Sacrificial Lambs No More

 According to the head of the British Army, General Sir ‘Roly’ Walker, we must all be prepared to make sacrifices for the good of our country.

Urging a “frank conversation” about preparing for war, Walker (salary at least 220,000 pa) said last month that “citizens have got to consent to sacrifices to prioritise defence and security”.

Then, one of his predecessors, Lord ‘Lordy’ Dannatt, piped up, “His Majesty’s Government would need to consider conscription, starting with 18-24 year-olds”.

I suppose we should be gratified they are still talking about consent. But the thing about consent is that to mean anything it has to be freely given – if it isn’t, it’s simply compliance. And while there is any element of choice left in this matter, why should we ‘consent’ to anything?

Because, for many people the last two decades have been one long sacrifice for which, to employ a well-known phrase, consent was decidedly manufactured.

Around 2010, I remember the opposition Conservatives lifting a phrase from Barack Obama – “We’re all in it Together” – to indicate that “shared sacrifices” were necessary for the greater good. Once they were in power, this noble sentiment took the form of regular doses of state money creation (known by the neutral sounding term Quantitative Easing*) which saved the insolvent banking sector and made rich people even richer, accompanied by eye watering austerity, a public sector pay-freeze and a 345% increase in benefit sanctions on the poorest people in society.

The incredible thing is, 16 years later, the script is exactly the same. Because of inflation, the latest budget involves “real-terms cuts” in departmental spending. And, despite promising to bring “compassion” and a culture change, the Starmer ‘Labour’ government raised benefit sanctions to a record level (a record on top of the previous record achieved by the Conservatives), entrenching, according to Amnesty UK, “a system that is becoming even more punitive than the one it promised to replace”.

Between 2010 and 2020, the sacrifices were to save ‘the economy’ (coincidentally making rich people even richer – billionaire wealth increased by 310%). Now the sacrifices are necessary to save the country from a non-existent Russian threat (coincidentally making rich people who have shares in arms companies even richer).

At least during the Cold War, when military spending was high and society was militarised to a high degree (historian David Edgerton has said after World War Two in Britain the ambition was not only to “build a New Jerusalem” but also a New Sparta), there was some kind of social contract.

Now there is just exploitation, precarious jobs, subsistence self-employment, rents that consume 60% of your income, and ever-rising council tax and heating bills – the last having risen by 79% since 2021, augmented by ‘market trading’, otherwise known as speculation in gas and electricity prices.

British Gas and its successor company Centrica, have made profits of more than £56 billion since the publicly-owned firm was privatised by Margaret Thatcher in 1986, while more than 7,400 people die each winter because their homes are too cold.

But they expect sacrifices.

The same hubris – that you can keep pushing and pushing and there will be no resistance – is currently experiencing something of a rude awakening across Europe. In 2025, a French general said that the country should “accept the loss of our children” in a confrontation with Russia. The children are now giving their verdict and centrist-banker-austerian president Macron may not survive the shock.

An MP from La France Insoumise (LFI), the left-wing party in France which backs the protests, told an audience in Birmingham last month that “the enemy is at home”. This truth, which applies just as much to Russia, alludes to a famous statement made by the German anti-war socialist Karl Liebknecht in middle of the First World War: “Every people’s main enemy is in their own country.” It was quite a costly sentiment to express.  After being imprisoned, and then sent to the Western Front, Liebknecht was murdered.

To prepare for the necessary sacrifices, appeals to patriotism are being ramped up. That is why there are even more war films (specifically World War Two films) on TV than there normally are. But as the patriotic revolutionary George Orwell once noted, patriotism is completely different from conservatism. In the 1940 essay My Country Right or Left, Orwell remembering realising on the eve of the Second World War that, despite previously opposing British involvement, he could never sabotage the war effort while “England was in a serious jam”.

But now it’s not England that is in a “serious jam” but its rulers. And we should not lift a finger to help them get out of it.

*Quantitative Easing (QE) was not limited to Britain. In 2022, Andrew Huszar, the man in charge of America’s $1.25 trillion QE programme, recalled that “Over the last 12 years, we’re talking about unprecedented amounts of money being printed and funnelled into the markets, banks being showered with trillions upon trillions upon trillions of dollars, ultimately benefiting the most privileged in our societies. So you now have billionaires launching rockets into space … You have certain elements of society that are soaring and other parts of our society that are being left, unfortunately, ever further behind.”

Coincidentally, military spending in the US – which goes directly to weapons firms like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon – has doubled since 2019, reaching $3 trillion.