The biggest concern about Starmer though is that it’s not even clear if he is even governing the country in any meaningful way, writes Daniel Lindley [photo credit: Getty Images]
It’s been a momentous few weeks in the history of modern Britain.
While all the media attention has rightly been focused on crumbling US support for Ukraine and a possible rapprochement with Russia, the consequences for the UK will be far-reaching.
After losing its Empire after the Second World War, the UK pivoted into having a ‘Special Relationship’ with the USA, where it would retain some of its global prestige by acting as the chief lieutenant of the Global Hegemon.
This has made the UK a particularly aggressive state in the European context, as the more conflict there is, the more opportunities the UK has to prove itself useful to its American ‘partner’, to use the more polite word, the more blunt word would be ‘liege’.
This dynamic can be seen in the Ukraine crisis, where the UK consistently pushed for a more belligerent policy towards Russia whereas countries like France and Germany attempted diplomatic solutions such as the Minsk Accords, and indeed opposed the initial 2008 declaration that Ukraine would join NATO.
The British government is now in an incredibly difficult position; it has two pillars of its foreign policy which have now become contradictory.
The first pillar is its commitment to supporting the United States, one which isn’t really voluntary as the UK military is so integrated into NATO that it can barely fight a war without US support.
A recent example is the report that the Shadow Storm missiles in Ukraine have now been rendered useless due to the US banning the UK from sharing US intelligence with Ukraine.
This is due to the UK being dependent on US satellites for signals intelligence, without which such missiles cannot be aimed accurately.
The second pillar is the UK’s staunch opposition to any diplomatic settlement with Russia over Ukraine, advocating instead for war until military victory. Whilst these two pillars were complementary under Joe Biden’s Presidency, with Donald Trump signalling a realignment of US foreign policy, the UK will have to proceed carefully.
Delusional and incoherent
Of course, that is not what has happened. On the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion, Starmer gave a strident speech to European leaders insisting that the military support for Ukraine must increase even further, as “Russia’s economy is in trouble” and “have lost the benefit of their land forces and their Black Sea Fleet.”
Of course this is a wildly optimistic appraisal of Ukraine’s chances, I’m not sure if it’s more concerning if Starmer is genuinely delusional, or if he’s just lying to keep a war going everyone knows Ukraine is not going to win.
In a contradictory move, Starmer then visited Donald Trump where he gave a very fawning display for a man who’d called Ukraine’s President Zelensky a ‘dictator’.
Starmer’s charm offensive was proven ineffective within 24 hours, when Zelensky’s visit to Washington turned into a diplomatic disaster with Trump declaring him ‘not ready for peace’ and withdrawing US military support.
Inviting Trump to an unprecedented second State Visit while he was in the middle of tearing up the UK’s place in the world is incoherent, to say the least.
Keir Starmer is a very strange politician. Everyone seems to agree that he doesn’t have any ideology or to have even shown any interest in a political career until he was in his 50s, only to then have a meteoric rise to becoming an MP, then leader of his party in five years and becoming Prime Minister in the next election.
It would look like an astonishing achievement had Rishi Sunak not just previously became Prime Minister in similar strange circumstances. If you want a good idea of what kind of political thinker Keir Starmer is, just know that one year after becoming Labour leader he was given a talk on “how economics works” by Ed Miliband, as he was “still working out what he thinks about macroeconomics.”
It also must be said that Starmer became Labour party leader through an unprecedented campaign of democratic fraud. I won’t go over the details here as so much has been written about Starmer’s “10 pledges” already; the important point is, while politicians may lie or make promises they couldn’t really deliver, scrapping your entire platform after winning an election and becoming an open ideological enemy of it is not a normal thing to happen in a democratic system.
A lot of his supporters resent this being brought up, some say it’s the whining of sore losers. There may be some truth to that. But I’d argue that it’s impossible to really understand Starmer without understanding this origin. His first act as a major political leader was subverting a democratic system by wholesale lying in collusion with the press.
Even those who had little sympathy with the people who were lied to that time ought to have thought about the lesson that was taught there, as it didn’t take long before this ‘win by wholesale shameless lying’ approach was being used against the wider public.
Who’s steering the Starmer train?
The biggest concern about Starmer though is that it’s not even clear if he is even governing the country in any meaningful way. The recently published book Get In: The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer paints a very unflattering picture of the main.
One of his advisors is quoted as saying “It’s impossible to work out whether Keir realizes he is a pawn in a chess game. Or does he like being a pawn in a chess game, provided it makes him powerful.”
Another person described as an ‘acolyte’ of Starmer’s Chief of Staff Morgan McSweeney is quoted as saying “Keir’s not driving the train. He thinks he’s driving the train, but we’ve sat him in front of the DLR.” It’s just plain undignified how people from Starmer’s office will happily just denigrate him to journalists.
McSweeney is a name who comes up again and again. It’s an example of how the British press really works that a man almost no one will have heard of until a few months ago is not only suddenly revealed to be a highly influential figure in British politics, but also that he’s played a central role in major political developments for most of the last decade.
An example of this is when the former Guardian political editor Anushka Asthana casually dropped the revelation that in 2017 she and other Guardian colleagues had been invited to a private meeting with McSweeney, Starmer, and other Labour MPs, where McSweeney laid out his plan for the Labour Right to take back control of the party through deceptive means, even specifying that the biggest threat to their plans were a Labour election victory. This corroborates with the version of events in Get In, which describes McSweeney’s plan as “subterfuge” and “the great deception that would destroy a movement.”
McSweeney’s ambitions go beyond the Labour Party. As well as leading the ‘Labour Together’ faction, McSweeney is also the former director of the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, which happens to share the same office as Labour Together.
The organisation has been quoted as vowing to “kill Elon’s Musk’s Twitter,” which Musk (a very important member of Donald Trump’s administration) called a declaration of war. More telling though was the bizarre scandal during the last US Presidential election where not only did Morgan McSweeney travel to the United States to advise the Harris campaign, but the Labour Party openly organised for “around 100 activists” to campaign for Kamala Harris.
While not necessarily illegal if no payments were made, the legality issue of this misses the point. It used to be considered highly irregular for a major British political party to even express a preference in US internal elections, never mind sending their own activists to campaign for one of the candidates.
Cutting back to Ukraine now, this incident in particular reveals the biggest problem for the current Labour government. It’s not so much that it’s run by unaccountable apparatchiks deeply loyal to the United States, but apparatchiks deeply loyal to one particular faction in the United States i.e. the Democratic Party, so much that they’re willing to blatantly interfere in domestic US affairs to help them.
That kind of reckless behaviour may work out ok if your side wins, but now they’ve made an enemy of the ruling faction of the US, their room for leverage on issues like Ukraine will likely be very small indeed.
Daniel Lindley is a trade union activist in the UK.
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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.
