Space Bats version of Operation Sealion.
The ASBs were invented by the late, great Alison Brooks, an authority on invasion plans for the U.K.
Their place is to posit/explain insane actions by invaders and the opposition.
Such as “the Army, RN and Airforce took a three day holiday. Until the Germans got ashore. To be sporting.”
Ah - the 1914 and 1939 argument. They worked out well.
In 1939 if the Germans had chosen a very high risk invasion then it's far from clear that they may not have succeeded.
The idea of Putin attacking the UK is obviously daft, but being blindsided is dafter still. I don't believe for a moment that you imagine that our armed forces are up to the task of defending us. They should be, but they aren't. Much of the shortfall is just horrible budget mismanagement, the rest mostly ghastly management generally, and some element is underfunding.
Had the Germans launched a seaborne invasion, it would have been a turkey shoot.
Not quite what Churchill thought though.
No, he knew very well that the Nazis could not invade, but for political reasons he portrayed the situation otherwise.
Something you've read, or just your opinion, or both? (You may be right, although my view is that he had a real and well-founded fear. Curious as to your source)
Read vast amounts over the years. Main info of late from the we have ways podcast - James Holland and Al Murray. Churchill would know full well how strong the navy was.
The various war cabinet diaries and minutes bear this out.
I can’t remember who quoted Earl St Vincent - “I do not say they cannot come. I say they cannot come by sea.”
At heart Hitler was a continentalist. He thought in terms of land warfare in Europe and had no understanding of Britain's sea power, trade links and the power of the empire. He had no plans for invading England. He mainly hoped he wouldn't need to invade. Sea lion doesn't even deserve the term half-baked. There is and always was a strand of nonsense about our ww2 history. We stood alone...apart from the empire and rather a lot of help from a not very neutral USA...
That's true, and yet. It's stories, even nonsense ones, maybe especially nonsense ones, that motivate people.
Starmer's big problem, I would suggest, is that he does not have a good story, and is not able to tell a good story were he provided one.
Churchill was certainly able to tell a good story, and it made a hell of a difference.
Of course, the Russian dead and injured aren't from Moscow and St Petersburg. As seems always to be the case in Russia, it is the poorest provinces that are bearing the cost of the center's ambitions.
But Russia doesn't have an unlimited supply of young men.
In June, 98,600 people were born in Russia. So, rounding, we're talking about 49,000 male babies.
They're losing 30,000 people per month - killed, captured and wounded - in Ukraine.
If you compare this to the British losses on the Western Front in the first World World War, you're looking at around 40,000 male babies per month, against 20,000 casualties.
So, in the First World War, the British were losing the equivalent of half a month's births on the battlefield. The Russians, in Ukraine, are at 60%.
Ukraine has similar demographics of course, from a smaller base, with people oversees to boot - which is probably why many are downbeat on their prospects in most offensive phases, now the Russians have seemingly ridden themselves of the highest amount of incomptence.
Russia very rarely loses wars on the battlefield. Much more often, it loses them on the home front. That has to be Ukraine's grand strategy here too. The Kremlin is overheating its economy because of war efforts and in the short term that will also bring some popularity but there will be a price to pay (literally) as inflation increasingly bites, as it will.
Obviously, with a Trump presidency, Putin need worry less about Western retaliation to war crimes in terms of support for Ukraine, sanctions and so on, and presumably that's his plan: bomb Ukraine more. But it's not worked so far and people are resilient in such situations.
And anyway, by the spring offensive it will be a question of which way will President Vance go. (Assuming Putin doesn't have the dirt on him too...CCTV of his sofa?)
Vance has been even more vocally anti-Ukraine than Trump.
Whilst there's no great threat to the UK, I'm pretty sure that Putin could invade us after Guy Fawkes night, and seize London. The Russian navy is no great shakes, but ours is almost an absence in force. It wouldn't hold of course - the Russians would have to fall back under a wave of soup thrown by odd people and beardy types clapping them far too firmly on the back. But, you know, just saying.
No chance. The last Russian naval victory was in the age of sail. Pathetic as our defences are after years of Tory neglect, the Royal Navy and RAF would sink their rustbuckets easily. The Ukranians have swept them from most of the Black Sea with no Navy at all..
Suppose you string out the RN in a big long line and imagine that each ship can defend say 20 miles of coast - we're still well short. The RAF has some crazily small number of combat aircraft.
Look, I can't really judge, but it seems quite clear to me that we spend billions on the illusion of having a defence whereas the reality is that we have almost none at all.
The Russian Navy never had much force projection.
Their surface navy (the bit that still floats) is covered with big, liquid fueled missiles. Which exposed very nicely when hit, as the Ukrainians demonstrated. Similar reasons to why their tanks throw their turrets…
Their one carrier is completely broken and can’t sail. And before you start the jokes, we have a carrier at sea. The F-35 on board are generations beyond anything Russian.
Their sub fleet is out of service.
Their amphibious landing capability is now next to nil.
So they can’t get to the U.K., can’t defend themselves on the way here and can’t land anything when they arrive. Aside from that…
Oh, and you don’t defend the U.K. by creating a picket line round the country (every 20 miles etc). As Nelson pointed out when he was in charge of the Channel Fleet, that’s not how it works
Ok, so just for the hell of it, what would you suggest would happen if Putin decided to try to seize London? RN sweeping the waves, and nothing more to be said?
His navy, such as it is, would be sunk in the Skaggerack.
So a first strike by NATO? Just 10k Russian troops on a holiday cruise and you sink them? I know such scenarios are outlandish and unrealistic, but say it was just a thousand Russian special forces - seize a Scottish airbase, fly in more troops. It wouldn't work - it'd be a horrible defeat for Russia, but the line between it working and not working is very far from where it should be.
You think there are 10,000 Russian special forces troops still alive and not tied down in trying to keep the Ukrainian invasion going?
Well I said ' a thousand'.
This is starting to sound like those comic Internet threads where the Argentina crash land Boeing 747s of troops on the Falklands.
As demonstrated at Kyiv airport and elsewhere, unsupported and unresupplied “special forces” just turning up are dead meat against even vague resistance.
Special forces aren’t magic ninjas. They are specialist recon, mostly. With a very small scale ability to undertake heroic, knife-in-your-teeth operations.
Ok lets step through this
1. Could Putin find 1k special forces troops? 2. Cold Putin find some barges or the like with those troops on them to nip into a Scottish port? 3. Could those troops swiftly find and seize and airport? 4. Could Putin fly in more troops? 5. Could the assembled force push south and seize quite a lot of things?
To all of the above the answer is probably yes.
Happily
6. Could this be sustained?
Is a fairly clear 'no'.
We are now at The Alien Space Bats version of Operation Sealion.
The ASBs were invented by the late, great Alison Brooks, an authority on invasion plans for the U.K.
Their place is to posit/explain insane actions by invaders and the opposition.
Such as “the Army, RN and Airforce took a three day holiday. Until the Germans got ashore. To be sporting.”
Ah - the 1914 and 1939 argument. They worked out well.
In 1939 if the Germans had chosen a very high risk invasion then it's far from clear that they may not have succeeded.
The idea of Putin attacking the UK is obviously daft, but being blindsided is dafter still. I don't believe for a moment that you imagine that our armed forces are up to the task of defending us. They should be, but they aren't. Much of the shortfall is just horrible budget mismanagement, the rest mostly ghastly management generally, and some element is underfunding.
Had the Germans launched a seaborne invasion, it would have been a turkey shoot.
The Royal Navy would have shat all over them, even if the Luftwaffe had tried their best.
Eventually, you'd have had the few German divisions that managed to successfully land surrender.
A German division was around 17000 men, if they’d successfully landed a few of them they might have been in with a shout. Anzio was initially only 36000.
17,000 men, without thousands of tons of equipment and supplies is just 17,000 POWs waiting to happen.
The best they could manage in the Sandhurst games was to get the initial wave ashore. Whom then got pushed into the sea. And that was with the umpires deliberately giving the Germans breaks to make it more interesting.
I’m just pointing out ‘a few divisions’ is not insignificant. Also the Luftwaffe might have been better sacrificing their Stukas supporting a landing and blasting the RN rather than frittering them away on fleabite daylight raids.
A few divisions is insignificant, without a lot of logistics.
The Stukas couldn’t hit ships in 1940 - pretty much at all. It was as a result of this failure, that a special group was setup to learn how. Which was then sent to the Med in 1941-42….
Stukas managed just fine in an anti shipping role in Norway and Dunkirk. And without them a whole series of British war films would have to dispense with the cliché of Tommies and tars cowering as Jericho’s trumpets sounded.
My wife looks at the headlines from AOL. They allow comments and sometimes get 20 odd on a story. Today they have a story about Starmer and the various tax proposals following his comments about a working man today. It now has over 500 comments. People are incandescent. She has never seen anything even close.
I imagine readers of aol are a self selecting sample. But all the same, this bloke just isn’t cut out for the gig is he.
Of course, the Russian dead and injured aren't from Moscow and St Petersburg. As seems always to be the case in Russia, it is the poorest provinces that are bearing the cost of the center's ambitions.
But Russia doesn't have an unlimited supply of young men.
In June, 98,600 people were born in Russia. So, rounding, we're talking about 49,000 male babies.
They're losing 30,000 people per month - killed, captured and wounded - in Ukraine.
If you compare this to the British losses on the Western Front in the first World World War, you're looking at around 40,000 male babies per month, against 20,000 casualties.
So, in the First World War, the British were losing the equivalent of half a month's births on the battlefield. The Russians, in Ukraine, are at 60%.
Ukraine has similar demographics of course, from a smaller base, with people oversees to boot - which is probably why many are downbeat on their prospects in most offensive phases, now the Russians have seemingly ridden themselves of the highest amount of incomptence.
Russia very rarely loses wars on the battlefield. Much more often, it loses them on the home front. That has to be Ukraine's grand strategy here too. The Kremlin is overheating its economy because of war efforts and in the short term that will also bring some popularity but there will be a price to pay (literally) as inflation increasingly bites, as it will.
Obviously, with a Trump presidency, Putin need worry less about Western retaliation to war crimes in terms of support for Ukraine, sanctions and so on, and presumably that's his plan: bomb Ukraine more. But it's not worked so far and people are resilient in such situations.
And anyway, by the spring offensive it will be a question of which way will President Vance go. (Assuming Putin doesn't have the dirt on him too...CCTV of his sofa?)
Vance has been even more vocally anti-Ukraine than Trump.
Whilst there's no great threat to the UK, I'm pretty sure that Putin could invade us after Guy Fawkes night, and seize London. The Russian navy is no great shakes, but ours is almost an absence in force. It wouldn't hold of course - the Russians would have to fall back under a wave of soup thrown by odd people and beardy types clapping them far too firmly on the back. But, you know, just saying.
No chance. The last Russian naval victory was in the age of sail. Pathetic as our defences are after years of Tory neglect, the Royal Navy and RAF would sink their rustbuckets easily. The Ukranians have swept them from most of the Black Sea with no Navy at all..
Suppose you string out the RN in a big long line and imagine that each ship can defend say 20 miles of coast - we're still well short. The RAF has some crazily small number of combat aircraft.
Look, I can't really judge, but it seems quite clear to me that we spend billions on the illusion of having a defence whereas the reality is that we have almost none at all.
The Russian Navy never had much force projection.
Their surface navy (the bit that still floats) is covered with big, liquid fueled missiles. Which exposed very nicely when hit, as the Ukrainians demonstrated. Similar reasons to why their tanks throw their turrets…
Their one carrier is completely broken and can’t sail. And before you start the jokes, we have a carrier at sea. The F-35 on board are generations beyond anything Russian.
Their sub fleet is out of service.
Their amphibious landing capability is now next to nil.
So they can’t get to the U.K., can’t defend themselves on the way here and can’t land anything when they arrive. Aside from that…
Oh, and you don’t defend the U.K. by creating a picket line round the country (every 20 miles etc). As Nelson pointed out when he was in charge of the Channel Fleet, that’s not how it works
Ok, so just for the hell of it, what would you suggest would happen if Putin decided to try to seize London? RN sweeping the waves, and nothing more to be said?
His navy, such as it is, would be sunk in the Skaggerack.
So a first strike by NATO? Just 10k Russian troops on a holiday cruise and you sink them? I know such scenarios are outlandish and unrealistic, but say it was just a thousand Russian special forces - seize a Scottish airbase, fly in more troops. It wouldn't work - it'd be a horrible defeat for Russia, but the line between it working and not working is very far from where it should be.
You think there are 10,000 Russian special forces troops still alive and not tied down in trying to keep the Ukrainian invasion going?
Well I said ' a thousand'.
This is starting to sound like those comic Internet threads where the Argentina crash land Boeing 747s of troops on the Falklands.
As demonstrated at Kyiv airport and elsewhere, unsupported and unresupplied “special forces” just turning up are dead meat against even vague resistance.
Special forces aren’t magic ninjas. They are specialist recon, mostly. With a very small scale ability to undertake heroic, knife-in-your-teeth operations.
Ok lets step through this
1. Could Putin find 1k special forces troops? 2. Cold Putin find some barges or the like with those troops on them to nip into a Scottish port? 3. Could those troops swiftly find and seize and airport? 4. Could Putin fly in more troops? 5. Could the assembled force push south and seize quite a lot of things?
To all of the above the answer is probably yes.
Happily
6. Could this be sustained?
Is a fairly clear 'no'.
We are now at The Alien Space Bats version of Operation Sealion.
The ASBs were invented by the late, great Alison Brooks, an authority on invasion plans for the U.K.
Their place is to posit/explain insane actions by invaders and the opposition.
Such as “the Army, RN and Airforce took a three day holiday. Until the Germans got ashore. To be sporting.”
Ah - the 1914 and 1939 argument. They worked out well.
In 1939 if the Germans had chosen a very high risk invasion then it's far from clear that they may not have succeeded.
The idea of Putin attacking the UK is obviously daft, but being blindsided is dafter still. I don't believe for a moment that you imagine that our armed forces are up to the task of defending us. They should be, but they aren't. Much of the shortfall is just horrible budget mismanagement, the rest mostly ghastly management generally, and some element is underfunding.
Had the Germans launched a seaborne invasion, it would have been a turkey shoot.
The Royal Navy would have shat all over them, even if the Luftwaffe had tried their best.
Eventually, you'd have had the few German divisions that managed to successfully land surrender.
A German division was around 17000 men, if they’d successfully landed a few of them they might have been in with a shout. Anzio was initially only 36000.
17,000 men, without thousands of tons of equipment and supplies is just 17,000 POWs waiting to happen.
The best they could manage in the Sandhurst games was to get the initial wave ashore. Whom then got pushed into the sea. And that was with the umpires deliberately giving the Germans breaks to make it more interesting.
I’m just pointing out ‘a few divisions’ is not insignificant. Also the Luftwaffe might have been better sacrificing their Stukas supporting a landing and blasting the RN rather than frittering them away on fleabite daylight raids.
A few divisions is insignificant, without a lot of logistics.
The Stukas couldn’t hit ships in 1940 - pretty much at all. It was as a result of this failure, that a special group was setup to learn how. Which was then sent to the Med in 1941-42….
Stukas managed just fine in an anti shipping role in Norway and Dunkirk.
Except at Dunkirk we retrieved 300000 men. How many ships were sunk by Stukas? Pinpricks.
Of course, the Russian dead and injured aren't from Moscow and St Petersburg. As seems always to be the case in Russia, it is the poorest provinces that are bearing the cost of the center's ambitions.
But Russia doesn't have an unlimited supply of young men.
In June, 98,600 people were born in Russia. So, rounding, we're talking about 49,000 male babies.
They're losing 30,000 people per month - killed, captured and wounded - in Ukraine.
If you compare this to the British losses on the Western Front in the first World World War, you're looking at around 40,000 male babies per month, against 20,000 casualties.
So, in the First World War, the British were losing the equivalent of half a month's births on the battlefield. The Russians, in Ukraine, are at 60%.
Ukraine has similar demographics of course, from a smaller base, with people oversees to boot - which is probably why many are downbeat on their prospects in most offensive phases, now the Russians have seemingly ridden themselves of the highest amount of incomptence.
Russia very rarely loses wars on the battlefield. Much more often, it loses them on the home front. That has to be Ukraine's grand strategy here too. The Kremlin is overheating its economy because of war efforts and in the short term that will also bring some popularity but there will be a price to pay (literally) as inflation increasingly bites, as it will.
Obviously, with a Trump presidency, Putin need worry less about Western retaliation to war crimes in terms of support for Ukraine, sanctions and so on, and presumably that's his plan: bomb Ukraine more. But it's not worked so far and people are resilient in such situations.
And anyway, by the spring offensive it will be a question of which way will President Vance go. (Assuming Putin doesn't have the dirt on him too...CCTV of his sofa?)
Vance has been even more vocally anti-Ukraine than Trump.
Whilst there's no great threat to the UK, I'm pretty sure that Putin could invade us after Guy Fawkes night, and seize London. The Russian navy is no great shakes, but ours is almost an absence in force. It wouldn't hold of course - the Russians would have to fall back under a wave of soup thrown by odd people and beardy types clapping them far too firmly on the back. But, you know, just saying.
No chance. The last Russian naval victory was in the age of sail. Pathetic as our defences are after years of Tory neglect, the Royal Navy and RAF would sink their rustbuckets easily. The Ukranians have swept them from most of the Black Sea with no Navy at all..
Suppose you string out the RN in a big long line and imagine that each ship can defend say 20 miles of coast - we're still well short. The RAF has some crazily small number of combat aircraft.
Look, I can't really judge, but it seems quite clear to me that we spend billions on the illusion of having a defence whereas the reality is that we have almost none at all.
The Russian Navy never had much force projection.
Their surface navy (the bit that still floats) is covered with big, liquid fueled missiles. Which exposed very nicely when hit, as the Ukrainians demonstrated. Similar reasons to why their tanks throw their turrets…
Their one carrier is completely broken and can’t sail. And before you start the jokes, we have a carrier at sea. The F-35 on board are generations beyond anything Russian.
Their sub fleet is out of service.
Their amphibious landing capability is now next to nil.
So they can’t get to the U.K., can’t defend themselves on the way here and can’t land anything when they arrive. Aside from that…
Oh, and you don’t defend the U.K. by creating a picket line round the country (every 20 miles etc). As Nelson pointed out when he was in charge of the Channel Fleet, that’s not how it works
Ok, so just for the hell of it, what would you suggest would happen if Putin decided to try to seize London? RN sweeping the waves, and nothing more to be said?
His navy, such as it is, would be sunk in the Skaggerack.
So a first strike by NATO? Just 10k Russian troops on a holiday cruise and you sink them? I know such scenarios are outlandish and unrealistic, but say it was just a thousand Russian special forces - seize a Scottish airbase, fly in more troops. It wouldn't work - it'd be a horrible defeat for Russia, but the line between it working and not working is very far from where it should be.
You think there are 10,000 Russian special forces troops still alive and not tied down in trying to keep the Ukrainian invasion going?
Well I said ' a thousand'.
This is starting to sound like those comic Internet threads where the Argentina crash land Boeing 747s of troops on the Falklands.
As demonstrated at Kyiv airport and elsewhere, unsupported and unresupplied “special forces” just turning up are dead meat against even vague resistance.
Special forces aren’t magic ninjas. They are specialist recon, mostly. With a very small scale ability to undertake heroic, knife-in-your-teeth operations.
Ok lets step through this
1. Could Putin find 1k special forces troops? 2. Cold Putin find some barges or the like with those troops on them to nip into a Scottish port? 3. Could those troops swiftly find and seize and airport? 4. Could Putin fly in more troops? 5. Could the assembled force push south and seize quite a lot of things?
To all of the above the answer is probably yes.
Happily
6. Could this be sustained?
Is a fairly clear 'no'.
We are now at The Alien Space Bats version of Operation Sealion.
The ASBs were invented by the late, great Alison Brooks, an authority on invasion plans for the U.K.
Their place is to posit/explain insane actions by invaders and the opposition.
Such as “the Army, RN and Airforce took a three day holiday. Until the Germans got ashore. To be sporting.”
Ah - the 1914 and 1939 argument. They worked out well.
In 1939 if the Germans had chosen a very high risk invasion then it's far from clear that they may not have succeeded.
The idea of Putin attacking the UK is obviously daft, but being blindsided is dafter still. I don't believe for a moment that you imagine that our armed forces are up to the task of defending us. They should be, but they aren't. Much of the shortfall is just horrible budget mismanagement, the rest mostly ghastly management generally, and some element is underfunding.
It is always worth remembering that anything touched by Whitehall or the British government turns to shit. There’s little reason to think our national defence is too different. In WW2, it was when the weight of industrious minds in the private sector entered the military and wider war effort that performance turned around.
The biggest thing, perhaps, in war is morale. Meaning something more than just being OK with life - a kind of thinking aggressiveness.
During the fall of France, a commander of a squadron of modern fighters - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewoitine_D.520 - lacked only the guns to arm them. He was almost violent in his insistence that it wasn't his job to get them armed into combat. Equally, commanders of field guns refused to use them against tanks - not our job....
At the same period, there was a meeting in Manchester about a possible German invasion. The commander of the heavy AA batteries around the city reported thus
- He'd setup the guns in their subsidiary anti-tank role. Could he please have some more anti-tank ammo?Heavy AA guns were generally very good for this. The famous German 88mm was an AA gun that got pointed at tanks. The Germans were only planning to bring very light tanks for the invasion. A heavy AA shell would have gone through them. Literally.
- He'd also setup to use the guns for long range bombardment. Using the men in his unit who'd served in the artillery, they'd setup firing tables and practised.
Wasn't it Alan Clark who said that in 1940 most French chose the pleasures of food, wine and adultery to the risks of war ?
Alan Clark talked a lot of bollocks about WWI and WWII
The French army fought hard at the start. But having the Germans live inside their OODA cycle knocked the stuffing out of them.
Of course, the Russian dead and injured aren't from Moscow and St Petersburg. As seems always to be the case in Russia, it is the poorest provinces that are bearing the cost of the center's ambitions.
But Russia doesn't have an unlimited supply of young men.
In June, 98,600 people were born in Russia. So, rounding, we're talking about 49,000 male babies.
They're losing 30,000 people per month - killed, captured and wounded - in Ukraine.
If you compare this to the British losses on the Western Front in the first World World War, you're looking at around 40,000 male babies per month, against 20,000 casualties.
So, in the First World War, the British were losing the equivalent of half a month's births on the battlefield. The Russians, in Ukraine, are at 60%.
Ukraine has similar demographics of course, from a smaller base, with people oversees to boot - which is probably why many are downbeat on their prospects in most offensive phases, now the Russians have seemingly ridden themselves of the highest amount of incomptence.
Russia very rarely loses wars on the battlefield. Much more often, it loses them on the home front. That has to be Ukraine's grand strategy here too. The Kremlin is overheating its economy because of war efforts and in the short term that will also bring some popularity but there will be a price to pay (literally) as inflation increasingly bites, as it will.
Obviously, with a Trump presidency, Putin need worry less about Western retaliation to war crimes in terms of support for Ukraine, sanctions and so on, and presumably that's his plan: bomb Ukraine more. But it's not worked so far and people are resilient in such situations.
And anyway, by the spring offensive it will be a question of which way will President Vance go. (Assuming Putin doesn't have the dirt on him too...CCTV of his sofa?)
Vance has been even more vocally anti-Ukraine than Trump.
Whilst there's no great threat to the UK, I'm pretty sure that Putin could invade us after Guy Fawkes night, and seize London. The Russian navy is no great shakes, but ours is almost an absence in force. It wouldn't hold of course - the Russians would have to fall back under a wave of soup thrown by odd people and beardy types clapping them far too firmly on the back. But, you know, just saying.
No chance. The last Russian naval victory was in the age of sail. Pathetic as our defences are after years of Tory neglect, the Royal Navy and RAF would sink their rustbuckets easily. The Ukranians have swept them from most of the Black Sea with no Navy at all..
Suppose you string out the RN in a big long line and imagine that each ship can defend say 20 miles of coast - we're still well short. The RAF has some crazily small number of combat aircraft.
Look, I can't really judge, but it seems quite clear to me that we spend billions on the illusion of having a defence whereas the reality is that we have almost none at all.
The Russian Navy never had much force projection.
Their surface navy (the bit that still floats) is covered with big, liquid fueled missiles. Which exposed very nicely when hit, as the Ukrainians demonstrated. Similar reasons to why their tanks throw their turrets…
Their one carrier is completely broken and can’t sail. And before you start the jokes, we have a carrier at sea. The F-35 on board are generations beyond anything Russian.
Their sub fleet is out of service.
Their amphibious landing capability is now next to nil.
So they can’t get to the U.K., can’t defend themselves on the way here and can’t land anything when they arrive. Aside from that…
Oh, and you don’t defend the U.K. by creating a picket line round the country (every 20 miles etc). As Nelson pointed out when he was in charge of the Channel Fleet, that’s not how it works
Ok, so just for the hell of it, what would you suggest would happen if Putin decided to try to seize London? RN sweeping the waves, and nothing more to be said?
His navy, such as it is, would be sunk in the Skaggerack.
So a first strike by NATO? Just 10k Russian troops on a holiday cruise and you sink them? I know such scenarios are outlandish and unrealistic, but say it was just a thousand Russian special forces - seize a Scottish airbase, fly in more troops. It wouldn't work - it'd be a horrible defeat for Russia, but the line between it working and not working is very far from where it should be.
You think there are 10,000 Russian special forces troops still alive and not tied down in trying to keep the Ukrainian invasion going?
Well I said ' a thousand'.
This is starting to sound like those comic Internet threads where the Argentina crash land Boeing 747s of troops on the Falklands.
As demonstrated at Kyiv airport and elsewhere, unsupported and unresupplied “special forces” just turning up are dead meat against even vague resistance.
Special forces aren’t magic ninjas. They are specialist recon, mostly. With a very small scale ability to undertake heroic, knife-in-your-teeth operations.
Ok lets step through this
1. Could Putin find 1k special forces troops? 2. Cold Putin find some barges or the like with those troops on them to nip into a Scottish port? 3. Could those troops swiftly find and seize and airport? 4. Could Putin fly in more troops? 5. Could the assembled force push south and seize quite a lot of things?
To all of the above the answer is probably yes.
Happily
6. Could this be sustained?
Is a fairly clear 'no'.
We are now at The Alien Space Bats version of Operation Sealion.
The ASBs were invented by the late, great Alison Brooks, an authority on invasion plans for the U.K.
Their place is to posit/explain insane actions by invaders and the opposition.
Such as “the Army, RN and Airforce took a three day holiday. Until the Germans got ashore. To be sporting.”
Ah - the 1914 and 1939 argument. They worked out well.
In 1939 if the Germans had chosen a very high risk invasion then it's far from clear that they may not have succeeded.
The idea of Putin attacking the UK is obviously daft, but being blindsided is dafter still. I don't believe for a moment that you imagine that our armed forces are up to the task of defending us. They should be, but they aren't. Much of the shortfall is just horrible budget mismanagement, the rest mostly ghastly management generally, and some element is underfunding.
Had the Germans launched a seaborne invasion, it would have been a turkey shoot.
The British navy would have come steaming down the channel en masse and although a lot of them would have been taken out by aircraft I really don't believe many barges would have survived either.
Of course, the Russian dead and injured aren't from Moscow and St Petersburg. As seems always to be the case in Russia, it is the poorest provinces that are bearing the cost of the center's ambitions.
But Russia doesn't have an unlimited supply of young men.
In June, 98,600 people were born in Russia. So, rounding, we're talking about 49,000 male babies.
They're losing 30,000 people per month - killed, captured and wounded - in Ukraine.
If you compare this to the British losses on the Western Front in the first World World War, you're looking at around 40,000 male babies per month, against 20,000 casualties.
So, in the First World War, the British were losing the equivalent of half a month's births on the battlefield. The Russians, in Ukraine, are at 60%.
Ukraine has similar demographics of course, from a smaller base, with people oversees to boot - which is probably why many are downbeat on their prospects in most offensive phases, now the Russians have seemingly ridden themselves of the highest amount of incomptence.
Russia very rarely loses wars on the battlefield. Much more often, it loses them on the home front. That has to be Ukraine's grand strategy here too. The Kremlin is overheating its economy because of war efforts and in the short term that will also bring some popularity but there will be a price to pay (literally) as inflation increasingly bites, as it will.
Obviously, with a Trump presidency, Putin need worry less about Western retaliation to war crimes in terms of support for Ukraine, sanctions and so on, and presumably that's his plan: bomb Ukraine more. But it's not worked so far and people are resilient in such situations.
And anyway, by the spring offensive it will be a question of which way will President Vance go. (Assuming Putin doesn't have the dirt on him too...CCTV of his sofa?)
Vance has been even more vocally anti-Ukraine than Trump.
Whilst there's no great threat to the UK, I'm pretty sure that Putin could invade us after Guy Fawkes night, and seize London. The Russian navy is no great shakes, but ours is almost an absence in force. It wouldn't hold of course - the Russians would have to fall back under a wave of soup thrown by odd people and beardy types clapping them far too firmly on the back. But, you know, just saying.
No chance. The last Russian naval victory was in the age of sail. Pathetic as our defences are after years of Tory neglect, the Royal Navy and RAF would sink their rustbuckets easily. The Ukranians have swept them from most of the Black Sea with no Navy at all..
Suppose you string out the RN in a big long line and imagine that each ship can defend say 20 miles of coast - we're still well short. The RAF has some crazily small number of combat aircraft.
Look, I can't really judge, but it seems quite clear to me that we spend billions on the illusion of having a defence whereas the reality is that we have almost none at all.
The Russian Navy never had much force projection.
Their surface navy (the bit that still floats) is covered with big, liquid fueled missiles. Which exposed very nicely when hit, as the Ukrainians demonstrated. Similar reasons to why their tanks throw their turrets…
Their one carrier is completely broken and can’t sail. And before you start the jokes, we have a carrier at sea. The F-35 on board are generations beyond anything Russian.
Their sub fleet is out of service.
Their amphibious landing capability is now next to nil.
So they can’t get to the U.K., can’t defend themselves on the way here and can’t land anything when they arrive. Aside from that…
Oh, and you don’t defend the U.K. by creating a picket line round the country (every 20 miles etc). As Nelson pointed out when he was in charge of the Channel Fleet, that’s not how it works
Ok, so just for the hell of it, what would you suggest would happen if Putin decided to try to seize London? RN sweeping the waves, and nothing more to be said?
His navy, such as it is, would be sunk in the Skaggerack.
So a first strike by NATO? Just 10k Russian troops on a holiday cruise and you sink them? I know such scenarios are outlandish and unrealistic, but say it was just a thousand Russian special forces - seize a Scottish airbase, fly in more troops. It wouldn't work - it'd be a horrible defeat for Russia, but the line between it working and not working is very far from where it should be.
You think there are 10,000 Russian special forces troops still alive and not tied down in trying to keep the Ukrainian invasion going?
Well I said ' a thousand'.
This is starting to sound like those comic Internet threads where the Argentina crash land Boeing 747s of troops on the Falklands.
As demonstrated at Kyiv airport and elsewhere, unsupported and unresupplied “special forces” just turning up are dead meat against even vague resistance.
Special forces aren’t magic ninjas. They are specialist recon, mostly. With a very small scale ability to undertake heroic, knife-in-your-teeth operations.
Ok lets step through this
1. Could Putin find 1k special forces troops? 2. Cold Putin find some barges or the like with those troops on them to nip into a Scottish port? 3. Could those troops swiftly find and seize and airport? 4. Could Putin fly in more troops? 5. Could the assembled force push south and seize quite a lot of things?
To all of the above the answer is probably yes.
Happily
6. Could this be sustained?
Is a fairly clear 'no'.
We are now at The Alien Space Bats version of Operation Sealion.
The ASBs were invented by the late, great Alison Brooks, an authority on invasion plans for the U.K.
Their place is to posit/explain insane actions by invaders and the opposition.
Such as “the Army, RN and Airforce took a three day holiday. Until the Germans got ashore. To be sporting.”
Ah - the 1914 and 1939 argument. They worked out well.
In 1939 if the Germans had chosen a very high risk invasion then it's far from clear that they may not have succeeded.
The idea of Putin attacking the UK is obviously daft, but being blindsided is dafter still. I don't believe for a moment that you imagine that our armed forces are up to the task of defending us. They should be, but they aren't. Much of the shortfall is just horrible budget mismanagement, the rest mostly ghastly management generally, and some element is underfunding.
Had the Germans launched a seaborne invasion, it would have been a turkey shoot.
Not quite what Churchill thought though.
No, he knew very well that the Nazis could not invade, but for political reasons he portrayed the situation otherwise.
Something you've read, or just your opinion, or both? (You may be right, although my view is that he had a real and well-founded fear. Curious as to your source)
Read vast amounts over the years. Main info of late from the we have ways podcast - James Holland and Al Murray. Churchill would know full well how strong the navy was.
The various war cabinet diaries and minutes bear this out.
I can’t remember who quoted Earl St Vincent - “I do not say they cannot come. I say they cannot come by sea.”
At heart Hitler was a continentalist. He thought in terms of land warfare in Europe and had no understanding of Britain's sea power, trade links and the power of the empire. He had no plans for invading England. He mainly hoped he wouldn't need to invade. Sea lion doesn't even deserve the term half-baked. There is and always was a strand of nonsense about our ww2 history. We stood alone...apart from the empire and rather a lot of help from a not very neutral USA...
Russia beat Germany - end of story. Even D-Day was a minor skirmish in comparison with any one of many battles on the eastern front. Britain lost.... but was spared the need to revise its identity due to the good fortune of having the allies sort things out.
The geopolitical outlook for Britain really hasn’t been this dark since the 1930s.
Trump, if he wins, is about to surrender Ukraine to the Russians. His policy, if he does not cause an actual trade war, is to undermine the liberal and democratic principles that underpin the Western order.
The Brics conference is certainly morphing from its slightly arbitrary origins to be a nascent challenge to the dollar hegemony.
At home, one British elite seem to be giving up on the concept of British power even as the world grows ever more Hobbesian. The other elite see Britain’s future in maintaining hostility with our nearest neighbours.
Brace.
You get societies where the elites cease to believe that their State has any reason to exist, like Poland in 1772, Venice in 1797, or France in 1940.
Perhaps, we have reached that point.
In intention, at any rate, the English intelligentsia are Europeanized. They take their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow. In the general patriotism of the country they form a sort of island of dissident thought. England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during ‘God Save the King’ than of stealing from a poor box.
Of course, the Russian dead and injured aren't from Moscow and St Petersburg. As seems always to be the case in Russia, it is the poorest provinces that are bearing the cost of the center's ambitions.
But Russia doesn't have an unlimited supply of young men.
In June, 98,600 people were born in Russia. So, rounding, we're talking about 49,000 male babies.
They're losing 30,000 people per month - killed, captured and wounded - in Ukraine.
If you compare this to the British losses on the Western Front in the first World World War, you're looking at around 40,000 male babies per month, against 20,000 casualties.
So, in the First World War, the British were losing the equivalent of half a month's births on the battlefield. The Russians, in Ukraine, are at 60%.
Ukraine has similar demographics of course, from a smaller base, with people oversees to boot - which is probably why many are downbeat on their prospects in most offensive phases, now the Russians have seemingly ridden themselves of the highest amount of incomptence.
Russia very rarely loses wars on the battlefield. Much more often, it loses them on the home front. That has to be Ukraine's grand strategy here too. The Kremlin is overheating its economy because of war efforts and in the short term that will also bring some popularity but there will be a price to pay (literally) as inflation increasingly bites, as it will.
Obviously, with a Trump presidency, Putin need worry less about Western retaliation to war crimes in terms of support for Ukraine, sanctions and so on, and presumably that's his plan: bomb Ukraine more. But it's not worked so far and people are resilient in such situations.
And anyway, by the spring offensive it will be a question of which way will President Vance go. (Assuming Putin doesn't have the dirt on him too...CCTV of his sofa?)
Vance has been even more vocally anti-Ukraine than Trump.
Whilst there's no great threat to the UK, I'm pretty sure that Putin could invade us after Guy Fawkes night, and seize London. The Russian navy is no great shakes, but ours is almost an absence in force. It wouldn't hold of course - the Russians would have to fall back under a wave of soup thrown by odd people and beardy types clapping them far too firmly on the back. But, you know, just saying.
No chance. The last Russian naval victory was in the age of sail. Pathetic as our defences are after years of Tory neglect, the Royal Navy and RAF would sink their rustbuckets easily. The Ukranians have swept them from most of the Black Sea with no Navy at all..
Suppose you string out the RN in a big long line and imagine that each ship can defend say 20 miles of coast - we're still well short. The RAF has some crazily small number of combat aircraft.
Look, I can't really judge, but it seems quite clear to me that we spend billions on the illusion of having a defence whereas the reality is that we have almost none at all.
The Russian Navy never had much force projection.
Their surface navy (the bit that still floats) is covered with big, liquid fueled missiles. Which exposed very nicely when hit, as the Ukrainians demonstrated. Similar reasons to why their tanks throw their turrets…
Their one carrier is completely broken and can’t sail. And before you start the jokes, we have a carrier at sea. The F-35 on board are generations beyond anything Russian.
Their sub fleet is out of service.
Their amphibious landing capability is now next to nil.
So they can’t get to the U.K., can’t defend themselves on the way here and can’t land anything when they arrive. Aside from that…
Oh, and you don’t defend the U.K. by creating a picket line round the country (every 20 miles etc). As Nelson pointed out when he was in charge of the Channel Fleet, that’s not how it works
Ok, so just for the hell of it, what would you suggest would happen if Putin decided to try to seize London? RN sweeping the waves, and nothing more to be said?
His navy, such as it is, would be sunk in the Skaggerack.
So a first strike by NATO? Just 10k Russian troops on a holiday cruise and you sink them? I know such scenarios are outlandish and unrealistic, but say it was just a thousand Russian special forces - seize a Scottish airbase, fly in more troops. It wouldn't work - it'd be a horrible defeat for Russia, but the line between it working and not working is very far from where it should be.
You think there are 10,000 Russian special forces troops still alive and not tied down in trying to keep the Ukrainian invasion going?
Well I said ' a thousand'.
This is starting to sound like those comic Internet threads where the Argentina crash land Boeing 747s of troops on the Falklands.
As demonstrated at Kyiv airport and elsewhere, unsupported and unresupplied “special forces” just turning up are dead meat against even vague resistance.
Special forces aren’t magic ninjas. They are specialist recon, mostly. With a very small scale ability to undertake heroic, knife-in-your-teeth operations.
Ok lets step through this
1. Could Putin find 1k special forces troops? 2. Cold Putin find some barges or the like with those troops on them to nip into a Scottish port? 3. Could those troops swiftly find and seize and airport? 4. Could Putin fly in more troops? 5. Could the assembled force push south and seize quite a lot of things?
To all of the above the answer is probably yes.
Happily
6. Could this be sustained?
Is a fairly clear 'no'.
We are now at The Alien Space Bats version of Operation Sealion.
The ASBs were invented by the late, great Alison Brooks, an authority on invasion plans for the U.K.
Their place is to posit/explain insane actions by invaders and the opposition.
Such as “the Army, RN and Airforce took a three day holiday. Until the Germans got ashore. To be sporting.”
Ah - the 1914 and 1939 argument. They worked out well.
In 1939 if the Germans had chosen a very high risk invasion then it's far from clear that they may not have succeeded.
The idea of Putin attacking the UK is obviously daft, but being blindsided is dafter still. I don't believe for a moment that you imagine that our armed forces are up to the task of defending us. They should be, but they aren't. Much of the shortfall is just horrible budget mismanagement, the rest mostly ghastly management generally, and some element is underfunding.
Had the Germans launched a seaborne invasion, it would have been a turkey shoot.
Not quite what Churchill thought though.
No, he knew very well that the Nazis could not invade, but for political reasons he portrayed the situation otherwise.
Something you've read, or just your opinion, or both? (You may be right, although my view is that he had a real and well-founded fear. Curious as to your source)
Read vast amounts over the years. Main info of late from the we have ways podcast - James Holland and Al Murray. Churchill would know full well how strong the navy was.
The various war cabinet diaries and minutes bear this out.
I can’t remember who quoted Earl St Vincent - “I do not say they cannot come. I say they cannot come by sea.”
At heart Hitler was a continentalist. He thought in terms of land warfare in Europe and had no understanding of Britain's sea power, trade links and the power of the empire. He had no plans for invading England. He mainly hoped he wouldn't need to invade. Sea lion doesn't even deserve the term half-baked. There is and always was a strand of nonsense about our ww2 history. We stood alone...apart from the empire and rather a lot of help from a not very neutral USA...
That's true, and yet. It's stories, even nonsense ones, maybe especially nonsense ones, that motivate people.
Starmer's big problem, I would suggest, is that he does not have a good story, and is not able to tell a good story were he provided one.
Churchill was certainly able to tell a good story, and it made a hell of a difference.
Take this ring, Master," he said, "for your labours will be heavy; but it will support you in the weariness that you have taken upon yourself. For this is the Ring of Fire, and with it you may rekindle hearts in a world that grows chill.
My wife looks at the headlines from AOL. They allow comments and sometimes get 20 odd on a story. Today they have a story about Starmer and the various tax proposals following his comments about a working man today. It now has over 500 comments. People are incandescent. She has never seen anything even close.
I imagine readers of aol are a self selecting sample. But all the same, this bloke just isn’t cut out for the gig is he.
He did ok in opposition, he does sneering, pomposity and sarcasm fairly well. But being in charge? No, the evidence shows he is really not up to that.
Of course, the Russian dead and injured aren't from Moscow and St Petersburg. As seems always to be the case in Russia, it is the poorest provinces that are bearing the cost of the center's ambitions.
But Russia doesn't have an unlimited supply of young men.
In June, 98,600 people were born in Russia. So, rounding, we're talking about 49,000 male babies.
They're losing 30,000 people per month - killed, captured and wounded - in Ukraine.
If you compare this to the British losses on the Western Front in the first World World War, you're looking at around 40,000 male babies per month, against 20,000 casualties.
So, in the First World War, the British were losing the equivalent of half a month's births on the battlefield. The Russians, in Ukraine, are at 60%.
Ukraine has similar demographics of course, from a smaller base, with people oversees to boot - which is probably why many are downbeat on their prospects in most offensive phases, now the Russians have seemingly ridden themselves of the highest amount of incomptence.
Russia very rarely loses wars on the battlefield. Much more often, it loses them on the home front. That has to be Ukraine's grand strategy here too. The Kremlin is overheating its economy because of war efforts and in the short term that will also bring some popularity but there will be a price to pay (literally) as inflation increasingly bites, as it will.
Obviously, with a Trump presidency, Putin need worry less about Western retaliation to war crimes in terms of support for Ukraine, sanctions and so on, and presumably that's his plan: bomb Ukraine more. But it's not worked so far and people are resilient in such situations.
And anyway, by the spring offensive it will be a question of which way will President Vance go. (Assuming Putin doesn't have the dirt on him too...CCTV of his sofa?)
Vance has been even more vocally anti-Ukraine than Trump.
Whilst there's no great threat to the UK, I'm pretty sure that Putin could invade us after Guy Fawkes night, and seize London. The Russian navy is no great shakes, but ours is almost an absence in force. It wouldn't hold of course - the Russians would have to fall back under a wave of soup thrown by odd people and beardy types clapping them far too firmly on the back. But, you know, just saying.
No chance. The last Russian naval victory was in the age of sail. Pathetic as our defences are after years of Tory neglect, the Royal Navy and RAF would sink their rustbuckets easily. The Ukranians have swept them from most of the Black Sea with no Navy at all..
Suppose you string out the RN in a big long line and imagine that each ship can defend say 20 miles of coast - we're still well short. The RAF has some crazily small number of combat aircraft.
Look, I can't really judge, but it seems quite clear to me that we spend billions on the illusion of having a defence whereas the reality is that we have almost none at all.
The Russian Navy never had much force projection.
Their surface navy (the bit that still floats) is covered with big, liquid fueled missiles. Which exposed very nicely when hit, as the Ukrainians demonstrated. Similar reasons to why their tanks throw their turrets…
Their one carrier is completely broken and can’t sail. And before you start the jokes, we have a carrier at sea. The F-35 on board are generations beyond anything Russian.
Their sub fleet is out of service.
Their amphibious landing capability is now next to nil.
So they can’t get to the U.K., can’t defend themselves on the way here and can’t land anything when they arrive. Aside from that…
Oh, and you don’t defend the U.K. by creating a picket line round the country (every 20 miles etc). As Nelson pointed out when he was in charge of the Channel Fleet, that’s not how it works
Ok, so just for the hell of it, what would you suggest would happen if Putin decided to try to seize London? RN sweeping the waves, and nothing more to be said?
His navy, such as it is, would be sunk in the Skaggerack.
So a first strike by NATO? Just 10k Russian troops on a holiday cruise and you sink them? I know such scenarios are outlandish and unrealistic, but say it was just a thousand Russian special forces - seize a Scottish airbase, fly in more troops. It wouldn't work - it'd be a horrible defeat for Russia, but the line between it working and not working is very far from where it should be.
You think there are 10,000 Russian special forces troops still alive and not tied down in trying to keep the Ukrainian invasion going?
Well I said ' a thousand'.
This is starting to sound like those comic Internet threads where the Argentina crash land Boeing 747s of troops on the Falklands.
As demonstrated at Kyiv airport and elsewhere, unsupported and unresupplied “special forces” just turning up are dead meat against even vague resistance.
Special forces aren’t magic ninjas. They are specialist recon, mostly. With a very small scale ability to undertake heroic, knife-in-your-teeth operations.
Ok lets step through this
1. Could Putin find 1k special forces troops? 2. Cold Putin find some barges or the like with those troops on them to nip into a Scottish port? 3. Could those troops swiftly find and seize and airport? 4. Could Putin fly in more troops? 5. Could the assembled force push south and seize quite a lot of things?
To all of the above the answer is probably yes.
Happily
6. Could this be sustained?
Is a fairly clear 'no'.
We are now at The Alien Space Bats version of Operation Sealion.
The ASBs were invented by the late, great Alison Brooks, an authority on invasion plans for the U.K.
Their place is to posit/explain insane actions by invaders and the opposition.
Such as “the Army, RN and Airforce took a three day holiday. Until the Germans got ashore. To be sporting.”
Ah - the 1914 and 1939 argument. They worked out well.
In 1939 if the Germans had chosen a very high risk invasion then it's far from clear that they may not have succeeded.
The idea of Putin attacking the UK is obviously daft, but being blindsided is dafter still. I don't believe for a moment that you imagine that our armed forces are up to the task of defending us. They should be, but they aren't. Much of the shortfall is just horrible budget mismanagement, the rest mostly ghastly management generally, and some element is underfunding.
Had the Germans launched a seaborne invasion, it would have been a turkey shoot.
The British navy would have come steaming down the channel en masse and although a lot of them would have been taken out by aircraft I really don't believe many barges would have survived either.
Rhine barges were not designed for an autumnal crossing of the Channel.
A destroyer sailing at high speed through them would have sunk them with its wake.
The geopolitical outlook for Britain really hasn’t been this dark since the 1930s.
Trump, if he wins, is about to surrender Ukraine to the Russians. His policy, if he does not cause an actual trade war, is to undermine the liberal and democratic principles that underpin the Western order.
The Brics conference is certainly morphing from its slightly arbitrary origins to be a nascent challenge to the dollar hegemony.
At home, one British elite seem to be giving up on the concept of British power even as the world grows ever more Hobbesian. The other elite see Britain’s future in maintaining hostility with our nearest neighbours.
Of course, the Russian dead and injured aren't from Moscow and St Petersburg. As seems always to be the case in Russia, it is the poorest provinces that are bearing the cost of the center's ambitions.
But Russia doesn't have an unlimited supply of young men.
In June, 98,600 people were born in Russia. So, rounding, we're talking about 49,000 male babies.
They're losing 30,000 people per month - killed, captured and wounded - in Ukraine.
If you compare this to the British losses on the Western Front in the first World World War, you're looking at around 40,000 male babies per month, against 20,000 casualties.
So, in the First World War, the British were losing the equivalent of half a month's births on the battlefield. The Russians, in Ukraine, are at 60%.
Ukraine has similar demographics of course, from a smaller base, with people oversees to boot - which is probably why many are downbeat on their prospects in most offensive phases, now the Russians have seemingly ridden themselves of the highest amount of incomptence.
Russia very rarely loses wars on the battlefield. Much more often, it loses them on the home front. That has to be Ukraine's grand strategy here too. The Kremlin is overheating its economy because of war efforts and in the short term that will also bring some popularity but there will be a price to pay (literally) as inflation increasingly bites, as it will.
Obviously, with a Trump presidency, Putin need worry less about Western retaliation to war crimes in terms of support for Ukraine, sanctions and so on, and presumably that's his plan: bomb Ukraine more. But it's not worked so far and people are resilient in such situations.
And anyway, by the spring offensive it will be a question of which way will President Vance go. (Assuming Putin doesn't have the dirt on him too...CCTV of his sofa?)
Vance has been even more vocally anti-Ukraine than Trump.
Whilst there's no great threat to the UK, I'm pretty sure that Putin could invade us after Guy Fawkes night, and seize London. The Russian navy is no great shakes, but ours is almost an absence in force. It wouldn't hold of course - the Russians would have to fall back under a wave of soup thrown by odd people and beardy types clapping them far too firmly on the back. But, you know, just saying.
No chance. The last Russian naval victory was in the age of sail. Pathetic as our defences are after years of Tory neglect, the Royal Navy and RAF would sink their rustbuckets easily. The Ukranians have swept them from most of the Black Sea with no Navy at all..
Suppose you string out the RN in a big long line and imagine that each ship can defend say 20 miles of coast - we're still well short. The RAF has some crazily small number of combat aircraft.
Look, I can't really judge, but it seems quite clear to me that we spend billions on the illusion of having a defence whereas the reality is that we have almost none at all.
The Russian Navy never had much force projection.
Their surface navy (the bit that still floats) is covered with big, liquid fueled missiles. Which exposed very nicely when hit, as the Ukrainians demonstrated. Similar reasons to why their tanks throw their turrets…
Their one carrier is completely broken and can’t sail. And before you start the jokes, we have a carrier at sea. The F-35 on board are generations beyond anything Russian.
Their sub fleet is out of service.
Their amphibious landing capability is now next to nil.
So they can’t get to the U.K., can’t defend themselves on the way here and can’t land anything when they arrive. Aside from that…
Oh, and you don’t defend the U.K. by creating a picket line round the country (every 20 miles etc). As Nelson pointed out when he was in charge of the Channel Fleet, that’s not how it works
Ok, so just for the hell of it, what would you suggest would happen if Putin decided to try to seize London? RN sweeping the waves, and nothing more to be said?
His navy, such as it is, would be sunk in the Skaggerack.
So a first strike by NATO? Just 10k Russian troops on a holiday cruise and you sink them? I know such scenarios are outlandish and unrealistic, but say it was just a thousand Russian special forces - seize a Scottish airbase, fly in more troops. It wouldn't work - it'd be a horrible defeat for Russia, but the line between it working and not working is very far from where it should be.
You think there are 10,000 Russian special forces troops still alive and not tied down in trying to keep the Ukrainian invasion going?
Well I said ' a thousand'.
This is starting to sound like those comic Internet threads where the Argentina crash land Boeing 747s of troops on the Falklands.
As demonstrated at Kyiv airport and elsewhere, unsupported and unresupplied “special forces” just turning up are dead meat against even vague resistance.
Special forces aren’t magic ninjas. They are specialist recon, mostly. With a very small scale ability to undertake heroic, knife-in-your-teeth operations.
Ok lets step through this
1. Could Putin find 1k special forces troops? 2. Cold Putin find some barges or the like with those troops on them to nip into a Scottish port? 3. Could those troops swiftly find and seize and airport? 4. Could Putin fly in more troops? 5. Could the assembled force push south and seize quite a lot of things?
To all of the above the answer is probably yes.
Happily
6. Could this be sustained?
Is a fairly clear 'no'.
We are now at The Alien Space Bats version of Operation Sealion.
The ASBs were invented by the late, great Alison Brooks, an authority on invasion plans for the U.K.
Their place is to posit/explain insane actions by invaders and the opposition.
Such as “the Army, RN and Airforce took a three day holiday. Until the Germans got ashore. To be sporting.”
Ah - the 1914 and 1939 argument. They worked out well.
In 1939 if the Germans had chosen a very high risk invasion then it's far from clear that they may not have succeeded.
The idea of Putin attacking the UK is obviously daft, but being blindsided is dafter still. I don't believe for a moment that you imagine that our armed forces are up to the task of defending us. They should be, but they aren't. Much of the shortfall is just horrible budget mismanagement, the rest mostly ghastly management generally, and some element is underfunding.
Had the Germans launched a seaborne invasion, it would have been a turkey shoot.
Not quite what Churchill thought though.
No, he knew very well that the Nazis could not invade, but for political reasons he portrayed the situation otherwise.
Something you've read, or just your opinion, or both? (You may be right, although my view is that he had a real and well-founded fear. Curious as to your source)
Read vast amounts over the years. Main info of late from the we have ways podcast - James Holland and Al Murray. Churchill would know full well how strong the navy was.
The various war cabinet diaries and minutes bear this out.
I can’t remember who quoted Earl St Vincent - “I do not say they cannot come. I say they cannot come by sea.”
At heart Hitler was a continentalist. He thought in terms of land warfare in Europe and had no understanding of Britain's sea power, trade links and the power of the empire. He had no plans for invading England. He mainly hoped he wouldn't need to invade. Sea lion doesn't even deserve the term half-baked. There is and always was a strand of nonsense about our ww2 history. We stood alone...apart from the empire and rather a lot of help from a not very neutral USA...
Russia beat Germany - end of story. Even D-Day was a minor skirmish in comparison with any one of many battles on the eastern front. Britain lost.... but was spared the need to revise its identity due to the good fortune of having the allies sort things out.
In terms of men yes, the Eastern Front was collosal but the western allies were very much fighting steel not flesh. Look at how many panzer divisions were sucked into Normandy and were destroyed. Look at the effects of the strategic bombing campaigns. The defeat of Germany relied on all combatants. For sure the Soviet efforts were neglected in British myth making for a long time but there is a danger of revising too far.
I’m not hostile to the idea of the UK apologising for its role in the transatlantic slave trade, and if you skim through the Caricom report, there’s actually some reasonable stuff in there.
But the word reparations is very commonly understood to mean monies paid by defeated nations to compensate for war damage.
And we even have a number (helpfully calculated by the University of the West Indies and the American Society of International Law): £18.8 trillion.
Just 8 times Britain’s total GDP.
As I posted on the other thread, Britain has become the global cuck, with Chagos the other example.
The fact that commentators inside the UK seriously entertain this shows a country that’s completely lost its self-confidence.
I'm certainly not against some deep self reflection and self criticism, but constant self flagellation is not the answer either - it doesn't seem to help us any either.
Of course, the Russian dead and injured aren't from Moscow and St Petersburg. As seems always to be the case in Russia, it is the poorest provinces that are bearing the cost of the center's ambitions.
But Russia doesn't have an unlimited supply of young men.
In June, 98,600 people were born in Russia. So, rounding, we're talking about 49,000 male babies.
They're losing 30,000 people per month - killed, captured and wounded - in Ukraine.
If you compare this to the British losses on the Western Front in the first World World War, you're looking at around 40,000 male babies per month, against 20,000 casualties.
So, in the First World War, the British were losing the equivalent of half a month's births on the battlefield. The Russians, in Ukraine, are at 60%.
Ukraine has similar demographics of course, from a smaller base, with people oversees to boot - which is probably why many are downbeat on their prospects in most offensive phases, now the Russians have seemingly ridden themselves of the highest amount of incomptence.
Russia very rarely loses wars on the battlefield. Much more often, it loses them on the home front. That has to be Ukraine's grand strategy here too. The Kremlin is overheating its economy because of war efforts and in the short term that will also bring some popularity but there will be a price to pay (literally) as inflation increasingly bites, as it will.
Obviously, with a Trump presidency, Putin need worry less about Western retaliation to war crimes in terms of support for Ukraine, sanctions and so on, and presumably that's his plan: bomb Ukraine more. But it's not worked so far and people are resilient in such situations.
And anyway, by the spring offensive it will be a question of which way will President Vance go. (Assuming Putin doesn't have the dirt on him too...CCTV of his sofa?)
Vance has been even more vocally anti-Ukraine than Trump.
Whilst there's no great threat to the UK, I'm pretty sure that Putin could invade us after Guy Fawkes night, and seize London. The Russian navy is no great shakes, but ours is almost an absence in force. It wouldn't hold of course - the Russians would have to fall back under a wave of soup thrown by odd people and beardy types clapping them far too firmly on the back. But, you know, just saying.
No chance. The last Russian naval victory was in the age of sail. Pathetic as our defences are after years of Tory neglect, the Royal Navy and RAF would sink their rustbuckets easily. The Ukranians have swept them from most of the Black Sea with no Navy at all..
Suppose you string out the RN in a big long line and imagine that each ship can defend say 20 miles of coast - we're still well short. The RAF has some crazily small number of combat aircraft.
Look, I can't really judge, but it seems quite clear to me that we spend billions on the illusion of having a defence whereas the reality is that we have almost none at all.
The Russian Navy never had much force projection.
Their surface navy (the bit that still floats) is covered with big, liquid fueled missiles. Which exposed very nicely when hit, as the Ukrainians demonstrated. Similar reasons to why their tanks throw their turrets…
Their one carrier is completely broken and can’t sail. And before you start the jokes, we have a carrier at sea. The F-35 on board are generations beyond anything Russian.
Their sub fleet is out of service.
Their amphibious landing capability is now next to nil.
So they can’t get to the U.K., can’t defend themselves on the way here and can’t land anything when they arrive. Aside from that…
Oh, and you don’t defend the U.K. by creating a picket line round the country (every 20 miles etc). As Nelson pointed out when he was in charge of the Channel Fleet, that’s not how it works
Ok, so just for the hell of it, what would you suggest would happen if Putin decided to try to seize London? RN sweeping the waves, and nothing more to be said?
His navy, such as it is, would be sunk in the Skaggerack.
So a first strike by NATO? Just 10k Russian troops on a holiday cruise and you sink them? I know such scenarios are outlandish and unrealistic, but say it was just a thousand Russian special forces - seize a Scottish airbase, fly in more troops. It wouldn't work - it'd be a horrible defeat for Russia, but the line between it working and not working is very far from where it should be.
You think there are 10,000 Russian special forces troops still alive and not tied down in trying to keep the Ukrainian invasion going?
Well I said ' a thousand'.
This is starting to sound like those comic Internet threads where the Argentina crash land Boeing 747s of troops on the Falklands.
As demonstrated at Kyiv airport and elsewhere, unsupported and unresupplied “special forces” just turning up are dead meat against even vague resistance.
Special forces aren’t magic ninjas. They are specialist recon, mostly. With a very small scale ability to undertake heroic, knife-in-your-teeth operations.
Ok lets step through this
1. Could Putin find 1k special forces troops? 2. Cold Putin find some barges or the like with those troops on them to nip into a Scottish port? 3. Could those troops swiftly find and seize and airport? 4. Could Putin fly in more troops? 5. Could the assembled force push south and seize quite a lot of things?
To all of the above the answer is probably yes.
Happily
6. Could this be sustained?
Is a fairly clear 'no'.
We are now at The Alien Space Bats version of Operation Sealion.
The ASBs were invented by the late, great Alison Brooks, an authority on invasion plans for the U.K.
Their place is to posit/explain insane actions by invaders and the opposition.
Such as “the Army, RN and Airforce took a three day holiday. Until the Germans got ashore. To be sporting.”
Ah - the 1914 and 1939 argument. They worked out well.
In 1939 if the Germans had chosen a very high risk invasion then it's far from clear that they may not have succeeded.
The idea of Putin attacking the UK is obviously daft, but being blindsided is dafter still. I don't believe for a moment that you imagine that our armed forces are up to the task of defending us. They should be, but they aren't. Much of the shortfall is just horrible budget mismanagement, the rest mostly ghastly management generally, and some element is underfunding.
It is always worth remembering that anything touched by Whitehall or the British government turns to shit. There’s little reason to think our national defence is too different. In WW2, it was when the weight of industrious minds in the private sector entered the military and wider war effort that performance turned around.
The biggest thing, perhaps, in war is morale. Meaning something more than just being OK with life - a kind of thinking aggressiveness.
During the fall of France, a commander of a squadron of modern fighters - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewoitine_D.520 - lacked only the guns to arm them. He was almost violent in his insistence that it wasn't his job to get them armed into combat. Equally, commanders of field guns refused to use them against tanks - not our job....
At the same period, there was a meeting in Manchester about a possible German invasion. The commander of the heavy AA batteries around the city reported thus
- He'd setup the guns in their subsidiary anti-tank role. Could he please have some more anti-tank ammo?Heavy AA guns were generally very good for this. The famous German 88mm was an AA gun that got pointed at tanks. The Germans were only planning to bring very light tanks for the invasion. A heavy AA shell would have gone through them. Literally.
- He'd also setup to use the guns for long range bombardment. Using the men in his unit who'd served in the artillery, they'd setup firing tables and practised.
Wasn't it Alan Clark who said that in 1940 most French chose the pleasures of food, wine and adultery to the risks of war ?
My wife looks at the headlines from AOL. They allow comments and sometimes get 20 odd on a story. Today they have a story about Starmer and the various tax proposals following his comments about a working man today. It now has over 500 comments. People are incandescent. She has never seen anything even close.
I imagine readers of aol are a self selecting sample. But all the same, this bloke just isn’t cut out for the gig is he.
He did ok in opposition, he does sneering, pomposity and sarcasm fairly well. But being in charge? No, the evidence shows he is really not up to that.
Not a man of faith, but I don't really get this idea - how is it different from if I formed a deep secular view not to do something, would that prevent me from participating as an elected representative?*
Of course, the Russian dead and injured aren't from Moscow and St Petersburg. As seems always to be the case in Russia, it is the poorest provinces that are bearing the cost of the center's ambitions.
But Russia doesn't have an unlimited supply of young men.
In June, 98,600 people were born in Russia. So, rounding, we're talking about 49,000 male babies.
They're losing 30,000 people per month - killed, captured and wounded - in Ukraine.
If you compare this to the British losses on the Western Front in the first World World War, you're looking at around 40,000 male babies per month, against 20,000 casualties.
So, in the First World War, the British were losing the equivalent of half a month's births on the battlefield. The Russians, in Ukraine, are at 60%.
Ukraine has similar demographics of course, from a smaller base, with people oversees to boot - which is probably why many are downbeat on their prospects in most offensive phases, now the Russians have seemingly ridden themselves of the highest amount of incomptence.
Russia very rarely loses wars on the battlefield. Much more often, it loses them on the home front. That has to be Ukraine's grand strategy here too. The Kremlin is overheating its economy because of war efforts and in the short term that will also bring some popularity but there will be a price to pay (literally) as inflation increasingly bites, as it will.
Obviously, with a Trump presidency, Putin need worry less about Western retaliation to war crimes in terms of support for Ukraine, sanctions and so on, and presumably that's his plan: bomb Ukraine more. But it's not worked so far and people are resilient in such situations.
And anyway, by the spring offensive it will be a question of which way will President Vance go. (Assuming Putin doesn't have the dirt on him too...CCTV of his sofa?)
Vance has been even more vocally anti-Ukraine than Trump.
Whilst there's no great threat to the UK, I'm pretty sure that Putin could invade us after Guy Fawkes night, and seize London. The Russian navy is no great shakes, but ours is almost an absence in force. It wouldn't hold of course - the Russians would have to fall back under a wave of soup thrown by odd people and beardy types clapping them far too firmly on the back. But, you know, just saying.
No chance. The last Russian naval victory was in the age of sail. Pathetic as our defences are after years of Tory neglect, the Royal Navy and RAF would sink their rustbuckets easily. The Ukranians have swept them from most of the Black Sea with no Navy at all..
Suppose you string out the RN in a big long line and imagine that each ship can defend say 20 miles of coast - we're still well short. The RAF has some crazily small number of combat aircraft.
Look, I can't really judge, but it seems quite clear to me that we spend billions on the illusion of having a defence whereas the reality is that we have almost none at all.
The Russian Navy never had much force projection.
Their surface navy (the bit that still floats) is covered with big, liquid fueled missiles. Which exposed very nicely when hit, as the Ukrainians demonstrated. Similar reasons to why their tanks throw their turrets…
Their one carrier is completely broken and can’t sail. And before you start the jokes, we have a carrier at sea. The F-35 on board are generations beyond anything Russian.
Their sub fleet is out of service.
Their amphibious landing capability is now next to nil.
So they can’t get to the U.K., can’t defend themselves on the way here and can’t land anything when they arrive. Aside from that…
Oh, and you don’t defend the U.K. by creating a picket line round the country (every 20 miles etc). As Nelson pointed out when he was in charge of the Channel Fleet, that’s not how it works
Ok, so just for the hell of it, what would you suggest would happen if Putin decided to try to seize London? RN sweeping the waves, and nothing more to be said?
His navy, such as it is, would be sunk in the Skaggerack.
So a first strike by NATO? Just 10k Russian troops on a holiday cruise and you sink them? I know such scenarios are outlandish and unrealistic, but say it was just a thousand Russian special forces - seize a Scottish airbase, fly in more troops. It wouldn't work - it'd be a horrible defeat for Russia, but the line between it working and not working is very far from where it should be.
You think there are 10,000 Russian special forces troops still alive and not tied down in trying to keep the Ukrainian invasion going?
Well I said ' a thousand'.
This is starting to sound like those comic Internet threads where the Argentina crash land Boeing 747s of troops on the Falklands.
As demonstrated at Kyiv airport and elsewhere, unsupported and unresupplied “special forces” just turning up are dead meat against even vague resistance.
Special forces aren’t magic ninjas. They are specialist recon, mostly. With a very small scale ability to undertake heroic, knife-in-your-teeth operations.
Ok lets step through this
1. Could Putin find 1k special forces troops? 2. Cold Putin find some barges or the like with those troops on them to nip into a Scottish port? 3. Could those troops swiftly find and seize and airport? 4. Could Putin fly in more troops? 5. Could the assembled force push south and seize quite a lot of things?
To all of the above the answer is probably yes.
Happily
6. Could this be sustained?
Is a fairly clear 'no'.
We are now at The Alien Space Bats version of Operation Sealion.
The ASBs were invented by the late, great Alison Brooks, an authority on invasion plans for the U.K.
Their place is to posit/explain insane actions by invaders and the opposition.
Such as “the Army, RN and Airforce took a three day holiday. Until the Germans got ashore. To be sporting.”
Ah - the 1914 and 1939 argument. They worked out well.
In 1939 if the Germans had chosen a very high risk invasion then it's far from clear that they may not have succeeded.
The idea of Putin attacking the UK is obviously daft, but being blindsided is dafter still. I don't believe for a moment that you imagine that our armed forces are up to the task of defending us. They should be, but they aren't. Much of the shortfall is just horrible budget mismanagement, the rest mostly ghastly management generally, and some element is underfunding.
Had the Germans launched a seaborne invasion, it would have been a turkey shoot.
Not quite what Churchill thought though.
No, he knew very well that the Nazis could not invade, but for political reasons he portrayed the situation otherwise.
Something you've read, or just your opinion, or both? (You may be right, although my view is that he had a real and well-founded fear. Curious as to your source)
Read vast amounts over the years. Main info of late from the we have ways podcast - James Holland and Al Murray. Churchill would know full well how strong the navy was.
The various war cabinet diaries and minutes bear this out.
I can’t remember who quoted Earl St Vincent - “I do not say they cannot come. I say they cannot come by sea.”
At heart Hitler was a continentalist. He thought in terms of land warfare in Europe and had no understanding of Britain's sea power, trade links and the power of the empire. He had no plans for invading England. He mainly hoped he wouldn't need to invade. Sea lion doesn't even deserve the term half-baked. There is and always was a strand of nonsense about our ww2 history. We stood alone...apart from the empire and rather a lot of help from a not very neutral USA...
Russia beat Germany - end of story. Even D-Day was a minor skirmish in comparison with any one of many battles on the eastern front. Britain lost.... but was spared the need to revise its identity due to the good fortune of having the allies sort things out.
Wrong in almost every particular.
You make the standard rookie error of thinking that being careful of your soldiers‘ lives means that you aren’t pulling your weight.
Of course, the Russian dead and injured aren't from Moscow and St Petersburg. As seems always to be the case in Russia, it is the poorest provinces that are bearing the cost of the center's ambitions.
But Russia doesn't have an unlimited supply of young men.
In June, 98,600 people were born in Russia. So, rounding, we're talking about 49,000 male babies.
They're losing 30,000 people per month - killed, captured and wounded - in Ukraine.
If you compare this to the British losses on the Western Front in the first World World War, you're looking at around 40,000 male babies per month, against 20,000 casualties.
So, in the First World War, the British were losing the equivalent of half a month's births on the battlefield. The Russians, in Ukraine, are at 60%.
Ukraine has similar demographics of course, from a smaller base, with people oversees to boot - which is probably why many are downbeat on their prospects in most offensive phases, now the Russians have seemingly ridden themselves of the highest amount of incomptence.
Russia very rarely loses wars on the battlefield. Much more often, it loses them on the home front. That has to be Ukraine's grand strategy here too. The Kremlin is overheating its economy because of war efforts and in the short term that will also bring some popularity but there will be a price to pay (literally) as inflation increasingly bites, as it will.
Obviously, with a Trump presidency, Putin need worry less about Western retaliation to war crimes in terms of support for Ukraine, sanctions and so on, and presumably that's his plan: bomb Ukraine more. But it's not worked so far and people are resilient in such situations.
And anyway, by the spring offensive it will be a question of which way will President Vance go. (Assuming Putin doesn't have the dirt on him too...CCTV of his sofa?)
Vance has been even more vocally anti-Ukraine than Trump.
Whilst there's no great threat to the UK, I'm pretty sure that Putin could invade us after Guy Fawkes night, and seize London. The Russian navy is no great shakes, but ours is almost an absence in force. It wouldn't hold of course - the Russians would have to fall back under a wave of soup thrown by odd people and beardy types clapping them far too firmly on the back. But, you know, just saying.
No chance. The last Russian naval victory was in the age of sail. Pathetic as our defences are after years of Tory neglect, the Royal Navy and RAF would sink their rustbuckets easily. The Ukranians have swept them from most of the Black Sea with no Navy at all..
Suppose you string out the RN in a big long line and imagine that each ship can defend say 20 miles of coast - we're still well short. The RAF has some crazily small number of combat aircraft.
Look, I can't really judge, but it seems quite clear to me that we spend billions on the illusion of having a defence whereas the reality is that we have almost none at all.
The Russian Navy never had much force projection.
Their surface navy (the bit that still floats) is covered with big, liquid fueled missiles. Which exposed very nicely when hit, as the Ukrainians demonstrated. Similar reasons to why their tanks throw their turrets…
Their one carrier is completely broken and can’t sail. And before you start the jokes, we have a carrier at sea. The F-35 on board are generations beyond anything Russian.
Their sub fleet is out of service.
Their amphibious landing capability is now next to nil.
So they can’t get to the U.K., can’t defend themselves on the way here and can’t land anything when they arrive. Aside from that…
Oh, and you don’t defend the U.K. by creating a picket line round the country (every 20 miles etc). As Nelson pointed out when he was in charge of the Channel Fleet, that’s not how it works
Ok, so just for the hell of it, what would you suggest would happen if Putin decided to try to seize London? RN sweeping the waves, and nothing more to be said?
His navy, such as it is, would be sunk in the Skaggerack.
So a first strike by NATO? Just 10k Russian troops on a holiday cruise and you sink them? I know such scenarios are outlandish and unrealistic, but say it was just a thousand Russian special forces - seize a Scottish airbase, fly in more troops. It wouldn't work - it'd be a horrible defeat for Russia, but the line between it working and not working is very far from where it should be.
You think there are 10,000 Russian special forces troops still alive and not tied down in trying to keep the Ukrainian invasion going?
Well I said ' a thousand'.
This is starting to sound like those comic Internet threads where the Argentina crash land Boeing 747s of troops on the Falklands.
As demonstrated at Kyiv airport and elsewhere, unsupported and unresupplied “special forces” just turning up are dead meat against even vague resistance.
Special forces aren’t magic ninjas. They are specialist recon, mostly. With a very small scale ability to undertake heroic, knife-in-your-teeth operations.
Ok lets step through this
1. Could Putin find 1k special forces troops? 2. Cold Putin find some barges or the like with those troops on them to nip into a Scottish port? 3. Could those troops swiftly find and seize and airport? 4. Could Putin fly in more troops? 5. Could the assembled force push south and seize quite a lot of things?
To all of the above the answer is probably yes.
Happily
6. Could this be sustained?
Is a fairly clear 'no'.
We are now at The Alien Space Bats version of Operation Sealion.
The ASBs were invented by the late, great Alison Brooks, an authority on invasion plans for the U.K.
Their place is to posit/explain insane actions by invaders and the opposition.
Such as “the Army, RN and Airforce took a three day holiday. Until the Germans got ashore. To be sporting.”
Ah - the 1914 and 1939 argument. They worked out well.
In 1939 if the Germans had chosen a very high risk invasion then it's far from clear that they may not have succeeded.
The idea of Putin attacking the UK is obviously daft, but being blindsided is dafter still. I don't believe for a moment that you imagine that our armed forces are up to the task of defending us. They should be, but they aren't. Much of the shortfall is just horrible budget mismanagement, the rest mostly ghastly management generally, and some element is underfunding.
It is always worth remembering that anything touched by Whitehall or the British government turns to shit. There’s little reason to think our national defence is too different. In WW2, it was when the weight of industrious minds in the private sector entered the military and wider war effort that performance turned around.
The biggest thing, perhaps, in war is morale. Meaning something more than just being OK with life - a kind of thinking aggressiveness.
During the fall of France, a commander of a squadron of modern fighters - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewoitine_D.520 - lacked only the guns to arm them. He was almost violent in his insistence that it wasn't his job to get them armed into combat. Equally, commanders of field guns refused to use them against tanks - not our job....
At the same period, there was a meeting in Manchester about a possible German invasion. The commander of the heavy AA batteries around the city reported thus
- He'd setup the guns in their subsidiary anti-tank role. Could he please have some more anti-tank ammo?Heavy AA guns were generally very good for this. The famous German 88mm was an AA gun that got pointed at tanks. The Germans were only planning to bring very light tanks for the invasion. A heavy AA shell would have gone through them. Literally.
- He'd also setup to use the guns for long range bombardment. Using the men in his unit who'd served in the artillery, they'd setup firing tables and practised.
Wasn't it Alan Clark who said that in 1940 most French chose the pleasures of food, wine and adultery to the risks of war ?
The geopolitical outlook for Britain really hasn’t been this dark since the 1930s.
Trump, if he wins, is about to surrender Ukraine to the Russians. His policy, if he does not cause an actual trade war, is to undermine the liberal and democratic principles that underpin the Western order.
The Brics conference is certainly morphing from its slightly arbitrary origins to be a nascent challenge to the dollar hegemony.
At home, one British elite seem to be giving up on the concept of British power even as the world grows ever more Hobbesian. The other elite see Britain’s future in maintaining hostility with our nearest neighbours.
Brace.
You get societies where the elites cease to believe that their State has any reason to exist, like Poland in 1772, Venice in 1797, or France in 1940.
Perhaps, we have reached that point.
In intention, at any rate, the English intelligentsia are Europeanized. They take their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow. In the general patriotism of the country they form a sort of island of dissident thought. England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during ‘God Save the King’ than of stealing from a poor box.
If your point in quoting Orwell from 84 years ago is 'twas ever thus', then you are spot on.
I have no doubt others better read than I can find similar quotes about the terminal decline of Britain and/or England from 1840 and 1740.
The geopolitical outlook for Britain really hasn’t been this dark since the 1930s.
Trump, if he wins, is about to surrender Ukraine to the Russians. His policy, if he does not cause an actual trade war, is to undermine the liberal and democratic principles that underpin the Western order.
The Brics conference is certainly morphing from its slightly arbitrary origins to be a nascent challenge to the dollar hegemony.
At home, one British elite seem to be giving up on the concept of British power even as the world grows ever more Hobbesian. The other elite see Britain’s future in maintaining hostility with our nearest neighbours.
Brace.
You get societies where the elites cease to believe that their State has any reason to exist, like Poland in 1772, Venice in 1797, or France in 1940.
Perhaps, we have reached that point.
In intention, at any rate, the English intelligentsia are Europeanized. They take their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow. In the general patriotism of the country they form a sort of island of dissident thought. England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during ‘God Save the King’ than of stealing from a poor box.
If your point in quoting Orwell from 84 years ago is 'twas ever thus', then you are spot on.
I have no doubt others better read than I can find similar quotes about the terminal decline of Britain and/or England from 1840 and 1740.
And usually such cyclical views will be wrong (if not apparent to those at the time) and sometimes right.
Of course, the Russian dead and injured aren't from Moscow and St Petersburg. As seems always to be the case in Russia, it is the poorest provinces that are bearing the cost of the center's ambitions.
But Russia doesn't have an unlimited supply of young men.
In June, 98,600 people were born in Russia. So, rounding, we're talking about 49,000 male babies.
They're losing 30,000 people per month - killed, captured and wounded - in Ukraine.
If you compare this to the British losses on the Western Front in the first World World War, you're looking at around 40,000 male babies per month, against 20,000 casualties.
So, in the First World War, the British were losing the equivalent of half a month's births on the battlefield. The Russians, in Ukraine, are at 60%.
Ukraine has similar demographics of course, from a smaller base, with people oversees to boot - which is probably why many are downbeat on their prospects in most offensive phases, now the Russians have seemingly ridden themselves of the highest amount of incomptence.
Russia very rarely loses wars on the battlefield. Much more often, it loses them on the home front. That has to be Ukraine's grand strategy here too. The Kremlin is overheating its economy because of war efforts and in the short term that will also bring some popularity but there will be a price to pay (literally) as inflation increasingly bites, as it will.
Obviously, with a Trump presidency, Putin need worry less about Western retaliation to war crimes in terms of support for Ukraine, sanctions and so on, and presumably that's his plan: bomb Ukraine more. But it's not worked so far and people are resilient in such situations.
And anyway, by the spring offensive it will be a question of which way will President Vance go. (Assuming Putin doesn't have the dirt on him too...CCTV of his sofa?)
Vance has been even more vocally anti-Ukraine than Trump.
Whilst there's no great threat to the UK, I'm pretty sure that Putin could invade us after Guy Fawkes night, and seize London. The Russian navy is no great shakes, but ours is almost an absence in force. It wouldn't hold of course - the Russians would have to fall back under a wave of soup thrown by odd people and beardy types clapping them far too firmly on the back. But, you know, just saying.
No chance. The last Russian naval victory was in the age of sail. Pathetic as our defences are after years of Tory neglect, the Royal Navy and RAF would sink their rustbuckets easily. The Ukranians have swept them from most of the Black Sea with no Navy at all..
Suppose you string out the RN in a big long line and imagine that each ship can defend say 20 miles of coast - we're still well short. The RAF has some crazily small number of combat aircraft.
Look, I can't really judge, but it seems quite clear to me that we spend billions on the illusion of having a defence whereas the reality is that we have almost none at all.
The Russian Navy never had much force projection.
Their surface navy (the bit that still floats) is covered with big, liquid fueled missiles. Which exposed very nicely when hit, as the Ukrainians demonstrated. Similar reasons to why their tanks throw their turrets…
Their one carrier is completely broken and can’t sail. And before you start the jokes, we have a carrier at sea. The F-35 on board are generations beyond anything Russian.
Their sub fleet is out of service.
Their amphibious landing capability is now next to nil.
So they can’t get to the U.K., can’t defend themselves on the way here and can’t land anything when they arrive. Aside from that…
Oh, and you don’t defend the U.K. by creating a picket line round the country (every 20 miles etc). As Nelson pointed out when he was in charge of the Channel Fleet, that’s not how it works
Ok, so just for the hell of it, what would you suggest would happen if Putin decided to try to seize London? RN sweeping the waves, and nothing more to be said?
His navy, such as it is, would be sunk in the Skaggerack.
So a first strike by NATO? Just 10k Russian troops on a holiday cruise and you sink them? I know such scenarios are outlandish and unrealistic, but say it was just a thousand Russian special forces - seize a Scottish airbase, fly in more troops. It wouldn't work - it'd be a horrible defeat for Russia, but the line between it working and not working is very far from where it should be.
You think there are 10,000 Russian special forces troops still alive and not tied down in trying to keep the Ukrainian invasion going?
Well I said ' a thousand'.
This is starting to sound like those comic Internet threads where the Argentina crash land Boeing 747s of troops on the Falklands.
As demonstrated at Kyiv airport and elsewhere, unsupported and unresupplied “special forces” just turning up are dead meat against even vague resistance.
Special forces aren’t magic ninjas. They are specialist recon, mostly. With a very small scale ability to undertake heroic, knife-in-your-teeth operations.
Ok lets step through this
1. Could Putin find 1k special forces troops? 2. Cold Putin find some barges or the like with those troops on them to nip into a Scottish port? 3. Could those troops swiftly find and seize and airport? 4. Could Putin fly in more troops? 5. Could the assembled force push south and seize quite a lot of things?
To all of the above the answer is probably yes.
Happily
6. Could this be sustained?
Is a fairly clear 'no'.
We are now at The Alien Space Bats version of Operation Sealion.
The ASBs were invented by the late, great Alison Brooks, an authority on invasion plans for the U.K.
Their place is to posit/explain insane actions by invaders and the opposition.
Such as “the Army, RN and Airforce took a three day holiday. Until the Germans got ashore. To be sporting.”
Ah - the 1914 and 1939 argument. They worked out well.
In 1939 if the Germans had chosen a very high risk invasion then it's far from clear that they may not have succeeded.
The idea of Putin attacking the UK is obviously daft, but being blindsided is dafter still. I don't believe for a moment that you imagine that our armed forces are up to the task of defending us. They should be, but they aren't. Much of the shortfall is just horrible budget mismanagement, the rest mostly ghastly management generally, and some element is underfunding.
Had the Germans launched a seaborne invasion, it would have been a turkey shoot.
Not quite what Churchill thought though.
No, he knew very well that the Nazis could not invade, but for political reasons he portrayed the situation otherwise.
Something you've read, or just your opinion, or both? (You may be right, although my view is that he had a real and well-founded fear. Curious as to your source)
Read vast amounts over the years. Main info of late from the we have ways podcast - James Holland and Al Murray. Churchill would know full well how strong the navy was.
The various war cabinet diaries and minutes bear this out.
I can’t remember who quoted Earl St Vincent - “I do not say they cannot come. I say they cannot come by sea.”
At heart Hitler was a continentalist. He thought in terms of land warfare in Europe and had no understanding of Britain's sea power, trade links and the power of the empire. He had no plans for invading England. He mainly hoped he wouldn't need to invade. Sea lion doesn't even deserve the term half-baked. There is and always was a strand of nonsense about our ww2 history. We stood alone...apart from the empire and rather a lot of help from a not very neutral USA...
That was not a state secret even in 1940.
We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender. And even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the Old.
Not a man of faith, but I don't really get this idea - how is it different from if I formed a deep secular view not to do something, would that prevent me from participating as an elected representative?*
Russian stock market down again after a brief recovery at the end of summer. Not bad given the inability to enforce the oil price cap and the fact Europe is still importing Russian gas (till the end of the year?). If only Ukraine had the kind of weapons to take out the oil refineries and ammunition dumps supplying the front lines. Sorry I forgot they do, they just don't have permission to use them. One of the big unknowns is the quality of the missiles they're producing themselves.
I see Farage is offering himself as a possible US Ambassador if Trump wins. This would appear to be a rare significant error from him. He must know that there is zero possibility of him being appointed to the role by a Labour Prime minister and probably zero under a Conservative one too. And I can't see this playing well with Reform voters either. Does he think they elected him so he could sod off to Washington? Does he actually want to replace the Tories or not? The New Statesman focus group of working class Labour voters was pretty bad for Starmer. Does he care?
Not a man of faith, but I don't really get this idea - how is it different from if I formed a deep secular view not to do something, would that prevent me from participating as an elected representative?*
*there are situations where having a closed mind would prevent involvement, but not on policy decisions like this.
You'd think an assisted dying bill ought to be a free vote, not whipped.
I think it is supposed to be, and there's nothing wrong with others trying to lobby or convince MPs which way they should vote on it, but the logic displayed in that example baffles me.
Not a man of faith, but I don't really get this idea - how is it different from if I formed a deep secular view not to do something, would that prevent me from participating as an elected representative?*
*there are situations where having a closed mind would prevent involvement, but not on policy decisions like this.
The idea of liberty of conscience is a very modern thing.
For most of history, the idea of respecting an *opposing* faith of viewpoint was madness - suffer heresy? Let it spread to others? Infect the body politic?
See the “Humanist” Sir Thomas Moore torturing and burning heretics.
Not a man of faith, but I don't really get this idea - how is it different from if I formed a deep secular view not to do something, would that prevent me from participating as an elected representative?*
*there are situations where having a closed mind would prevent involvement, but not on policy decisions like this.
The idea of liberty of conscience is a very modern thing.
For most of history, the idea of respecting an *opposing* faith of viewpoint was madness - suffer heresy? Let it spread to others? Infect the body politic?
True enough, so we need to fight very hard to maintain it!
Not a man of faith, but I don't really get this idea - how is it different from if I formed a deep secular view not to do something, would that prevent me from participating as an elected representative?*
*there are situations where having a closed mind would prevent involvement, but not on policy decisions like this.
The idea of liberty of conscience is a very modern thing.
For most of history, the idea of respecting an *opposing* faith of viewpoint was madness - suffer heresy? Let it spread to others? Infect the body politic?
True enough, so we need to fight very hard to maintain it!
Nah
Starting my own religion of Respect and Kindness.
Look at us slightly wrong and we nuke you. With respect, tolerance and kindness.
Because offering your souls to the God of atomic fire is to bless you most highly. 10 million degrees purifies the soul….
Not a man of faith, but I don't really get this idea - how is it different from if I formed a deep secular view not to do something, would that prevent me from participating as an elected representative?*
*there are situations where having a closed mind would prevent involvement, but not on policy decisions like this.
The idea of liberty of conscience is a very modern thing.
For most of history, the idea of respecting an *opposing* faith of viewpoint was madness - suffer heresy? Let it spread to others? Infect the body politic?
True enough, so we need to fight very hard to maintain it!
Nah
Starting my own religion of Respect and Kindness.
Look at us slightly wrong and we nuke you. With respect, tolerance and kindness.
Because offering your souls to the God of atomic fire is to bless you most highly. 10 million degrees purifies the soul….
I don't think this chap - who I know has written a lot about the role of Latinos in american politics - has any specific insight into the level of GOP votes for Harris, but I find it interesting in the attempt to put a number on it, in this case 10%.
We won't really know for a long time I guess, though if the outcome is a surprisingly comfortable one for the Democrats in the Presidential but not elsewhere, then that would be a indicator it was on the higher end I suppose. There’s a good possibility that Harris hits 10% GOP defection. That’s a really big number.
Russian stock market down again after a brief recovery at the end of summer. Not bad given the inability to enforce the oil price cap and the fact Europe is still importing Russian gas (till the end of the year?). If only Ukraine had the kind of weapons to take out the oil refineries and ammunition dumps supplying the front lines. Sorry I forgot they do, they just don't have permission to use them. One of the big unknowns is the quality of the missiles they're producing themselves.
I see Farage is offering himself as a possible US Ambassador if Trump wins. This would appear to be a rare significant error from him. He must know that there is zero possibility of him being appointed to the role by a Labour Prime minister and probably zero under a Conservative one too. And I can't see this playing well with Reform voters either. Does he think they elected him so he could sod off to Washington? Does he actually want to replace the Tories or not? The New Statesman focus group of working class Labour voters was pretty bad for Starmer. Does he care?
I read that today. Broadly I agree. I don't think it's a 'significant' error but it does feel cheap and a let down to Reform's supporters. Getting bored of the Commons already?
Russian stock market down again after a brief recovery at the end of summer. Not bad given the inability to enforce the oil price cap and the fact Europe is still importing Russian gas (till the end of the year?). If only Ukraine had the kind of weapons to take out the oil refineries and ammunition dumps supplying the front lines. Sorry I forgot they do, they just don't have permission to use them. One of the big unknowns is the quality of the missiles they're producing themselves.
I see Farage is offering himself as a possible US Ambassador if Trump wins. This would appear to be a rare significant error from him. He must know that there is zero possibility of him being appointed to the role by a Labour Prime minister and probably zero under a Conservative one too. And I can't see this playing well with Reform voters either. Does he think they elected him so he could sod off to Washington? Does he actually want to replace the Tories or not? The New Statesman focus group of working class Labour voters was pretty bad for Starmer. Does he care?
I read that today. Broadly I agree. I don't think it's a 'significant' error but it does feel cheap and a let down to Reform's supporters. Getting bored of the Commons already?
I believe the idea has come up before, I don't recall if from him or not, but if I had to guess he might have thought it just got him into the news cycle emphasising him as a man with potential significant influence (real or imagined), and presuming that would play well with supporters. Especially knowing it is not going to happen. He may not have thought about how it looked in terms of wanting to jump ship from the Commons.
The Washington Post will not be making an endorsement in this year's presidential race, the editor of the editorial pages has told colleagues at a tense meeting this morning https://x.com/davidfolkenflik/status/1849841419193643424
ON FRIDAY AFTERNOON, the Washington Post announced that it would not be making an endorsement in the presidential race. After that, a number of things happened very quickly.
First, the paper’s former executive editor Marty Baron called the decision “cowardice.”
Second, at least one senior Post opinion writer resigned.
Third, it was leaked that the editor of the editorial page had already drafted the paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris when publisher Will Lewis—who is a new hire, hailing from the Rupert Murdoch journalism tree—quashed it and then released a CYA statement about how the paper was “returning to its roots” of not endorsing candidates. The Post itself reported that the decision was made by the paper’s owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
Everything about this story feels like a tempest in a teapot, a boiling story about legacy media fretting over itself in the mirror.
It’s not.
It’s a situation analogous to what we saw in Russia in the early 2000s: We are witnessing the surrender of the American business community to Donald Trump.
The Washington Post will not be making an endorsement in this year's presidential race, the editor of the editorial pages has told colleagues at a tense meeting this morning https://x.com/davidfolkenflik/status/1849841419193643424
Employer NI increase 2% confirmed?!? Will raise £15bn +
They are actually insane. Taxation should be on consumption, not work. Employers NI is particularly pernicious as it's effectively income tax, but disguised so people don't notice it as much.
Effectively they've just given every worker in the country an enforced 2% pay rise, then taken it off them in tax. That's next year's pay rise gone for all my employees then 😢 - I pay them as decently as a I can already, there isn't any spare fat in the situation for the government to steal.
Russian stock market down again after a brief recovery at the end of summer. Not bad given the inability to enforce the oil price cap and the fact Europe is still importing Russian gas (till the end of the year?). If only Ukraine had the kind of weapons to take out the oil refineries and ammunition dumps supplying the front lines. Sorry I forgot they do, they just don't have permission to use them. One of the big unknowns is the quality of the missiles they're producing themselves.
I see Farage is offering himself as a possible US Ambassador if Trump wins. This would appear to be a rare significant error from him. He must know that there is zero possibility of him being appointed to the role by a Labour Prime minister and probably zero under a Conservative one too. And I can't see this playing well with Reform voters either. Does he think they elected him so he could sod off to Washington? Does he actually want to replace the Tories or not? The New Statesman focus group of working class Labour voters was pretty bad for Starmer. Does he care?
Farage doesn't want to be Britain's ambassador to Trump but rather Trump's ambassador to Britain.
The Washington Post will not be making an endorsement in this year's presidential race, the editor of the editorial pages has told colleagues at a tense meeting this morning https://x.com/davidfolkenflik/status/1849841419193643424
So much for the liberal media.
See my Bulwark quote. Bezo has kissed the ring.
Not worth the hassle for the plutocrats, even if Bezos is not going to be able to get in as deep as Musk has.
I don't think this chap - who I know has written a lot about the role of Latinos in american politics - has any specific insight into the level of GOP votes for Harris, but I find it interesting in the attempt to put a number on it, in this case 10%.
We won't really know for a long time I guess, though if the outcome is a surprisingly comfortable one for the Democrats in the Presidential but not elsewhere, then that would be a indicator it was on the higher end I suppose. There’s a good possibility that Harris hits 10% GOP defection. That’s a really big number.
Your weekly reminder I've been on the Kemi bandwagon pretty much before anyone else on PB!
I was raving about her to my mp years ago.
I've been cautiously on the Kemi bandwagon since, I think, tbe leadership electipn which brought us Truss. Cautiously because while she's ace she's also a loose cannon and it could all come crashing down in short order. Let's hope not.
Employer NI increase 2% confirmed?!? Will raise £15bn +
They are actually insane. Taxation should be on consumption, not work. Employers NI is particularly pernicious as it's effectively income tax, but disguised so people don't notice it as much.
Effectively they've just given every worker in the country an enforced 2% pay rise, then taken it off them in tax. That's next year's pay rise gone for all my employees then 😢 - I pay them as decently as a I can already, there isn't any spare fat in the situation for the government to steal.
It's being put through as all the other ideas that Rachel has come up with like non doms won't work.
And won't affect public sector as it's an in and out arrangement for them. Only affects real private sector employment costs.
We will still have more CGT, restrictions on ISAs, fuel tax, alcohol tax not confirmed yet.
Of course, the Russian dead and injured aren't from Moscow and St Petersburg. As seems always to be the case in Russia, it is the poorest provinces that are bearing the cost of the center's ambitions.
But Russia doesn't have an unlimited supply of young men.
In June, 98,600 people were born in Russia. So, rounding, we're talking about 49,000 male babies.
They're losing 30,000 people per month - killed, captured and wounded - in Ukraine.
If you compare this to the British losses on the Western Front in the first World World War, you're looking at around 40,000 male babies per month, against 20,000 casualties.
So, in the First World War, the British were losing the equivalent of half a month's births on the battlefield. The Russians, in Ukraine, are at 60%.
Ukraine has similar demographics of course, from a smaller base, with people oversees to boot - which is probably why many are downbeat on their prospects in most offensive phases, now the Russians have seemingly ridden themselves of the highest amount of incomptence.
Russia very rarely loses wars on the battlefield. Much more often, it loses them on the home front. That has to be Ukraine's grand strategy here too. The Kremlin is overheating its economy because of war efforts and in the short term that will also bring some popularity but there will be a price to pay (literally) as inflation increasingly bites, as it will.
Obviously, with a Trump presidency, Putin need worry less about Western retaliation to war crimes in terms of support for Ukraine, sanctions and so on, and presumably that's his plan: bomb Ukraine more. But it's not worked so far and people are resilient in such situations.
And anyway, by the spring offensive it will be a question of which way will President Vance go. (Assuming Putin doesn't have the dirt on him too...CCTV of his sofa?)
Vance has been even more vocally anti-Ukraine than Trump.
Whilst there's no great threat to the UK, I'm pretty sure that Putin could invade us after Guy Fawkes night, and seize London. The Russian navy is no great shakes, but ours is almost an absence in force. It wouldn't hold of course - the Russians would have to fall back under a wave of soup thrown by odd people and beardy types clapping them far too firmly on the back. But, you know, just saying.
No chance. The last Russian naval victory was in the age of sail. Pathetic as our defences are after years of Tory neglect, the Royal Navy and RAF would sink their rustbuckets easily. The Ukranians have swept them from most of the Black Sea with no Navy at all..
Suppose you string out the RN in a big long line and imagine that each ship can defend say 20 miles of coast - we're still well short. The RAF has some crazily small number of combat aircraft.
Look, I can't really judge, but it seems quite clear to me that we spend billions on the illusion of having a defence whereas the reality is that we have almost none at all.
The Russian Navy never had much force projection.
Their surface navy (the bit that still floats) is covered with big, liquid fueled missiles. Which exposed very nicely when hit, as the Ukrainians demonstrated. Similar reasons to why their tanks throw their turrets…
Their one carrier is completely broken and can’t sail. And before you start the jokes, we have a carrier at sea. The F-35 on board are generations beyond anything Russian.
Their sub fleet is out of service.
Their amphibious landing capability is now next to nil.
So they can’t get to the U.K., can’t defend themselves on the way here and can’t land anything when they arrive. Aside from that…
Oh, and you don’t defend the U.K. by creating a picket line round the country (every 20 miles etc). As Nelson pointed out when he was in charge of the Channel Fleet, that’s not how it works
Ok, so just for the hell of it, what would you suggest would happen if Putin decided to try to seize London? RN sweeping the waves, and nothing more to be said?
His navy, such as it is, would be sunk in the Skaggerack.
So a first strike by NATO? Just 10k Russian troops on a holiday cruise and you sink them? I know such scenarios are outlandish and unrealistic, but say it was just a thousand Russian special forces - seize a Scottish airbase, fly in more troops. It wouldn't work - it'd be a horrible defeat for Russia, but the line between it working and not working is very far from where it should be.
You think there are 10,000 Russian special forces troops still alive and not tied down in trying to keep the Ukrainian invasion going?
Well I said ' a thousand'.
This is starting to sound like those comic Internet threads where the Argentina crash land Boeing 747s of troops on the Falklands.
As demonstrated at Kyiv airport and elsewhere, unsupported and unresupplied “special forces” just turning up are dead meat against even vague resistance.
Special forces aren’t magic ninjas. They are specialist recon, mostly. With a very small scale ability to undertake heroic, knife-in-your-teeth operations.
Ok lets step through this
1. Could Putin find 1k special forces troops? 2. Cold Putin find some barges or the like with those troops on them to nip into a Scottish port? 3. Could those troops swiftly find and seize and airport? 4. Could Putin fly in more troops? 5. Could the assembled force push south and seize quite a lot of things?
To all of the above the answer is probably yes.
Happily
6. Could this be sustained?
Is a fairly clear 'no'.
We are now at The Alien Space Bats version of Operation Sealion.
The ASBs were invented by the late, great Alison Brooks, an authority on invasion plans for the U.K.
Their place is to posit/explain insane actions by invaders and the opposition.
Such as “the Army, RN and Airforce took a three day holiday. Until the Germans got ashore. To be sporting.”
Ah - the 1914 and 1939 argument. They worked out well.
In 1939 if the Germans had chosen a very high risk invasion then it's far from clear that they may not have succeeded.
The idea of Putin attacking the UK is obviously daft, but being blindsided is dafter still. I don't believe for a moment that you imagine that our armed forces are up to the task of defending us. They should be, but they aren't. Much of the shortfall is just horrible budget mismanagement, the rest mostly ghastly management generally, and some element is underfunding.
Had the Germans launched a seaborne invasion, it would have been a turkey shoot.
The Royal Navy would have shat all over them, even if the Luftwaffe had tried their best.
Eventually, you'd have had the few German divisions that managed to successfully land surrender.
A German division was around 17000 men, if they’d successfully landed a few of them they might have been in with a shout. Anzio was initially only 36000.
17,000 men, who need a constant supply of fuel, food, medical supplies and ammunition.
For D Day to work, we needed Pluto - and that was just for oil.
Trump claiming that Harris has allowed "the largest border invasion in the history of the world".
Now, excuse me Donald, you are dissing those Nazi generals you so admire. Those who undertook Operation Barbarossa. Unless at the Mexican border, the invaders have turned up with more than 190 divisions and 4 air fleets (Luftflotten) including 5,500,000 officers and men, more than 47,000 field guns and mortars, 4,300 tanks and assault guns and nearly 5,000 combat aircraft.
Of course, the Russian dead and injured aren't from Moscow and St Petersburg. As seems always to be the case in Russia, it is the poorest provinces that are bearing the cost of the center's ambitions.
But Russia doesn't have an unlimited supply of young men.
In June, 98,600 people were born in Russia. So, rounding, we're talking about 49,000 male babies.
They're losing 30,000 people per month - killed, captured and wounded - in Ukraine.
If you compare this to the British losses on the Western Front in the first World World War, you're looking at around 40,000 male babies per month, against 20,000 casualties.
So, in the First World War, the British were losing the equivalent of half a month's births on the battlefield. The Russians, in Ukraine, are at 60%.
Ukraine has similar demographics of course, from a smaller base, with people oversees to boot - which is probably why many are downbeat on their prospects in most offensive phases, now the Russians have seemingly ridden themselves of the highest amount of incomptence.
Russia very rarely loses wars on the battlefield. Much more often, it loses them on the home front. That has to be Ukraine's grand strategy here too. The Kremlin is overheating its economy because of war efforts and in the short term that will also bring some popularity but there will be a price to pay (literally) as inflation increasingly bites, as it will.
Obviously, with a Trump presidency, Putin need worry less about Western retaliation to war crimes in terms of support for Ukraine, sanctions and so on, and presumably that's his plan: bomb Ukraine more. But it's not worked so far and people are resilient in such situations.
And anyway, by the spring offensive it will be a question of which way will President Vance go. (Assuming Putin doesn't have the dirt on him too...CCTV of his sofa?)
Vance has been even more vocally anti-Ukraine than Trump.
Whilst there's no great threat to the UK, I'm pretty sure that Putin could invade us after Guy Fawkes night, and seize London. The Russian navy is no great shakes, but ours is almost an absence in force. It wouldn't hold of course - the Russians would have to fall back under a wave of soup thrown by odd people and beardy types clapping them far too firmly on the back. But, you know, just saying.
No chance. The last Russian naval victory was in the age of sail. Pathetic as our defences are after years of Tory neglect, the Royal Navy and RAF would sink their rustbuckets easily. The Ukranians have swept them from most of the Black Sea with no Navy at all..
Suppose you string out the RN in a big long line and imagine that each ship can defend say 20 miles of coast - we're still well short. The RAF has some crazily small number of combat aircraft.
Look, I can't really judge, but it seems quite clear to me that we spend billions on the illusion of having a defence whereas the reality is that we have almost none at all.
The Russian Navy never had much force projection.
Their surface navy (the bit that still floats) is covered with big, liquid fueled missiles. Which exposed very nicely when hit, as the Ukrainians demonstrated. Similar reasons to why their tanks throw their turrets…
Their one carrier is completely broken and can’t sail. And before you start the jokes, we have a carrier at sea. The F-35 on board are generations beyond anything Russian.
Their sub fleet is out of service.
Their amphibious landing capability is now next to nil.
So they can’t get to the U.K., can’t defend themselves on the way here and can’t land anything when they arrive. Aside from that…
Oh, and you don’t defend the U.K. by creating a picket line round the country (every 20 miles etc). As Nelson pointed out when he was in charge of the Channel Fleet, that’s not how it works
Ok, so just for the hell of it, what would you suggest would happen if Putin decided to try to seize London? RN sweeping the waves, and nothing more to be said?
His navy, such as it is, would be sunk in the Skaggerack.
So a first strike by NATO? Just 10k Russian troops on a holiday cruise and you sink them? I know such scenarios are outlandish and unrealistic, but say it was just a thousand Russian special forces - seize a Scottish airbase, fly in more troops. It wouldn't work - it'd be a horrible defeat for Russia, but the line between it working and not working is very far from where it should be.
You think there are 10,000 Russian special forces troops still alive and not tied down in trying to keep the Ukrainian invasion going?
Well I said ' a thousand'.
This is starting to sound like those comic Internet threads where the Argentina crash land Boeing 747s of troops on the Falklands.
As demonstrated at Kyiv airport and elsewhere, unsupported and unresupplied “special forces” just turning up are dead meat against even vague resistance.
Special forces aren’t magic ninjas. They are specialist recon, mostly. With a very small scale ability to undertake heroic, knife-in-your-teeth operations.
Ok lets step through this
1. Could Putin find 1k special forces troops? 2. Cold Putin find some barges or the like with those troops on them to nip into a Scottish port? 3. Could those troops swiftly find and seize and airport? 4. Could Putin fly in more troops? 5. Could the assembled force push south and seize quite a lot of things?
To all of the above the answer is probably yes.
Happily
6. Could this be sustained?
Is a fairly clear 'no'.
We are now at The Alien Space Bats version of Operation Sealion.
The ASBs were invented by the late, great Alison Brooks, an authority on invasion plans for the U.K.
Their place is to posit/explain insane actions by invaders and the opposition.
Such as “the Army, RN and Airforce took a three day holiday. Until the Germans got ashore. To be sporting.”
Ah - the 1914 and 1939 argument. They worked out well.
In 1939 if the Germans had chosen a very high risk invasion then it's far from clear that they may not have succeeded.
The idea of Putin attacking the UK is obviously daft, but being blindsided is dafter still. I don't believe for a moment that you imagine that our armed forces are up to the task of defending us. They should be, but they aren't. Much of the shortfall is just horrible budget mismanagement, the rest mostly ghastly management generally, and some element is underfunding.
Had the Germans launched a seaborne invasion, it would have been a turkey shoot.
The Royal Navy would have shat all over them, even if the Luftwaffe had tried their best.
Eventually, you'd have had the few German divisions that managed to successfully land surrender.
A German division was around 17000 men, if they’d successfully landed a few of them they might have been in with a shout. Anzio was initially only 36000.
17,000 men, who need a constant supply of fuel, food, medical supplies and ammunition.
For D Day to work, we needed Pluto - and that was just for oil.
I had a grandfather who worked on that. I always thought it should have been Platboto, not Pluto - Pipeline at the bottom of the ocean. Pluto implies to me some sort of tunnelling.
Employer NI increase 2% confirmed?!? Will raise £15bn +
They are actually insane. Taxation should be on consumption, not work. Employers NI is particularly pernicious as it's effectively income tax, but disguised so people don't notice it as much.
Effectively they've just given every worker in the country an enforced 2% pay rise, then taken it off them in tax. That's next year's pay rise gone for all my employees then 😢 - I pay them as decently as a I can already, there isn't any spare fat in the situation for the government to steal.
It's being put through as all the other ideas that Rachel has come up with like non doms won't work.
And won't affect public sector as it's an in and out arrangement for them. Only affects real private sector employment costs.
We will still have more CGT, restrictions on ISAs, fuel tax, alcohol tax not confirmed yet.
Trouble is, it "works" in the short term as a revenue raiser - but at a tremendous long term cost, which means more strangling of the productive sector of the economy, and less growth in the future.
But this lot are so short term and short sighted it's untrue. They actually made Sunak's Tories seem competent.
Hundreds of truckles of cheddar worth more than £300,000 have been stolen from London cheese specialist Neal’s Yard Dairy.
Fraudsters posing as legitimate wholesalers received the 950 clothbound cheeses from the Southwark-based company before it was realised they were a fake firm.
Hundreds of truckles of cheddar worth more than £300,000 have been stolen from London cheese specialist Neal’s Yard Dairy.
Fraudsters posing as legitimate wholesalers received the 950 clothbound cheeses from the Southwark-based company before it was realised they were a fake firm.
Newsnight: Washington Post will not endorse a candidate.
There's a story circulating about how Bezos stepped in to prevent a Harris endorsement.
So that's Musk and Bezos in the Trump camp. Maybe Zuckerberg has gone over to the dark side too?
He jumped that shark a few weeks ago.
The Meta CEO, in a Thursday interview with Bloomberg’s Emily Chang, recalled seeing the former president get up after the shooting and then pump his fist in the air, a moment documented in widely shared photos from the attack that killed one rally attendee.
Zuckerberg described the scene, which featured an American flag waving in the sky, as “one of the most badass things” he’s seen in his life.
Entirely coincidentally, not long after...
"Donald Trump threatens to imprison Mark Zuckerburg for 'rest of his life' if 'he does anything illegal' over election"
Hundreds of truckles of cheddar worth more than £300,000 have been stolen from London cheese specialist Neal’s Yard Dairy.
Fraudsters posing as legitimate wholesalers received the 950 clothbound cheeses from the Southwark-based company before it was realised they were a fake firm.
Trump claiming that Harris has allowed "the largest border invasion in the history of the world".
Now, excuse me Donald, you are dissing those Nazi generals you so admire. Those who undertook Operation Barbarossa. Unless at the Mexican border, the invaders have turned up with more than 190 divisions and 4 air fleets (Luftflotten) including 5,500,000 officers and men, more than 47,000 field guns and mortars, 4,300 tanks and assault guns and nearly 5,000 combat aircraft.
Which we might have noticed.
Urgent Q for Home Office ministers: Has the UK prepared plans for exodus of Americans fleeing Trump 2.0 USA?
Hundreds of truckles of cheddar worth more than £300,000 have been stolen from London cheese specialist Neal’s Yard Dairy.
Fraudsters posing as legitimate wholesalers received the 950 clothbound cheeses from the Southwark-based company before it was realised they were a fake firm.
Trump claiming that Harris has allowed "the largest border invasion in the history of the world".
Now, excuse me Donald, you are dissing those Nazi generals you so admire. Those who undertook Operation Barbarossa. Unless at the Mexican border, the invaders have turned up with more than 190 divisions and 4 air fleets (Luftflotten) including 5,500,000 officers and men, more than 47,000 field guns and mortars, 4,300 tanks and assault guns and nearly 5,000 combat aircraft.
Which we might have noticed.
Urgent Q for Home Office ministers: Has the UK prepared plans for exodus of Americans fleeing Trump 2.0 USA?
I'm sure Reeves has a list of ways she wants to tax them.
Russian stock market down again after a brief recovery at the end of summer. Not bad given the inability to enforce the oil price cap and the fact Europe is still importing Russian gas (till the end of the year?). If only Ukraine had the kind of weapons to take out the oil refineries and ammunition dumps supplying the front lines. Sorry I forgot they do, they just don't have permission to use them. One of the big unknowns is the quality of the missiles they're producing themselves.
I see Farage is offering himself as a possible US Ambassador if Trump wins. This would appear to be a rare significant error from him. He must know that there is zero possibility of him being appointed to the role by a Labour Prime minister and probably zero under a Conservative one too. And I can't see this playing well with Reform voters either. Does he think they elected him so he could sod off to Washington? Does he actually want to replace the Tories or not? The New Statesman focus group of working class Labour voters was pretty bad for Starmer. Does he care?
Farage doesn't want to be Britain's ambassador to Trump but rather Trump's ambassador to Britain.
I think he just wants to get a lot of money for not very much work.
Hundreds of truckles of cheddar worth more than £300,000 have been stolen from London cheese specialist Neal’s Yard Dairy.
Fraudsters posing as legitimate wholesalers received the 950 clothbound cheeses from the Southwark-based company before it was realised they were a fake firm.
Hundreds of truckles of cheddar worth more than £300,000 have been stolen from London cheese specialist Neal’s Yard Dairy.
Fraudsters posing as legitimate wholesalers received the 950 clothbound cheeses from the Southwark-based company before it was realised they were a fake firm.
Curious about this story. I would think artisanal cheese would be hard to pass off? People normally want to know the provenance, that it's been stored correctly etc
Trump claiming that Harris has allowed "the largest border invasion in the history of the world".
Now, excuse me Donald, you are dissing those Nazi generals you so admire. Those who undertook Operation Barbarossa. Unless at the Mexican border, the invaders have turned up with more than 190 divisions and 4 air fleets (Luftflotten) including 5,500,000 officers and men, more than 47,000 field guns and mortars, 4,300 tanks and assault guns and nearly 5,000 combat aircraft.
Which we might have noticed.
Urgent Q for Home Office ministers: Has the UK prepared plans for exodus of Americans fleeing Trump 2.0 USA?
Of course, the Russian dead and injured aren't from Moscow and St Petersburg. As seems always to be the case in Russia, it is the poorest provinces that are bearing the cost of the center's ambitions.
But Russia doesn't have an unlimited supply of young men.
In June, 98,600 people were born in Russia. So, rounding, we're talking about 49,000 male babies.
They're losing 30,000 people per month - killed, captured and wounded - in Ukraine.
If you compare this to the British losses on the Western Front in the first World World War, you're looking at around 40,000 male babies per month, against 20,000 casualties.
So, in the First World War, the British were losing the equivalent of half a month's births on the battlefield. The Russians, in Ukraine, are at 60%.
Ukraine has similar demographics of course, from a smaller base, with people oversees to boot - which is probably why many are downbeat on their prospects in most offensive phases, now the Russians have seemingly ridden themselves of the highest amount of incomptence.
Russia very rarely loses wars on the battlefield. Much more often, it loses them on the home front. That has to be Ukraine's grand strategy here too. The Kremlin is overheating its economy because of war efforts and in the short term that will also bring some popularity but there will be a price to pay (literally) as inflation increasingly bites, as it will.
Obviously, with a Trump presidency, Putin need worry less about Western retaliation to war crimes in terms of support for Ukraine, sanctions and so on, and presumably that's his plan: bomb Ukraine more. But it's not worked so far and people are resilient in such situations.
And anyway, by the spring offensive it will be a question of which way will President Vance go. (Assuming Putin doesn't have the dirt on him too...CCTV of his sofa?)
Vance has been even more vocally anti-Ukraine than Trump.
Whilst there's no great threat to the UK, I'm pretty sure that Putin could invade us after Guy Fawkes night, and seize London. The Russian navy is no great shakes, but ours is almost an absence in force. It wouldn't hold of course - the Russians would have to fall back under a wave of soup thrown by odd people and beardy types clapping them far too firmly on the back. But, you know, just saying.
No chance. The last Russian naval victory was in the age of sail. Pathetic as our defences are after years of Tory neglect, the Royal Navy and RAF would sink their rustbuckets easily. The Ukranians have swept them from most of the Black Sea with no Navy at all..
Suppose you string out the RN in a big long line and imagine that each ship can defend say 20 miles of coast - we're still well short. The RAF has some crazily small number of combat aircraft.
Look, I can't really judge, but it seems quite clear to me that we spend billions on the illusion of having a defence whereas the reality is that we have almost none at all.
The Russian Navy never had much force projection.
Their surface navy (the bit that still floats) is covered with big, liquid fueled missiles. Which exposed very nicely when hit, as the Ukrainians demonstrated. Similar reasons to why their tanks throw their turrets…
Their one carrier is completely broken and can’t sail. And before you start the jokes, we have a carrier at sea. The F-35 on board are generations beyond anything Russian.
Their sub fleet is out of service.
Their amphibious landing capability is now next to nil.
So they can’t get to the U.K., can’t defend themselves on the way here and can’t land anything when they arrive. Aside from that…
Oh, and you don’t defend the U.K. by creating a picket line round the country (every 20 miles etc). As Nelson pointed out when he was in charge of the Channel Fleet, that’s not how it works
Ok, so just for the hell of it, what would you suggest would happen if Putin decided to try to seize London? RN sweeping the waves, and nothing more to be said?
His navy, such as it is, would be sunk in the Skaggerack.
So a first strike by NATO? Just 10k Russian troops on a holiday cruise and you sink them? I know such scenarios are outlandish and unrealistic, but say it was just a thousand Russian special forces - seize a Scottish airbase, fly in more troops. It wouldn't work - it'd be a horrible defeat for Russia, but the line between it working and not working is very far from where it should be.
You think there are 10,000 Russian special forces troops still alive and not tied down in trying to keep the Ukrainian invasion going?
Well I said ' a thousand'.
This is starting to sound like those comic Internet threads where the Argentina crash land Boeing 747s of troops on the Falklands.
As demonstrated at Kyiv airport and elsewhere, unsupported and unresupplied “special forces” just turning up are dead meat against even vague resistance.
Special forces aren’t magic ninjas. They are specialist recon, mostly. With a very small scale ability to undertake heroic, knife-in-your-teeth operations.
Ok lets step through this
1. Could Putin find 1k special forces troops? 2. Cold Putin find some barges or the like with those troops on them to nip into a Scottish port? 3. Could those troops swiftly find and seize and airport? 4. Could Putin fly in more troops? 5. Could the assembled force push south and seize quite a lot of things?
To all of the above the answer is probably yes.
Happily
6. Could this be sustained?
Is a fairly clear 'no'.
We are now at The Alien Space Bats version of Operation Sealion.
The ASBs were invented by the late, great Alison Brooks, an authority on invasion plans for the U.K.
Their place is to posit/explain insane actions by invaders and the opposition.
Such as “the Army, RN and Airforce took a three day holiday. Until the Germans got ashore. To be sporting.”
Ah - the 1914 and 1939 argument. They worked out well.
In 1939 if the Germans had chosen a very high risk invasion then it's far from clear that they may not have succeeded.
The idea of Putin attacking the UK is obviously daft, but being blindsided is dafter still. I don't believe for a moment that you imagine that our armed forces are up to the task of defending us. They should be, but they aren't. Much of the shortfall is just horrible budget mismanagement, the rest mostly ghastly management generally, and some element is underfunding.
Had the Germans launched a seaborne invasion, it would have been a turkey shoot.
The Royal Navy would have shat all over them, even if the Luftwaffe had tried their best.
Eventually, you'd have had the few German divisions that managed to successfully land surrender.
A German division was around 17000 men, if they’d successfully landed a few of them they might have been in with a shout. Anzio was initially only 36000.
17,000 men, who need a constant supply of fuel, food, medical supplies and ammunition.
For D Day to work, we needed Pluto - and that was just for oil.
I had a grandfather who worked on that. I always thought it should have been Platboto, not Pluto - Pipeline at the bottom of the ocean. Pluto implies to me some sort of tunnelling.
I hate to be pedantic but surely the seabed is under the ocean?
Russian stock market down again after a brief recovery at the end of summer. Not bad given the inability to enforce the oil price cap and the fact Europe is still importing Russian gas (till the end of the year?). If only Ukraine had the kind of weapons to take out the oil refineries and ammunition dumps supplying the front lines. Sorry I forgot they do, they just don't have permission to use them. One of the big unknowns is the quality of the missiles they're producing themselves.
I see Farage is offering himself as a possible US Ambassador if Trump wins. This would appear to be a rare significant error from him. He must know that there is zero possibility of him being appointed to the role by a Labour Prime minister and probably zero under a Conservative one too. And I can't see this playing well with Reform voters either. Does he think they elected him so he could sod off to Washington? Does he actually want to replace the Tories or not? The New Statesman focus group of working class Labour voters was pretty bad for Starmer. Does he care?
Farage doesn't want to be Britain's ambassador to Trump but rather Trump's ambassador to Britain.
Hundreds of truckles of cheddar worth more than £300,000 have been stolen from London cheese specialist Neal’s Yard Dairy.
Fraudsters posing as legitimate wholesalers received the 950 clothbound cheeses from the Southwark-based company before it was realised they were a fake firm.
Curious about this story. I would think artisanal cheese would be hard to pass off? People normally want to know the provenance, that it's been stored correctly etc
Neal's Yard isn't that specialist. Their cheese is a standard offering in lots of restaurants.
Of course, the Russian dead and injured aren't from Moscow and St Petersburg. As seems always to be the case in Russia, it is the poorest provinces that are bearing the cost of the center's ambitions.
But Russia doesn't have an unlimited supply of young men.
In June, 98,600 people were born in Russia. So, rounding, we're talking about 49,000 male babies.
They're losing 30,000 people per month - killed, captured and wounded - in Ukraine.
If you compare this to the British losses on the Western Front in the first World World War, you're looking at around 40,000 male babies per month, against 20,000 casualties.
So, in the First World War, the British were losing the equivalent of half a month's births on the battlefield. The Russians, in Ukraine, are at 60%.
Ukraine has similar demographics of course, from a smaller base, with people oversees to boot - which is probably why many are downbeat on their prospects in most offensive phases, now the Russians have seemingly ridden themselves of the highest amount of incomptence.
Russia very rarely loses wars on the battlefield. Much more often, it loses them on the home front. That has to be Ukraine's grand strategy here too. The Kremlin is overheating its economy because of war efforts and in the short term that will also bring some popularity but there will be a price to pay (literally) as inflation increasingly bites, as it will.
Obviously, with a Trump presidency, Putin need worry less about Western retaliation to war crimes in terms of support for Ukraine, sanctions and so on, and presumably that's his plan: bomb Ukraine more. But it's not worked so far and people are resilient in such situations.
And anyway, by the spring offensive it will be a question of which way will President Vance go. (Assuming Putin doesn't have the dirt on him too...CCTV of his sofa?)
Vance has been even more vocally anti-Ukraine than Trump.
Whilst there's no great threat to the UK, I'm pretty sure that Putin could invade us after Guy Fawkes night, and seize London. The Russian navy is no great shakes, but ours is almost an absence in force. It wouldn't hold of course - the Russians would have to fall back under a wave of soup thrown by odd people and beardy types clapping them far too firmly on the back. But, you know, just saying.
No chance. The last Russian naval victory was in the age of sail. Pathetic as our defences are after years of Tory neglect, the Royal Navy and RAF would sink their rustbuckets easily. The Ukranians have swept them from most of the Black Sea with no Navy at all..
Suppose you string out the RN in a big long line and imagine that each ship can defend say 20 miles of coast - we're still well short. The RAF has some crazily small number of combat aircraft.
Look, I can't really judge, but it seems quite clear to me that we spend billions on the illusion of having a defence whereas the reality is that we have almost none at all.
The Russian Navy never had much force projection.
Their surface navy (the bit that still floats) is covered with big, liquid fueled missiles. Which exposed very nicely when hit, as the Ukrainians demonstrated. Similar reasons to why their tanks throw their turrets…
Their one carrier is completely broken and can’t sail. And before you start the jokes, we have a carrier at sea. The F-35 on board are generations beyond anything Russian.
Their sub fleet is out of service.
Their amphibious landing capability is now next to nil.
So they can’t get to the U.K., can’t defend themselves on the way here and can’t land anything when they arrive. Aside from that…
Oh, and you don’t defend the U.K. by creating a picket line round the country (every 20 miles etc). As Nelson pointed out when he was in charge of the Channel Fleet, that’s not how it works
Ok, so just for the hell of it, what would you suggest would happen if Putin decided to try to seize London? RN sweeping the waves, and nothing more to be said?
His navy, such as it is, would be sunk in the Skaggerack.
So a first strike by NATO? Just 10k Russian troops on a holiday cruise and you sink them? I know such scenarios are outlandish and unrealistic, but say it was just a thousand Russian special forces - seize a Scottish airbase, fly in more troops. It wouldn't work - it'd be a horrible defeat for Russia, but the line between it working and not working is very far from where it should be.
You think there are 10,000 Russian special forces troops still alive and not tied down in trying to keep the Ukrainian invasion going?
Well I said ' a thousand'.
This is starting to sound like those comic Internet threads where the Argentina crash land Boeing 747s of troops on the Falklands.
As demonstrated at Kyiv airport and elsewhere, unsupported and unresupplied “special forces” just turning up are dead meat against even vague resistance.
Special forces aren’t magic ninjas. They are specialist recon, mostly. With a very small scale ability to undertake heroic, knife-in-your-teeth operations.
Ok lets step through this
1. Could Putin find 1k special forces troops? 2. Cold Putin find some barges or the like with those troops on them to nip into a Scottish port? 3. Could those troops swiftly find and seize and airport? 4. Could Putin fly in more troops? 5. Could the assembled force push south and seize quite a lot of things?
To all of the above the answer is probably yes.
Happily
6. Could this be sustained?
Is a fairly clear 'no'.
We are now at The Alien Space Bats version of Operation Sealion.
The ASBs were invented by the late, great Alison Brooks, an authority on invasion plans for the U.K.
Their place is to posit/explain insane actions by invaders and the opposition.
Such as “the Army, RN and Airforce took a three day holiday. Until the Germans got ashore. To be sporting.”
Ah - the 1914 and 1939 argument. They worked out well.
In 1939 if the Germans had chosen a very high risk invasion then it's far from clear that they may not have succeeded.
The idea of Putin attacking the UK is obviously daft, but being blindsided is dafter still. I don't believe for a moment that you imagine that our armed forces are up to the task of defending us. They should be, but they aren't. Much of the shortfall is just horrible budget mismanagement, the rest mostly ghastly management generally, and some element is underfunding.
Had the Germans launched a seaborne invasion, it would have been a turkey shoot.
The Royal Navy would have shat all over them, even if the Luftwaffe had tried their best.
Eventually, you'd have had the few German divisions that managed to successfully land surrender.
A German division was around 17000 men, if they’d successfully landed a few of them they might have been in with a shout. Anzio was initially only 36000.
17,000 men, who need a constant supply of fuel, food, medical supplies and ammunition.
For D Day to work, we needed Pluto - and that was just for oil.
I had a grandfather who worked on that. I always thought it should have been Platboto, not Pluto - Pipeline at the bottom of the ocean. Pluto implies to me some sort of tunnelling.
I hate to be pedantic but surely the seabed is under the ocean?
Never fear to be pedantic. I'm not 100% sure of this myself. But I'd say the channel tunnel is under the ocean - or, actually, sea - while the titanic is at the bottom of the ocean. Just a personal view, mind, and I'm not going to fall out with anyone about it. The more interesting bit is that it was my grandfather's project. Well, him and some other fellas.
Of course, the Russian dead and injured aren't from Moscow and St Petersburg. As seems always to be the case in Russia, it is the poorest provinces that are bearing the cost of the center's ambitions.
But Russia doesn't have an unlimited supply of young men.
In June, 98,600 people were born in Russia. So, rounding, we're talking about 49,000 male babies.
They're losing 30,000 people per month - killed, captured and wounded - in Ukraine.
If you compare this to the British losses on the Western Front in the first World World War, you're looking at around 40,000 male babies per month, against 20,000 casualties.
So, in the First World War, the British were losing the equivalent of half a month's births on the battlefield. The Russians, in Ukraine, are at 60%.
Ukraine has similar demographics of course, from a smaller base, with people oversees to boot - which is probably why many are downbeat on their prospects in most offensive phases, now the Russians have seemingly ridden themselves of the highest amount of incomptence.
Russia very rarely loses wars on the battlefield. Much more often, it loses them on the home front. That has to be Ukraine's grand strategy here too. The Kremlin is overheating its economy because of war efforts and in the short term that will also bring some popularity but there will be a price to pay (literally) as inflation increasingly bites, as it will.
Obviously, with a Trump presidency, Putin need worry less about Western retaliation to war crimes in terms of support for Ukraine, sanctions and so on, and presumably that's his plan: bomb Ukraine more. But it's not worked so far and people are resilient in such situations.
And anyway, by the spring offensive it will be a question of which way will President Vance go. (Assuming Putin doesn't have the dirt on him too...CCTV of his sofa?)
Vance has been even more vocally anti-Ukraine than Trump.
Whilst there's no great threat to the UK, I'm pretty sure that Putin could invade us after Guy Fawkes night, and seize London. The Russian navy is no great shakes, but ours is almost an absence in force. It wouldn't hold of course - the Russians would have to fall back under a wave of soup thrown by odd people and beardy types clapping them far too firmly on the back. But, you know, just saying.
No chance. The last Russian naval victory was in the age of sail. Pathetic as our defences are after years of Tory neglect, the Royal Navy and RAF would sink their rustbuckets easily. The Ukranians have swept them from most of the Black Sea with no Navy at all..
Suppose you string out the RN in a big long line and imagine that each ship can defend say 20 miles of coast - we're still well short. The RAF has some crazily small number of combat aircraft.
Look, I can't really judge, but it seems quite clear to me that we spend billions on the illusion of having a defence whereas the reality is that we have almost none at all.
The Russian Navy never had much force projection.
Their surface navy (the bit that still floats) is covered with big, liquid fueled missiles. Which exposed very nicely when hit, as the Ukrainians demonstrated. Similar reasons to why their tanks throw their turrets…
Their one carrier is completely broken and can’t sail. And before you start the jokes, we have a carrier at sea. The F-35 on board are generations beyond anything Russian.
Their sub fleet is out of service.
Their amphibious landing capability is now next to nil.
So they can’t get to the U.K., can’t defend themselves on the way here and can’t land anything when they arrive. Aside from that…
Oh, and you don’t defend the U.K. by creating a picket line round the country (every 20 miles etc). As Nelson pointed out when he was in charge of the Channel Fleet, that’s not how it works
Ok, so just for the hell of it, what would you suggest would happen if Putin decided to try to seize London? RN sweeping the waves, and nothing more to be said?
His navy, such as it is, would be sunk in the Skaggerack.
So a first strike by NATO? Just 10k Russian troops on a holiday cruise and you sink them? I know such scenarios are outlandish and unrealistic, but say it was just a thousand Russian special forces - seize a Scottish airbase, fly in more troops. It wouldn't work - it'd be a horrible defeat for Russia, but the line between it working and not working is very far from where it should be.
You think there are 10,000 Russian special forces troops still alive and not tied down in trying to keep the Ukrainian invasion going?
Well I said ' a thousand'.
This is starting to sound like those comic Internet threads where the Argentina crash land Boeing 747s of troops on the Falklands.
As demonstrated at Kyiv airport and elsewhere, unsupported and unresupplied “special forces” just turning up are dead meat against even vague resistance.
Special forces aren’t magic ninjas. They are specialist recon, mostly. With a very small scale ability to undertake heroic, knife-in-your-teeth operations.
Ok lets step through this
1. Could Putin find 1k special forces troops? 2. Cold Putin find some barges or the like with those troops on them to nip into a Scottish port? 3. Could those troops swiftly find and seize and airport? 4. Could Putin fly in more troops? 5. Could the assembled force push south and seize quite a lot of things?
To all of the above the answer is probably yes.
Happily
6. Could this be sustained?
Is a fairly clear 'no'.
We are now at The Alien Space Bats version of Operation Sealion.
The ASBs were invented by the late, great Alison Brooks, an authority on invasion plans for the U.K.
Their place is to posit/explain insane actions by invaders and the opposition.
Such as “the Army, RN and Airforce took a three day holiday. Until the Germans got ashore. To be sporting.”
Ah - the 1914 and 1939 argument. They worked out well.
In 1939 if the Germans had chosen a very high risk invasion then it's far from clear that they may not have succeeded.
The idea of Putin attacking the UK is obviously daft, but being blindsided is dafter still. I don't believe for a moment that you imagine that our armed forces are up to the task of defending us. They should be, but they aren't. Much of the shortfall is just horrible budget mismanagement, the rest mostly ghastly management generally, and some element is underfunding.
Had the Germans launched a seaborne invasion, it would have been a turkey shoot.
The Royal Navy would have shat all over them, even if the Luftwaffe had tried their best.
Eventually, you'd have had the few German divisions that managed to successfully land surrender.
A German division was around 17000 men, if they’d successfully landed a few of them they might have been in with a shout. Anzio was initially only 36000.
17,000 men, who need a constant supply of fuel, food, medical supplies and ammunition.
For D Day to work, we needed Pluto - and that was just for oil.
I had a grandfather who worked on that. I always thought it should have been Platboto, not Pluto - Pipeline at the bottom of the ocean. Pluto implies to me some sort of tunnelling.
Look, if we're going to be all pedantic, the English Channel is not an ocean either.
Hundreds of truckles of cheddar worth more than £300,000 have been stolen from London cheese specialist Neal’s Yard Dairy.
Fraudsters posing as legitimate wholesalers received the 950 clothbound cheeses from the Southwark-based company before it was realised they were a fake firm.
Curious about this story. I would think artisanal cheese would be hard to pass off? People normally want to know the provenance, that it's been stored correctly etc
Neal's Yard isn't that specialist. Their cheese is a standard offering in lots of restaurants.
Yeah. If the cheese actually comes from Neal's Yard, rather than someone on Facebook Marketplace.
Of course, the Russian dead and injured aren't from Moscow and St Petersburg. As seems always to be the case in Russia, it is the poorest provinces that are bearing the cost of the center's ambitions.
But Russia doesn't have an unlimited supply of young men.
In June, 98,600 people were born in Russia. So, rounding, we're talking about 49,000 male babies.
They're losing 30,000 people per month - killed, captured and wounded - in Ukraine.
If you compare this to the British losses on the Western Front in the first World World War, you're looking at around 40,000 male babies per month, against 20,000 casualties.
So, in the First World War, the British were losing the equivalent of half a month's births on the battlefield. The Russians, in Ukraine, are at 60%.
Ukraine has similar demographics of course, from a smaller base, with people oversees to boot - which is probably why many are downbeat on their prospects in most offensive phases, now the Russians have seemingly ridden themselves of the highest amount of incomptence.
Russia very rarely loses wars on the battlefield. Much more often, it loses them on the home front. That has to be Ukraine's grand strategy here too. The Kremlin is overheating its economy because of war efforts and in the short term that will also bring some popularity but there will be a price to pay (literally) as inflation increasingly bites, as it will.
Obviously, with a Trump presidency, Putin need worry less about Western retaliation to war crimes in terms of support for Ukraine, sanctions and so on, and presumably that's his plan: bomb Ukraine more. But it's not worked so far and people are resilient in such situations.
And anyway, by the spring offensive it will be a question of which way will President Vance go. (Assuming Putin doesn't have the dirt on him too...CCTV of his sofa?)
Vance has been even more vocally anti-Ukraine than Trump.
Whilst there's no great threat to the UK, I'm pretty sure that Putin could invade us after Guy Fawkes night, and seize London. The Russian navy is no great shakes, but ours is almost an absence in force. It wouldn't hold of course - the Russians would have to fall back under a wave of soup thrown by odd people and beardy types clapping them far too firmly on the back. But, you know, just saying.
No chance. The last Russian naval victory was in the age of sail. Pathetic as our defences are after years of Tory neglect, the Royal Navy and RAF would sink their rustbuckets easily. The Ukranians have swept them from most of the Black Sea with no Navy at all..
Suppose you string out the RN in a big long line and imagine that each ship can defend say 20 miles of coast - we're still well short. The RAF has some crazily small number of combat aircraft.
Look, I can't really judge, but it seems quite clear to me that we spend billions on the illusion of having a defence whereas the reality is that we have almost none at all.
The Russian Navy never had much force projection.
Their surface navy (the bit that still floats) is covered with big, liquid fueled missiles. Which exposed very nicely when hit, as the Ukrainians demonstrated. Similar reasons to why their tanks throw their turrets…
Their one carrier is completely broken and can’t sail. And before you start the jokes, we have a carrier at sea. The F-35 on board are generations beyond anything Russian.
Their sub fleet is out of service.
Their amphibious landing capability is now next to nil.
So they can’t get to the U.K., can’t defend themselves on the way here and can’t land anything when they arrive. Aside from that…
Oh, and you don’t defend the U.K. by creating a picket line round the country (every 20 miles etc). As Nelson pointed out when he was in charge of the Channel Fleet, that’s not how it works
Ok, so just for the hell of it, what would you suggest would happen if Putin decided to try to seize London? RN sweeping the waves, and nothing more to be said?
His navy, such as it is, would be sunk in the Skaggerack.
So a first strike by NATO? Just 10k Russian troops on a holiday cruise and you sink them? I know such scenarios are outlandish and unrealistic, but say it was just a thousand Russian special forces - seize a Scottish airbase, fly in more troops. It wouldn't work - it'd be a horrible defeat for Russia, but the line between it working and not working is very far from where it should be.
You think there are 10,000 Russian special forces troops still alive and not tied down in trying to keep the Ukrainian invasion going?
Well I said ' a thousand'.
This is starting to sound like those comic Internet threads where the Argentina crash land Boeing 747s of troops on the Falklands.
As demonstrated at Kyiv airport and elsewhere, unsupported and unresupplied “special forces” just turning up are dead meat against even vague resistance.
Special forces aren’t magic ninjas. They are specialist recon, mostly. With a very small scale ability to undertake heroic, knife-in-your-teeth operations.
Ok lets step through this
1. Could Putin find 1k special forces troops? 2. Cold Putin find some barges or the like with those troops on them to nip into a Scottish port? 3. Could those troops swiftly find and seize and airport? 4. Could Putin fly in more troops? 5. Could the assembled force push south and seize quite a lot of things?
To all of the above the answer is probably yes.
Happily
6. Could this be sustained?
Is a fairly clear 'no'.
We are now at The Alien Space Bats version of Operation Sealion.
The ASBs were invented by the late, great Alison Brooks, an authority on invasion plans for the U.K.
Their place is to posit/explain insane actions by invaders and the opposition.
Such as “the Army, RN and Airforce took a three day holiday. Until the Germans got ashore. To be sporting.”
Ah - the 1914 and 1939 argument. They worked out well.
In 1939 if the Germans had chosen a very high risk invasion then it's far from clear that they may not have succeeded.
The idea of Putin attacking the UK is obviously daft, but being blindsided is dafter still. I don't believe for a moment that you imagine that our armed forces are up to the task of defending us. They should be, but they aren't. Much of the shortfall is just horrible budget mismanagement, the rest mostly ghastly management generally, and some element is underfunding.
Had the Germans launched a seaborne invasion, it would have been a turkey shoot.
Not quite what Churchill thought though.
No, he knew very well that the Nazis could not invade, but for political reasons he portrayed the situation otherwise.
Something you've read, or just your opinion, or both? (You may be right, although my view is that he had a real and well-founded fear. Curious as to your source)
Read vast amounts over the years. Main info of late from the we have ways podcast - James Holland and Al Murray. Churchill would know full well how strong the navy was.
The various war cabinet diaries and minutes bear this out.
I can’t remember who quoted Earl St Vincent - “I do not say they cannot come. I say they cannot come by sea.”
At heart Hitler was a continentalist. He thought in terms of land warfare in Europe and had no understanding of Britain's sea power, trade links and the power of the empire. He had no plans for invading England. He mainly hoped he wouldn't need to invade. Sea lion doesn't even deserve the term half-baked. There is and always was a strand of nonsense about our ww2 history. We stood alone...apart from the empire and rather a lot of help from a not very neutral USA...
Russia beat Germany - end of story. Even D-Day was a minor skirmish in comparison with any one of many battles on the eastern front. Britain lost.... but was spared the need to revise its identity due to the good fortune of having the allies sort things out.
Correction: the Soviet Union beat Germany. And a large proportion of its fighters and casualties were Ukrainian.
I’m not sure I agree with the concept that the winning candidate will sweep the swing states. In fact I think it’ll be messy and it’s likely to come down to a single state or two that are very close.
I think the demographics, ballot initiatives, down ballot races etc will shape things.
I don’t even think it will be as clear cut as rust belt / sun belt.
At this stage I could see the sort of chaotic result where Trump wins AZ and NV, Harris pulls off a win in one of NC and GA, and then we have a photo finish in the rust belt.*
Trump claiming that Harris has allowed "the largest border invasion in the history of the world".
Now, excuse me Donald, you are dissing those Nazi generals you so admire. Those who undertook Operation Barbarossa. Unless at the Mexican border, the invaders have turned up with more than 190 divisions and 4 air fleets (Luftflotten) including 5,500,000 officers and men, more than 47,000 field guns and mortars, 4,300 tanks and assault guns and nearly 5,000 combat aircraft.
Which we might have noticed.
Urgent Q for Home Office ministers: Has the UK prepared plans for exodus of Americans fleeing Trump 2.0 USA?
I'm sure Reeves has a list of ways she wants to tax them.
Of course, the Russian dead and injured aren't from Moscow and St Petersburg. As seems always to be the case in Russia, it is the poorest provinces that are bearing the cost of the center's ambitions.
But Russia doesn't have an unlimited supply of young men.
In June, 98,600 people were born in Russia. So, rounding, we're talking about 49,000 male babies.
They're losing 30,000 people per month - killed, captured and wounded - in Ukraine.
If you compare this to the British losses on the Western Front in the first World World War, you're looking at around 40,000 male babies per month, against 20,000 casualties.
So, in the First World War, the British were losing the equivalent of half a month's births on the battlefield. The Russians, in Ukraine, are at 60%.
Ukraine has similar demographics of course, from a smaller base, with people oversees to boot - which is probably why many are downbeat on their prospects in most offensive phases, now the Russians have seemingly ridden themselves of the highest amount of incomptence.
Russia very rarely loses wars on the battlefield. Much more often, it loses them on the home front. That has to be Ukraine's grand strategy here too. The Kremlin is overheating its economy because of war efforts and in the short term that will also bring some popularity but there will be a price to pay (literally) as inflation increasingly bites, as it will.
Obviously, with a Trump presidency, Putin need worry less about Western retaliation to war crimes in terms of support for Ukraine, sanctions and so on, and presumably that's his plan: bomb Ukraine more. But it's not worked so far and people are resilient in such situations.
And anyway, by the spring offensive it will be a question of which way will President Vance go. (Assuming Putin doesn't have the dirt on him too...CCTV of his sofa?)
Vance has been even more vocally anti-Ukraine than Trump.
Whilst there's no great threat to the UK, I'm pretty sure that Putin could invade us after Guy Fawkes night, and seize London. The Russian navy is no great shakes, but ours is almost an absence in force. It wouldn't hold of course - the Russians would have to fall back under a wave of soup thrown by odd people and beardy types clapping them far too firmly on the back. But, you know, just saying.
No chance. The last Russian naval victory was in the age of sail. Pathetic as our defences are after years of Tory neglect, the Royal Navy and RAF would sink their rustbuckets easily. The Ukranians have swept them from most of the Black Sea with no Navy at all..
Suppose you string out the RN in a big long line and imagine that each ship can defend say 20 miles of coast - we're still well short. The RAF has some crazily small number of combat aircraft.
Look, I can't really judge, but it seems quite clear to me that we spend billions on the illusion of having a defence whereas the reality is that we have almost none at all.
The Russian Navy never had much force projection.
Their surface navy (the bit that still floats) is covered with big, liquid fueled missiles. Which exposed very nicely when hit, as the Ukrainians demonstrated. Similar reasons to why their tanks throw their turrets…
Their one carrier is completely broken and can’t sail. And before you start the jokes, we have a carrier at sea. The F-35 on board are generations beyond anything Russian.
Their sub fleet is out of service.
Their amphibious landing capability is now next to nil.
So they can’t get to the U.K., can’t defend themselves on the way here and can’t land anything when they arrive. Aside from that…
Oh, and you don’t defend the U.K. by creating a picket line round the country (every 20 miles etc). As Nelson pointed out when he was in charge of the Channel Fleet, that’s not how it works
Ok, so just for the hell of it, what would you suggest would happen if Putin decided to try to seize London? RN sweeping the waves, and nothing more to be said?
His navy, such as it is, would be sunk in the Skaggerack.
So a first strike by NATO? Just 10k Russian troops on a holiday cruise and you sink them? I know such scenarios are outlandish and unrealistic, but say it was just a thousand Russian special forces - seize a Scottish airbase, fly in more troops. It wouldn't work - it'd be a horrible defeat for Russia, but the line between it working and not working is very far from where it should be.
You think there are 10,000 Russian special forces troops still alive and not tied down in trying to keep the Ukrainian invasion going?
Well I said ' a thousand'.
This is starting to sound like those comic Internet threads where the Argentina crash land Boeing 747s of troops on the Falklands.
As demonstrated at Kyiv airport and elsewhere, unsupported and unresupplied “special forces” just turning up are dead meat against even vague resistance.
Special forces aren’t magic ninjas. They are specialist recon, mostly. With a very small scale ability to undertake heroic, knife-in-your-teeth operations.
Ok lets step through this
1. Could Putin find 1k special forces troops? 2. Cold Putin find some barges or the like with those troops on them to nip into a Scottish port? 3. Could those troops swiftly find and seize and airport? 4. Could Putin fly in more troops? 5. Could the assembled force push south and seize quite a lot of things?
To all of the above the answer is probably yes.
Happily
6. Could this be sustained?
Is a fairly clear 'no'.
We are now at The Alien Space Bats version of Operation Sealion.
The ASBs were invented by the late, great Alison Brooks, an authority on invasion plans for the U.K.
Their place is to posit/explain insane actions by invaders and the opposition.
Such as “the Army, RN and Airforce took a three day holiday. Until the Germans got ashore. To be sporting.”
Ah - the 1914 and 1939 argument. They worked out well.
In 1939 if the Germans had chosen a very high risk invasion then it's far from clear that they may not have succeeded.
The idea of Putin attacking the UK is obviously daft, but being blindsided is dafter still. I don't believe for a moment that you imagine that our armed forces are up to the task of defending us. They should be, but they aren't. Much of the shortfall is just horrible budget mismanagement, the rest mostly ghastly management generally, and some element is underfunding.
Had the Germans launched a seaborne invasion, it would have been a turkey shoot.
Not quite what Churchill thought though.
No, he knew very well that the Nazis could not invade, but for political reasons he portrayed the situation otherwise.
Something you've read, or just your opinion, or both? (You may be right, although my view is that he had a real and well-founded fear. Curious as to your source)
Read vast amounts over the years. Main info of late from the we have ways podcast - James Holland and Al Murray. Churchill would know full well how strong the navy was.
The various war cabinet diaries and minutes bear this out.
I can’t remember who quoted Earl St Vincent - “I do not say they cannot come. I say they cannot come by sea.”
At heart Hitler was a continentalist. He thought in terms of land warfare in Europe and had no understanding of Britain's sea power, trade links and the power of the empire. He had no plans for invading England. He mainly hoped he wouldn't need to invade. Sea lion doesn't even deserve the term half-baked. There is and always was a strand of nonsense about our ww2 history. We stood alone...apart from the empire and rather a lot of help from a not very neutral USA...
Russia beat Germany - end of story. Even D-Day was a minor skirmish in comparison with any one of many battles on the eastern front. Britain lost.... but was spared the need to revise its identity due to the good fortune of having the allies sort things out.
Russia lost ... but was spared by the British who had worn down German air power in the Battle of Britain, and were forcing them to keep three dozen divisions in Western Europe and several more in North Africa, without which Hitler would have won in 1941 or mid-1942.
World War 2 was a team effort on the Allied side. The contribution of each of the three major allies was essential.
This. 100x this. One of the most stupid political decisions in modern times.
Ailbhe Rea @PronouncedAlva · 7h The worry: Gordon Brown’s first move as Chancellor was to make the Bank of England independent; for Rachel Reeves, it was scrapping help for pensioners with their heating bills.
Yeah, it's just so hard to decide which side is the most dangerous at this election. A real poser for sure.
I doubt the other side can spell manoeuvre properly either.
It's true that a British chancellor might be poised to lose the confidence of the markets for the second time in just over 25 months, but British travails simply pale into insignificance in the face of the Republican failure to spell French-derived words in English properly*.
* I guess this is how we're going to have to get used to talking about things when we don't want to risk saying what we really think, for fear of what the consequences might be for our family still living in the States.
Comments
That might be a problem for the USA it really isn't for us.
Starmer's big problem, I would suggest, is that he does not have a good story, and is not able to tell a good story were he provided one.
Churchill was certainly able to tell a good story, and it made a hell of a difference.
And without them a whole series of British war films would have to dispense with the cliché of Tommies and tars cowering as Jericho’s trumpets sounded.
The French army fought hard at the start. But having the Germans live inside their OODA cycle knocked the stuffing out of them.
Take this ring, Master," he said, "for your labours will be heavy; but it will support you in the weariness that you have taken upon yourself. For this is the Ring of Fire, and with it you may rekindle hearts in a world that grows chill.
A destroyer sailing at high speed through them would have sunk them with its wake.
Justice secretary Shabana Mahmood has said she'll vote against assisted dying because it is incompatible with her faith. This is a sound reason for her not to choose an assisted death, but not to deny that right to others.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/oct/23/muslims-bradford-assisted-dying-bill
https://nitter.poast.org/Stephenmevans1/status/1849812654971335092#m
*there are situations where having a closed mind would prevent involvement, but not on policy decisions like this.
You make the standard rookie error of thinking that being careful of your soldiers‘ lives means that you aren’t pulling your weight.
But he could write well.
I have no doubt others better read than I can find similar quotes about the terminal decline of Britain and/or England from 1840 and 1740.
We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender. And even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the Old.
I see Farage is offering himself as a possible US Ambassador if Trump wins. This would appear to be a rare significant error from him. He must know that there is zero possibility of him being appointed to the role by a Labour Prime minister and probably zero under a Conservative one too. And I can't see this playing well with Reform voters either. Does he think they elected him so he could sod off to Washington? Does he actually want to replace the Tories or not? The New Statesman focus group of working class Labour voters was pretty bad for Starmer. Does he care?
For most of history, the idea of respecting an *opposing* faith of viewpoint was madness - suffer heresy? Let it spread to others? Infect the body politic?
See the “Humanist” Sir Thomas Moore torturing and burning heretics.
Starting my own religion of Respect and Kindness.
Look at us slightly wrong and we nuke you. With respect, tolerance and kindness.
Because offering your souls to the God of atomic fire is to bless you most highly. 10 million degrees purifies the soul….
https://x.com/dieworkwear/status/1849884294954746063
We won't really know for a long time I guess, though if the outcome is a surprisingly comfortable one for the Democrats in the Presidential but not elsewhere, then that would be a indicator it was on the higher end I suppose.
There’s a good possibility that Harris hits 10% GOP defection. That’s a really big number.
PA will be the state with the biggest number.
Relying on ‘Third party validators’ & a ‘permission structure’ strategy likely limits bigger movement.
https://nitter.poast.org/madrid_mike/status/1849903916139290704#m
https://x.com/USA_Polling/status/1849919385982378283
Trump would attempt to deport all these categories.
WI: Harris +2
PA: Harris +1
MI: Tied
GA: Trump +1
NC: Trump +1
NV: Trump +1
AZ: Trump +2
Redfield / Oct 22, 2024
https://x.com/USA_Polling/status/1849881230516408548
https://x.com/davidfolkenflik/status/1849841419193643424
So much for the liberal media.
First, the paper’s former executive editor Marty Baron called the decision “cowardice.”
Second, at least one senior Post opinion writer resigned.
Third, it was leaked that the editor of the editorial page had already drafted the paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris when publisher Will Lewis—who is a new hire, hailing from the Rupert Murdoch journalism tree—quashed it and then released a CYA statement about how the paper was “returning to its roots” of not endorsing candidates. The Post itself reported that the decision was made by the paper’s owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
Everything about this story feels like a tempest in a teapot, a boiling story about legacy media fretting over itself in the mirror.
It’s not.
It’s a situation analogous to what we saw in Russia in the early 2000s: We are witnessing the surrender of the American business community to Donald Trump.
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/bezos-kills-washington-post-endorsement-guardrails-falling
Yes, like Ike was a fascist who had to be opposed.
Bezos appeasos.
Effectively they've just given every worker in the country an enforced 2% pay rise, then taken it off them in tax. That's next year's pay rise gone for all my employees then 😢 - I pay them as decently as a I can already, there isn't any spare fat in the situation for the government to steal.
Which looking at the outcome last time was an even bigger win for the Dems than Nevada, albeit still under 3%
Come on Dems, just flip Texas already and then you can lose Pennsylvania and Michigan and still win! (no, they won't win Texas).
Brace.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidential_election#Voter_demographics
Cautiously because while she's ace she's also a loose cannon and it could all come crashing down in short order. Let's hope not.
And won't affect public sector as it's an in and out arrangement for them. Only affects real private sector employment costs.
We will still have more CGT, restrictions on ISAs, fuel tax, alcohol tax not confirmed yet.
For D Day to work, we needed Pluto - and that was just for oil.
Now, excuse me Donald, you are dissing those Nazi generals you so admire. Those who undertook Operation Barbarossa. Unless at the Mexican border, the invaders have turned up with more than 190 divisions and 4 air fleets (Luftflotten) including 5,500,000 officers and men, more than 47,000 field guns and mortars, 4,300 tanks and assault guns and nearly 5,000 combat aircraft.
Which we might have noticed.
I always thought it should have been Platboto, not Pluto - Pipeline at the bottom of the ocean. Pluto implies to me some sort of tunnelling.
But this lot are so short term and short sighted it's untrue. They actually made Sunak's Tories seem competent.
Though it is of course also possible (though considerably less likely) that the polling is fairly accurate.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cje03dq2pyyo
Fraudsters steal 22 tonnes of high-value cheddar
Hundreds of truckles of cheddar worth more than £300,000 have been stolen from London cheese specialist Neal’s Yard Dairy.
Fraudsters posing as legitimate wholesalers received the 950 clothbound cheeses from the Southwark-based company before it was realised they were a fake firm.
https://thehill.com/homenews/media/4954012-bezos-washington-post-endorsement/
Along with a load of self serving pablum.
I note that, quite unusually, they aren't displaying reader comments.
.
"Donald Trump threatens to imprison Mark Zuckerburg for 'rest of his life' if 'he does anything illegal' over election"
Republicans against Trump
@RpsAgainstTrump
NEW: Freedom Caucus leader says North Carolina should consider giving Trump its electors before votes are counted
Rep. Andy Harris said the damage caused by Hurricane Helene in pro-Trump counties would justify the extraordinary maneuver.
https://x.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1849855502513316043
You mean they were Trussed up ?
https://x.com/ECaliberSeven/status/1849830330800222609
I think the demographics, ballot initiatives, down ballot races etc will shape things.
I don’t even think it will be as clear cut as rust belt / sun belt.
At this stage I could see the sort of chaotic result where Trump wins AZ and NV, Harris pulls off a win in one of NC and GA, and then we have a photo finish in the rust belt.*
*other permutations are available.
Earlier I mentioned F15s in Ukrainian service; I meant F16s. Apologies.
39% of Gen Z (born between 1997 and 2012) said Trump's McDonald’s shift made them like him somewhat or much more.
That’s significantly more than the 23% who said the shift made them like Trump less, while 38% said it did not impact how much they like him."
https://x.com/FrankLuntz/status/1849942075543793886
World War 2 was a team effort on the Allied side. The contribution of each of the three major allies was essential.
Ailbhe Rea
@PronouncedAlva
·
7h
The worry: Gordon Brown’s first move as Chancellor was to make the Bank of England independent; for Rachel Reeves, it was scrapping help for pensioners with their heating bills.
https://x.com/PronouncedAlva/status/1849846482217717870
* I guess this is how we're going to have to get used to talking about things when we don't want to risk saying what we really think, for fear of what the consequences might be for our family still living in the States.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/e-coli-cases-linked-to-mcdonald-s-quarter-pounders-rises-to-75-federal-agencies-say/ar-AA1sVA9z?ocid=BingNewsVerp