The commentator’s privilege

I wouldn’t have expected George Monbiot, the longtime Guardian columnist, to sound like a grizzled war hawk but there he was on Question Time comparing Matt Goodwin to Neville Chamberlain for suggesting that Ukraine might have to abandon some of the territory it has lost to the Russians.

I don’t like this sort of moralistic argument. If someone has a case for how Ukraine can win its land back then I would be glad to hear it. Just demanding moral courage as if that can take the place of men and materiel is not so compelling.

Still, it was odd to hear this sort of War on Terror-era talking point coming from George Monbiot. Monbiot has always been a fairly independent-minded columnist — criticising his cousins on the left when he disagrees with them. For what it’s worth, I enjoy reading his columns. A consistent theme of his work, though, has been opposition to defence spending.

“If we were to cut the military budget by 80 or 90%,” Monbiot declared in 2006, “We would do ourselves nothing but good.” “No country that is capable of attacking NATO countries is willing to do so,” he insisted, “[And] no country that is willing is capable.” “So what role remains for our armed forces? A small one.”

“We could cut defence spending by 90% and suffer no loss to our national security,” Monbiot announced in 2009. “Stop building tanks.” So averse was Monbiot to the arms trade that he stopped buying poppies — or announced that he was going to do so — because the Royal British Links had links to defence manufacturers.

In 2020, amid the pandemic, Monbiot maintained that Britain had been “spending hundreds of billions against imaginary hazards”. “If ever there were a time to reassess the genuine threats to our security and separate them from the self-interested aims of the weapons industry,” he concluded, “This is it.”

So, between 2006 and 2020, Britain should have been cutting its armed forces to the bones. Now, suddenly, it should be dedicated to supporting Ukraine in its pursuit of total victory. A lot can change in five years!

Now, I’m not accusing Monbiot of dishonesty here. He has openly changed his mind. In 2024, he announced that the time had come for rearmament. Yes, it had abruptly turned out that a hostile nation might attack a NATO member after all — and the US might not come to our defence. “With great discomfort,” Monbiot wrote, “I find myself open to arguments for rearmament”:

I now believe we need to enhance our conventional capabilities, both to support other European nations against Russia and – something that seemed unimaginable a few years ago – perhaps to defend ourselves.

It is admirable when somebody can change their mind. But we opinion commentators have the luxury of being able to change our minds as and when we feel like it. Imagine if we lived in Monbiotworld. Between the 00s and the 10s, Britain had reduced its defence spending by 90%. (Perhaps other NATO members had followed suit.) Now, suddenly, it had to change course. Soldiers had to be recruited and trained. Tanks, and ships, and planes had to be purchased or constructed. Does Monbiot think that this could be accomplished at his convenience? It takes years to rearm — and if Western states had been listening to people like him over the past two decades, Putin could have sipped his morning coffee in Kiev sometime in 2022. Yes, “the situation has changed”, as Monbiot says. But a nation needs a strong military in peacetime because the situation can change. Once the situation has changed, it is a bit late to adapt.

We opinion columnists are often free-riders on people who ignore us. We can fantasise about our hare-brained schemes and then change course when the facts are too evidently against us, safe in the knowledge that people who count have been ignoring us enough that our opinions can seem outdated rather than embarrassingly and disastrously wrong.

Imagine, for example, that after years of saying that fossil fuels are harmless and should be used to our heart’s content I suddenly announced that the situation had changed and I was becoming an environmentalist. Monbiot might be glad to have me on the team, of course, but I think he would suggest a little more self-reflection.

The world demands constant realism, because when politicians — unlike opinion columnists — change course, they can do so across the bodies of the people who fell victim to their earlier mistakes.