January 29, 2024 - 4:00pm
It’s easy to ignore the siren voices that seem almost eager to send Britain to war. Yet such voices grow louder. Last week, General Sir Patrick Sanders, Chief of the General Staff, declared that Britain must prepare a citizen army and put itself on a war footing. In a similar vein, Defence Secretary Grant Shapps said that Britain must shift from being a post-war country to a pre-war one. Even Boris Johnson now claims to support conscription. Presumably the tens of billions spent in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the more than 600 service personnel who sacrificed their lives, were never involved in a military conflict.
In response to Sanders’s comments, the Ministry of Defence said that there were no plans to revive national service — a position echoed by Number 10. That makes sense given Britain ended conscription in 1960. If our country could end national service at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the high point of the Cold War, it seems outlandish to say its return is now necessary.
Yet it would be wrong to dismiss such views as either making noise to get more resources, as with Sanders, or peacocking for attention like the former prime minister. Because, while the present debate may possess an almost surreal bent, things will feel different under a Labour government, particularly if the conflict in the Middle East intensifies. While Sunak and Shapps are happy to reject calls from the head of the British Army, Labour’s desire to win credibility on traditionally Conservative terrain, such as defence, will mean otherwise.
Precedent suggests as much. While David Cameron’s participation in the removal of Muammar Gaddafi was catastrophic, the experience of Iraq and Afghanistan blunted Britain’s martial impulses during the 2010s. In contrast to the brutal fighting British forces saw in Helmand two decades ago, not a single member of the armed forces died on duty during the Johnson premiership. For any criticisms one can make of the Tories since 2010, foreign adventurism (with the exception of Libya) isn’t one of them.
So could the pendulum really swing back under a Keir Starmer premiership? The signs are certainly there. After all, when Starmer’s efforts as Director of Public Prosecutions to help extradite autistic hacker Gary McKinnon came to nothing (they were scotched by none other than Theresa May as Home Secretary), he boarded a plane to Washington the next day to meet with deputies of the US Attorney General. When May’s decision came through, the now Labour leader was said to be furious.
Then there was the case of Binyam Mohamed, a British resident who was subject to extraordinary rendition and torture by the US. After his release without charge, Mohamed produced evidence of British collusion in his torture — and it fell to Starmer to decide whether the MI5 officer responsible would face prosecution. He decided they would not, and would later arrive at the same conclusion for an MI6 officer accused of sanctioning the torture of detainees at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. In other words, Starmer’s record shows he is happy to genuflect to both Washington and Britain’s domestic security apparatus. This, combined with a desire to fend off claims of being too Left-wing, are a recipe for a prime minister who looks more like Blair than Boris on foreign affairs.
When vying to become Labour leader, Starmer promised to introduce a “prevention of military intervention act” that would stop “more illegal wars”. Under such legislation, military action would occur if a lawful case were made and authorised by the House of Commons. Yet all of this was dispensed with during recent airstrikes on Yemen. Whether or not one believes Parliament should be given such powers — a point of contention — this underscores how the Labour leader’s flip-flopping applies just as much to foreign affairs as it does to things like public ownership.
It’s important to note that Starmer will do anything to win. But just as importantly, he is (like the rest of the Labour Right) a full-throated Atlanticist, who possesses an almost compulsive desire to please Washington. This cohort views Atlanticism as part of their personal identity, and a tool to bash the Left, rather than something of instrumental value in policy terms. As with Brexit, the idea that Britain could ever determine its own course is unthinkable to them.
Finally, one can also see how issues of foreign policy might quickly appeal to a Labour prime minister whose opportunities for domestic reform are constrained. Unable, or unwilling, to solve the major problems impacting millions of voters — from housing to eviscerated high streets — an overseas crusade could seduce. At a dangerous moment for Britain and the world, Labour’s next premier sounds suspiciously reminiscent of its last but one. I’d wager Starmer is more likely to lead us into the next pointless war than almost anyone on the Tory benches.
Aaron Bastani is the co-founder of Novara Media, and the author of Fully Automated Luxury Communism.
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SubscribeAll reasonable points, but a couple of things missing:
– Unlike in Blairs and Cameron’s day, Britain need not go to other continents to look for wars. Various European countries are under varying degrees of threat from Russia – and Europe is likely to have to deal with that without relying much on American help.
-It very much remains to be seen how ‘Atlanticist’ and how willing to ‘genuflect to Washington’ Starmer’s Labour will be if Washington is ruled by Orange Man. Genuflect to Trump? Really?
And Trump’s not really an Atlanticist. His vision of America stops at its land borders. He’ll have absolutely no interest in Starmer or Sunak or any likely leader of the tory party.
Don’t be so sure. Trump is a pragmatist. He will leverage use of American military might to protect and enhance Americans interests. In a coming post-UN world, Europe and the UK will need America. Trade deals in exchange for protection.
In 1914 it was the Tory Party, all moral bluster, that was braying for war. Now it’s both the conservatives and the Left.
If the generals want a citizen army they are first going to have to do something about the UK’s 6.3 million people on sickness disability benefit. That not evidence of a nation fit to be mobilised.
Yet it was a LIBERAL government that actually took us to War in 1914.
A national disaster from which we shall probably never recover!
It was during the world wars that the government realised just in what a terrible state the health of the nation was. They went around looking for fit and healthy young men to fight and could barely find any.
People complain about “nanny state” when the government tries to limit Brits’ intake of ultra processed whatever wrapped in ultra processed something else but just wait until daddy state comes looking for fighters…
A few months in boot camp will fix up 90% of ’em.
What measures does he propose to reduce immigration?
The American Empire is unravelling before our eyes.
Britain, as the Empire’s Castrum Atlanticum, will find itself in the position of Cologne in the 5th Century, when no more garrisons could be found.
The choice is simple: get sacked by hordes of barbarians, or else embrace the new religion and swim with the currents of the new global order.
The American Empire will be fine. We are just shifting elites. Same with Europe as it moves right.
Any writer who places the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1960 (when we ended conscription, and which he states happened during the midst of the crisis) deserves nothing but contempt.
It was, of course, 1962.
Clearly, Aaron Bastani hates Starmer (not news, typical leftist infighting). I read this article as being primarily about that and not really about defence at all.
I rather doubt that Starmer and Lammy have done much serious thinking about such matters in any case. Also Starmer’s ability to know what he actually thinks and stick to it. Also Lammy’s to do any serious thinking in the first place. But it could be worse – at least Diane Abbott’s no longer in the mix.
This talk of conscription is just nonsense. Not needed. Not helpful. A properly run professional army is enough. As many have said, we’re world class in army training. We’ve just given up on training enough of our own people. So typical of modern Britain.
I’m afraid the idea that the UK offers ‘world class’ training has been proven to be utter codswallop on the various fronts in Ukraine this summer. If ‘we’ come up against some insurgents it might do at a pinch, but against a peer in an ISR, drone & mine heavy conflict they’ve not got a clue.
Yet more of your usual nonsense. Fact free propaganda. Must do better !
Name me another military college with the reputation of Sandhurst.
Reputation is not performance.
@Peter. There’s this straight from the horses mouths (plenty more if you look). The proof of the pudding though was the failure of the offensives.
https://www.politico.eu/article/ukraine-war-army-nato-trained-them-wrong-fight/
The hubris of the Sandhurst types blandly expecting that their experience in (the not that successful) campaigns in Basra and Helmand would add anything to a force who had been fighting in trenches already for 8 years was staggering. What experience do the British have on clearing mines under fire – or dealing with the fact that the RF can remotely re-lay them all around them whilst they’re at it? How about of being shelled for days on end? There are plenty more aspects of this new epoch of war that ‘we’ simply have no experience of – it’s the Ukrainians who should have been offering the training to us, not the other way round.
Absolutely correct! As an old Cold Warrior, I am very mindful that I was born at the height of it!
Would you die for Keir Starmer? Or for Grant Shapps? Ignore anyone who advocated a military intervention unless you could imagine that person as an 18-year-old in battle. The call for war always comes primarily from the liberal bourgeoisie. That is the class least likely to join the Armed Forces voluntarily, or to see combat even in periods of conscription. Military, especially Army, recruitment depends heavily on the working class, if the people in question could always still be called that.
Are they going to join up to defend the foodbanks, the poor doors, the playgrounds that social housing tenants’ children were not allowed to use, the school menus with items not available to pupils on free meals, and the criminalisation of homelessness to the point of the imprisonment that some people already contrived for themselves every winter because it was warmer than the streets? Either a lot of people escape poverty by joining the Army because they still feel that they have something worth defending, or hardly anyone from Britain joins it at all. Here we are.
No mention of Starmer’s CPS obstructing the Swedish investigators efforts to interview Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy and then deleting the email evidence about it Aaron? Too close to the edge of the Overton Window for you? You know if you mention his name you’re off the Question Time list.
As for those who are fostering the idea that Britain could possibly militarily confront Russia, the Iranians or any of our official enemies they’re way beyond preposterous. We might just about be able to put a Brigade into the field – possibly 20K soldiers – who would last about a week and a half in a conflict like Ukraine. Our military establishment is utterly corrupt – a bunch of revolving-door Humanities Graduate Ruperts who have left us with weapon systems that are simply not fit for purpose. Moving back to a conscript mind-set for our forces is essentially impossible now – the systems are too complex, too expensive, too fragile.
The supposedly incompetent Russians never moved that far away from a doctrine that forsaw the need for ‘Total War’ – their systems were designed for it and they have the industrial and educational base to support it – we don’t have any of those things.
We don’t even have any steel now. This country is a disgrace.
I don’t see how can anyone have a clue about what Starmer would actually do. For that to happen there would need to be some form of plans around a consistent set of policy statements. I won’t be holding my breath.
He’s continuity Sunak, handcuffed by Rachel Reeves’s ‘very serious’ dogmatic national-economy-as-household incompetence and bought-and-paid-for Zionism.
I am not entirely sure of that, but I am happy that he seems to have purged a large portion of the Left of the party.
Purged is an interesting word . I think they are still there ?
Corbyn isn’t, is he?
On retirement PM’s get a lot of money speaking in the USA.
Yes, he’d be the first to back a US military campaign for regime change in Tehran. The poodliest poodle to date.
Somebody keep me right. I sort of see a year or two’s national service as a great idea for the average ‘lad’. Living with other lads, getting physically fit, playing war games, having bed and board provided, learning some useful skills, strutting about in front of the girls, ending up with a hatful of stories to tell for the rest of your life… and getting paid for it. What’s not to like?
Do I hear the voice of Corbyn from the man once dubbed ‘Corbyn’s attack dog’? “Mr Bastani has been at the centre of the alt-left criticism directed at Sir Keir Starmer as he attempts to take the party in a new direction.” (Lee Harpin, Jewish Chronicle, Feb 2021)
Rubbish. Starmer is already a slave to Muslim voters…so expect timidity on the Middle East and weakening of his supportive noises toward Israel. His maddog Corbynistas may be locked up now, but Labour’s aversion to the idea of defending the national interest will stop the necessary boost to our defence budgets and harm the defence export industry. He will be on his knees to the EU of course..until he faces a full right Orbanny Empire…and ditto his Atlanticism when Donald is back in White House. Stop puffing this weathervane weasel up!!! He is a shallow progressive whose commitment to the Flag is as sincere as his commitment to the respect of a British vote.
Very much agree with Bastani’s analysis here. I’m a tory,but those who lament the coming Labour government because they think the bad state of our military can only get worse are wide of the mark.I think Starmer will look after the military far more than any of the disastrous tory PMs of recent years.