It’s not just our diminished armed forces that leave Britain vulnerable to Putin, it’s a generation raised on the idea that Britain isn’t worth fighting for, says James Price

In his “Politics and the English Language” George Orwell warned against using tired, old metaphors, as they reflected tired, old thinking. But the poor frog in a pan of water, not realising the temperature is rising until it is too late to escape, is such a powerful one that I am going to use it anyway.

In this rendition, the frog is good old Blighty, unaware of the risks to our security that look close to reaching boiling point and with armed forces so diminished as to leave us all but defenceless.

Buoyed by fantasy ideas of an ever more peaceful world, the British state (at the behest of the Treasury) has allowed itself to finance only the threats that it thinks it can afford, rather than the threats it actually faces. 

And just as we are waking up to the need to re-arm, and some are realising this means we need to re-industrialise, few have yet realised that domestic social issues will hamstring our ability to re-recruit soldiers, sailors and airmen. 

Woke cultural decay has had an undoubted negative effect on our sense of patriotism. Why would anyone sign up to fight for a country you had been told was irredeemably racist and uniquely terrible in all of history? 

And the trend towards weakness doesn’t help; young people who feel that they are too ‘anxious’ to make a phone call are hardly likely to willingly pick up a rifle.

As the country has become more diverse, fewer people feel that Britain is “their home”, worth fighting and dying for. This is borne out in various statistics, where certain groups are underrepresented in the current British Army, let alone future recruitment drives.