The real reason Britain is doomed to lose the next world war

Telegraph

06-03-2025

Sir Keir Starmer must be terrified of having to lead Britain into World War Three. Not least because our young men could so easily dodge conscription. All they'd have to do is tell a judge that being sent overseas would breach their right to family life in the UK.
After all, that excuse always seems to work for foreign criminals. So why not for innocent British men?
There is, however, an even greater problem facing the Prime Minister. Because I strongly suspect that he's starting to grasp the real reason why Britain is doomed to lose the next war. It's not just our inadequate spending on defence, or our complacent reliance on the USA to protect us.
We've got a crisis that's more fundamental, which is that we simply won't want to fight.
For decades now, young people have been taught to be ashamed of this country. They've been taught that Britain's history is one of almost uninterrupted, and unparalleled, cruelty and exploitation and that the figures once hailed as national heroes, from Francis Drake to Churchill, were really villains.
In short: they've been taught that the British are the baddies. And so, having had it drilled into them practically from birth that their country is nothing to be proud of, why on earth would they want to risk their lives defending it?
As it happens, we already know they don't want to. Remember that extraordinary poll of Gen Z from last month, showing the near-total collapse in patriotic feeling among Britain's young? In 2004, a similar poll found that 80 per cent of young people felt 'proud to be British'. Today, a mere two decades later, it's just 41 per cent. Is it any surprise, therefore, that only 11 per cent said they'd be willing to fight for Britain? And that more than 40 per cent said they would absolutely never fight for Britain, in any circumstances at all?
Of course it's not. Previous generations were taught very differently. And yes, to our superior 21st-century eyes, perhaps that teaching was a little 'jingoistic'. But jingoism can actually have a useful purpose. By telling children that their nation's history was glorious and brimming with heroes, you give them a reason to cherish it, and perhaps even to become heroes themselves one day, in their nation's hour of need. When our forefathers were sent to fight in the trenches of the Western Front, not all of them might have known exactly why the Great War was being fought. But they at least had a clear idea of what they were trying to defend.
Would today's young men be able to say the same? I'm not sure they would. The grim truth is that we no longer have a strong and unifying national identity – the sort of identity that pulls a country through a war, and gives it the courage to fight on. Our schools may teach something they call 'British values', but these 'values' are always hopelessly vague – as, of course, they have to be. In our atomised, multicultural society teachers daren't suggest that any 'values' aren't British. After all, we wouldn't want anyone to feel 'excluded'.
As a result of this loss of identity, we are simply not a united people any more. In fact, many of us share little more than a language – and often, not even that. On Tuesday it was reported that almost one million people in England can't speak English fluently – and more than 130,000 can't speak English at all. Meanwhile, I'm sure no one has forgotten that, in 2014, it was claimed that more than twice as many British Muslims had joined Isis than the British Armed Forces.