Mr. Murphy, I agree with just about every word you said. I might add a few of my own. We don’t spend more money on our military because we can’t afford it. And why not? Because one of the major parties – Labour – spends most of each of its terms of office recruiting extra government workers (and adding extra levels of bureaucracy to “justify” them) in order to increase its support among the voters. (If you are a government employee in Britain at the moment and vote anything but Labour, you need a psychiatrist.) And then the population finally sees through this, and chucks them out – and the next lot have too much of a mess to clean up, and are too interested in keeping their own featherbedded jobs, to really do what’s necessary in the time available.

Along with that, both major parties continue to wreck our educational system, probably to ensure that there aren’t enough people in Britain with the education to see through the bent statistics and illogical arguments, full of holes, that constitute “political debate” in today’s Britain. Guy Fawkes had a point.

Britain in 2008 is a country that could be great, strangled in red tape and carrying legions of utterly useless – in fact damaging – parasites instead of real legions. Just to illustrate the point a little more, at the moment the RN has twice as many admirals as ships. I wish I could do something about it – but there’s only one of me.