So the Royal Navy has scrambled frigates. Russia is testing our maritime sovereignty in the Channel. And we are meant to be alarmed? Outraged? Stirred to patriotic fervour? I confess I felt nothing but a weary sense of déjà vu, as if watching a particularly tedious episode of a historical drama where the script has been recycled from the Cold War. The Russian bear waves its paws; Whitehall flaps; newspapers sell. It is a pantomime, complete with panto villains and a chorus of breathless anchors. But beneath the siren calls and the sonar pings, there is a deeper malady: the decadence of a nation that has forgotten what sovereignty actually means.
Let us set aside the technicalities. A Russian submarine in our waters, a frigate deployed, a statement from the Ministry of Defence that it is all routine. Routine? Since when did the presence of a potential adversary’s naval assets within sight of our shores become routine? The word suggests acceptance, a shrug of the shoulders, a tacit agreement that this is just the way things are. It is the language of decline. The Romans would not have called barbarian raids on the Danube routine. They would have called them what they were: a symptom of crumbling borders and faltered will.
Consider the context. This is not the 1980s, when the Soviet Navy was a genuine existential threat, and the Royal Navy was a genuine counterweight. This is 2025, and Russia’s navy is a rusting, poorly maintained shadow of its former self, propped up by oil revenues and Soviet nostalgia. A single Russian submarine in the Channel is not an invasion force. It is a provocation, yes, but also a test. And we are failing it not because we lack the hardware, but because we lack the nerve.
The nerve to say: these are our waters, and any incursion, no matter how small, is an act of hostility that will be met with proportional force. Instead, we get statements about “monitoring” and “reassuring allies”. We get frigates scrambled after the fact, as if the mere sight of a Russian hull in our territorial sea is something to be observed, not repelled. This is the behaviour of a spectator, not a sovereign power.
And why? Because we have spent decades hollowing out our sense of national identity. We have traded it for a postmodern, globalised shrug. Sovereignty, once the bedrock of the nation state, is now a dirty word, associated with little Englanders and Brexiteers. The intellectuals sneer at it. The establishment pays it lip service while quietly outsourcing it to Brussels or NATO or the UN. And so when a Russian vessel tests that sovereignty, we are left with nothing but a tepid response and a lot of hand-wringing.
The Victorian era understood these things. Lord Palmerston would not have been scrambling frigates. He would have had a gunboat on the spot, a sharp note delivered to St Petersburg, and a chorus of approval from the public. Because in those days, the British people understood that a slight to their sovereignty was a slight to their very existence. Today, we have forgotten what we are defending. Is it a set of values? A shared history? A patch of land? Or is it just a postcode on the global map, indistinguishable from any other?
The Russian game is obvious. They probe, they test, they see how far they can push before we push back. And every time we respond with measured restraint, they learn that the cost of aggression is low. It is the same pattern we saw in Crimea, in Ukraine, in the Baltic airspace incursions. The West reacts with sanctions and condemnations, and the bear keeps clawing. The Channel incident is simply the next act in a long-running farce.
What is to be done? I am not calling for war. I am calling for clarity. For a government that dares to say: our maritime borders are inviolable, and any violation will be met with immediate and decisive action. That does not require a larger navy or more spending. It requires a spine. It requires leaders who understand that the essence of sovereignty is not a legal fiction but a muscle that must be exercised or it atrophies.
But I suspect we will get more of the same. More monitoring. More statements. More hand-wringing. Because we have become a nation of critics, not doers. We analyse, we debate, we write columns like this one. But we no longer act. And that, not the Russian submarine, is the real threat to our sovereignty. The Channel is a mirror, and what it reflects is a Britain that has lost the will to defend itself. The Romans fell for many reasons, but one was that they forgot what they were fighting for. We may not have fallen yet, but we are certainly practising.
