JUST at the point that Keir Starmer tries to rally his tattered “army of the willing” into some kind of battle order to defend the fragile Ukrainian regime, he faces a flanking attack from Labour MPs.
These MPs are conscious that in sacrificing the remnants of social spending to replenish the profits of the arms manufacturers will entail a sacrifice of their parliamentary careers made all the more unbearable because the years (or months) to the next election will make it no less certain.
There will be some deviants, but today almost all Labour MPs come to politics with a sense that the job of the Labour Party is to find a compromise between the sacrifices that maintaining the stability of the capitalist system entails with some amelioration of the conditions that this endeavour entails for working people.
There are even a few who see in the prospectus of a Labour Party a real, if distant, goal of more or less fundamental change in the relationship between labour and capital.
But there is no-one who thinks that this Labour administration, led by the likes of Starmer and Streeting, Cooper and McFadden, has any intention or desire to order the nation’s affairs either to promote continental peace or strengthen the welfare state.
Starmer presents his exertions as the necessary steps to put in place a “peace plan.” But presently there is no peace to be kept. Ukraine and Russia are, to the best of their respective abilities, knocking spots off each other.
Putin, who has the battlefield initiative, has said that in any peace treaty between the combatants, Russia will not tolerate Nato military forces in Ukraine. Meanwhile, Starmer continues in his dreamlike state, speculating on the size and composition of such a force which has the highly conditional backing only a portion of the EU states supposedly committed, has no remotely credible role yet defined, and no credible rules of engagement.
President Macron’s delusions are even greater than Starmer’s. His assertion that it is up to Ukraine to decide which nations supply troops to police any peace agreement is flatly contradicted by Putin whose position is that Nato troops in Ukraine means war.
Of course, Britain already has a military force deployed in Russia’s neighbourhood in Poland and Estonia. No-one really believes that they could play any significant role in impeding a Russian advance.
Nor, for that matter, does anyone beyond the deluded battalions of retired brigadiers, seriously think that Russia, which is unable to turn its battlefield advantage into significant territorial gains in Ukraine, is going to head west in any remotely credible circumstance.
Once an eastward advance carried the promise of liberation and socialism. Today there is not much of a constituency for the rule of capital in the form of Putin’s oligarchs. “Schrodinger’s Russian threat” is simultaneously an existential threat to the whole of Europe and too feeble to overcome Zelenskyy’s fragile, fractious and fast-vanishing army.
Nato is semi-detached from the US, the EU states divided, and with the world economy in urgent need of peace and stability, the objective interests of most people in the world lie in a peaceful resolution of the Ukraine war in line with present realities.
Poland, which might be a substantial military obstacle to any Russian advance, itself sees little prospect of such a turnout and instead importunes Trump to site nuclear missiles on Polish territory. But it was precisely the siting of US missiles on European territory that saw Labour officially marching against their deployment 40 years ago.
Labour today is both a threat to peace and a force for poverty.
