Would you fight for the UK?
The patriotism and courage of Ukrainians holds up a mirror to our own uneasy, divided nation. To restore trust and solidarity at home, government needs to show we really are in this together.
WOULD I take up arms? Would you?
If it was me under fire, would I find the same level of basic stand-up courage and patriotism that, from everything I’ve seen over the last two weeks, appears to come as standard with a Ukrainian passport?
If it was my family standing outside Glasgow Central station with one bag of luggage, awaiting a train that is never destined to come, would we muster the same spirit and resilience as these people seem to have found within themselves despite the mortal threat they face?
Would I kiss my family goodbye, pick up the nearest Kalashnikov, and head for the front?
Would you?
As the dead bodies rack up in Ukraine’s mortuaries, these are pretty self-indulgent and second order questions, of course. Nonetheless, they are ones I’ve found myself talking about with friends and colleagues over the last couple of weeks. Partly the questions are begged because of the sheer proximity of events on the other side of our continent. Even for those of us who have connections in other parts of the world, the cultural familiarity of western-facing Kyiv and Odessa makes it all the harder not to step into the shoes of our fellow Europeans and imagine what we’d do. Mostly, though, I find myself asking these questions of myself and of us because I’m not entirely sure the answers are in the affirmative, and it troubles me. Guilt nags away. Bluntly, does Mr Putin have a point? Is he right that we in the ‘decadent’ West have simply decided we can no longer be bothered to defend our way of life? Are nations like the UK simply too fractured and atomized to find a common cause?
On the question of actual fighting, we do not appear to be up for the scrap. In 2015, a global Gallup survey asked people around the world if they would indeed be prepared to take up arms for their nation. Ukraine came in the top half, with 62% saying they’d do so. Britain, along with every other major western European nation was down near the bottom. We came in at 27% (just below France).
This is apples and pears of course; it’s not that surprising that nations like Ukraine with a large nuclear-armed neighbour are going to think in more martial ways than comfortably secure Britain. It is also important not to get too starry-eyed about Ukraine’s unity: this a country that has been riven by divisions since its inception. But as we’ve marvelled at the sight of true courage among ordinary Ukrainians these last few days - of communal grace in the face of fear – so those figures point to a deeper gnawing fear within the western soul; that we wouldn’t have shown such spirit.
Certainly, it’s hard to picture a British Zelensky emerging in the country right now (polls show that Boris Johnson has not benefited from a “rallying to the flag” moment: he is just as unpopular as before the tanks went in). That continues the trend of the last few decades, where the bond between our political leaders and the governed has frayed to breaking point. At the end of the Second World War, Gallup (again) found that just over a third of Britons thought politicians were in it for themselves. By last year, the figure had risen to 63%. There is evidence recently that trust in politics has ticked back up a little, but polarisation lurks within the numbers: according to the most recent British Social Attitudes Survey, this rise was mostly due to Leave voters expressing their approval that Brexit finally “got done”. Remainers are just as fed up as before.
That points to a wider picture: behind this lack of faith in our political leaders stands a greater unease - a kind of national wariness over what or who can be trusted or relied upon any more. It’s the agglomeration of a political system that has debased itself too often, an economic model that has failed to provide a decent standard of living for too many, and the loosening of the cultural norms on which we once could hang our identities: a religion, a class, and even, these days, a gender. No wonder football, and the identity it confers on fans, is so popular. No wonder we approve of regional and local leaders in the UK who seek to protect our own walled city from an outside world you can’t trust (despite its abysmal record, 61% of people in Scotland think the Scottish Government works in Scotland’s best interests, compared with just 15% for the UK Government).
As a nation, we have the occasional spasm of unity and a notion of patriotism, but with every Oligarch left un-sanctioned, with every second-rate minister given a knighthood, and with every passing month when wages are stretched even further, so the acid of cynicism eats into them. Fight for this? For Sir Gavin Williamson? Don’t make me laugh.
Yet, despite it all, I’m not going to descend here into western doom-mongering. This is not end of days for the west or for Britain’s part in its survival. As Ben Wallace, the admirable Defence Secretary whose competence and seriousness has been a stand-out feature in recent weeks, Britain has played a key role in recent months behind the scenes in arming and supporting Ukraine. Our soft power still counts for a lot, as Mr Putin’s ban on the BBC news demonstrated. It may be late in the day but the realisation that we need to less on authoritarian regimes for utilities and goods is a step in the right direction. And, as the remarkable fundraising by Daily Mail readers over the last week has shown, ordinary people are ready and willing to play their part, however small, in solidarity with those in crisis.
What I think we need urgently - to use a much-battered phrase – is to rekindle a sense that we are indeed “all in this together”. And we need government to step up to do so. When polls show that three-quarters of people in Britain support schemes taking in refugees from Ukraine, it is infuriating that the Government’s hopeless bureaucracy holds up refugees from coming to our shores. Get it sorted. Meanwhile, here on the home front, we need and deserve a government that focusses on delivery. As a report by the Resolution Foundation noted yesterday, the perfect storm in the economy is about to reduce income by levels not seen since the 1970s. Let’s see government find practical steps to help: one obvious national effort is to step up efforts to help families insulate their homes in advance of the next surge in energy bills.
Yes, a national call to lag your loft is not the stuff of Churchillian rhetoric but in these bruised and fearful times, wouldn’t it be refreshing to see Boris Johnson and Nicola Sturgeon respond to moments of crisis with practical and achievable goals for once? With serious and useful ideas? Western democracies can start the road back to legitimacy and restore trust by showing they have a plan to function better than the alternative. And that’s worth fighting for.
ENDS
This article first appeared in the Scottish Daily Mail, 9th March 2022