@MarkGoodwin1878@CraigTrudgill Early goal changes the game. Allows you lot to sit deep, and puts pressure on us. Poor referee completely rattled us as well. I do agree that we didnt deserve to win but the referee had a huge impact and without his awful decisions it could have been a completely different game
It is easy to dismiss this as snowflakery, but I think Oli Dugmore is on to something here. Young people in Britain today have been comprehensively screwed over for decades. They are unable to accumulate wealth in the way their parents and grandparents did. Housing is completely unaffordable, incomes are stagnant, and pensions increasingly feel like a mirage rather than a promise. Social mobility no longer exists.
But there is a far more serious issue at stake than intergenerational fairness. Britain is entering a new era of great power competition, and the conditions that sustained the post–Cold War settlement no longer apply. That settlement began to fracture after 2007 and is plainly broken today. National social cohesion should always have been front and centre of statecraft, yet it has been neglected for too long by Britain’s political elites (left and right).
Liddell Hart argued that the essence of grand strategy is peace, not war. I do not mean this in a pacific or sentimental sense. He meant that the purpose of statecraft is to secure a stable political order over the long term, which requires the alignment of military power, economic strength, domestic policy and social legitimacy even in peacetime. This is the logic behind the old maxim that if you want peace, you must be prepared for war. None of these foundations disappear simply when a war ends, nor do they suddenly come into being when one begins. That is why the talk of a “peace dividend” in the 1990s was so myopic and so foolish.
It is also why John Bew is 100% right to argue that Britain urgently needs a new political economy and a new social contract. Grand strategy is too often reduced to budgets, platforms, and force structures. But non-material factors such as national morale, legitimacy and domestic political culture are just as decisive as energy, industry and military capacity. Just speak to the Italians during WW2 about the importance of morale!
A society in which large swathes of young people are locked out of homeownership, economic security and any credible belief that effort will be rewarded is not a foundation for deterrence, resilience or long-term stability. It is a strategic liability.