In March 2021, the broadcaster Sky announced that it was offering a placement programme exclusively for minority candidates across its news division.
Bosses there felt that events in Minnesota the previous year should be honoured with affirmative action in Greater London forever, and that local news overflowed with too many women in the US Fox News female presenter profile.
From now on, they said, the women talking on TV had to be a bit heavier and angrier, and the new black men a bit, well, homosexual.
A new American chief executive, a woman called Dana Strong, had also just been appointed, and she declared that Sky would commit to net zero and would take a lead in ‘broadcasting climate change’. Then in April it was revealed that Strong was travelling from London to her home in America for weekends, using a private jet.
Sky has recently started a new series called The Wargame. It ‘stars’ some of the most prominent past faces in British politics, namely: Michael Gove, the former conservative MP, who plays the role of Prime Minister; Nicola Sturgeon, the former First Minister of Scotland who plays his deputy; Harriet Harman, former deputy leader of the Labour Party, who plays Home Secretary and; the former Conservative Defence Secretary, Penny Mordaunt, who plays her previous self. A Labour Baroness called Ayesha Hazarika plays the Prime Minister’s Director of Communications.
In addition, Sky gave roles to two other unexpected people. One is called Sir Kim Darroch, the former Ambassador to the United States whose memos insulting Donald Trump were leaked, resulting in his resignation. Darroch is said to be a significant feature within Britain’s unseen shadow power centre. When a Prime Minister promises to push a lever to make something happen, then pushes it, the reason nothing happens is because of people like Darroch. In The Wargame, Darroch plays a national security advisor.
The other role was given to Christopher Steele, the former intelligence operative who plied Hillary Clinton’s campaign with garbage intel in the lead-up to the 2016 US election. Darroch and Steele share an intense loathing of Trump.
In real time
The Wargame is set around a fictional COBRA (emergency response committee) crisis: Russia is attacking the United Kingdom. The episodes document the responses in real time from a cast secured in a bunker room: the monitoring of intelligence reports, the latest casualty numbers, what people are saying on X or Facebook. The situation has been made to look real because at some point, possibly soon, the UK establishment wants it to be.
War talk accelerated in the week I left London. Jacob Rees-Mogg, the former Conservative Minister, made a bizarre video explaining that people need to fight for their country and in doing so, might die. Following Rees-Mogg came a creepy Fabian called Paul Richards, whose CV claims he ‘trains CEOs for media appearances’. Richards claimed, on prime-time television, that if the country went to war, the first thing it should do is lock up anyone who refuses to enlist.
Assuming Rees-Mogg and Richards deserve to be taken seriously, we should first examine whether Britain can actually fight a war. At once a few problems surface.
The first is the state of the armed forces, which have seen a reduction of roughly 25% since the late 2000s. The second is the painfully expensive, sluggish maintenance of military assets. The third is that there is no appetite to fund defence: a fact graciously admitted by the Prime Minister some weeks ago when he declared that funding defence over welfare was just not going to happen. Benefits and no economic activity over conflict: always.
But the fourth problem is possibly the most underestimated.
When Restore Britain’s Rupert Lowe was expelled from Nigel Farage’s Reform party, dozens of white Generation Z, or Zoomer, men swarmed over him. They are the people expected to enlist in the face of war, but something about the way they thought distinguished them from previous generations faced with the same prospect. This group, who would be drafted onto the new party’s policy and media desks, were furious at the state of their country.
Worthless university degrees
There are things you see in them. The worthless university degrees which they’re going to spend a chunk of their careers paying off. The rejections from corporations for internships or jobs because of their complexion. The effects of fourth-wave feminism in convincing this group’s potential partners not to marry or have children. Their anger at the rising number of young white men committing suicide.
Britain is not unique.
In the US, the Groyper movement is made up of young men with similar cynicism and detachment. In Europe, so-called ‘far-right’ movements have witnessed considerable uptake within their youth ranks. Moreover, their political opposites share the same reluctance to go to war, but hate their country for what it is, as opposed to what it has become.
Polling corresponds to sentiment. Around 50% of young men between the ages of 17 and 29 surveyed in Britain declare no interest in fighting for their country. In fact, they see their country imposing war upon them in an asymmetrical re-arrangement of democratic obligations, accusing it of policing speech above violent crime and prioritising the well-being of men who arrive in the country illegally.
For all the talk or threats of Rees-Mogg and Richards, for all Sky’s efforts to parade war in fancy dress, a fundamental component of conflict isn’t there, and can’t be resolved in the way aggressive military investment can.
The point of The Wargame is to popularize the idea of conflict, for families to start talking over dinner tables. However, it won’t be the cast or their children sent into battle. Gove was an intrigue specialist, not a man of war. People like him prosper only in ages of abundance. Nicola Sturgeon defended decisions to send male rapists into female prisons.
Feigned bewilderment
When her ex-husband was prosecuted for looting the bank accounts of the party she led, she feigned bewilderment. Harriet Harman brought a chilling form of ‘girl boss-ness’ to Parliament. Her former supporters now warn women that following their old idol’s advice will leave them alone and miserable.
In the past the media could sell wars as expressions of urgent, existential national interest, and expect a reasonably enthusiastic reflex. Here, an aloof broadcaster talks through curious avatars to a demoralized and despairing audience, uncertain as to whether any other government could be worse than its own.
[Image: by LightFieldStudios]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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