Link: Bloomberg.com: U.K. & Ireland.

Just when the full extent of Francis Fukuyama's idiocy is finally becoming apparent, the UK government's financial incompetence is compromising the defence of the realm. Right now, the government should be cutting every public sector job involving tasks too vague for concrete tests of successful performance to be applied. Instead it is trying to offload orders for fighter planes, which it cannot now afford, despite having had more than 10 years (the planes having been delivered very late indeed) to save up. The real story here is not the loss of the planes (with which the forces seem unenamoured) but the admission that our government is so financially incompetent as not to make provision for its obligations. Was it hoping to win the lottery perhaps?

I am tired of hysterical risk assessments. Almost every problem today is touted as a "greater threat than global warming" (probably true, but that's not how it's meant). However, I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that our nation's independence has rarely been more vulnerable than it is now. I do not fear the much-exaggerated terrorist threat. The hapless primitives of Muslim extremism have never been as dangerous as the Soviet-trained and American-funded hard men of the IRA, despite having a few losers prepared to sacrifice their own lives in an attempt to kill. There will not be as many of those as we fear. The human will to live is remarkably strong. Nor will the threat last as long. We may struggle to digest Muslim men into our culture but we will absorb the women, for whom traditional ways are not quite as attractive. All we have to do to begin that process is cut off the supply of village girls for arranged marriages. British-educated Muslim women will take care of the rest.

The real risks we face now are both internal and external. Internally, we face the loss of our freedoms under cover of "The War Against Terror." That is in our own hands. We must make it clear to our politicians at every opportunity, both by democratic process and civil disobedience,  that we will not submit. We must make it clear that this kind of PC nonsense is not the way to "protect" us against terrorists. Only good intelligence work can do that - and then imperfectly.

The external threat is less dramatic, but no less serious. We face Finlandisation by the sub-optimally democratic powers of the world that Nature has blessed with oil and gas. Eco-fantasies aside, our civilisation depends as profoundly on those fuels as on the air we breathe. We have been buffered by North Sea supplies for a while, but that is almost over. Even if it were not, I doubt the soon-t0-be-independent Scots would be gentler fuel overlords than the Saudis or their competitors. Without that buffer, we can already see Germany chumming up to the suppliers on which its industry depends. Thanks to the "Atomkraft? Nein Danke!" idiots of the 1980's, it has no choice. We are in no place to sneer. We have already compromised our own ethics for Saudi Arabia, so let's not pretend we will not do the same for other suppliers, whoever they are and whatever their demands

Our two key spending priorities right now should therefore be energy independence (building nuclear power stations - and fast) and defence. We should be building, not scaling down, our home defences and we should prioritise them over foreign adventures. We need to secure as many sources of energy supply as possible until our nukes come online, in order to play one supplier off against the other. And we need a navy and air force able to defend our supply routes.

While New Labour has tinkered relentlessly (and at huge economic and social cost) with every trivial aspect of our lives, it has failed in the primary role of government. It has not secured our independence as a nation.