Defence of the Realm: Britain on Mr Putin's Chessboard

Diplomatic Situation

Last year, some politicians and military historians were concerned that the British public might, in 2014, forget what the world went through in 1914 to 1918: the period of the Great War. Even as recently as three weeks before the publication of this article (during the Sochi Winter Olympics) it looked as if the main reminder of that pivotal time in human affairs would be the BBC's programming efforts, with both national and regional programmes on the history and background of the Great War. And the nearest a flood weary British public was getting to empathy with their ancestors in the trenches, was an acute anxiety about the supply of sandbags.

But on this weekend, the beginning of March, 2014, the rolling news channels are bringing us back to 1914 with a bump. Though the pre-recorded discussions about the possibility of another world war, based on what went wrong in 1914, all concentrate on tensions between China and Japan, the emerging diplomatic train crash is in Ukraine. A more dangerous place than a group of uninhabited islands, and from the British point of view, close to home geographically and even closer to home historically, because the Crimean War was in many ways the prototype of the Great War, with the advent in Europe of the sort of industrialised siege warfare fought at an eye-watering cost in blood and treasure that the Americans would shortly experiment with between themselves.

Although most readers will have seen glib presentations by earnest young British historians trying to prove that the Great War was Britain's fault, the truth was that Britain had spent the opening years of the twentieth century repeatedly intervening to stop war breaking out between the great powers over the Balkans, and what finally allowed it to happen was a blithe assumption by the British Cabinet that their Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, could go on doing this indefinitely, a determination on the part of Austro-Hungary to consolidate its grip on the Balkans, recently bartered for with the Ottoman Empire without the slightest reference to the people of the Balkans, and a belief on the part of the German government that 1914 was a window of opportunity to clip the wings of both the Russian and French Empires at the same time.

Although Winston Churchill, then the First Lord of the Admiralty, is portrayed by the "Britain's fault brigade" as the cabinet member most eager for war, he only realised that war was more than faintly possible only a few days before it broke out. He was listening to Edward Grey reading out the German-approved ultimatum which Austro-Hungary had delivered to Serbia, and about twenty minutes into this document, he realised that this was the sort of demand issued by warlike kings in ancient or Biblical times, and it was more extreme than any diplomatic paper which had been published in Europe for some centuries. Serbia was being faced with a demand that she should meekly agree to stop existing, on account of an assassination carried out by a group of mostly Bosnian private citizens. Happenstance had it that a Serb fired what turned out to be the fatal shots, after Bosnians had thrown what turned out to be ineffective bombs. Austro-Hungary and Germany knew this, but their differing ambitions both required a Serbian capitulation, so that was what they demanded. By any modern standard, Bosnian and Serb grievances against Austro-Hungary seem perfectly valid, too: they didn't want to pass from one Empire to another, they wanted to be Bosnia and Serbia.

Even so, Britain could and probably would have evaded war, had Germany not decided to invade and crush Belgium, a declared neutral country, simply to shave a few days off their timetable for the invasion of France, which was one of Serbia's protecting powers. Had France and Russia not been Serbia's protecting powers, Germany would have had no interest in the Balkans at all. As it was, Serbia looked like a good pretext for a lightning war of aggression against Germany's two main European rivals.

With Serbia being a pretext for aggression in the first place, the hammer blow which landed on Belgium was completely unprovoked by anything which Belgium had done, and all that France and Russia had done to provoke war was insist, mostly through diplomatic channels rather than practical military action, that Serbia not be brutally crushed.

Though the patterns and alliances in 2014, vis a vis Ukraine, are different, the danger is very similar. Britain and America want all the parties to adhere to agreements made in 1994, and to the basic principles of international law. Russia in 2014, like Germany in 1914, has objectives which are incompatible with both and sees no reason why she shouldn't use force, the scale and brutality of which will be determined by operational convenience, as an attractive alternative to adhering to legal principles which will not give Russia what she wants. Britain and America, Germany too, are walking into the same trap as Russia and France did in 1914. They are advocating reason and high principle in the face of a great power that favours force.

Unlike Britain and America, Germany anticipated the current situation, or something approaching it, and she had a strategy. Which was to shelter the Ukraine from Russia by swiftly drawing Ukraine into the European Union. However, Germany completely sabotaged that strategy's chances of success a couple of years in advance, by making clear, with French support, that she absolutely would not countenance Turkish entry into the European Union, then or ever. Without Turkish membership and participation in EU policy making, there is little practical help or shelter which the EU can extend across the Black Sea to the Ukraine. Vladimir Putin's obvious riposte to all Germany and the EU's protest and bluster over Ukraine is "you and whose army?" If the answer to that one had been "well, the Turkish army" we might have seen a new thing on Earth: a conciliatory Kremlin.

Defence Capability

It's not just the diplomatic situation which is beginning to resemble 1914. Just over a decade after the Boer war, Britain entered the Great War with an army that was pitiably small by contemporary European standards, and with the Royal Navy assumed by the cabinet to be completely capable, when in fact it tended to lack the unglamorous capacities that would be needed the most. In particular, there was only token investment in any capacity to patrol Britain's coastal waters and protect coastal shipping. Then, as in 1939, everyone assumed that the railways were the backbone of British industry, but the reality in both world wars was that London, not the North and Midlands, was Britain's most important industrial area and all the railways running into London simply couldn't keep London supplied with enough fuel, food and raw materials to fight a war. The balance of the supplies were brought in by coastal shipping and many key industrial plants were built on the Thames with their own wharfs. Newspaper printing presses had newsprint delivered directly by ship, coal, wheat and timber tended to reach London by ship rather than rail, too.

The Royal Navy had a lot of battleships and heavy cruisers, but some apparently powerful classes of battleship were largely useless in practice because there was so little difference in power between main (12") and secondary armament (9.2") that gunnery officers were unable to determine which splash was due to which battery and therefore they were helpless to correct their own fire. The biggest cruisers tended to have a small number of very big guns rather than a large number of smaller guns; coupled with the basic range-finding and gun-laying technology of the day, this made it difficult to get the range of a target by "straddling it" before it had moved far enough for any range obtained to be meaningless anyway. (A ranging salvo fires each gun in in (rapid) turn, each set to a different range. By counting which shells in the sequence go either side of the target, the gunnery officer obtained the true range and could then fire a "broadside" of shells fired almost together to actually hit the target. The Glorious class cruisers had just four huge 15" guns: in battle, they obtained few, if any, hits. In WW2, the cruiser HMS Exeter with just six 8" guns, did critical damage to the fuel system on the German Pocket Battleship Graf Spee with just two accurate hits on the only weak spot in the target's armour. The Glorious class could have been effective if the guns had been stepped down a size to allow enough of them (at least six) to be carried to get the target's range in one salvo. The "smaller" Edwardian cruisers tended towards fearsome assemblages of 9.2" guns mounted all over, and unable to all bear on the same target for effective ranging salvos and destructive broadsides. Their captains might have sneered at HMS Exeter, half their size and with just three twin turrets mounting puny 8" guns.

In the years before 1914 and the outbreak of war, the Royal Navy concentrated its creative attention and not just its money, on the biggest ships and the biggest guns. If it had been a little more flexible, a little more heedful of small things, the Battle of Jutland in 1915 might just have ended the war. As it was, enough of the German fleet returned to port more or less intact to prevent the allied blockade being extended into the Baltic, and to pose an ongoing threat to Britain's coastal towns and vital coastal shipping. The biggest single reason for the German escape was that the Royal Navy's Grand Fleet fired too many shells which missed, the second reason was that insufficient attention had been paid to the detailed design of the shells themselves, so that many of the hits obtained did only superficial damage. Jutland left the German Navy badly shaken, but it wasn't destroyed and the British taxpayer had the right to expect that it should have been.

After Jutland, the Royal Navy put more of its money into destroyers, torpedo boats, gunboats and even motor launches, because these could swiftly protect coastal towns and coastal shipping from raiding forces, as well as protecting Atlantic convoys from U-boats. By 1939 and the outbreak of WW2, the destroyers were again too few in number and the torpedo boats, gunboats and launches almost non-existent. The whole capability, including seamanship skills and tactical understanding, had to be rebuilt under constant attack from German S-boats. See Peter Scott's book, "The Battle of the Narrow Seas" if there are any copies to be had.

In the present day, the MoD has recently announced an order to build three modified (ie: 90 metres long instead of 81 metres long) River Class patrol vessels. These will not only replace the three existing 81 metre River Class vessels, it is anticipated that they will be the only Royal Navy vessels routinely patrolling UK home waters. When it comes to patrolling all the seas, Atlantic, North Sea and Irish Sea, from Guernsey to the North of Shetland, three vessels is definitely not a crowd.

The 90 metre River Class, though, is close to being the right type of vessel for the job. It is five knots faster than the older 81 metre ships, can carry a bit more in the way of troops or cargo, and larger Merlin helicopters can land on its rear deck, as well as Lynx and their "Wildcat" replacements.  (Though, the Navy does not have large numbers of fully equipped naval Merlin helicopters, and the twenty-five Merlins now being transferred to the Royal Navy by the RAF are all troop/cargo aircraft without radar, sonar and serious weapons capability. If any helicopter can be found to operate from a River Class ship at all, it's likely to be an Agusta Westland Wildcat.) 

The rear deck, which is for cargo and salvage as well as helicopters, is coupled with a big crane, and although this is perceived as being mainly of use in civil emergencies, the swift salvage of intelligence material from sinking ships and downed aircraft can prove pivotal in war. In WW2, not only did the capture of code books and equipment from German and Italian vessels swing the tide of naval warfare in favour of the allies for months at a time, the capture, by a German commerce raider in the Indian Ocean, of an admiralty report into the vulnerability of Malaysia and Singapore to Japanese invasion, proved invaluable to the Japanese officers planning just such an invasion and it also affected Japan's decision to go to war against Britain and the United States in the first place. But to have one ship in the right place at the right time to pull off that kind of coup, it is necessary to have more than three of them at sea.

The problem with the River Class, though, is armament. There is almost none, though the 30mm cannon is powerful in the minds of MoD spokesmen talking up the protection of the Falkland Islands by HMS Clyde. The Royal Thai Navy has an almost identical vessel fitted with a much more powerful 76.2mm gun, but a bigger gun is going to look like grotesque overkill if used on any sort of pirate or smuggler's vessel, and yet against a Russian frigate, say, a ship with a 76.2mm gun is unlikely ever to close to within effective range before being sunk by a hail of guided missiles. It would be better to keep the 30mm gun, or perhaps replace it with the 40mm CTA gun now being fitted to the Army's Warrior armoured vehicles (more effective gun, but same size mounting.) An anti-surface capability should come from the careful integration of a small number of vertical launch missile tubes into the ship's superstructure. To give the patrol vessel a chance of survival should its patrol bring an encounter a front line enemy warship, without making it look warlike and threatening as it goes about its peacetime duties.

Corvettes of about the same tonnage as the River Class patrol vessel can be equipped with up to eight launch tubes for the Exocet MM40 block 3, which would allow engagements at a survivable range of 180km or so. The new Perseus missile being procured for the Royal Navy's new type 26 Frigates, is designed to fit the same launch tube. That would allow patrol vessels in or near the UK's coastal waters, to hold seaborne threats off at quite some distance. 

The River Class, as they stand, are not equipped with any sort of anti-air missile system, either. This is partly because there is no space, not necessarily for the missiles themselves, but for the target tracking system they would normally require. Variously the tracking system is a radar or optical device, it is generally big, expensive and complicated, and apart from being a potential point of system failure, target tracking systems are a source of radar or laser emissions which allow the enemy to keep track of the vessel's location as it undertakes evasive action; enemy anti-radar missiles can even home on the target tracking system and put the vessel's defences out of action very easily if they don't do worse damage. 

The new Seaceptor missile is designed not to need a target tracking system onboard the launch vessel. It can be launched on the basis of a fix from a surveillance radar alone (and the 90 metre River Class can have one of those with no problem) or even a non-radar sensor, or networked data from third party sensors such as on an AWACS aircraft, another ship, or even a (naval) Merlin helicopter. Once the Seaceptor is launched, the surveillance radar (if used) can immediately cease transmissions to avoid betraying the vessel's evasive actions or attracting anti-radar weapons. It is very compact, and subjects the launch vessel to minimal rocket blast when launched. A pack of three Seaceptors will fit in the same space as a single launch tube for legacy weapons such as Seawolf or MICA, and it provides Seawolf-type precision out to similar ranges as the now obsolete Sea Dart system from the old type 42 destroyers. Fitting the new River Class Vessels with six to eight unobtrusive 3-round launch packs is a no brainer, which means that only the British Treasury is likely to object. It would transform them from sitting ducks in the event of a significant air campaign against the UK, to a threat which attacking aircraft would have to avoid. 

To make the River Class vessels pose a threat to an enemy nuclear submarine, perhaps lurking with the intention of tracking and sinking Britain's nuclear deterrent submarines as they leave their bases for their patrol areas (this is a problem that's highly likely to occur at some point) what's needed is a two round launcher for the Sting Ray anti-submarine torpedo and a reasonable sonar installation, which is likely to be useful in all sorts of other ways during peacetime. 

These changes (and an increase in numbers of a small and cheap vessel) would make the River Class a genuine rather than a purely symbolic protection for the UK and any shipping in its waters, and it would not greatly change their unthreatening appearance or operating costs.

The main problems with the Royal Navy's "Major Warships" such as the type 45 air defence destroyer and the forthcoming type 26 frigate or "global combat ship" are numbers and a decision not to actually fit all the equipment the type 45s were designed to carry. When the type 45 was being designed, the assumption was that twelve of them was the minimum necessary procurement, this was whittled down to eight and the Cameron government has actually capped production at six. None of them so far have been fitted with any anti-ship missiles, though the modular design allows such missiles to be fitted in more than one way and of more than one type. The excuse was that the type 45 would always be protected from surface threats by a couple of type 26 frigates. All well and good, but those were planned on the basis that somewhere between nineteen and twenty-one of them would be procured, and the Cameron government has committed to a maximum of thirteen. Which means that the type 45s cannot expect to always be escorted by a pair of type 26s, and therefore need some kind of anti-ship missile, which they were designed to carry.

The RAF's problems can be stated much more succinctly: they have the right types of aircraft in service or on the way, but have been cut much too far in terms of aircraft numbers, bases and manpower. Also, critically, there has been a change in doctrine which now states that the RAF will never have to fight from its home bases, so they don't really need any ground or air defences. In the light of current events, the most dangerous and unjustified assumption possible. The triumph of political dementia over military reality.

The army has largely conquered the age old problem of poor kit in inadequate quantities, but now, like the RAF has been cut to too small a size to protect the country against any serious European threat of the kind which is now jumping up and down on the Ukraine, secure in the knowledge that the West can and will do nothing to stop it. It also suffers an equally serious doctrinal lunacy to the RAF's "not fighting from its home bases" in the way that "reserves" are being used to compensate for the loss of tens of thousands of full-time regular soldiers.

There is no problem with having an army with a large reserve element, if the regular element is large enough to deal with small crises without needing those reserves to be mobilised. But the current doctrine is that it will now be routine, for reserves to play a part in routine deployments and the immediate response to military emergencies. This reverses the meaning of "reserve" and it's very dangerous. Reserves are part of the civil economy, the more capable reserve soldiers are, the more important their civilian jobs are likely to be. If they have to be mobilised every time the Foreign Secretary needs a show of force to back up his wise words and gentle insistence, the MoD will be constantly pulling the rug out from under the country's economic recovery, and in the case of a major military emergency, it will cause significant economic (and social) disruption before the first shot is fired. 

This gives aggressive foreign powers an attractive mechanism for weakening Britain as a whole: just engineer a constant stream of low-level military confrontations and watch British industry get fed up with the constant absence of key workers.

The Royal Navy needs more than three patrol vessels, and they must be modestly but effectively armed to the point where they can protect themselves and credibly threaten aggressors and intruders. It needs to fully arm and equip its Type 45 destroyers, and the number of Type 26 frigates must be reviewed upwards a bit before shipbuilding capacity is cut to fit the low number and a higher number becomes impossible to obtain.

The RAF needs at least some increase in strength, even more urgently it needs to retain or recommission enough airbases to maintain a bit of redundancy and resilience in the face of attack, and it must be able to defend those airbases and train to operate from them whilst under attack, as it always used to do.

The British Army must retain sufficient numbers of regular troops to deal with small wars and the beginnings of large ones, without drawing on its reserves from the very outset. It must also develop an intelligent mobilisation strategy, so that when it does draw on its reserves, it doesn't shut the civil economy down in the process. This could involve the creation of a civilian reserve of retired or semi-retired skilled workers who could be tasked and perhaps even trained in advance, to help the employers of reserve soldiers keep their businesses -and the country- running during a general mobilisation. 

Buy to Rot: How Virginia Water and Bishop's Avenue Have Become Billionaire Slums

On Christmas Day, 2013, the author attended the short morning service at a small and very multi-racial, vibrantly non-conformist church in the billionaire's enclave of Virginia Water, in Surrey. None of the congregation seemed to be billionaires, and the basic village businesses near the Church were in slightly dilapidated buildings, largely from the sixties and seventies. All around the wider area, though, comfortable 1920s and 1930s English houses with decent-sized gardens had been bought up, demolished and replaced by glittering mansions, usually with at least an underground car-park and often a multi-floor basement containing extensive leisure facilities. Almost all, if not completely all, of the property investors commissioning such works are foreign nationals, or offshore trusts or shell companies, all of which seem to indicate ultimate foreign ownership, by persons who require several layers of shielding between their finances and any light of day.

With all this prosperity and "investment" of billions of pounds on luxury housing going on all around, why did the basic shops and amenities around the Church look so down at heel? There were some boutique-style shops around somewhere, but the local retail economy did not approach that of Beverley Hills, though the apparent net worth of the mansion owners in the area would appear to be a high multiple of the net worth of Beverley Hills, if not the whole state of California. There was utterly incalculable wealth, but less apparent local prosperity than might be found in Leighton Buzzard in Bedfordshire, or Leeds in Yorkshire. At some point I asked what turned out to be the crucial question: "How many people live in all these mansions?" to which, the reply was "almost nobody lives in them, though that one on the corner isn't quite so bad because the owner does come and have a dinner party in it almost every month." It quickly became apparent that, despite the expenditure of several billions of pounds on packing mansions onto the plots of former middle class family homes, often by sinking three or four stories into the ground first and then balancing a two-storey mansion on top, the local economy was operating at a tickover compared to when the ordinary middle class homes had been lived in, by well-off but not wildly-wealthy ordinary middle class families. The multi-racial non-conformists had a church in the billionaire's enclave, because it had been unwanted and available when they were looking for a home. Most of the worshipers lived in other villages and towns nearby. But they were the only real sign of life in what, in the eyes of the UK's government and our political elite, is the runaway success story of Virginia Water, because so much money has been invested and, frankly, buried in the ground. Quite possibly never to be seen, or used, again.

In the Hampstead area of North London, the most exclusive of many billionaire's rows in modern Britain is Bishops Avenue. There are sixty-six mansions there, many of which are, or were, fairly tacky 1930s equivalents of the modern Virginia Water mansions, built on the sites of 19th century houses of much greater architectural worth. Of those sixty-six mansions, only three are currently believed to be fully occupied and at least sixteen are derelict having been empty for decades. See Daily Mail article here. The thirties do seem to have been when the rot set in for Bishop's Avenue, in the sense of millionaire tat replacing genuine quality, but the practice of buying or building mansions there and then abandoning them to literally rot, seems to have started in the post war period.

In the past few years, the majority of non-social new-build apartments in London have been sold overseas without even being advertised for sale in Britain. Ministers have been proud of the fact that 100,000 homes had been built and sold in the past year, but are completely silent on the issue of how many of them were sold or rented to British residents, or even new immigrants, and how many are in the hands of overseas investors who scarcely even visit Britain, let alone reside here. Since whole apartment blocks have all been sold out, often being completely sold out "off plan", and yet remain silent and largely unlit at night, it would appear that the majority of new apartment homes in London are not even making it as far as the overgeared "buy to let" market that would have snapped them up back in the nineties. They have been bought, from brand new, to rot. Meanwhile, the effect on local retail businesses and amenities is even more marked than in Virginia Water: they close, because there is no-one there. This is the real reason why property developers either fight tooth and nail, or exercise considerable guile, to avoid  their "section 106" planning obligations to provide infrastructure and amenities to support their large "residential" developments, because they know from the outset that there will be no residents in the foreseeable future.

Even if this didn't pose an economic danger to Britain and even if it wasn't worsening an acute social problem of housing affordability and availability, the waste of space, energy and resources would be grossly offensive. Since it does pose a grave economic threat and the affront to those struggling to buy, rent, or find these homes advertised for the likes of them to even aspire to, is almost off the scale, there's a imminent threat to social order inherent in all this, let alone a threat to social and economic mobility. It is a catastrophe, perceived as success in the minds of our ruling elite, those minds being as far from the reality of our everyday existence as the sands of Mars.

And then, earlier this week, the BBC's Robert Peston published an article and broadcast a film, about the economic and social situation in China. And the film in particular rang a deep resounding bell with all of the problems noted above, approximately once for every minute of screen time.

To take just a couple of examples:
To begin with, the boom in construction projects in China was sustained by the Communist Central Government's directive to the banks that they should lend freely. When that lending rose to dangerous levels, the central government directed that the banks should back off a bit, for the general good. But regional and city governments had become dependent on the gravy train of massive residential development and white elephant projects (there are dozens of HS2-type railway projects instead of just the one we have in Britain) to keep their supporters sweet and stay in power, so regional and city governments promptly created "shadow" banks to keep the credit boom rolling. Now the credit boom was not only out of the control of the Communist Central Government; Beijing no longer even has any reliable information on how big the credit boom actually is. Things are not exactly the same in the other Asian superpower, India. But there are equivalent very bad ideas at work. And in other major Asian powers as well. Casino economies in five or six different flavours. And because officials in positions of public trust should not be lapping up quite so much gravy in any of the major Asian powers, their share has to be hidden and not just "invested". Hello, Virginia Water! Perhaps that's why, in leafy Surrey and even in Park Lane in the middle of London, every Millionaire or Billionaire's home now has to be made into a concrete iceberg, with more floor space below ground than above: the wealth mustn't be too visible, don't you know. What happens when the current once in 250 year groundwater levels seen all around London, work their way through the clay to the centre, isn't yet clear, but one way or another, it will become clear by the end of 2014. At least their billions of pounds of "investment" has made space for billions of gallons of excess groundwater. The most expensive drainage sumps in human history.

Then, paradoxically, there is the issue of unoccupied property. This was highlighted in Mr Peston's film, but seems not to have made the cut in his webpage article. In short, one Chinese expert stated, with some authority, that despite China's huge population, massive internal migration and widespread aspiration towards better standards of housing than previous generations enjoyed, something like 15% of residential property in China is unoccupied, and the rate of occupancy is lowest where the market value is highest. Remember Bishop's Avenue, the most exclusive address of all, with just three out of sixty-six properties enjoying full-time residency and sixteen of them actually falling down?

(The author wouldn't be surprised if the true unoccupancy rate for British residential property proved close to 15%, too. Certainly, there were known to be 800,000 empty homes in the country about five years ago, since when officialdom has tried not to let us have a reliable figure. But with a building rate of 100,000 homes a year and in some areas whole developments of that being sold into complete unoccupancy, the empty home figure, were it known, is bound to be on the rise.)
 
Britain's political elite are snugly certain that it is absurd to worry about all this: never mind where the money came from, and what problems and risks it leaves behind in its country of origin: it is being invested here, so that's fine.

But it isn't being invested. The people who have sent this money here, are doing two things with it, and neither of them counts as investment:

They are hiding the money, because they broke various laws to get it and they face penalties ranging from public disgrace to a bullet in the back of the neck, or the gallows or a lynch mob, for being seen to have it when the music stops.

Secondly, Chinese "investors" in particular are able to perceive that what they have been doing is to gamble on the Chinese property market with false credit raised through the unregulated shadow banks. And their solution is a typical gambler's one: they are covering their bets with fresh bets of equal value on the much smaller British property market. The ultimate consequences of that particular attempt at "double or quits" could be dire enough to bring the world to war.

Britain and China, as nations, must agree to blame and punish the property gamblers and willfully complicit property developers for those consequences, and not each other. Or this will indeed all end in mutual hostility, as China and probably other Asian and Middle-Eastern states attempt to recover stolen money from Britain, that has all been sunk in once-glittering assets which are then worth next to nothing.

PS:
The author now has an author's page on Amazon.

Inculcated Reflex and Disaster, Part 1: Shibboleths and HS2 Failure.

It's a curious paradox that, in order to be accepted into any intellectual circle, or any circle which aspires to intellectual status, an individual must learn to suppress original thought. If we can understand this paradox, we can understand how really great disasters happen, supposedly "without warning".

Acceptance into an intellectual circle is dependent on other intellectuals accepting that you are indeed one of them, and this is why the Nobel Laureate Prof. Richard Feynman refused membership of a sort of secret society for gifted people (which seemed to operate in every major college and university in the United States and possibly beyond), because the only point of membership was to assert one's intellectual status, not to make or facilitate any new discovery or insight. Unfortunately, very few of the world's intellectual elite share Feynman's insight; that membership of any self-defining elite can swiftly destroy your worth and usefulness as a person.

Now, the fact that acceptance into the circle is dependent on the other individuals in it, accepting that you are one of them, means, actually, that each one of them is as nervous of his status as you are. Therefore, they can only agree with your views and ideas if their survival instinct tells them that others will agree with you, too. So, although as a new member you are required to pronounce whatever the local shibboleth happens to be, there is also a  super-shibboleth at work, which threatens to expose and disgrace any establish member who accepts your pronunciation of the shibboleth when others don't.

In Britain, the Royal Society is, in theory, a collection of the nation's brightest and best scientists. In practice, like most similar organizations, it is instead a collection of the most influential British scientists. The Royal Society selects and refines its influential membership through a number of shibboleths, the most currently important of which is rejection of any sort of serious British space programme, especially manned, as a threat to "real science" or just an absurdity: something so ridiculous that all credibility is lost merely by suggesting that it is possible, let alone desirable. Something set up by King Charles the Second to oblige his ministers to become forward looking, inquiring and imaginative, has become a mechanism for opposing and covertly sabotaging the "wrong kind" of progress. The Royal Society stands a barrier between Britain and the second half of the Twentieth Century, let alone any part of the Twenty-first, when it ought to be getting its sights set on the Twenty-second Century by now.

The mechanism by which shibboleths disable a person's capacity for original thought is scientifically explicable: our conscious minds and our subconscious minds work in parallel all the time, and the primary task of the subconscious mind is the avoidance of danger. The sub-conscious mind does not analyse and understand things: it reacts to danger. It's definition of danger is harvested from the experiences of the conscious mind, but without the conscious mind usually being aware of what it is programming its subconscious "watchdog" system with. Shellshock is what the subconscious mind does when there is overwhelming danger which the conscious mind cannot evade or even understand, for a period of time. If the conscious mind knows it might die at any minute, and it isn't supplying any precise definition of what the signs are of the situation it must avoid in order to stay alive, the sub-conscious mind demands a reaction to almost everything.

For members of an elite, membership becomes the core of the individual's self-awareness and eventually the sub-conscious assigns any threat to that status the same significance as it would to a threat to life. The sub-conscious promptly does what it is there for, and speeds up the individual's responses to shibboleth-type situations by making the reaction happen before the conscious mind thinks anything through. Anything touching on matters which are perceived as crucial to the elite, is dealt with by developing a set of inculcated reflexes ("Pavlovian" is nearly but not quite the right word) which guide the individual away from the perceived danger as if it were a cliff edge or a fire. The fatal flaw of the human sub-conscious, is that this can condition the individual to ignore or even actively oppose, the very kind of warning to which he should be paying urgent attention: see the housing market-driven banking crash of 2008, or Stalin's refusal to allow Soviet forces to deploy or even make any preparation for Hitler's "Operation Barbarossa" in 1941, despite being given two weeks warning and a quite reasonably accurate German order of battle by British Intelligence. The heroic outcome: the Red Army managing to halt and then defeat the German army just outside Moscow only by stupendous effort and massive sacrifice even with the help of the weather, should have been a routine and inexpensive annihilation of German invasion forces in summer while they were still safely hundreds of miles from Moscow. It was a Shibboleth of Stalin and the whole politburo, that the British were untrustworthy. manipulative liars, and that shibboleth killed millions of Russians. British Intelligence handed Stalin a chance to win the war before the Wansee conference, that launched Hitler's "final solution", had even taken place. Nearly all of the genocidal violence which the Jewish population experienced before the Wansee conference, occurred in the lands which Stalin lost control of primarily because he ignored British warnings.

And the cryptographic breakthroughs which allowed British Intelligence to offer that warning in the first place, wouldn't have been possible if the Nazis and German military leadership had not developed an "Enigma shibboleth" which made questioning the security of their encryption protocols seem like an act of disloyalty.

Once the proposed HS2 high-speed railway between London and Birmingham achieved "all party support", which in this case is defined as the leaderships of all three "main" political parties agreeing to support it without consulting their back benchers and membership, the necessity, benefits and inevitable success of HS2 immediately became a shibboleth of the British political elite. Precisely because of the importance of the matter, because the technical risks are significant and the financial risks are absolutely gigantic, the political elite started to ignore or reject anything which made anything of any of the risks or the huge unfairness with which half a million households must be treated in order to push the project through. 

This is the real reason why the Transport Secretary has just invoked what amount to war powers to keep secret a report, submitted to the Cabinet in 2011, which warns of the risks of HS2 failing in financial and political terms. (The risk of a purely technical failure: some part of the project proving technically impossible, has not yet even been considered so far as can be discerned by any document in the public domain.) Patrick McLoughlin claims that he is acting to protect the confidences of those civil servants who prepared the report, though he has no such respect for those who have authored material in support of the project and he publishes their work widely and freely. The truth is, he is acting to protect, not the process by which the report was prepared, but the process by which it was ignored by the political elite, acting on their inculcated reflexes.

One doesn't need to know what the report says to know why it has to be secret: if it raised serious doubts, or issued some grave warning, and ministers (with the support of the opposition leader) had decided to press ahead anyway, based on a reappraisal or some fresh evidence, that would be perfectly respectable and there would be no call for secrecy. The reason for keeping such a report secret for so long can only lie in how that report was dealt with in the decision-making process and not in its content. Perhaps campaigners should amend their freedom of information requests to cover the way the report was considered after being submitted, rather than anything which involves its content or the privacy of those civil servants who compiled it?

Although the blog author does not know of any equivalent report covering technical, rather than financial, risks to the HS2 project, any plan which involves a river diversion near where the A52, important existing railways and the proposed HS2 railway all intersect the river Erewash, must have been subjected to some well-informed scepticism by one or more engineers by now. The apparent silence on this issue suggests that there is another report, so threatening to the HS2 shibboleth, that even its existence has been kept secret. There is, however, a set of outline descriptions of the civil engineering challenges for each bit of track: Please accept the preceding link as acknowledgement of the source of the extract below.

3.5.4
In the vicinity of the station and Toton Yard, the existing Trent Junction to Chesterfield (Erewash Valley) line would be diverted to pass through the proposed new station on the modified existing network, and this line would lie to the east of the high speed alignment along this length. Trains from the high-level lines would also be able to bypass the new station by utilising the new rail flyover that passes over the high speed alignment, and rejoining the Trent Junction to Chesterfield line alongside Sandiacre after passing through Toton Yard.

Toton station to Trowell

3.5.5
North of Toton, the high speed route would reduce from six tracks to four and then two tracks, and it would then pass under the bridge carrying the A52 Brian Clough Way over the current railway (2). The extent of the alteration of the lateral positioning of existing lines, as well as the introduction of HS2, would require that the existing bridge be demolished and replaced. As the A52 could not be closed for the duration required to achieve these works, either a new permanent off-line bridge would be constructed or a temporary off-line diversion and associated temporary structure would be needed.

3.5.6
North of the A52, the River Erewash would require diversion over approximately 100m to avoid conflict with the realigned existing lines.

3.5.7
Further north from the A52, Derby Road crosses the existing lines (3). There is insufficient vertical clearance under this structure to accommodate the new high-speed lines, and the horizontal positions of the high speed and realigned existing lines would conflict with the supports of the existing structure. The structure would therefore have to be demolished and replaced about 2m higher.

3.5.8
North of Derby Road, the route would rise in level, climb out of the Erewash Valley, and swing eastwards to run parallel to the M1, north of Stanton Gate. About 550m north of Derby Road, the route would cross the River Erewash, the Erewash Canal and the realigned existing Erewash rail lines, on a 780m viaduct (4).

The blog author is somewhat inclined to bet that one of the sections of HS2 most likely to halt the entire project for technical reasons, is highlighted above. Note that the A52 has to be permanently realigned merely to allow the river to be moved in order to allow the existing railway to be moved to allow the HS2 line to be built without a low radius bend in it. This is entirely a consequence of ministers setting a specification for a very high track speed of 400 kph, (for prestige reasons and no other), when the need they are supposedly meeting is one of capacity. Even the brief summaries of engineering challenges are so vast in aggregate that he cannot be sure that there are not dozens of other sections like this. Despite the utter indifference of the political elite to any problem besetting a shibboleth project, the civil service is methodical and the blog author expects that they will have commissioned reports and assessments, or will do so shortly. The blog author is also quietly confident that the political elite will ignore these in their own decision-making and suppress news of their existence in order to avoid the political embarrassment of using war powers to prevent their publication.


PS:
The above should also give some clue as to why a degree of privacy is essential to mental health: if a person is concerned (or knows for certain under many regimes) that any thought they might voice, or note down, can be heard, observed or recorded and then used against them in some way, then conscious attempts at self-censorship will turn into a reflex by which the sub conscious mind attempts to keep the conscious mind out of trouble by stopping it from thinking at all. It's not just a question of the harm that may be done by intrusive surveillance by the state: many elite groups and cults require candidates and members to open their whole lives, including their innermost thoughts, up to constant scrutiny and in many cases systematic and relentless criticism. It's almost impossible that such a process will fail to do damage.