Keir Starmer meets Armed Forces Chiefs in 10 Downing Street by Simon Dawson
Keir Starmer has put himself at the centre of a war drive, increasing UK ‘defence’ spending to ever higher levels and volunteering a ‘peace keeping force’ in Ukraine. French president Emmanuel Macron wants his neighbours to shelter under France’s ‘nuclear umbrella’. Poland’s Donald Tusk has said that the country should acquire nuclear weapons while also signalling that adult men will have compulsory military training.
Anyone would think we were in September 1939. Europe is at war – or that’s the message we’re getting from governments. The EU has announced an €800bn package to be spent on ‘defence’. Everywhere there are moves to militarise national economies, arms company shares are booming, Danish prime minister Mette Fredriksen demands that Europe must rearm and calls for ‘spend, spend, spend on defence and deterrence’.
The sudden supposed crisis centres on the war in Ukraine and the rapid change in US attitudes to it since Trump became president, along with his urging Europe to spend more on its own defence (something which is not remotely new and has been a longstanding gripe). But it is already clear that the response from European governments is a wild overreaction. In this sense it must be seen as a crisis-ridden western capitalism reaching for militarism, nationalism and supposed threats of war to escape economic stagnation, political unpopularity and general discontent.
The failure of neoliberal capital is giving way to an era of protectionism, tariffs and wars. This both creates much greater instability between various powers, and presses them on the urgency of greater military spending.
The current crisis began when Trump declared he was talking to Russia’s president Putin and that they would work to end the Ukraine war. It intensified with the punishment beating of Ukraine’s president by Trump and Vance in the White House. What has happened here is that the reality of the war in Ukraine has clashed with the rhetoric of support which has marked the western imperialist view of it for the past few years.
Trump is a brutal representative of a section of the US ruling class but his actions are further highlighting how much the war is a proxy between Nato and Russia. Denial of intelligence and satellite cover is already damaging the Ukrainians’ position. But this was already a war being lost and growing ever more unpopular in Ukraine itself, especially around the question of conscription.
Those of us who opposed the war from the start were clear: while we were against the invasion by Russia and urged Russian troop withdrawal, this was a war which could only escalate dangerously to the whole of Europe if it continued. The massive supply of arms, the increasing number of red lines crossed by Joe Biden’s administration as Russia slowly advanced, the direct invasion into Russian territory in Kursk, all pointed in that direction.
Even if Trump had lost the election there would almost certainly have been a peace deal this year, since Ukraine is suffering particularly from the disproportion of population with Russia, which means it has fewer potential military recruits, but also because of the nature of the war, which is largely one of attrition with very high casualties on both sides. The peace deal will not be favourable to Ukraine as it will lose much of the territory now occupied by Russia, but there is no prospect of that situation changing without a much bigger escalation on the Nato side – one which Trump and indeed the Nato powers do not want.
The turn towards war economies is a belated recognition of this reality – and it is one which has to talk up the Russian threat to absurd levels. The Ukraine war has not been a success for Putin. He has control of around 18% of territory there and even progress to this has been very slow. His army is poor and relies heavily on those from the poorer and ethnic minority regions, as well as prison conscripts and, recently, North Korean troops in Kursk. There is no chance that he is going to invade Britain, France, Germany or Poland.
Russia’s economy and its military spending is dwarfed by the rest of the EU – in fact the economy does not match France or Germany but is similar to Spain. The idea that he is the new Hitler would be laughable if the consequences weren’t so serious. Hitler’s Germany was the second largest economy in the world, with advanced technology and a totally fascist military state.
So this drive to military spending is based on a series of lies. It also assumes that an arms race and pivot to military spending will enhance security. The opposite is true. Meanwhile we know who is going to suffer: what is spent on military and ‘defence’ will come from the budgets for overseas aid, but also from care, education, housing, health and other public services. Here we are facing a vicious cut in disability benefits for some of the poorest in society, threats to local government funding, an unprecedented housing crisis, on top of the impoverishment of pensioners, those with families, the sick and disabled.
So there is an increasingly battered and worsening domestic outlook while money for war is in abundance. The ruling classes of Europe are even prepared to relax their tight borrowing rules to fund this – something they refused to do for Greece and still refuse to do to improve living standards of working-class people. There is much talk about a Trump-Putin axis of the far right, and fear of the growth of the far right across Europe. But this drive to war is in the main coming from the liberal and centre left, not the far right.
It is also endorsed by far too many on the supposed left internationally and here in Britain. The Greens, the nationalist parties and much of the Labour left oppose cuts to overseas aid (quite rightly) but few have raised their voice over increase in ‘defence’ spending. Union leaders like Unite’s Sharon Graham urge more such spending to protect her members’ jobs while ignoring the fact that other public spending cuts are likely to affect her members in local government or health care.
A left which gets behind its own ruling class in supporting war and the drive to war becomes completely disarmed when it comes to fighting back. There are always superficially reasonable arguments for doing so. In the First World War, each belligerent power rejected peace talks because they were a trick that would benefit the other side. Similar arguments were put to prove that the German Kaiser or the Russian Tsar were uniquely brutal and belligerent (depending on which side you were). Today revulsion at Trump or Putin shouldn’t lead us to believe our own rulers are in principle much better.
Indeed when we see the first Labour government in 14 years overtaking the Tories in their systematic attacks on working class people, scapegoating of migrants, tearing up of planning regulations and climate goals, we surely cannot see it as a ‘lesser evil’. Indeed, this drive to war will increase right wing ideas and allow the far right to appear as champions of those under attack from the B52 liberals.
We fight back against this not by giving our own rulers a free pass but by recognising that the main enemy is at home – whether we are Russian, Ukrainian, German or British. Welfare not warfare is a key demand.