In Part:

General Patrick Sanders, former Chief of the General Staff, has said publicly that Britain’s army is “too small to survive a war.” Thirty-two percent of serving soldiers say they are content with their pay. Japan calls Britain a ghost ally. Its own generals call it worse.

Professor Andrew Dorman of King’s College London, writing for UK in a Changing Europe on 19 February of this year: “Britain’s continuing claim to be Europe’s leading military power looks increasingly fanciful and symptomatic of a government that is floundering.” He meant it as a warning. It reads as a verdict.

PORT TALBOT, SCUNTHORPE, AND THE PRICE OF PRINCIPLES

In October 2024, the last blast furnaces at Tata Steel’s Port Talbot plant — a facility producing steel since 1902, the industrial heart of South Wales — were extinguished. Two thousand eight hundred workers received their redundancy notices the same week. Not over months. Not through attrition. One week. The cause was energy. British industrial electricity runs up to 50% higher than for competitors in France and Germany. The government offered £500 million toward transition to electric arc furnaces not operational until 2027. In the gap: 2,800 layoffs, 300 jobs retained. The managed transition.

Then came Scunthorpe. British Steel — owned by Chinese firm Jingye — announced in March 2025 it was preparing to close. Two thousand seven hundred jobs in a town making steel for over 160 years. Losses of £700,000 per day. Parliament was recalled on a Saturday. Emergency legislation passed. The constitutional scramble deployed for genuine national crises. Nobody connected it to anything. They just passed the law and went home.

UK steel output fell 29% in 2024 alone. Britain came within weeks of becoming the only G7 nation unable to produce primary steel from raw iron ore. The country of Bessemer and Brunel. The birthplace of the Industrial Revolution. While its Prime Minister was in Munich pledging £500 million for Ukrainian air defences. The same number. Same week. Different priorities. The 2,800 families of Port Talbot noticed, even if the newspapers didn’t.

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https://islanderreports.substack.com/p/britains-ghost-army