The word 'jaw dropping' is quite frequently used these days of the early days of the Trump presidency but yesterday was a day when it was well justified. The American Vice President, J D Vance, was addressing the European security conference, currently being held in Munich. Vance astonished his audience by telling them that the threat from Russia and China was as noting compared with the 'enemy within' As a reminder, Putin has invaded and captured swathes of territory in Ukraine, assassinated many of his opponents and sent agents onto the streets of the UK to assassinate Russian dissidents and murdering and maiming several UK citizens whilst he was at it. Vance was arguing that radical Islam was the real enemy within and pointed out that free speech in Britain was now curtailed, citing the case of the prosecution of an anti-abortion protester who was breaking the 'cordon sanitaire' put around abortion clinics to prevent intimidation. The UK was very much within his sights and a NewsNight contributor last night saw the hand of Elon Musk behind all of this. But this comes from the Vice President of the SA where several of their rabid supporters invaded the Capitol building at the time when Trump lost the 2021 election and were all subsequently pardoned by Trump and this means that the USA is in no position to lecture the UK on the rule of law. Not withstanding what Vance had to say, there is a growing recognition that Europe as a whole (and this includes the UK) will have to increase the proportion of defence expenditures from a planned 2.5% to at least 3.5% and this will probably be at the expense of the social security, health and education budgets which are themselves already massively under funded. t seems that it will be raining all of this morning, so it looks as though I had better give our walk a miss and, in any case, I feel rather 'fluey' and under the weather this morning so I may just indulge myself by following the political analysis on the TV and watching some of the recorded highlights from the rugby matches played over he last two weekends. It seems that Keir Starmer is in the queue to meet with Trump but he is well behind both the leaders of Israel, Japan and India so this is probably a reflection of how unimportant the UK is regarded these days.
After we had breakfasted this morning, it was raining cats and dogs as they say and there was no way that I could have pushed Meg down the hill and through the rain. Apart from anything else, I have felt pretty 'fluey' all day so I am dosing myself up on Cold and Flue Relief tablets every four hours. I did leave Meg for a few minutes whilst I popped out to collect a newspaper and, in the meantime, I have just dozed throughout the rest of the morning. After the lunch time carers had called and made Meg comfortable, I started to think about lunch. I fried off a red onion to which I added some peppers, tomatoes, pork mince and some onion gravy. I always enrich my gravy with a dollop of brown sauce and to this I added the baked potato and some beans. It turned out to be quite a tasty lunch and I was delighted to see that Meg managed her portion of it, albeit a little slowly, finishing off with a little chocolate dessert. Straight after lunch. I realised that I had not watched Thursday night's 'Question Time' and this turned out to be pretty lively and interesting after the Trump interventions in the Ukraine. Then after a bit of a doze, I decided to see if I could watch the England France rugby match from last weekend - except that I fell asleep during all of the first half and then it was time for the carer's afternoon call. As they hd some time on their hands, one of them mentioned that after his shift with the care agency was finished, he was going to go off on a go-karting session. They asked me about my games and past-times when I was younger and I recounted them to the story, that they have heard many times before, how at the age of 10 I was inducted into the craft of building a go-cart from a set of old pram wheels and how I did this for my son when he was at a similar age. They asked about my sporting abilities but I was pretty average about every sport that I played, whilst being a bit better than average at cricket and at gymnastics. I explained to the young male Asian carer that we see often who a keen player of cricket was also quite how we used to play cricket in the street using chalk marks on the lamppost for wickets. I also explained how we had a complex series of little rules to govern our games in the street - for example, a ball that landed without a bounce in a neighbouring garden was considered a 'four' whilst you could be caught out if the ball bounced off a wall but the catcher had to catch the ball in one hand. It was intriguing that the young male Asian carer reckoned they had the same one-handed rule when he played cricket in his youth.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine's president, calls for creation of 'armed forces of Europe' amid fears of reduction in US support. This is interesting because other comment is to the effect that this is the harsh truth to which Britain and France (the two largest military powers in Europe) need to respond. I think there is a sinking feeling that whatever happens in Ukraine, it is probable that the ambitions of Putin to re-create a greater Russia will not end there and the states of Moldova, Belarus and the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia will be within his sights. There are massive parallels between the ambitions of Hitler in the 1930's and Putin today- the political messages coming from what I have heard today is that the UK and the rest of Europe have no alternative but to stand up to the bully Putin with commensurate armed strength. There is a talk of n European army of some 100,000-150,000 being needed but to put this into context, the size of the regular British army is about 74,000 so the scale of the challenge facing Europe is not to be under-estimated.
© Mike Hart [2025]