Programming note: Tonight, Friday, right here at SteynOnline, I'll be launching our seventy-ninth Tale for Our Time. Hope you'll want to give it the once-over.
~Two random-ish headlines from today's Times - London, that is, not New York. First:
UK blocking Trump from using RAF bases for strikes on Iran
The disagreement over the use of British sites is behind the US president's withdrawal of support for the Chagos Islands deal
Andrew's arrest is the worst constitutional crisis in a century
The King has to deal with a far bigger threat than have any of his recent forebears
In the scheme of things, these are the same story. Almost everything is these days.
Set aside for the moment whether the Pentagon bombing Iran will accomplish any meaningful strategic objectives of the United States. I am not myself persuaded - and, granted that Lindsey Graham has the ear of the President and I don't, the last three-quarters of a century of comprehensively bungled warmongering suggests how moving on from Pushtun goatherds to Putin's drones to nuclear mullahs is likely to work out. Be that as it may, if you account for forty per cent of the entire planet's military spending, it would be nice to be able to use some of "your" bases.
RAF Fairford, for example, despite its name, is the USAF's only airfield for heavy bombers in Britain and Europe. In essence, the Yanks run the joint - save for the Brits having a yea or nay on its use for combat operations and getting to hold the Royal International Air Tattoo there every July. Thus, in April 1986 the Ministry of Defence had to sign off on President Reagan's punitive bombing of Libya in retaliation for Colonel Gaddafi's attack on a West Berlin discothèque frequented by American soldiers. Four decades later, Keir Starmer is taking time out of his hectic schedule of undertipping his Ukrainian rent-boys in order to deny similar permission to Reagan's successor.
So you can understand why President Trump is not terribly assured by Sir Keir's supposed "ninety-nine-year lease" with the increasingly Sinophile Mauritians under which the Pentagon will allegedly continue to have access to facilities in the soon-to-be dissolved British Indian Ocean Territory. Diego Garcia has proved indispensable to almost all America's wars of recent decades, so who knows whether that's good news or bad.
But what's changed between bombing Gaddafi in 1986 and bombing Khamenei in 2026?
Well, as a certain "niche Canadian" put it twenty sod-bollocking years ago:
Demography doesn't explain everything but it accounts for a good ninety per cent – including the easy stuff, like why Jacques Chirac wasn't amenable to Colin Powell's schmoozing on Iraq: If the population of your cities was thirty per cent Muslim and with spectacularly high youth unemployment rates and a bunch of other grievances, would you be so eager to send your troops into an Arab country fighting alongside the Great Satan?
As it was for Chirac, so two decades on for Starmer: would you be so eager to send the Great Satan's bombers into action against the Islamic (if non-Arab) Republic from your air bases? What's the Muslim population of Keir's cities?
Manchester 22.28%
Leicester 23.45%
Oldham 24.38%
Slough 29.44%
Birmingham 29.85%
Bradford 30.53%
Luton 32.94%
Blackburn 34.99%
London Borough of Tower Hamlets 39.93%
They're the official figures from the 2021 census - almost all significantly higher now thanks to the so-called "Boriswave" launched by the traitor Johnson. Unlike Kemal Fatterturk and the other middle-aged swingers of Westminster, in Birmingham and Manchester the Mohammedans skew young and fit.
What was that other story? Oh, yeah...
Andrew's arrest is the worst constitutional crisis in a century
"Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor" is the world's most famous sex-fiend because he is, to put it discreetly, distinct from the male inhabitants of the above municipalities. As grotesque and repulsive as he assuredly is, he does not appear to have gang-raped any schoolgirls, dangled them off balconies, anally branded them, doused them in petrol or burned them alive. Rupert Lowe's just concluded Gang Rape Inquiry heard copious evidence of such routine atrocities - and it went entirely uncovered by the "mainstream" media because, as with USAF bombers taking off from RAF bases, it would upset members of the diverse community and those like Starmer who depend on their votes. Rape on, Ahmed! Sir Keir has your back!
As for "the worst constitutional crisis in a century", who cares? At the time of Edward VIII's abdication, England was England. At the time of the last senior royal to be taken into Andrew-like custody and eventually executed (Charles I), England was England. Not now. Within a generation, the native population will become a minority first in England and then in the UK. Who gives a sodding bollock about a "constitutional crisis" when you've got an existential crisis?
The King, of course, has already gone over to the other side. As Ayatollah Khamenei is the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic, so His Majesty is the Supreme Governor of the Church of England. Yet one notices that, while the Supreme Leader eschews any Lenten greetings, the Supreme Governor lays it on with a trowel for Ramadan:
Wishing all Muslims in the UK, the Commonwealth and around the world a blessed and peaceful Ramadan.#RamadanMubarak pic.twitter.com/ZZTdHDU8bG
— The Royal Family (@RoyalFamily) February 17, 2026
His son and heir has even less feeling for the church which he will one day head. The real "constitutional" crisis is that the Crown has chosen to be part of the problem, not the solution. As for those hundreds of thousands of gang-raped English working-class girls, as I wrote just a few months ago, the Royal Family has not a word to say. The House of Windsor, it is hardly worth remarking, has embarked on its own inevitable transition.
One more from Sir Paul Marshall's increasingly preposterous Spectator:
Why Starmer must raise defence spending fast
Okay, I'll bite. Why?
Britain's armed forces lack the mass, readiness and resilience needed to produce a credible deterrent in an era of intensifying threats.
This is by some chap called Eliot Wilson:
I am a member and contributing editor at Defence on the Brink, which was founded by my colleagues Ted Jeffery and Col (Ret'd) Philip Ingram, along with Col (Ret'd) Simon Diggins and Cormac Smith.
Messrs Wilson, Jeffery, Ingram, Diggins, Smith... Those are credible names for a morris-dancing troupe in Little Sodding on the Bollock, but not otherwise for an England in which the Home Secretary is Mahmoud, the Mayor of London is Khan, and the front bench of Farage's "far-right" "nativist" "populist" opposition is Yusuf and Zahawi while their candidate in Portsmouth is a citizen of Bangladesh called Asaduzzaman.
During the two-decade "war on terror", more British Muslims served with Isis and the like than as soldiers of the Queen. Yet pasty sallow blokes called Smith and Jones are still expected to sign up for a land in which they've been demographically dispossessed and for a king whose enthusiasm for Ramadan jubilations is matched only by his PM's for Slav twinks.
It's all demography. Where's the "credible deterrent" for the only "intensifying threat" that matters? Or can that wait till Trump has to ask the Mauritians if his B52s can take off from Diego Garcia to bomb Luton?
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