Starmer and Stop the War

Zombie foreign policy

The term ‘tankie’ was coined to refer to those international supporters of the USSR who approved ‘sending in the tanks’ to put-down anti-Soviet uprisings in Budapest in 1956 and then Prague in 1968. Over the years and certainly in its modern, Western usage, the term has morphed so that now it is used more commonly to describe pejoratively those who oppose sending in tanks, by those who are almost always to be found in favour of it.

In some ways this transformation from one meaning to an entirely opposite one is perhaps what you’d expect to happen if a bipolar Cold War ends but the language, military architecture and thinking remains intact.

Keir Starmer, the docile leader of Britain’s Labour party, has condemned the UK anti-war group, Stop the War Coalition. If he didn’t himself use the word ‘tankie’ to describe the group, that was the tone he reached for, even as Starmer himself calls for the sending in of tanks to Ukraine. If this sort of inward rebuke also seems a parochial response to a potential global conflagration, that’s just Starmer.

His words have in equal parts delighted the centrist establishment who loathed Jeremy Corbyn and his notion of a less-US and more continental European foreign policy for the UK, and enraged those on the political left who still have rage to give to Starmer’s mismanagement of the only coalition of voters ever known to have brought Labour to power.

Starmer’s charges against Stop the War are mostly what you’d expect, and in-keeping with his previous actions, be that a baseless removal of the whip from Jeremy Corbyn or dismissing Rebecca Long-Bailey for sharing on social media an interview in which it was accurately stated (by someone other than Rebecca Long-Bailey, bizarrely) that the Israeli state sells police training globally, having developed those methods in its architecture of Palestinian oppression.

As always, those same quarters whose first response to criticism of Starmer is a demand of loyalty and to focus instead on the Tories refuse their own advice. As always, there is a thrill to their delight at what is seen as another attack against left-wingers, this despite the fact that notions of non-intervention - and still more of diplomacy - have adherents across the political spectrum.

The political centre that Starmer embodies and interacts primarily for and with accuse Stop the War Coalition of being useful idiots of Russia, or, to use the common terminology, of “Putin”.

Because this group functions as its own echo chamber, there is little questioning of whether they themselves might equally be the useful idiots of a US-led Atlanticism that cares little for the UK, Europe or - most important of all at this time - Ukrainians and Russians.

Given their general fascination with his downfall, it is ironic, too, that few in the group would ask whether they might even have been made the useful idiots of Boris Johnson, who is only too happy to indulge the brouhaha of anti-Russian rhetoric and the war drum if it allows him shuffle off the political hook the political centre has otherwise been constructing for him, over violations of Covid restrictions throughout the pandemic.

If the period of 2017-19 should be read as a test of whether the British political centre liked the EU and Europe more than it disliked a left-wing Labour party, the current episode over Russia and the Ukraine is perhaps a test of whether that same group can bring itself to dislike Boris Johnson more than it uncritically adores Atlanticism.

As British commentators rush to the defence of even Liz Truss - walked-out on in her self-promoting visit to Moscow by Russia’s Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov - the verdict is that, sadly, it will probably trend towards Atlanticism.

Starmer and dissonance

Putting aside the strange focus and timing of Starmer’s intervention on the subject of a small pressure group, much of what Starmer says is valid and, on the face of it, even praiseworthy. He condemns authoritarians and aggression, and supports democracy. What’s not to like?

Starmer suggests, moreover, that the UK values democracy in its allies. When looking to key UK partners such as Saudi Arabia, UAE, Israel and Bahrain, this seems questionable - the UK even went about selling arms to Saudi, despite its own evidence showing no certainty that they wouldn’t be used to commit war crimes.

But Starmer is the leader of the opposition and not the government, and so let us take him at his word and assume that - in office - he would want to reorientate away from these alliances.

Starmer has indeed, albeit briefly, himself argued against the UK arming Saudi Arabia as it goes about the destruction of Yemen. Again, if he is sincere in this position, then Stop the War - who have long-advocated the UK stop arming Saudi - are nothing if not an ally in the objective.

Stop the War likewise have been consistent in their support of Palestinians resisting Israeli apartheid, making them - if anything - a useful partner for the stated UK aim of a diplomatic resolution and viable two-state solution in Palestine. Britain mostly stuck with its European partners in endorsing the JCPOA, the agreement with Iran that curbed its nuclear programme in return for sanctions relief. Again, Stop the War have been forthright and correct in asserting that threats of war and the impact of sanctions don’t help the situation in Iran.

If he is to be taken at his word on various matters of foreign policy, Starmer should see Stop the War as a useful support in bringing about much that he himself has talked about or would - as leader of the UK - implicitly be signed up for. If Starmer is saying that he cannot be taken at his word in these things, then that is a new and greater problem all of its own, one that in some ways goes to the heart of what the Starmer project has been about - a trade of actual democracy for a veneer of polite (towards some) respectability that people are simply being asked to trust in.

The situation is further confused because - policy specifics aside - what Starmer and his enthusiasts in the Europhile political centre purport to desire for the UK as a country bears a strong resemblance to what Stop the War stand for.

Emmanuel Macron’s meeting with Vladimir Putin appears to have offered the beginnings of a constructive way forward, or at least points to further talks and the need for cool heads. Germany has been adamant in its refusal for the time being to move from its policy of not exporting weapons to conflict zones, steadfastly advocating the need to engage wholeheartedly with a diplomatic path. The continental idols of Britain’s Europhile political centre have more in common with the Stop the War position than Britain’s Europhile political centre itself.

Its reaction to the Ukraine-Russia dispute - much like the threat of the less-unequal, less-privatised, less-warring country that Labour threatened under Corbyn - shows again that the British political centre seeks to be a more continentally European state, just so long as it doesn’t have to do or endorse any of the things that mark continental European states.

If Stop the War can at times seem extreme in their positions, or uncouth in their mannerisms, then this is arguably more because the British political centre is so craven before Atlanticism, so willing to suspend all judgment and censor all dissent, that those who are determined to stand against the unnecessary pursuit of war are left having to retreat more than should ever be necessary into the self-protection of a subculture. If Stop the War have insufficient respectability, this is primarily because ideas that belong firmly in the political mainstream have been pushed to its margins.

Even while decrying and purporting to challenge it, this group, including Starmer himself, show themselves as essentially happy in the country modelled and practised foremost and best of all by the Tory party. Just as corporations and the rich will ask themselves why they’d need a Labour party “under new management” to do what the Tory party already does rather well for them, what is the use of a Labour party with this version of foreign policy when the Tories are already trusted to offer the real thing?

But putting aside electoral calculations, what of the moral failure of political and media elites in - as with their initial anointment of Johnson over Corbyn - refusing to weigh the consequences of that which they endorse or will turn a blind eye to?

Even if it would be wrong to make such groups synonymous with the Ukrainian state or all of its concerns, why does the British political class seemingly have no qualms with proposed US arming of neo-nazi paramilitaries in Ukraine, or the potential for far-right militancy from these groups across and into Europe? Why no concerns at the potential fallout from war and more refugees moving towards a Europe that failed either to take or even deal humanely with the last movement of refugees towards it? Why no regard that even the Ukrainian president wants the US and its Western allies to cool its war rhetoric?

Another pressing but unasked question is what role this sort of craven Atlanticism leaves for the UK anyway. The supposedly “Global Britain”, of which the Tories talk and Starmer says he can best deliver is, formulated in this way, no more than a small, flickering shadow of US foreign policy anyway. And if this is all Britain is - and as in some ways Lavrov demonstrated by walking out on Truss - why bother engaging with such a small and inconsequential country if you have to talk to the boss anyway? Russia itself seems to be adopting a similar approach of talking (more constructively) to the US rather than a bombastic NATO.

Russia owes the US some degree of time and respect because it is a global power and mostly still hegemonic. The same does not apply of Britain, which in its deference to the US foregoes the opportunity to differentiate itself as a useful or meaningful actor on the international stage anyway. The potentially valuable role of the UK, particularly in a post-Brexit world, is to take its proximity and cultural likeness to Europe, and its lingual connections to the US, and to endeavour to bridge the two, but this is not what is happening or what Starmer encourages.

To an extent the relationship between the US and the UK conceived in this way holds up a mirror to that of the Tory Party and Keir Starmer; an established power with a junior partner marked only by its eagerness to say the same thing. Who’d listen?