HMS Montrose’s Wildcat helicopter takes off from the flight deck.PO Chris Weissenbaum, RNZN
There are twin British media conventions when it comes to new prime ministers. The first is to give the leader of the country the benefit of the doubt, as you might when meeting your friend’s latest squeeze. The second is to gingerly place them at some point on the spectrum of acceptable governing opinion, subject to future revision.
Such courtesies are among the many ways by which the gates of public life are guarded, without anyone having to admit the embarrassing limits of our democracy. Consider, for example, that defence policy is remarkably similar at every single point on that spectrum.
Since Burnham came to office, he has adopted the singular, morphic British foreign policy and continued the relay race. The clearest sign was the appointment of John Healey as Chancellor, a man who just a month before had resigned Starmer’s sinking government, while demanding even more for arms spending.
This was part of a national media campaign waged by politicians and former senior figures in the armed forces, setting the mood for the incoming Burnham administration. The new defence minister, Wes Streeting, made clear that Healey will get what he’s lobbied for: “…we’ve committed £298bn over the next four years, including an additional £15bn on top of last year’s Spending Review settlement”. Naturally, this money will be culled from other areas of spending, he admitted.
In one of his earliest public addresses, the new prime minister appeared in video form at an arms fair alongside the armourers of Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians, to promise that making bombs would “reindustrialise this nation”. The truth is that these weapons firms exploit government largess and produce fewer jobs than socially useful sectors like infrastructure and education.
Such is the placid scene at the top. Politicians, foreign allies, the big corporate arms merchants and the journalists supposed to hold them to account, all singing a merry tune. But what does the world look like when we close the hymnal?
Within days of Burnham’s unchallenged ascension, Trump had reopened the European airbridge pouring high explosives onto civilian targets in Iran. The targeted destruction of civilian infrastructure is called a war crime, but only when committed by Russia in Ukraine. When the identical crime is publicly threatened and then committed by the US in Iran, in another war of aggression, media and politicians alike can’t find the same language, if they mention it at all.
An ominous development brought home the dangerous hypocrisy. Days after Burnham came to office, the Iranians accused Ukraine of attacking one of its commercial ships in the Caspian Sea, killing a sailor. For months, Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy has sought to fuse the two wars in Europe and the Middle East. This was apparent in March, when he called Russia and Iran “brothers in hatred” at a rally of MPs in Westminster. The objective is transparent: Zelenskyy wants to increase US interest in the Ukraine war by presenting it as a front in Trump’s frustrated conflict over the Strait of Hormuz. The moral high ground from which Ukraine resists its more powerful neighbour has been sold for the aid of an even greater imperialist.
Just as the Ukrainian leader was toying with these combustible materials, a strange visitor arrived in Kyiv. Laura Loomer, Trump’s court racialist and paranoiac, who once supported the Russian seizure of all Ukraine, made a propaganda video with Zelenskyy in which she praised him effusively. The BBC was among other western outlets to warmly receive the about-turn.
Posting on X during her trip, she described Ukraine’s racial hygiene: “One thing I really love about Ukraine is I haven’t seen a single Muslim here. It’s so refreshing.” She speculated that this explained why the country was “so clean and orderly”. “Ukraine is more white and more Christian than Russia!” she said in another missive, calling on Trump’s supporters to show ethnic solidarity.
The claim is not original. The idea that Russia is an Asiatic horde of mixed blood is the ideology of Ukraine’s fascistic Azov Brigade. In 2010 the founder of the outfit, Andriy Biletsky, said its object was to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade … against Semite-led Untermenschen [subhumans]”.
This is the reality of imperial war: a carnival of filthy reaction. It’s widely believed that Loomer’s trip anticipates a warming of relations between Washington and Kyiv. But her racist bile also speaks to the convergence of the wars. A vast geographic area from Eastern Europe to the Caucasus, the Caspian to the Eastern Mediterranean, across large parts of Africa, the Arbian Peninsula and the Gulf, is being drawn into a vortex of violence, hatred and destruction.
This is not a tale of a zone of catastrophe placing burdens on the enlightened west. The horrors in Ukraine, Iran, Yemen, Sudan and Gaza are not only buffeting against us, as we hear in broadcasts and articles about the ‘challenges’ faced by the PM. The new age of war is being authored here in the plush arms fair addressed by the prime minister, and the shipyards, weapons factories and airports of Scotland.
The respectable chatter of the liberal pundit and the perverse racial diatribe of the crank have formed a unity of purpose. The only thing separating them is the mood of listless incoherence with which the former are led on the road to hell.
Above all else, the meaning of the new British government is expressed in its lurch towards the new war economy. It must be resisted, not only in the defence of our most basic rights and needs in this country, but in the name of a universal human civilisation and culture, which faces its greatest peril in generations.
Source: The National