“Recent opinion polls show that 44% of the population think there should be fewer foreign policy interventions. Across the channel, Jean Luc Melenchon’s France Insoumise has shown that pro-Palestine, anti-war politics can be tremendously popular.”
By Chris Nineham
Calls to ramp up military spending and escalate military backing for Ukraine have dominated the NATO summit, with new UK prime minister Keir Starmer using it 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”. He also stressed throughout the campaign not just his own support for NATO, but that the post-war Labour Party was central to the foundation of NATO in the first place.
New defence minister John Healey underlined the point by rushing to Odessa to announce a new arms deal with Ukraine’s president Zelensky. Despite Labour’s insistence on keeping the purse strings tight at home, Healey promised to give Ukraine millions of pounds worth of ammunition, artillery and ground attack missiles.
None of this is designed to please the electorate or bolster Labour support. Recent opinion polls show that 44% of the population think there should be fewer foreign policy interventions. Across the channel, Jean Luc Melenchon’s France Insoumise has 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 NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and the catastrophic campaigns in Syria and Libya. It has also led to Britain’s continuing support for Israel in the midst of its genocide.
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.
Few would deny the world is becoming increasingly dangerous as the US tries to face down global challengers and Israel threatens to start a new war against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Continuing current 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 that 64% of Reform voters want less foreign intervention.
On Gaza, 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 to make some concessions, indicating he will drop the UK’s 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.
- Chris Nineham is the Vice Chair of the Stop the War Coalition. You can follow him on Twitter/X; and Stop the War on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter/X.
- You can join Stop the War and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) for an online debate with key activists and experts on how the Washington war summit has heightened tensions from Eastern Europe to the Middle East and the Asia Pacific on Tuesday 16th July.
