THE rise of the far right in Britain and the fascistic takeover by the Trump regime in the US is due in part to the sycophancy of world leaders, argued Greek former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis.

Varoufakis was speaking alongside Jeremy Corbyn on Friday at a Westminster University event celebrating the life and legacy of former Labour Party minister and socialist, Tony Benn. Benn, who died 11 years ago, would have turned 100 on April 3.

The discussion was hosted by his daughter Melissa Benn and explored Benn’s inspirational leadership and commitment to working people, while centring his ideas and achievements in the context of current political events.

The widespread lurch to the right in many countries, including the US and Britain, is being fuelled, said Varoufakis, by the complicity of leadership in Britain and in Europe.

“You can see that in our leaders — Keir Starmer, Emanuel Macron, [Friedrich] Merz — they resemble slaves who believe in slavery,” said Varoufakis. “And they are begging the master in Washington, DC, ‘Please master, allow us to remain your slaves. Allow us to continue the idiotic war in Ukraine. Let us also play a role in perpetuating the Palestinian genocide. Don’t do it all yourself. We want to be part of it.’”

Varoufakis himself has been banned from speaking in Germany in person or even by video because of his outspoken views on the Gaza genocide.

Both he and Corbyn agreed that out-of-control militarism was the greatest threat to preserving socialist values and building a society of fairness and equity.

“We’ve now got a government here in Britain that has taken five billion off the very poorest people and is spending 13 billion more from ’27 onwards on arms and, in the words of Rachel Reeves, ’turning Britain into a defence superpower’,” Corbyn said, referring to the Starmer government’s decision to increase military spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP, eventually rising to 3 per cent.

In making the announcement in Parliament to cheers from fellow Labour Party members, Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, described it as “the biggest sustained increase in defence spending since the end of the cold war.”

But promises of a massive expenditure to replenish weapons “won’t work in Britain,” Varoufakis said. “They don’t even have the money to spend on the arms. They are not even doing it but they are proclaiming it, which is the greatest gift to Nigel Farage, to the worst parts of the Tory Party.”

The acute global crises we should be focused on, said Corbyn are “environmental disaster, climate change, global economic inequality, 70 million people with no home to call their own as refugees, victims of environmental disaster, human rights abuses and war.”

Instead, “What are the richest countries doing, the most powerful countries in the world?” Corbyn asked rhetorically. “Spending more and more money on arms, on weapons and developing yet more techniques for war.”

What we should be talking about, said Corbyn, “is not some sort of global scenario of sending arms and armies all over the world. We should be talking about social justice and equality, the danger of the rise of the far right and racism here, and looking at how we bring an end to the ghastly war in Ukraine, the ghastly war in the Middle East where the Palestinian people have been rent apart, the war in Sudan and the battle for resources in the Congo going on at the moment.”

The hope for change, said Corbyn, lies in part in the fact that “more than a million people have joined in demonstrations in opposition to what the government is doing in supporting Israel and its attack on Gaza and the West Bank and I take great heart in the fact that a million people have not done what the media have told them to do, have not done what the government has told them to do. They’ve gone out on the streets and said they are with the victims of the bombardment that we, Britain, are arranging via RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus.”

Like Varoufakis, Corbyn also agreed that change cannot come from within the current Labour Party. When asked by an audience member at the Benn event if the Labour Party had lost its way, Corbyn quipped, “I’ll put it to a vote if you want.” He recalled that “after 2020 we were assured that the policies were fine, the only problem was me, so if I’m out of the way everything’s going to be fine and we will carry on with the same policies. Do you know what? I’ve carried on but the policies haven’t.”

But on a more serious note, Corbyn urged young people especially, struggling to find a political home to stick together as he and the four other progressive independents in Parliament are doing. “The future is that all of us who believe in socialism, who believe in social justice need to be together campaigning for it,” he said.

Faced with the choice of whether young people should “fight the control freaks and centralisation in the Labour Party or get out there campaigning to get people into unions, to defend public services and get decent wages for people, I would say get out there and be active,” Corbyn said.

If change relies on upending the status quo from the inside, then, Varoufakis said, “we need a Labour Party that is not in the pocket of the city banks, not this Labour Party but another Labour Party that we nearly had with Jeremy.”

But ultimately, Varoufakis said, “we must never lose sight of the end game, which is to revive economic democracy, democracy at the workplace. Co-operatives, the idea of one worker, one share, one vote. Unless we go back to that and we excite young people at the prospect of rebuilding society on the basis of having one person, one share, one vote, then socialism is not going to succeed.”

To wry laughter, he added, “Of course, if you try to do that they will nuke you, literally nuke you.”

Linda Pentz Gunter is a writer based in Takoma Park, Maryland. She is currently covering events in Britain.