WITH every passing day, Britain’s war psychosis seems to deepen.
This week Defence Secretary John Healey spent an hour telling MPs about the activities of a Russian spy ship off Britain’s shores, and the navy’s endeavours to track its progress.
Healey, not naturally given to martial posturing, nevertheless gave it his best shot, by solemnly declaiming a message to Russian President Vladimir Putin: “We see you, we know what you are doing, and we will not shy away from robust action to protect this country.”
What exactly was this purpose of this performance? Assuming that the Russian ship was acting as described it did not appear to be in breach of international law.
Moreover, intelligence-gathering is a fact of life and there is not a single great power which does not indulge in it. London hosts a very prominent building on the south bank of the Thames devoted entirely to espionage — MI6 headquarters.
While operations like the Salisbury poisonings of 2018 widely attributed to Russian military intelligence cannot be countenanced, the more normal reaction to routine activities like that of the Russian vessel is to keep an eye out but not make a public fuss.
That no longer seems to be Labour’s approach. Rather, it snatches at anything that can be used to ramp up international tension.
It is likely not accidental that Healey’s attempt to make the nation’s flesh creep coincided with Donald Trump’s first week in office.
Britain has been the most belligerent Nato power bar none in trying to keep the Ukraine conflict going. Last week Keir Starmer, who sends three billion hard-to-spare pounds to Ukraine in military aid every year, signed an improbable century-long pact with Kiev.
He is certainly anxious that Trump may cut a deal to end the war, which Ukraine could not sustain without Washington’s cash and weaponry. Starmer, like Rishi Sunak and Boris Johnson before him, demands a total defeat for Moscow, which every serious analyst realises is not on the cards.
So Healey’s ostentatious sabre-rattling is at least in part aimed at reminding Washington as to just how awful the Russians are — why, they even tried to take a peek at Britain’s undersea cable network.
But there is more to it than that. Militarism is Labour’s go-to answer for a range of problems.
It claims to want a “reset” in relations with the European Union, yet rejects one proposal from the EU after another, from youth exchange programmes to participation in a tariff-free manufacturing supply chain pact, suggested this week.
Instead the government hopes to thaw links solely by promoting military initiatives with key EU states like France and Germany.
Again, some Starmerites urge an arms build-up, extravagant to the point of insanity, to kick-start otherwise elusive economic growth.
An alliance from Trump to journalist Paul Mason, in his latest incarnation a collaborator at an arms industry-funded think tank, urges 5 per cent of gross domestic product be spent on the military, more than twice the current figure.
Mason argues that this entirely unfeasible project would lead to a manufacturing boom, to the profit of his new sponsors.
It would certainly lead to the devastation of public services since the bond markets would never tolerate funding such a programme from state debt and on all recent precedent the orders would largely go to US firms anyway.
But all of this is only aided by the banging of war drums by Healey and the like. For Labour, all roads forward seem to lie through militarisation. The unions and the left must reject this miserable programme of ever-more guns and little butter for our future.
