Back in January, a reporter asked Keir Starmer about a YouGov poll showing that a majority (62%) of the public would rather the government prioritise public services than offer them tax cuts. “We’ll see what the Budget brings in early March,” he replied. “[But] I think it’s very obvious that they are trying to salt the ground… They have totally neglected the national interest.”
Far be it from me to question the great leader, but I’m not entirely sold on his choice of metaphor here. Probably the single best known example of a military force salting the earth to undermine an enemy was Rome’s conquest of Carthage in 146BC – but this was the action not of a retreating army but a victorious conqueror, which hardly seems to fit. (It also, by the by, seems to have been a Victorian invention, based on a passage from the Bible.) The technique actually used by retreating armies to wreck things for their attackers – burning crops, ripping out infrastructure and so on – is a scorched Earth policy.
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