Newly elected Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, will use the NATO conference in Washington this week to stress continuity with the Tories’ disastrous foreign policy. Starmer may have talked up change during the election campaign, but a video released on his first day in office included a message to Ukraine’s President Zelensky that a new government “makes no difference to the support you will see”.
To underline the point, the next day new Defence Minister, John Healey, rushed to Odessa to announce a new arms deal with Ukraine’s President Zelensky. Britain can’t give the Ukrainians the missile defence systems they say they need most, but it was important to the new government to make a public display of enthusiasm for continuing the war in Ukraine. So, despite Labour’s insistence on keeping the purse strings tight at home, Healey promised to give Ukraine millions of pounds worth of high calibre ammunition, AS 90 artillery, and Brimstone ground attack missiles.
Meanwhile, Starmer has promised that he is prepared to use Trident nuclear weapons if necessary. During the election campaign he stressed not just his own support for NATO, but that the post-war Labour Party was central to founding NATO in the first place, a point picked up by NATO’s head Jens Stoltenberg in the run up to the summit.
“It was actually the United Kingdom, the present government, back in 1949 in London, that was a driving force for the establishment of NATO,” said Stoltenberg “I therefore welcome also the strong commitment of Keir Starmer to continue that path.”
All this isn’t designed to please the electorate or bolster Labour support. Recent opinion polls show that 44% of the population think there should be less foreign policy interventions as against 36% who think there should be more. Across the channel, Jean Luc Melenchon’s France Insoumise has just shown that pro-Palestine, anti-war politics can be tremendously popular.
Starmer’s position is about holding on to the special relationship with the US which is so important to big business and the wider establishment in Britain.
It is this relationship that has powered Britain’s involvement in a string of terrible wars from the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, organised by NATO, through the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq to the catastrophic campaigns in Syria and Libya. It has also led to Britain’s continuing support for Israel in the midst of its genocide.
This is doubly dangerous foreign policy. Everyone accepts the world is becoming increasingly tense as the US tries to face down global challengers and Israel threatens to start a new war against Hezbollah in Lebanon. It was NATO’s decades’ long expansion into Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union that created the conditions for the Ukraine war. That expansion has accelerated recently, and arms spending is mushrooming across Europe.
Continued support for Israel and Ukraine will only push the world closer to wider war. Meanwhile at home the risk is the far-right can become the voice for some of those who oppose foreign wars. Polls show, for example, that 64% of Reform voters want less foreign intervention and its leader Nigel Farage has spoken out against the war in Ukraine.
On Palestine, the election proved that Labour has a big problem, with five pro-Palestine independents elected and many more getting significant votes. Here even hawkish Starmer has had to try and make some concessions, promising at least to drop its opposition to the International Criminal Court’s decision to issue an arrest warrant for Netanyahu.
The demonstrations and protests on Palestine are having an impact. We need to keep them up. But we urgently need to step up the wider campaign against Labour’s continuity foreign policy on all other fronts, including Britain’s support for NATO.