There is an almost uncontested view in our political and media establishment at the moment in relation to our war machines. It seems we have too few of them and the ones we have are too old and not smart enough. The Defence Investment Plan (DIP), which promised a further £15 billion for the military, is not nearly enough, it seems. We need much more.

Those pesky Russians. The distant Chinese. Even the Argentinians or the faceless feared other that we tend to call ‘Muslims’. You will easily find ‘experts’ from all sorts of think tanks with impressive accents who will describe all sorts of ‘strategic threats’.

The logic here is inescapable because nothing unites like a common enemy even if we have to make one up. It is an easy sell for a nation obsessed with Churchill and the Hitler. There are echoes of an old Britain here – after all the awfulness of our own Empire are airbrushed out in sepia – in which the plucky under-bulldog fights heroically against evil others in the cause of freedom and justice.

What are we as a nation, if we are no longer this? Perhaps we never really were- the complex arc of 20th C history was always messier and more nuanced.

Part of the problem is that the persistent mythology of those bluebirds over the sandbagged cliffs of Dover are remarkably useful to a certain kind of politician and a certain kind of politics. Faced with massive long term problems that demand a radical break with business as normal, instead hey are doubling down on the mythology. Time to raise the colours, to patrol the border and stockpile Spitfires.

The Iona Community (of which I am a new member) has just signed this letter urging the UK to rethink its spending on arms;

Signatories including CAFOD, Green New Deal Rising and the Iona Community warn against skewing funding away from other forms of international engagement.

The shift represents a “staggering shift” of resources from productive to destructive ends, at a time of armed conflict, inequality and climate breakdown.

Development, diplomacy, peacebuilding, and conflict and atrocity prevention are all essential and underfunded tools in building a safer world, they say.

Signatories say:

• The UK’s military spending is on track to reach its highest level since the Second World War
• The ratio of military to development spending will soon reach almost nine-to-one, up from below four-to-one six years ago.
• The UK’s nuclear weapons programme now exceeds Russia’s spending and is the third most expensive in the world.

I live on the Clyde estuary, watching the dark shadows of our nuclear submarines head out with their cargo of mass destruction.

There is also a new base up around the corner from which our two massive new aircraft carriers are supplied and re-armed. These ships – the biggest ever to sail under the white ensign – emit a low rumble, which is sensed more than heard as it passes the trees at the end of our garden.

It’s enough to drive you to poetry.

HMS Queen Elizabeth

Cloaked behind oak
The carrier makes passage out to sea
Salt air sucks and pulses to sound
Part rumble, part drone
Sound like shadow 
Like that mythological Death Star

What games we played
All those war stories we gloried in
Even now I am not immune from the allure
Of a big boy’s war toy, or
The easy separation of hero
From villain…

…as if guns every made anything better.
As if bombs solved problems
As if massive ships full of killing machines
Represented good value for money
As if the stinking corpse of Empire
Could yet resuscitate