Does Keir Starmer, like Boris Johnson, want to be a reincarnation of Winston Churchill?

He certainly appears to want to be a war leader and so he is looking for a possible war.

Although our economy is in a poor state and our public services are run into the ground for lack of money, he is spending billions on more submarines, guns, planes and soldiers. He could also be moving towards the resurrection of the Civil Defence Corps, which was formed in 1949 and recruited around 300,000 volunteers. A sort of non-military Home Guard, the Corps would have come into its own in the event of a nuclear attack. It dissolved around 1968, by which time CND had educated the public into understanding the unthinkable reality of nuclear war and the uselessness of Civil Defence

Starmer wants us to think of a future war as being a sort of tolerable repeat of WW2.

He wants Britain to be “war ready. But if he were not so ignorant of history, he would be conscious of the fact that we have been war ready or actively engaged in war, without pause, since the end of the Second World War, causing death and destruction to ourselves and other peoples.

But Starmer is the man whose recently stated revisionist view of history was that the British Empire was “a force for good in the world.”

Where was the good in colonisation and the colonial wars we fought to hold on to Malaya and Kenya in the 1940’s and 1950’s? Where was the good in the slave trade?

Where are these purportedly threatening states for which we have to be war ready? The recently published Defence  Review identified China, Russia, Iran and North Korea as likely to pounce on us at any time.

Again Starmer reveals his distorted and limited knowledge of history.

Let’s start with China.

China has not tried to force drug addiction on the British people, whereas in the mid-19th century we fought two wars and eventually forced China to import opium and create thousands of addicts. That was another great victory for the British Empire.

China did not invade and colonise the isle of wight for a hundred years, but that’s what we did to the island of Hong Kong, the eastern-most outpost  of the Empire

Now Korea. In 1950 the Labour government sent 60,000 troops to Korea, a thousand of whom were killed in action. They were sent at the behest of the US, which was occupying South Korea after the Japanese were forced out at the end of WW2 and the communist-controlled North  made moves to unify the two parts of the country.

Britain and North Korea have never been on good terms, but no North Korean soldier has ever set foot on British soil or threatened to do so, although by 1953 we had laid waste to both North and South.

Iran exemplifies the worst of Britain’s arrogance and belligerence. My political awakening came at the age of 16 in 1953, when Mossaddegh, The socialist Prime Minister of the secular government of Persia had the temerity to nationalise the Anglo-Persian Oil Company which was part-owned by the British government.

How dare this upstart nationalise our oil company! This was echoed by the British Labour Party, which had just nationalised anything that moved.

Such blatant hypocrisy opened my eyes to the true nature of the Labour Party and subsequent developments  determinined my life-long commitment to the Left.

With the help of the CIA, Britain deposed Mossaddegh, propped up the feudal Shah of Persia and prepared the ground for the present theocratic grip on the country.

The Royal Navy is daily patrolling the Persian Gulf, but you won’t find an Iranian warship anywhere near British waters.

Since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, we have had British troops in the Baltic states, keeping an eye on the pesky Russians, but we have not set foot in Russia since 1918, when our army invaded and tried to overturn the revolution.

Apart from sending in bovine agents to carry out maladroit poisonings of their own dissident citizens, the Russians have left us alone.

The lesson from the outbreak of the First World War is that, with both sides armed to the teeth and feverish, it takes only a minor incident to set the world on the road to Armageddon.