What Metro reports, with its usual tone of breathless normalisation, is that ministers are again talking about “war footing”. Conscription is not proposed, of course—not yet. It is merely being discussed. Options are being kept open. The ground is being prepared. This is how the British State does everything: by insinuation, and by softening the public with conditional language until the unthinkable becomes administrative routine.

Let me deal, as briefly as it deserves, with the public justification. Russia has no stated intention of invading Poland, or the Baltic States, or anywhere else outside the Ukraine. It has no stated intention, and probably no great ability. Even if it had, the protection of Eastern Europe is not a legitimate British interest. It is certainly not a duty. We helped save these countries from Communism. We did more than anyone else to get them into the European Union. We opened our borders to their emigrants. When we voted to leave the European Union, and our government made feeble efforts to leave, the governments of these countries could have returned some part of the big favour we had given. They could have given critical procedural assistance in the crisis of 2019. Instead, they followed the French and German lead, and shat all over us. We owe them nothing now.

Enough of the stated reasons for war with Russia. It involves no meaningful British interest. But it does involve the critical interests of the British ruling class. This is a shadowy blob that has its base in the City of London, and is known through its public satellites: finance, consultancy, law, NGOs, media, and the bureaucratic priesthood that lives by extracting rents from complexity while producing nothing of value. This is a ruling class enriched by parasitism, rebranded as “financial services”. It is the head of a caste that has never created anything of real value, and would not know how to begin even if it wanted.

This class rode high after 1991. The Soviet collapse appeared to cement a project of safe and unending parasitism: a unipolar world, enforced by American power, administered by supranational institutions, lubricated by global finance. The New World Order—never officially named, but universally understood—was to be a boot on the human face forever. Borders would dissolve. Nations would wither. Politics would be replaced by management. History would end. The City would collect its fees.

Britain was torn apart to serve this order. Industry was scrapped. Skills were lost. Energy security was treated as vulgar. The native population was demonised as backward and dangerous, while imported labour was used to suppress wages and fracture solidarity. The Army became a boutique expeditionary force for other people’s wars. The police became a domestic compliance unit. The State ceased to be national and became managerial.

And for a while, it worked. The money flowed. The lectures were believed. The dissenters were marginalised. But the past decade has been unkind to fantasies. The world did not submit. Russia recovered. China rose. Supply chains snapped. Sanctions failed. War returned—not as a policing action against a weak state, but as a contest between industrial powers. The boot slipped.

An alternative order is forming—messy, plural, not liberal, but not managerial either—around Russia and China. It does not flatter the City. It does not require London lawyers. It does not need British “expertise”. And this terrifies the people who live from mediation rather than production. So they want the old order back—not negotiated, not adapted: imposed.

That is what this war talk is about. It is not about defending Britain. It is not about preventing invasion. Russia is not coming to Kent. This is about salvaging a world-system in which the City sits at the centre, skimming value while others make things. It is about restoring a hierarchy that once paid handsomely.

The trouble is that Britain no longer has the means. You cannot fight an industrial war after deindustrialising. You cannot mobilise a people you have spent decades labelling as contemptible. You cannot conscript loyalty after criminalising identity. The British ruling class dismantled the social foundations that made 1914 possible—and now it wants the uniforms without the nation.

This is where conscription enters the picture. When volunteers vanish, coercion follows. When belief collapses, force replaces it. The expectation is simple and brutal: young men—particularly working‑class, particularly English—are to put on uniforms and go abroad to die so that a financial order can be patched together for another season. As in 1914, they are to be told stories about civilisation and duty. As in 1914, the beneficiaries will not be the ones bleeding.

And what would victory bring, even if it were possible? More of the same. More surveillance. More speech laws. More demographic engineering. More lectures about values from people who despise the public. A “win” for this regime would mean a strengthened managerial State at home and a restored hierarchy abroad. It would not mean freedom. It would mean entrenchment.

This is the central obscenity of the conscription talk: the war is not for us, and even success would not benefit us.

Why, then, should anyone fight? Why should a young man die for a State that treats him as a problem to be managed? For a country where he cannot speak freely, cannot trust the police, cannot form a family without financial ruin, cannot object to the transformation of his community without being smeared as hateful? Why should he be asked to kill Russians for a regime that has done more to dispossess him than any foreign power?

The answer, from Westminster, is silence dressed up as duty. They will accuse refusal of cowardice. They will say it is unpatriotic. They will wrap coercion in the flag they otherwise despise. But this is not patriotism. It is extraction—of bodies, of lives, of the last remaining asset of a hollowed‑out nation.

You can take it as read that the sons of the City will not be there. The posh boys will be “essential”. The daughters of the regime will be “protected”. The war, like every other burden, will be outsourced downward. The fortunate sons will network abroad. The unfortunate sons will be buried abroad.

I have no intention of being scammed out of my life. I will not fight Russia to save the City’s balance sheet. I will not die to resurrect a New World Order that brought me nothing but surveillance, precarity, and contempt. I will not put on a uniform for a victory that would only deepen domestic repression.

If the ruling class wants its war, it can fight it itself. Let the financiers trade rifles for spreadsheets. Let the ministers lead from the front. Let the ideologues demonstrate their courage somewhere other than a studio. Let their children fight and bleed and die.

Yes, take your war footing and keep it. The dice are loaded. The table is broken. The bill is yours.