Who would take up arms for Broken Britain?

Putin will be over the moon. Caves in Iraq will echo with the laughter of whatever remains of ISIS. For a new poll has found that a measly six per cent of Britons would take up arms if we faced an ‘imminent invasion’. Armies of mad Islamists could be amassing on our beaches and just one in 17 of us would ask for a gun. ‘We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be’, said Churchill. Not anymore, we won’t.

The YouGov survey is a sobering read. And a scary one. There were 2,300 respondents. Just six per cent said they would volunteer to fend off a looming foe. Fifty-two per cent said they can’t fight because of age or disability. No doubt this includes many folk who really are too old for war. But I bet it also includes silver-spoon twats who’ve been convinced by TikTok that they have ADHD or some other bullshit malady.

Fourteen per cent said they would serve if they were called up. That’s good to know – they won’t volunteer to defend our sceptred isle but they’ll give it a whirl if the alternative is jail. But 17 per cent said they wouldn’t fight for Blighty even if ordered to do so. What a testament to our nation’s decay: more people would rather rot in the stagnant security of a jail cell than risk a hair on their head in a battle for Britain’s future.

Think about how insane these stats are. As a writer for the Spectator points out, around six per cent of Brits think we should be allowed to eat dogs. So fighting for your country is now as batty and eccentric a notion as chowing down on dog meat. A couple of years ago, a poll found that nine per cent of Brits aged 18 to 24 had a ‘favourable’ view of Hamas. God help us if Hamas should ever land on our shores: more young Brits would be fanboying over the Islamofascist invaders than trying to fend them off.

As with all surveys, caveats are called for. It’s possible that if an invasion really were imminent – if we could see warships at Dover – then minds would be sharpened and guns reached for. Hell, even some of our ‘neurodivergent’ youths might crewcut their blue hair and peel themselves away from Warhammer to prep for real war. An invasion isn’t imminent. Russia isn’t on our doorstep. There’s no Luftwaffe overhead.

And yet, it would be suicidal folly to not take seriously a poll like this one. For it points to a cavernous spiritual decay in our once great nation. Indeed, what is the point of a nation whose own people would not fight for it? If a country isn’t worth fighting for in the eyes of its own young, then surely it has surrendered its right to exist? The nation that cannot summon the spirit of its citizens to defend it against foreign foes is dead already – it’s just waiting for a strong enough military breeze to put it out of its misery

Here’s the frightening thing: I know where the pre-emptive draft-dodgers are coming from. My initial horror at the thought of Britain becoming a defenceless realm, our young more interested in figuring out their gender identity than fighting for the land of their forebears, swiftly gave way to understanding. I get it. Why would people fight for this Britain? What would they be fighting for?

Who would lay down their life for a land of vape shops and fried chicken and cunts on buses playing their music out loud? Why would anyone take up arms for a country where the high street stinks and litter piles up and you can’t go 10 metres without seeing a woman in a medieval cloak from the 7th century? Who would risk life and limb for a nation where illegal immigrants are setting up tent cities and the authorities do damn-all about it? The other day, I walked past one such encampment in Warren Street and one of the inebriated inhabitants showed me his anus. His literal arsehole. Surely, as a freeborn Briton, I deserve the liberty to traverse my capital city without being exposed to the rectal opening of a foreign panhandler?

Indeed, given the virtual erasure of our borders by rich officials who crave cheap labour from overseas to make their coffee and wipe their arses, where even is this nation we’d be expected to defend? If people have got the idea that our borders aren’t worth manning, can you blame them? After all, almost every day hundreds of young men from God knows where spill on to our shores and we’re called racist scum if we complain about it. Are you sure we wouldn’t also be called racist if we tried to fend off a literal army of gun-toting Koran bashers?

What would Brits be called upon to defend, exactly? A glorified airport lounge that was once a kingdom? A supposedly Christian country where Christians are arrested if their preaching offends ‘queers’ or Muslims? The birthplace of religious liberty where now mothers are publicly shamed by mobs of bearded men if their kid scuffs a page of the Koran? This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England where you can’t even fly the goddamn national flag lest it upset plummy leftists and their asylum-seeker au pairs?

Then there has been the wilful decommissioning of patriotic feeling. A core crusade of the anti-working-class intelligentsia has been the borderline criminalisation of national pride. Britain, they tell us, is a nation born from the sin of colonialism, a nation morally scarred by its historic crimes. Popular culture is awash with the self-regarding self-loathing of a cultural elite that hates its own country and the oiks who inhabit it. Little wonder that a survey of Gen Z last year found that half think Britain is a ‘racist country’. Who’s going to fight for a racist country? Let it die, no?

When will the ruling classes learn that their moral dereliction is having the most dreadful consequences? That it is making everyday life more shit and our future more perilous? That it is weakening the national spirit and emboldening those who hate us? I hate that my fellow citizens think our nation is not worth fighting for. I hate even more that I fully understand why.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.