This popular 1878 song can’t be held up as an exemplar of rhyme and metre. Yet every Briton of a certain age knows the first two lines, which gave rise to the word ‘jingoism’:
“We don’t want to fight but by Jingo if we do/ We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too…”
Alas, these two lines don’t describe the current state of Britain’s armed forces, which is why it’s useful to recall the next, lesser known, lines of the same verse:
“We’ve fought the Bear before, and while we’re Britons true,/ The Russians shall not have Constantinople.”
Now these lines do bear some tangential relevance to today’s geopolitics, even though Constantinople, as it then was, isn’t an immediate target of Russian imperial expansion. But other targets are still in Russia’s crosshairs.
The song was composed at the end of yet another Russo-Turkish War (there were seven altogether if I’m counting correctly), in which the Russians sought to protect the Balkan nations, especially Bulgaria, from Ottoman atrocities.
Their less noble objective was to reverse the calamity of the Crimean War and achieve Russia’s perennial goal of capturing Constantinople and gaining control of the Straits. After Russia routed the Turks in the 1878 Battle of Plevna, that goal was in sight. The road to Constantinople was open, and the Straits were within reach.
That outcome wasn’t something the British Empire could countenance. It couldn’t allow a hostile power to achieve strategic dominance over the key trade routes connecting Britain to the Middle East. Especially since the Russians had been dropping hints about India as another possible conquest.
Hence a fleet of British battleships sailed in to send a message. The Russians, the memory of the Crimean debacle still fresh in their memory, got it loud and clear. They stopped at the gates of Constantinople and signed a treaty that effectively put an end to the Ottoman Empire as an aggressive force – but also to Russia’s designs on the Straits.
Today Russia’s imperial ambitions are directed westwards rather than southwards, but any Briton trying to sing that jingoistic song would be laughed out of the pub. Successive governments seem to have been so passionately committed to the cause of unilateral disarmament that the only message Britain can send now is that of impotence and cowardice.
The Royal Navy is at its historical weakest, and Horatio Nelson has been too dead for too long to do something about it. Otherwise he certainly would: for the first time since Trafalgar, the French navy outnumbers ours.
Still, we can almost get away with that in the present strategic situation. The Russians are pushing across the continent in a westerly direction, and if allowed to go on, the nearest salt water they’ll reach will be the English Channel. (If you think they see the Ukraine as the last stop, there’s a bridge across the Dnieper I’d like to sell you. Or, more apposite, one across the Vistula.)
But the Duke of Wellington would be even less happy than Nelson. Courtesy of the new cuts in defence spending, for the first time since Waterloo the British Army will have fewer than 70,000 soldiers. By comparison, our grossly understaffed police forces number 149,769 officers. More than twice as many.
Such a tiny army can only be deployed in a tripwire mode, with the soldiers dying en masse in the hope of slowing the enemy down to gain time for help to arrive from across the ocean. And if help doesn’t arrive, they’ll all be mown down.
That prospect is unlikely to increase morale, and it doesn’t. An MoD survey found that some 58 per cent of our servicemen rate their morale as low.
So much for the ships and the men. Now what about the money?
Here the Labour government is enthusiastically building on the legacy of the previous Tory governments. They always treated the defence budget as the first candidate for cuts.
This was accompanied by frankly idiotic rhetoric about the changing nature of modern warfare. Thus, announcing another round of sweeping cuts, Dave Cameron explained that modern battles were different from Waterloo. They no longer required what Napoleon called large battalions.
Presumably, two computers could fight it out between them and whichever one went on the blink first would lose. At least Cameron had the excuse of never having seen a truly modern electronic war, like the one raging in the Ukraine.
Today’s government, on the other hand, should know that boots on the ground are as vital as they always have been. For all the drones, missiles, robots and PlayStation gadgets being used by both sides, soldiers still fight and die, and the fewer they are the more likely they are to be killed.
At present, our defence spending stands at 2.3 per cent of GDP, barely above the absolute peacetime minimum demanded by NATO. Starmer has promised to raise it to 2.5 per cent, but only when some loose cash is burning a hole in the Exchequer’s pocket. In round numbers, that means never.
The Ukrainians are heroically keeping “the Bear” of that old song at bay. But for how long? America’s assistance is dwindling away, showing every sign that it’ll go down to nothing regardless of how the November election goes. Without the US, it’ll fall on Europe to protect itself, and the western part of it shows no appetite for putting guns before butter, or rather before social handouts and foreign aid.
Poland is a welcome exception, but then the Poles have no illusions about their ursine neighbour, having found themselves more than once on the receiving end of its fangs and claws. Poland is busily building up the strongest army in Europe, spending almost five per cent of her GDP on defence — more than the US in relative terms.
Unlike the Poles, Western European governments proceed on the assumption, or rather hope, that they’ll never have to fight another war. Keeping their fingers crossed, they lavish money on all sorts of projects, none of which even remotely approaches defence in vital importance.
This is the suit Britain follows, with one PM after another claiming that cutting defence is a “difficult decision”. It may be, but that decision isn’t just difficult. It’s also foolhardy, irresponsible and potentially fatal.
Indeed, “Britons true” don’t want to fight but by Jingo if we do, we’ve got no ships, we’ve got no men, we’ve got no money too. This ought to be the new song, but no one is singing it.