The Teutons are coming!

With a very strong possibility of an all-German Champions League final at Wembley, after Real Madrid were crushed 4-1 by Borussia Dortmund last night and Barcelona 4-0 by Bayern Munich the night before, I wonder how long it will be before UKIP claim that this is a result of the inability to control our borders, of handing power over to the EUSSR and of the general need to get out of 'Europe' altogether.

Gnawing away at Liverpool FC's reputation

With the FA charging him today with violent conduct (and saying that a three-match ban is insufficient), it is a good time to reflect on the incredible pictures of Luis Suarez trying to take a bite out of Branislav Ivanovic (and staying on the pitch to score with virtually the last kick of the game 30 seconds after an already ludicrous six minutes of injury time had elapsed) were extraordinary but not altogether surprising.  The Professional Footballers' Association has offered to send him on an anger management course, but his psychological problems seem deeper than that.  What was hilarious (aside from some excellent headlines such as "Eats... Shoots... Leaves?" in The Guardian) were some - and, it has to be emphasised, some - Liverpool fans trying to defend Suarez as the victim of another media conspiracy.   Those interviewed who tried to support him had such a bunker mentality that rationality (and it seems oxygen) struggled to make any headway.  They could not understand the reputational damage this one player has inflicted on their club, despite Suarez dishonouring the memory of Anne Williams (the Hillsborough campaigner who died a few days ago) of whom in tribute he and his colleagues were wearing black armbands.  Of course, without Suarez's goals and assists for goals, Liverpool would be struggling to avoid relegation, which may have entered calculations, but the man is absolutely toxic for the image.  He was banned for seven games in The Netherlands (a punishment he didn't complete after being transferred to Liverpool) after biting a player there, he was banned for eight matches after racially abusing Patrice Evra (and where Liverpool began sinking into the mire after accusing the victim of lying, flying in the face of Suarez's admission of what he had said) and when Evra was prepared to shake his hand to put the past behind, Suarez dragged his hand out of the way (completely opposite to what he did in the 2010 World Cup and on Sunday), plus he has admitted to diving.  All this and yet there are some in Liverpool red prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt.  Thankfully, there are plenty of Koppites who are absolutely disgusted at his actions, but not the overwhelming majority it should be.

Winners!

Congratulations Gillingham FC on securing the League Two Championship yesterday - a first championship since 1964 and only a second ever championship in their history. It may have been a 2-2 home draw with lowly Wimbledon AFC but it takes Gillingham to a level at which they cannot be caught - result first and worry about the performance later.  So the first club to decide anything anywhere in England's football league landscape and now a trophy.  Onwards and upwards!

Same old, same old verities

It is rich of David Cameron to lambast Labour as the party of "waste and propaganda" ahead of the looming local elections, when just days earlier we had a state-subsidised de facto state funeral of a divisive political leader, that, at times, veered into a party political broadcast (and the Tories resist state-funding for election campaigns, ha!).  If that isn't waste and propaganda, I don't know what qualifies as such.  But then being rich comes naturally to Cameron.

Shot down in flames

So, even a modest proposal to introduce background checks on gun sales can’t overcome the fear that the NRA generates in US senators – truly a monster to the democratic process. New York mayor, Michael Bloomberg, again skewers the “increasingly extremist wing of the gun lobby” and their legislative lackeys, but it’s small comfort in place of commonsense law-making (I’m increasingly preferring the billionaire mayor to be the next POTUS, ahead of Hillary Clinton – unlike Mitt Romney, he has virtues other than his financial acumen). President Barack Obama may have been inspired to compromise in the image of his hero Lincoln (as expertly captured by Steven Spielberg’s film), but compromise is weakness to be exploited by the lunatic leaders of the NRA, who wanted to make it easier for nutters to possess guns by expanding carry-and-conceal rights. Unfortunately, Obama doesn’t have a team of fixers like Lincoln had – bring back Rahm Emmanuel – all is forgiven!


And right-wing losers like Dr Tim Stanley (you don’t need to be especially clever to be a doctor – in some instances, the title is a façade for a glorified student) have the chutzpah to say Obama is the failure for not passing gun checks when 90% of Americans support them. You can’t please habitual Obama trash-talkers – either he’s too much of a dictator or he’s not enough of one (I remember when ‘Dr’ Niles Gardiner almost had an aneurysm when asked to say something nice about Obama). Catch-22 indeed.

One of the Republican senators whose nerve failed him was the appropriately named Jeff Flake. Apparently, he has a film poster of Mr Smith Goes To Washington – presumably that’s the wretched Adam Sandler remake. Then again, it’s only the matter of a filibuster – the reason that it rarely goes to this is that US senators have to make/take calls and attend functions to please donors: they don’t want to waste that time as some bore drags out the legislative process. Inevitably, one-man filibusters rarely succeed as the speaker has to leave the chamber to answer the call of nature – the trouble is, a large swathe of the Republican party see ‘checks and balances’ as something to abuse. It may be a sign that conservatives are more tenacious in achieving their goals than ‘liberals’ but underhand conservatism set in motion the fall of the Roman Republic viz. the fate of the Gracchi brothers.

The non-chimes of Big Ben

Although I didn't agree with the lavish expense laid on by the government's generosity of the taxpayer, if I was going to contribute my 61 pence to the occasion of Margaret Thatcher's funeral, I might as well get some value out of it by watching the proceedings (I voluntarily donated £1 when visiting the Science Museum last Friday - far better VFM).  After the Diamond Jubilee 'fiasco', Huw Edwards had been dropped and David Dimbleby had been restored to pride of BBC place to give gravitas to the programme.  Unfortunately, though rust may be appropriate on the occasion of the Iron Lady, Dimbleby showed some decay himself, mistaking Liberal Democrat MP Danny Alexander for his near namesake Labour MP Douglas Alexander.  Despite the noble Scottish lineage of the name Alexander, Douglas in Opposition would be nowhere near this funeral, even if he wanted to be, Edward Miliband representing modern Labour (and the trade unions?). One finds it hard to confuse Danny Alexander given his shock of ginger hair, as indeed it is Prince Andrew's ex-wife as Dimbleby acknowledged of her bouffant, yet protocol slipped here, addressing her as the Duchess of York, Fergie.  That's Sarah Ferguson to you - we're not living it up at the Hampsteads here.  And he boobed again, missing out name-checking Norman Tebbit in favour of Norman Lamont who he erroneously called Margaret Thatcher's Chancellor of the Exchequer, before being rapidly corrected to Lamont being John Major's Chancellor (Major himself being Maggie's last Chancellor).  Deary me.
And if that wasn't bad enough, he initially glazed over the clearly audible boos from some in the ground, saying there had been no disturbance.  A few minutes later, Dimbleby said of the horses drawing the gun carriage (whose heads were bobbing around, including one champing at the bit and the side of his partnering horse's face), that missiles of some description had been lobbed as the coffin passed and this may have perturbed the horses.  As flowers were being thrown, Dimbleby, for the benefit of the TV viewers, said these were not missiles, adding that they too might disturb the equine contingent (flower-throwing scum).  He rounded off his performance by referring to the Bishop of London's sermon as a 'lesson' when it was David Cameron and Amanda Thatcher (Maggie's granddaughter) who had read the lessons.
19 year-old Amanda is strikingly beautiful, especially in her killer heels, though it was a little strange to hear an American accent come out of that mouth.  Knowing that Mark, her father, has many dealings with South Africa, I would have understood a Boer-inflected speech - maybe her mum is American (I can't be bothered to Wiki it).  Some in the congregation didn't open their mouths at all.  This would have been on religious (Henry Kissinger) or non-religious grounds, though Nick Clegg, who clearly falls in the latter category, lustily sang the hymns, though it could be said he has no principles anyway!  But if you're going to attend an overtly Christian celebration for a woman that you honour, the least you could do (unless you really feel it imperills your religious confession) is getting into the swing of things, instead of keeping a curmudgeonly silence.
Overall, it was an over-the-top send off (e.g. Big Ben falling silent) for a woman whose funeral plans were being overruled, even when she was still alive, started by Tony Blair (who was quick to the cathedral entrance at the end to ambush people as they left and make himself feel important), through Gordon Brown who insisted upon a gun carriage, to Cameron.  That the funeral opened with words used at Lord Nelson's funeral I'm sure drew a cluck from those at home from more than just me.  Thatcher wanted a small funeral in the chapel under the House of Commons - really they should have embalmed her in the space in the north wall left by Nicholas Lyndwoode (a former Bishop of St David's who was discovered during renovation and reburied), then she could have been permanently part of Parliament.

The BMB

It’s hard to know what to say in the aftermath of a terrorist attack, though all the sympathetic messages on Facebook for the victims and condemnation of the Boston Marathon Bombing (note: not 4/15, a sign of the Bushite militarisation of politics receding) are in the same situation, coming across as trite in their bewilderment. In the absence of any progress in the criminal investigation, a news-hungry world latches on to the victims, when they probably should be left in peace, especially the families of the killed who should have had time to grieve privately before it was announced. I’m quite happy for a media blackout if it helps catch the person or people who did this, but, as with hydraulics, those flood of reporters must be diverted somewhere and sadly it is those that have suffered in the first instance from the bombs.


It bears some similarity to the East Coast Massacres of 2001, when in New York, in addition to the aeroplane strikes on the World Trade Center, it was believed there had been a truck bomb in another part of the city. Of course, like the various unaccounted aeroplanes on that day (which conspiracy theorists will have you believe were shot down by the military and hushed up), chaos breeds confusion and further chaos, as Chinese Whispers take hold. It was initially believed that the JFK Memorial Library had also been bombed in Boston. This was later downgraded to an ‘unrelated’ fire. In the final assessment, I wonder to the severity of the incident, if it happened at all, but that is what public fear can do to rationality.

Three died and over a hundred more were injured, yet Iran’s biggest earthquake in a quarter of a century generates little comment, as goes the apocryphal headline ‘Earthquake in Chile, not many dead’. A figure of 40 dead was first released and although the governor of the province worst hit later said no-one died, the values guiding coverage of the story remain the same. No British people died in Boston, so it proves that despite fears of decline, the USA remains the centre of the world.

Five (or thereabouts) go mad in Pyongyang

I remember reading the Lonely Planet guide to Korea and after copiously covering the south, it opened its section on the north, “If you do go to North Korea, you’ll instantly become the most interesting person you know.”  No doubt being interesting went a bit too far when students visiting the hermit state were co-opted by BBC journalists.  Pixellated images only go so far because the authorities in North Korea know who they are.

In all research projects at university level, one must have signed ‘informed consent’ forms from all that you might be compromising.  It doesn’t sound like the BBC crew fulfilled this key requirement and so now suffer the blowback when some of the students have complained.  ‘Human shields’ is bombastic rhetoric worthy of the DPRK, but it seems like John Sweeney and his team knew they were on shaky ground with the British-based students, let alone Pyongyang.  Technically, if they had been rumbled, they could have been accused of being spies.  Those committing espionage have no protection under the Geneva Convention or any rules of war – execution was a possibility (and what could the West have done about it?  Absolutely nothing).

Still, that’s taking it to extremes.  The London School of Economics were pushing hard against the release of the Panorama programme, but then they’ve got their reputation to uphold.  Future research excursions not just to North Korea but any place with shady and suspicious governance would be imperilled unless they protested in the strongest terms, even if not students had kicked up some dust.  The LSE’s irritation at the BBC refusing their request to pull the Panorama reportage was slightly undermined by the vice-chancellor’s Irish brogue, referring several times to the ‘fillum’. 

Ultimately, the ‘film’ showed that becoming interesting would more be in one’s determination to journey to one of the last totalitarian states on the planet, rather than what one did there in all honesty.  Aside from comical asides, like the electricity failing in a building making electricity generators or a hospital with no visible patients, plus some of the outstanding scenery that has not suffered environmental degradation (an ecological catastrophe is taking place alongside the human one), what one could see of the place was strikingly boring.  They’d even taken down the portraits of Marx and Lenin from the parliament building (for no apparent reason).  There were interesting parallels with Mongolia: the blocky communist imagery on a war memorial and the central square outside parliament was just like Sükhbaatar Square, though Eastern bloc planning was largely identical in every architect’s briefcase.  Despite the grinding poverty, North Korea showed it had technology beyond missile- and fissile material-making in providing a metro service for the long-suffering of their population in the capital.  Not very attractive, let alone a patch on the Moscow Metro for communist design, it nevertheless the deepest in the world – as Sweeney remarked, useful for surviving a nuclear strike.  One can easily see the party functionaries and military officers commandeering it in such an event because it was for them originally designed.

I once went to the feudal fiefdom of Transdnistria, a tiny sliver of land across the River Dnistria from its ‘parent’ state of Moldova and unrecognised by the entire world (yet its integrity guaranteed by a resident Russian army).  It has two main cities – Tiraspol and Bendery.  I entered on a three-hour visa and, frankly, that was all that was needed.  Were it not for the fact that one can only enter and exit via China, one might not need a visa for that much longer in North Korea.

Space for the new, not the old

With gushing tributes still flowing in for Baroness Thatcher as if commentators had just lost their mother (or for the toffs their nanny), it’s as if the funeral procession had already begun its stately crawl through Fleet Street. I mean, it’s not as if there is real news around, like Kim Jong-Un thinking the game of ‘Nuke ‘Em’ in Robocop can be recreated.


This talk of a statue for the greengrocer’s daughter to take over the empty fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square is disturbing in its own right. To be sure, the characters already have dubious pasts, if not being outright reprobates. George IV’s gluttonous girth somehow didn’t kill the horse upon which he is sitting. General Sir Charles James Napier indulged in the most outrageous piece of imperialism since Clive of India (Punch had him sending a one-word telegram ‘Peccavi’, Latin for “I have sinned” i.e. Sindh). Major-General Sir Henry Havelock was responsible for suppressing the Indian Mutiny and quite a brutal campaign that was. And then, on top of the central column, we have an arch-philanderer. So, she would fit right in.

Yet and yet, it would be so wrong. These figures have passed out of our understanding – they are backdrops, not focal points, as a Thatcher statue would be. And what a focal point! It wouldn’t just be the pigeons depositing their faeces on it – at least Winston Churchill only gets carpeted (literally) once a year on May Day. And a statue of Thatcher has been decapitated before – who is to say it won’t happen again? Moreover, with the likes of newspaper blogger Graeme Archer saying she was a warrior against the real enemy of socialism (a disturbing catch all term ranging from democrats to dictators), it would be a massive affront to anyone who regards themselves as socialist. Where is Clement Attlee’s statue? Having Grantham’s most famous daughter would instantly politicise the place and as the Queen owns the square in Right of Crown, I think she would be loathe to take sides after using all her capital in attending the funeral.

The empty Fourth Plinth is, in fact, rarely empty. It says something about the British character – that while we are happy to glory in our history, we also leave a space for innovation, we are not afraid to experiment and we move on before it gathers dust like everything else. Our psyche is not set in stone.

Back to the Future (how many times has this title been referenced)

Funny how one can get quickly out of the habit of doing things, but hard to restart them again.  Anyway, all my coursework bar one (not including the small matter of a 14,000 word dissertation) is done and all my classes have finished -sadly in my opinion - forever.  This one-year Masters course has been a burst of freshness to blow away the cobwebs.

Anyway, when the Argie-bargie over the Falklands was at its most shrill and there was still an eighties-revival in the charts, people were saying how we we were living the 1980s all over again.  As in Hollywood, the people who had grown up in that decade had become the movers-and-shakers.  In the 1990s, we had a re-run of the 1960s, in the 2000s the '70s were in vogue and now it is the turn of the 80s.

Compounding all this is the death of Margaret Thatcher.  In a front-page cartoon on The Independent speaking of the funeral, one middle-aged copper said to another: "All police leave cancelled - just like the good, old days!"  Now the BBC is effectively banning the choice of a campaign by many thousands by playing only a five second excerpt of 'Ding dong, the witch is dead' on Sunday's Top 40 (where it may even reach no. 1).  Even those on the right are divided about whether the song should be played in its entirety or not, with some saying it would be like a heckle at a funeral - except the chart show isn't a wake - while Conservative Marc Wilson MP said it would be terrible that such a staunch upholder of freedom around the world should be associated with censorship.  My own view is that the song should be given the full freedom of the airwaves wherever is debuts, as it is a useful corrective to the overblown proceedings Thatcher (against her stated own wishes) is being given - a state funeral in all but name, with even the Queen attending (though maybe just to make sure her nemesis is dead).  If it had been a quiet funeral (as Thatcher wanted and as indeed Clement Attlee had), with no Tory triumphalism, such as this 'True Blue' planning commission, then the 'Ding dong' song would be gratuitous.  As it is, it picks at establishment values by those who would otherwise feel unempowered (and indeed may have been disempowered by Thatcherite policies).  Being grandiose always runs the risk of the bathetic.  I think myself that the Pet Shop Boys' ironic take on yuppie culture in Opportunities would have been a far better caricature of her reign.  In a funny way, the BBC are playing the ultimate tribute to Thatcher, effectively banning songs as they did with Frankie Goes To Hollywood in the early 80s.

The grocer’s daughter from Grantham goes

Although anticipated for such a long time as potentially happening at any moment, the death of Margaret Thatcher is still a bit of shock.  Even The Daily Telegraph was caught on the hop, beaten to breaking the news by the BBC, even though the baroness was staying in the Ritz Hotel (as she recuperated from an operation), an establishment in the hands of the Barclay brothers, owners of The Telegraph.  Cue predictable outpourings of warm reminiscences and fierce hostility.  One insightful strand of thought amongst all the headlines about being a divisive prime minister was that she was a leader, not following the crowd – whether one agreed with Thatcher or not, she laid out a clear path for the country until hubris got the better of her at the end of the 1980s.

It was noticeable that among the most prominent of the tributes was from former South African president, F. W. De Klerk, who finally dismantled apartheid.  Even if Nelson Mandela gave any public pronouncements, I imagine he would have kept quiet, with Mrs Thatcher quite unabashed in labelling him a terrorist (though she had no trouble with former guerrilla fighter-turned-president Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe).  She’s outlived some of her contemporaries – Ronald Reagan, Francois Mitterand, Edward Heath, Michael Foot, Jim Callaghan – yet others are still around – Arthur Scargill, Derek Hatton, Michael Heseltine, Helmut Kohl (who she called an ‘old man in a hurry’ despite him being younger than her), Mikhail Gorbachev and George H. W. Bush, whom she told not to have a ‘wobbly’ over Iraq in 1990.

I know some people have kept a bottle of champagne stored away for the day when Thatcher died, but Ed Miliband was right in saying she changed the centre ground and indeed what it means to be a Conservative (for her radicalism was very anti-conservative).  She defined a decade, with a risky but successful war that hastened the end of a brutal military junta, evisceration of the coal-mining and manufacturing sectors, a needed suppression of out-of-control trade unions, the get-rich-quick yuppie greed, the privatisation of the ‘family silver’ and calling IRA terrorism ‘criminality’ rather than declaring a war on it.  She was also an inspiration to many women that they could achieve the highest positions in the land on merit.  Now Sir John Major is the Elder Person of State, as the oldest living former prime minister.  I’m not a Thatcher supporter by any stretch or a Conservative but I still think it is sad that she has died.

Going up

Although Gillingham FC's stadium at Priestfield isn't that large, it certainly can generate some passion.  One can often hear, even from the other side of town, a voluminous roar as a goal is scored, ill-defined but primal.  Yet at 4.55pm as I walked on the Great Lines, about as far as one can get without straying into Chatham, the sun beating down and spring warmth finally permitted, I heard very clearly and repeatedly "We are going up, say, we are going up," as if I was right outside the ground itself.  They had beaten lowly Torquay 1-0, but it was enough as the teams in 4th and 5th place (the two slots immediately outside the automatic promotion places) cannot possibly catch the Gills now.  Martin Allen's side have proven again that while goals win games, defences win leagues and finishing top of League Two must now be the priority and it is looking likely as well.  In my lifetime, the Gills have won play-off finals but I can't recall them ever winning the tier they were in.  Those spine-tingling chants that I heard today could get ever louder as the season winds to its conclusion.

Skewered on Trident

With many getting hot under the collar about North Korea's ridiculous bluster, as Kim Jong-Un seeks to shore up his domestic power position, yesterday David Cameron sought to bolster his own position with some red-meat talk about Britain's "independent nuclear deterrent" or rather 'independent' nuclear 'deterrent'.  Using North Korea as an example of the need to keep Trident is an argument even more intellectually bankrupt than Tony Blair's claim that Iraq could launch WMD in 45 minutes.
It's all about interests and Britain has had no strategic ones east of Suez since it gave Hong Kong back to the Chinese in 1997.  While Iraq was found to have no WMD (as was pretty clear from Hans Blix's reports before the 2003 invasion), there were British bases on Cyprus as potential targets, though given the welter of important places to destroy in the region, I doubt Iraq's defence ministry cared one jot about the Cypriot installations.  This just shows the depth of rigour in Cameron's argument.  It's just a shame that no-one picked him up on it, with Labour haunted by their 1983 manifesto ('the longest suicide note in history') and a right-wing backlash and the Liberal Democrats choosing to pick fights they know they can win.
Of course, David Cameron was showing his commitment to shipbuilding in Scotland as well but if we need nuclear-armed submarines to keep the shipyards afloat, that is egregious discretionary spending.  If current welfare policy is accused of subsidising the undeserving ('products of a welfare culture' as The Forgers' Gazette would have it), this is an insane large subsidy for a few thousand jobs - money that could be spent on retraining all those employees with much to spare or if it is about shipbuilding capacity, many destroyers that will be need to protect the new aircraft carriers.
And as for those aircraft carriers, the first one coming into service in 2018 will be immediately mothballed.    Cameron says we need Trident to protect us against threats like North Korea but South Korea and Japan don't have nuclear weapons as they know the United States would obliterate North Korea in the event of war.  Britain's submarines by contrast patrol the North Atlantic (when not laid up in harbour, as any one of the three, that's right a measly three, is constantly).  Cameron did away with our previous aircraft carriers in 2010 believing that we wouldn't face threats over the coming decade; now he's changed his tune on threats but he is Mr U-Turn after all.  Aircraft carriers are essential for power projection, nuclear-armed submarines are not.  It was the presence of aircraft carriers that won the Falklands War, not submarines (whose nuclear-tipped weapons, even in a live war, were not used).  In the Libyan revolution in 2011, the French could send an aircraft carrier of the African coast, while Britain had the indignity of flying all the way back and forth from Sicily.  Our nuclear weapons were inappropriate in such a situation.
They aren't even independent, unlike that of the French.  The UK can only use them in conjunction with the Americans and not before.  It is the fob on the keyring for the ignition keys of the American juggernaut.  It is the public that gets fobbed off though.  Without Trident, the deficit could be cut much, much faster, yet ordinary people must suffer for this white elephant non-weapon that we don't even have control over.  Who exactly are we deterring?  Precisely no-one.  The Russians may like a bit of nationalism but they prefer the goodies that come with being the global liberal order - warmongering is not their thing towards western Europe.  Iran is contained by both the USA and Israel.  And regarding British strategic interests, that is it.
On bare-faced shame, Cameron's statement in Scotland (where a majority oppose nuclear submarines being stationed - so much for shoring up pan-British support ahead of the referendum next year) is on a par with a Labour MP on Newsnight who, in the wake of the Serious Fraud Office dropping its corruption case in 2006 regarding the al-Yamamah BAE-Saudi Arabia deal, effectively condoned corruption if it safeguarded BAE jobs in his constituency.  While the Labour MP showed himself to be worthless moral exemplar by being honest in not caring about corruption, Cameron is the same by lying to the British about the need to guard against North Korea.
Essentially, it is willy-waving but with Britain only outshining North Korea and possibly Pakistan of the official nuclear club, it is not a very impressive member in all senses.  It is like the man who buys a gun through a sense of personal inadequacy more than anything else.  With a veto on any institutional changes, the British permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council is not in any threat, despite its anachronism, should we ditch nuclear weapons.  The Americans might not be happy about having to shoulder a bit more of the burden of the North Atlantic, but it would be only a minor irritant for them (and they might even agree to it willingly if the UK supplemented its military capacity in other sectors).  It is not the Cold War anymore when there was a need for a united front.
To get rid of nuclear weapons would be an immense moral statement and a sign of strength in ourselves as a country, not a weakness.  North Korea would probably still continue with its own nuclear programme but would have even more international opprobrium placed on them - if Mr Cameron was more steadfast in his Christianity, he would know that by setting this moral example to the North Korean leadership, it "would heap burning coals on their heads."  Do as I say, not do as I do is a one-way street of ineffectiveness (what India called 'the nuclear apartheid' that it was determined to break).  Although South Africa developed nuclear weapons for internal use, it was greeted very positively around the world when they renounced their capability.  Pretoria doesn't feel threatened by Pyongyang.  North Korean hackers are the real threat to the commercial well-being of the West.  Beefing up cybersecurity is the cheapest and best defence the UK really needs.  Having the best brains working on this, is the real independent deterrent to state-sponsored capacity.