Starmer’s position on Ukraine – that he would support sending British troops there to keep the peace (whatever that means) – is a canny one from a domestic political point of view. For many years Labour lost votes for being seen to be pacifistic and hostile to the armed forces; which is quite mistaken historically, but an impression that seemed to be confirmed by the fact that the nation’s leader in World War II was the (nouveau) Conservative Winston Churchill.
In fact the true military men in his war Cabinet were often socialists, including the Labour leader Clement Attlee, who in World War I had fought at Gallipoli and worked his way up through the ranks to become a Major. By contrast Churchill saw very little action, and was given his high rank (Lieutenant Colonel) only because he was a toff. (See my Britain Before Brexit, 2021, chapter 8.) During World War II it was generally the working classes who were more solid in favour of that defensive war – as opposed to aggressive, imperial ones (see ibid. chapter 9) – with their MPs crucial to the removal of Neville Chamberlain, and his replacement by the warlike Churchill, whose own Conservative party was more equivocal on the issue, to put it mildly. Many of them (together, notoriously, with the Daily Mail) flirted with Nazism. So don’t be misled into thinking that Conservatives are always more patriotic, in this kind of situation, and the Left the ‘traitors’, or wimps. Sir Keir represents a strong Labour tradition here.
Porter’s Pensées 
Two very disappointing announcements today.
Kemi Badenoch has shown weakness of character by giving in to Robert Jenrick and the Daily Mail by talking about withdrawal from the ECtHR. She talks about international bodies being taken over by dictators – well, the ECtHR seems the least likely to fit that description and the ECHR is a bulwark against dictatorship. She has betrayed a signficant section of the Conservative Party and I believe she has made a Reform-led right in British politics much more likely, not less, by validating Reform’s demands.
The other disappointment comes from Keir Starmer – not in terms of the increase in defence spending, which I think is inevitable and necessary (as indicated in the Lawrence Freedman article I posted previously) but in his decision to fund it by cutting the overseas aid budget, already mangled to fund asylum-seeker accommodation. It is a target dictated by the likes of Reform and the Daily Mail and the copycat Badenoch – see recent issues for the evidence – and very much in line with “Blue Labour” thinking. The “Britain vs. developing countries” choice is a false one. The root of Labour’s financial problems lies in wildly over-promising on tax restraint to win over Tory voters. A national defence crisis would have been the perfect justification for revisiting income, big tech and other taxes. Meanwhile the logic of denouncing “economic migrants” while cutting overseas aid escapes me.
I can see why so many developing countries are placing their bets on reparations. While I think some reparations plans (e.g. the Brattle Report) would lead to a significant misallocation of the available funds away from where they are most needed – and would therefore be an extremely flawed way of tackling global poverty – I suppose the global South is thinking that the only way of obtaining global social justice is to take the North to court. We could do better than this.
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Indeed. The Tories have always been fair-weather patriots, for example requiring schools to put up posters of Churchill in the V-gesture pose last decade; but as soon as they meet a genuine fascist like Pinochet they just want to know he can pass the port in the right direction. And it’s always been that way, and apparently will be again now. So, in short, don’t trust them when you’re in a scrape and the chips are down.
But surely that reflects well on Churchill? His party and the papers supporting it were half appeasers, half sympathisers, yet over the late thirties he more or less single-handedly persuaded them that fascism was a new thing, an evil no one had seen before. After that persuading the British public must have been easy, and that made winning the war possible, no matter how lacklustre he was as a general or leader. Fair play to him?
Alas, there’s no comparable figure I can see in the modern Conservative party. The nearest is maybe Johnson, but even he has thrown his lot in with the far-right in the last couple of days. Not that anybody sane would want him back, but if he could persuade the party and the press that the F-word is back and we ought to do something about it if we don’t want to be the other F-word’ed, then it would have been worth it.
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