This story has broken me. It has unleashed a rage so strong I can barely express it, but allow me to try. Above all, I am angry with the decades-long malevolent incompetence of the British state: politicians of all parties, the judiciary, the civil service. Their collective uselessness has shattered the social contract and made us all poorer and less safe. In just 25 years, they have led us from an affluent, high-trust society to a broken, low-trust one. I am sickened by the growth in sectarian politics. I am appalled by the foreign ghettos in our cities and imported, bent voting practices and resultant corruption in some of our councils. I hate seeing the clothing of female oppression on our streets. I am sickened by the fact our Jewish community lives under siege. I no longer wish to pay tax to support those who have come here illegally and should be removed immediately. It is to our shame that we have accepted mass immigration without insisting on integration. I am tired of being told that a British passport makes a foreigner as British as me. I assure you that the “British citizen” in this story is not. I am saddened that for so many people, the concept of “British” is essentially meaningless. I am sick of the obsession with a minor war 2,500 miles away that barely affects us. I despise that £88m of our tax money is going to Hamas (because it will), when the tax burden is a record high, everything is expensive, welfare spending is out of control and we can’t even pay for our own defences when the global risk of conflict is the highest it has been since the end of the Cold War. And in spite of how much of our money the government steals from our pockets, nothing, at all, in this country works. Healthcare, transport, education - all broken. It is a stain on our national politics that we have five Gaza MPs. It is our national shame that our government is intent on sucking up to the Palestinian entity which contains some of the worst monsters on the face of planet. It is a disgrace that our Foreign Secretary shook the hand of the representative of the Iranian regime that has slaughtered tens of thousands of its own people, and that he doesn’t seem to understand why that photograph will damn him forever. It is embarrassing that we had a Foreign Office minister dancing with and hugging the representative of the Palestinian Authority. The lack of serious statesmanship is mind-boggling and indicative of how far we have fallen. They say the past is a foreign country, but my goodness, do I miss the country I grew up in. I feel so sorry for the generation that grew up after 2000 and will never know how good it was. It’s not coming back. I have no time for the demagogues and grifters who exploit this anger. I know other people feel the same as I do, and my goodness, do I understand why people are angry. For decades, those we have elected to govern in our interests have instead run our country into the ground. And to cap it all, now we are led by fatuous, asinine, deeply unserious airheads who think serious governance is a TikTok video about pork scratchings, as the last vestiges of a coherent society die under the weight of their malignant frivolity. The worst part of it is that there is absolutely nothing any of us can do about it. I just want to live in a happy, stable, prosperous country like we used to be, instead of one that is run by a state apparatus that does nothing but beat us down, obsess over irrelevances, take our money, and leave us poorer and less safe.

I spent 16 years in the British Army, leaving the Parachute Regiment as a Major. I served three tours in Afghanistan, one attached to US Army Special Forces, as well as tours in Bosnia, Northern Ireland and the Middle East. I later taught military theory and leadership at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. Academically, I have an LLB in Law & Politics, an MA with Distinction in War Studies & Military History and an MSc with Distinction in Psychology. I also hold postgraduate qualifications in Leadership & Strategic Management and Higher Education, and I am now completing a PhD in War Studies examining what Ukraine and the post-7 October wars can tell us about the future of warfare. Since leaving the Army, I have spent a great deal of time going to the wars I write about. I visited Gaza twice in 2024, went inside captured Hezbollah tunnels in Lebanon, visited the Ukrainian front lines, and in 2025 became the first neutral researcher invited to observe the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation distribution sites. My research has produced substantial reports on casualty statistics, human shields, information warfare, humanitarian operations and the tactical lessons emerging from Gaza. You can find them at @HJS_Org I make no apology for advertising to you that this is an unusually strong background for analysing contemporary conflict. There are not many conflict analysts who combine command experience in war, formal study of war, law and psychology, experience teaching future Army officers, think-tank research and repeated fieldwork inside the conflicts they analyse. Those different disciplines also catch different mistakes. Military experience makes it harder to mistake a map arrow for a feasible operation. War Studies forces tactical events back into their political and strategic context. Psychology matters when propaganda, perception and behavioural manipulation have become part of the battlefield. Law matters when almost every contemporary campaign is simultaneously fought through international institutions, courts and competing claims about legitimacy. Fieldwork is the final check because people who actually fight wars have a habit of complicating theories developed by chairborne researchers from several thousand miles away. That is what I try to bring to my Substack. I am less interested in telling readers who “won” yesterday than in working out what happened, why it happened, what the participants were trying to achieve, whether they possessed the means to achieve it, and what the consequences are likely to be. Tactical success, military effectiveness and strategic success are not synonyms. Much bad analysis begins by treating them as though they are. I will get things wrong. Anyone analysing wars in real time will. The promise I can reasonably make is that I will go to the evidence, go to the people involved where I can, change my assessment when the evidence changes, and tell you what I think rather than what my supposed political tribe would prefer me to think. There is an enormous quantity of geopolitical commentary available for free. I think the combination behind mine is genuinely unusual. If that is the sort of conflict analysis you want to read, please check out: mrandrewfox.substack.com