Secretary Antony J. Blinken meets with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer in London, 10 September 2024.
We can be assured of one thing at this year’s Labour conference: there will be continuity Tory policies from the government on matters of war, peace and arms spending. It meets against a background of a threatened invasion of Lebanon by Israel, compounding its genocidal war in Gaza.
Keir Starmer has made it clear that the support for Israel which lost him so many votes at the election is going to continue. He is also in the forefront of urging the US and European countries to allow Ukraine to use long-range missiles within Russia.
Both are escalations of already horrific wars. But the word “peace” barely passes the Prime Minister’s lips. Instead he wants to project himself as a “strong” leader — hence his trip to Washington to urge President Joe Biden to back greater missile use by Ukraine inside Russia. While he made the “tough choice” of cutting pensioners’ winter fuel allowance, thus consigning many of older people to misery and illness, when it comes to arms and “defence” spending, the sky’s the limit.
The task of the anti-war movement is to ensure that he doesn’t succeed in these militaristic aims. Already he is remarkably unpopular for a newly elected prime minister with one of the biggest Labour majorities ever. The lack of enthusiasm at the time of the election has in many cases turned to positive opposition to his policies.
This has been most noticeable over the winter fuel allowance. But the issues of war and militarism, arms spending and pensions cuts, and support for Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians, are all leading to increasing alarm at prospects of further war and conflict.
Take the war on Gaza. We are approaching a year since the events of October 7 and since Israel launched its war on the people of the Gaza strip. Starmer was very clear: that Israel had the right to “defend itself” and to if necessary, cut off water and electricity to Gaza civilians. The abhorrence and outrage at this statement cut deep but did not result in a change of heart from Starmer. Instead he doubled down on supporting Israel, despite losing massive amounts of support from traditional Labour voters, especially in the Muslim community.
The election results should have been a wake-up call for Labour’s leadership, which lost five supposedly safe seats to pro-Gaza independent candidates, came close to losing a handful more, and saw a surge in support for those to the left of Labour, including the Greens.
But Starmer and co refused to acknowledge the anger and upset and instead denounced those defeating them as running “hate campaigns” and using intimidation — a transparent code for attacking Muslim candidates, and totally false accusations.
The determination to ignore Gaza continues, despite cosmetic attempts to limit arms sales. After the state terrorist attacks on Lebanon and then further Israeli bombings last week, there was no condemnation of Israel forthcoming from the British government. Yet these attacks were part of an attempt by Netanyahu to drive towards greater war in the Middle East.
Any responsibility for such an escalation lies firmly with the Israeli prime minister and his right-wing allies in government, who want to extend the present war in Gaza to Lebanon, and to war with Iran. Neither Starmer nor Biden has any intention of seriously sanctioning him or of doing anything but back and arm Israel to the hilt.
Then there is Ukraine. More than two-and-a-half years since the Russian invasion, Ukraine is losing the war. The Nato powers, and especially the US and Britain, want to prevent this from happening, or at least to put Ukraine in a stronger negotiating position for the peace talks which most acknowledge are likely to happen in the next year.
Starmer’s solution is to send more weaponry and allow it to be used in more circumstances. Biden didn’t agree to this on Starmer’s Washington trip, but he and the lamentable David Lammy will continue to put this case, regardless of the dangers of further escalation between nuclear powers, and of the extremely high human and financial cost of fighting the war.
There’s a very different attitude to money for war than there is for relieving poverty. British military aid to Ukraine since the war began adds up to £7.8 billion, and Lammy has just announced another £600 million.
Labour’s foreign policy is not about “fighting terrorism” or “promoting democracy” as its minsters try to proclaim. It is about promoting the needs of British imperialism, in lockstep with that of the US, including military interventions and huge levels of arms sales. If that means supporting a terror state like Israel, or refusing to countenance a ceasefire and peace talks in Ukraine, that goes with the territory.
Protesters have been out in force against the genocide in Gaza for a year now. We are having an impact, most recently when the TUC supported resolutions on Palestine and wider Middle East war. Stop the War wants to take the movement more deeply into the unions, and link it with the Nato proxy war in Ukraine, the new arms race which is threatening the future of humanity, and the growing threat of wider war.
Source: Morning Star