In February of this year ‘Labour Affairs’ pointed out that the Labour Party has historically been an imperialist party and continues to be so. Britain no longer has an empire but its political elite feel in their bones that they are heirs to an imperial tradition and need to go on acting as if the UK continues to be an imperial power. Labour, Liberals, Tories all share an imperial reflex so British foreign policy has a large degree of continuity. These days British imperialism takes the form of acting as a minor assistant and cheerleader for the Americans, who have a project of planetary domination, which involves in the long term the crushing of two powerful states, the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China. 

The British public tends to go along with the political elite’s imperialism because it belongs to its own residual imperial reflexes, but largely in a passive way. There are costs but they are largely hidden in increased taxation, poorer public services and higher energy bills. Moralising warmongering propaganda can temporarily arouse the public to a degree of virtue signalling such as flying the flag of the Banderite Ukrainian regime at the outset of the war in Ukraine in 2022. The big exceptions to this are the outbreaks of popular feeling against the Anglo-American aggression in Iraq in 2003 and support for the Israeli genocide that has been going on for the past year. In neither case has the government paid much attention to popular feeling as it did not correspond to their imperialist agenda.

Since Britain does not suffer the obvious consequences of war, such as large numbers of body bags, publicly grieving relatives or destroyed buildings, let alone invasion and plunder of the homeland, imperialism seems like an affordable luxury. Successive warmongering governments have taken pains never to describe the dangers of enemy action on British territory and this has not been difficult since those dangers have, until now, been remote. However, Britain’s participation in the war against Russia in Ukraine may change that. The war in Ukraine has since 2022 been a proxy war, the Ukrainians providing the bulk of the cannon fodder and the US and other European countries contributing special forces, technical support and weaponry. Apart from the Morning Star, all the British press has been united in advocating an even more aggressive stance against Russia. 

Britain is also active in promoting a warlike attitude in Europe. Ever since Johnson sabotaged the promising Turkish sponsored peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine in March 2022 Britain has been pushing Europe for ever greater escalation. With Europe having no coherent policy that reflects its own interests, British warmongering has found its most willing allies in the Baltic states – states that it must be remembered were admitted to the EU mainly through British influence – together with the self-proclaimed formulator of EU foreign policy, Ursula Von Der Layen. The result is a dangerous mixture of nationally ingrained Russophobia and a powerful bureaucratic figure who is permitted to strut the European stage unfettered by any political accountability. There is currently no capacity among the governing circles in Europe to counter this drift towards war – a drift that is being propelled primarily by Britain. And surveying the prevailing political movement outside of those governing circles what is becoming increasingly obvious is that the main possibility for countering this drift is coming from what is described by mainstream media as the ‘far right’, an epithet that includes left wing parties such as Germany’s BSW. With war being the biggest danger to the working class of Europe the task that the left needs to set itself is how to ensure that such an outcome is best avoided. The public mood in the large European countries, particularly Germany, seems to be shifting towards a desire for peace. Unfortunately, in Britain there is very little sign of such a move.

With the failure of the proxy war, the US and its vassals have become increasingly desperate to find an approach that will delay the inevitable defeat of their Ukrainian proxies. The latest scheme is to fire British and French missiles deep into Russia. This can only be done with American technical assistance. The Russian government has made it clear that any such action will be regarded as an act of war by the US and the UK and that they feel entitled to take an appropriate response should such an action take place. Keir Starmer and David Lammy (our chief diplomat) have been lobbying the Americans hard for authorisation for British Storm Shadow missiles to be fired into Russia with American assistance. For them peace negotiations and an end to the slaughter or Ukrainians is an irritation which is denounced as appeasement. Only one party in the UK, the Worker’s Party of Britain, has come out unequivocally against Britain taking part in the aggression against Russia.

The British government is thus engaged in a campaign to involve the UK in a war against Russia. The bulk of the British public are only dimly aware of this and, if they are, they can take assurance in the claims of the media that the Russians are bluffing and that attacks on Russia will be free of consequences. The Russian Federation regards the NATO encroachment on Ukraine as an existential issue for its national security. The Russians have ample experience of the devastating effects of war on their own land and people and do not wish to experience them again. But they also know that to avoid repeating such a fate, they must be ready to take warlike measures to deter aggressors. Furthermore, the distributed nature of the assets of the imperial power and its vassals gives them plenty of targets and the Russians have, in some respects, far more advanced weaponry than anything possessed by the Americans and their allies, particularly in missile technology. They have plenty of options short of nuclear weapons, for hurting American or British interests, either in their homelands or in their bases abroad. The UK by contrast is a negligible military power, a chihuahua amongst Alsatians. A quite unjustified sense of impunity has led to a reckless policy of aggression against Russia, a country that does not threaten our interests in the least if it is left to mind its own affairs without outside interference. 

The British people are unaware of the mortal danger into which they may be slipping should these two get their way. Starmer and Lammy are keen not to spell out the possible consequences of their actions to the British public. Britain needs to wake up and appreciate that attacks on British bases abroad or even British assets in the British Isles are a possible initial consequence of such a reckless foreign policy. Ultimately annihilation may be Britain’s fate if Starmer and Lammy get their way.