Where is Britain’s grand strategy? Neither party is prepared for the coming war

In The Kindly Ones, Anthony Powell’s fictionalised portrayal of the Britain of the late Thirties, the approaching war appears like a spectre “now materialising in slow motion,” a “looming, menacing shape of ever greater height, ever thickening density”. The mood of the time, overbearing in its intensity, was one in which “crisis was unremitting, cataclysm not long to be delayed”. It is hard not to empathise with Powell’s detached hero, soon to be swept up in the world’s convulsion.

After all, Powell’s recollection of the newsreel footage of the time — of “close-ups of stocky demagogues, fuming, gesticulating, stamping; oceans of raised forearms; steel-helmeted men tramping in column; armoured vehicles rumbling over the pavé of broad boulevards” — could be a description of the Conservative Party’s first election broadcast. CCHQ’s offering looks like government propaganda from Children of Men: over images of missiles firing and a Chinese tank parading down a boulevard, we are assured our nation’s survival lies only with Sunak’s Conservative Party. The voters, it appears, do not share this conclusion.

As this week’s exclusive UnHerd poll revealed, 54% of voters believe that Britain will be at war within five years. If the majority opinion of the poll respondents is correct, Britain is about to elect a wartime Prime Minister, and have reluctantly chosen Starmer. Given a choice between Starmer and whichever Tory plotter next takes their turn on the throne, this is not an unreasonable decision. Yet in a general election driven by voter apathy, disenchantment and a widespread dissatisfaction, one of the strange lacunae so far has been the absence of any serious discussion of British foreign policy. The election is taking place in the shadow of a volatile international order, and yet the wars in which Britain has found itself embroiled have been sublimated, in the campaign discourse, into parochial domestic concerns.

The Gaza war, whose regional escalation has already seen British jets ineffectually bomb Houthi militants in Yemen and shoot down Iranian drones heading for Israel, has been transmuted into a culture-war debate about the policing of demonstrations in London. In Ukraine, Western allies have just crossed another long-standing red line over permitting Kyiv to use donated weapons to attack inside Russia, provoking a furious debate among security and international relations analysts — and yet the war itself has, for most people, long faded into the background. In the Far East, where Johnson’s ill-fated government committed the Royal Navy to a “Pacific tilt”, Chinese sabre-rattling against Taiwan is ramping up alarmingly. The rising costs of energy, food and consumer goods driven by geopolitical disorder — a mere foretaste of what is yet to come — have taken euphemistic form as “the cost-of-living crisis”, like a permanent shift in weather patterns to be grimly adapted to, rather than a consequence of political choices.

The drumbeat of war is growing ever louder, yet even as Sunak disastrously moots conscription for the young and Starmer pledges a triple lock on the nuclear deterrent, campaigning on the threatening international situation is either an afterthought or an opportunity to posture. Even in the first televised election debate, vital questions of national security were only discussed towards the end, as short soundbites tacked on to a question from a Muslim voter about Gaza. We are told, again and again, that we are living in a 1938 world, and then the dire warnings are overtaken by the usual Westminster gossip and dysfunction. Lobby journalists badger Starmer on whether, and even when, he will use Britain’s nuclear deterrent. Britain’s genuinely alarming security situation, a topic that requires urgent national debate over both the country’s preparedness and willingness to go to war, is just more fodder for the soundbite class.

It is alarming to observe on social media a growing conspiracy theory, notably stoked by the former Conservative MP Andrew Bridgen, that Britain will “reveal” at some point this summer that it is at war with Russia (why Putin would respect the needs of Sunak’s election campaign in obscuring this information has not been convincingly explained). Yet no doubt such anxieties spring from the simultaneous reality of the threats Britain now faces and the strange, cynical unreality of the political discourse surrounding them. It is genuinely irresponsible of Sunak to throw out half-baked plans for national service, which would do nothing to address the modernisation needs of Britain’s still-shrinking and under-equipped Army, purely as desperate bait for wavering conservative voters. In doing so, the entire discourse around national security is cheapened, and warnings about the genuine threats we face are rendered less credible.

Equally, it is irresponsible of Starmer to suborn Britain’s approach to the Middle East conflict to Labour’s internal psychodrama over Corbyn. By initially pledging his unflinching support for Israel’s poorly-planned punitive campaign in Gaza — which now looks set to end with Hamas still in power, tens of thousands of civilians dead, and Israel’s leadership facing war crimes charges — Starmer chose to exorcise Corbyn’s ghost and avoid any serious analysis of the war’s aims and likely outcome. Despite pledging to place country over party, when it came to the first serious test of his future foreign policy, Starmer placed his own intra-party feuds over Britain’s national interest. Had Starmer chosen the path set out here at the beginning of war, of entirely disengaging from the conflict — a policy, the new UnHerd poll reveals, that a majority of the country supports — he would be in a stronger position now.

Instead, just as the Conservative Party finds itself outflanked on the Right among its core voter base over immigration, Starmer finds the Labour Party, in essence a fragile coalition of southern liberals and northern Muslims, struggling to maintain the support of a demographic whose votes could previously be weighed rather than counted. Indeed, the growing antipathy to Israel’s very existence revealed by the poll, now the dominant opinion among the young, can perhaps be partly attributed to the country’s rapidly changing demographics, until now welcomed by Labour Party functionaries as both a desirable outcome in itself and a sure source of votes. Despite the Greens’ attempt to capture Labour’s wavering Muslim vote, the future of politics in Northern towns may soon enough look more like George Galloway’s vision of social conservatism and anti-Western foreign policy than the top-down Zionism of Starmer’s rightward revolution. Blair may have failed at exporting liberal democracy to the Middle East, but by radically transforming the country’s immigration policies, he was unintentionally successful in importing the Middle East’s deepest passions to Westminster. No doubt future analysts, observing the increased salience of Indian and Nigerian political passions in Britain, will make the same observation of Johnson’s most transformative contribution to British history.

Yet until the twin effects of both a rapidly changing world order and Britain’s changing demographics hit the Westminster system, British foreign policy careens down the road of path dependency. As David Lammy’s recent distillation of the Labour Party’s strategic worldview proves, there is no meaningful choice on offer in this election of what foreign policy to pursue, or serious discussion of what British national interests require: such matters are intentionally depoliticised, kept carefully away from debate in front of mere voters. The Tory rebel Robert Jenrick’s call for an “Anglo-Gaullist” foreign policy, ruthlessly focussed on British self-interest, is the majority opinion in the country, according to the UnHerd poll, but it is nowhere to be found in Whitehall: to even suggest such a thing would be an unforgivable offence against mandarin dignity.

Part of the problem, no doubt, is that British security and foreign policy is made in Washington: with our closed and inward-looking national caste of securocrats dedicated to the Atlantic alliance as a good in itself, the only decisions available to the two parties is how far to acquiesce to America’s strategic whims of the moment. Whether or not these whims, bitterly debated in the imperial capital itself, are in Britain’s interests are irrelevant: the choice we are given is only how best to interpret Washington’s confused and ambiguous desires.

While the international situation looms like a threatening cloud over this election, the absence of any meaningful discussion of Britain’s strategic vision merely reflects the fact that, until we know who wins the American election, we cannot say with certainty what our foreign policy will actually be. Now Biden reigns, both parties’ Ukraine policy is to support Kyiv until Russia’s total defeat, no matter how unrealistic that now sounds. Should Trump win and seek peace negotiations with Putin, even at Ukraine’s expense, then that will automatically become Britain’s policy too — though there has been no domestic discussion of what that outcome would look like, and how Britain’s future relationship with an aggressive, aggrieved Russia can be securely managed. Whichever of America’s two gerontocratic rivals wins the election, Starmer will bend the knee and pledge Britain’s security and prosperity at his service. The great questions of strategy, even when they determine national survival, are after all a matter for great powers, not mere client states: as ever, the weak do what they must.

In his 1940 memoir Strange Defeat, the pioneering historian Marc Bloch, who had latterly served as a staff officer, and would later be executed by the Gestapo for his Resistance activities, ruminated on the causes of France’s sudden military collapse. The army was poorly led and unprepared; the country was bitterly divided. Yet Bloch reserved his deepest antipathy for “the parliamentary system [which] has too often favoured intrigue at the cost of intelligence and true loyalty”. In the France of 1940, Bloch wrote:

“Our party machinery had already begun to give off the smell of a dry-rot which it had acquired in small cafés and obscure back rooms. It could not even offer the excuse that it was strong, because at the first breath of despotism it collapsed like a house of cards… More often than not they failed even to determine who was to wield the power. They served merely as spring-boards for clever careerists who spent their time knocking one another off the top of the political structure.”

In the situation we now face, such immediately recognisable political dysfunction is a luxury Britain cannot afford: our nation’s security is a matter of far greater import than the Westminster rigmarole we sank into in safer times.

Yet the overriding theme of the election — from the Left-wing and Muslim discontent with Starmer, of which Galloway is now the sole Westminster incarnation, to Farage’s reinvigorated revolt against the Conservatives from the Right — has been a message from the electorate that Britain’s political system works against the British people’s interests, and requires total root-and-branch reform. This is doubly true of our foreign policy, the shadowy presence looming behind every rote stump speech on this campaign. Domestically, and internationally, history has fated us to live at the end of one political order and the troubled birth of another. We cannot go on as we are: and for good or ill, soon enough we will not.

---

Aris Roussinos is an UnHerd columnist and a former war reporter.

arisroussinos