If our military cannot crush any country of our choosing tomorrow, are we really Britain?

15th February 2023

By Bill McKay, a 68-year-old former British Army subaltern 1983-1988

WHEN I hear that our armed forces are not fully geared up and ready to invade Norway tomorrow, I weep. For we have lost the very essence of our country.

For what is Britain? What is our country, if not poised and ready to use overwhelming force to smash any nation that offends us, like a hammer smashing a walnut?

I mean no offence to Norway. It could be anyone: France, Serbia, Liberia, Ecuador, Fiji. We’ve been at war with all of them in our time and we f**ked them up freestyle. We didn’t need to gear up or rearm. We were ready for massive aggression at zero notice.

But according to defence secretary Ben Wallace, a former soldier like me, we no longer have that capability. If Spain starts acting up or the Democratic Republic of the Congo gets lippy, all we have are words and nuclear weapons.

What’s happened to us? Why aren’t we the angry monster bristling with weaponry and only too ready to take offence that sunk the Belgrano and twatted the Argies back in ’82?

We let ourselves get soft. We stopped ploughing every spare penny into our military, lulled by the end of the Cold War, our only wars mere indulgences like Iraq or a recreational bombing of Libya.

The announcement that our military is under-strength, that it would struggle to even crush Belgium beneath its shiny heel, is a wake-up call. F**k everything else. Close the schools. Triple taxes. We must become a fully militarised nation.

Only when there are more tanks than cars, when every adult male has a military rank and when we are so ready for war we’ll start one on a misunderstanding can we truly be the Britain that the world once feared.

I fancy invading Morocco this time. Who’s up for it?

10 terrible music acts designed to screw money out of parents

15th February 2023

MUSIC producers quickly realised children and pre-teens were a lucrative market thanks to people known as ‘parents’. Here are some of the crap acts that were the result.

S Club 7

They’re back together and this time you’ll be paying for it instead of your weary parents. There’s nothing wrong with a bit of nostalgia, but bear in mind ‘Get ‘em young’ was also the motto of the Jesuits and the Nazis.

S Club Juniors

Casting the net even younger, S Club 7’s management assembled S Club Juniors with the CBBC show S Club Search. Parents grudgingly coughed up the cash again, but at least Frankie Bridge was in The Saturdays’ Just Can’t Get Enough video, which was some recompense for dads.

One Direction

One Direction were surely intended to make parents weep as their girl children channelled their embryonic feelings of love into ‘official’ stationery sets and other tat. Still, it’s all a normal part of growing up until you become mature enough to send death threats to Taylor Swift, Caroline Flack or whichever unworthy female celeb was stealing your Harry.

Boyzone

The pretty-boy covers band were ideal for tweens due to being so unthreatening. Did they undergo surgery to remove all traces of sexuality? It seems likely. Ronan Keating should be examined to see if he’s like an Action Man down there.

Early Kylie

Before Charlene off Neighbours morphed into a classy dance act with a big gay following, she was knocking out crap like The Locomotion for kiddies. All under the tutelage of the dark puppet master Pete Waterman, a man who loves Northern Soul so much he only made synth-pop toss.

Hear’Say

People swear the strangely punctuated band had ‘hits’, but you try naming them if you weren’t a 12-year-old fan. Also unleashed gobshite self-publicist Myleene Klass on an unsuspecting world, and we’re still suffering for it today.

The Archies

Back in the 60s Archie Comics created The Archies with their enduring hit Sugar, Sugar, a subject Haribo-obsessed children can relate to. It quickly gets extremely annoying but an animated band certainly cuts down on overheads like hotel bills, cocaine supplies, weird solo concept albums, etc.

Hanson

Remember these test tube mutants? No one at their record company thought ‘Yes, the Hanson boys will have a broad fanbase of pre-teen girls and Mojo readers alike’. However they only had one hit, MMMBop, so the financial damage wasn’t too bad.

Westlife

Hardly worth mentioning when Boyzone is already listed, but their phenomenal chart stats (16 number one singles, 34 top 50 singles, 13 top two albums) give a good idea of their manufactured nature. They’re still touring – the Far East this year for some reason – so why not see them at Singapore Stadium? For old times’ sake, get your elderly parents to pay.

Bratz

No f**king around here, just suck some more cash out of parents whose kids owned the dolls. The vast Bratz franchise included numerous singles and albums, weirdly on Geffen, so technically they were stablemates of Nirvana and Snoop Dogg. However they barely charted anywhere except Norway, where a dad called Olaf probably regrets wasting his kroner to this day.