Starmer plans to cut services to fund war

... does he just want to hand the country over to Nigel Farage on a silver platter?

Does Keir Starmer have a political suicide wish? Maybe the British Prime Minister secretly wants to hand the country over to Nigel Farage on a silver platter, nicely garnished with his catastrophic failures. It is difficult to know how he’d behave differently if that wasn’t his aim.

According to Bloomberg, the British government is preparing to cut already devastated government departments by up to 11% in order to increase defence spending.

The Treasury, they report, has asked for public services outside of the ringfenced departments - health, education and defence - to model two possible scenarios. One is where the amount of cash they get remains the same in absolute terms, but taking into account inflation, would work out in real terms as a 5% cut. The other scenario is an 11% cut in real terms.

This was supposed to be the worst case scenario, but now Starmer’s determination to hike defence spending reportedly means many government departments could soon discover that’s the looming outcome.

Indeed, the Times newspaper - the favoured newspaper for Labour officials to brief against each other - reported this Saturday that Starmer was determined to overrule his Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, on British defence spending after the Munich security summit, with Donald Trump determined to strike a peace deal with Russia which, in practise, would hand Vladimir Putin a victory in its invasion of Ukraine.

The Labour manifesto had set out a commitment for defence spending to reach 2.5% of gross domestic product (that is, the overall size of the British economy).

But the embattled Reeves had set out spending plans for defence spending to reach 2.3% this year instead. This doesn’t sound like a big difference, but in spending terms, it means billions. Indeed British army officers are reported to be pushing for even higher - 2.65% - which would mean an additional £10bn. And bear in mind that when Labour won the election, they managed to suck demand out of the economy by catastrophising about a £20bn “black hole” in the nation’s finances they had supposedly found.

The Times piece makes it clear that Keir Starmer’s people are briefing against his Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, describing it as a “shot across the chancellor’s bows”

This may be part of Starmer’s attempt to reassert his authority after his own advisors briefed two other Times journalists for their new book, Get In: the Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer, that he’s not really in charge, that he’s a yes-man for those advisors, who say they’ve convinced him he’s driving the train when in fact they’ve sat him at the front of the driverless Docklands Light Railway. It is striking how Labour’s team are viciously briefing against each other just months after an election.

Other sums being thrown around involve raising taxes by an additional £12 billion to boost defence spending. I am all for raising taxes on well-off Britons and big business to fund, say, nurses, doctors, hospitals, teachers, schools, good public transport. But Labour ruled out those sorts of tax rises, and in any case, I don’t want to hike taxes to splash out on weapons to slaughter people.

Before I discuss Starmer’s other proposal for Ukraine, it’s just worth digesting this for a moment. Our public services have been devastated by years of austerity, of cuts, of underfunding, of understaffing, of under-resourcing. There is a widespread sense in Britain of this country not really working anymore, and those cuts have so much to do with that.

The resulting malaise and hardship had so much to do with why Brexit happened - indeed, one detailed academic study set out how there was a strong link between an area’s exposure to austerity and whether it voted for Leave in the 2016 referendum.

That dissatisfaction has helped drive the rise of Nigel Farage and Reform, and general political disquiet and polarisation in this country.

Further cutting back on services will have a devastating impact on our social fabric, on living standards - we’ve already had the longest squeeze in workers’ wages since the Napoleonic Age. It will hit the vulnerable hard, as well as those who get by but for whom life can often be a struggle.

And it will damage the economy by sucking out demand and investment - and given the government keeps talking about growth, that once again trashes what they say is their only real purpose in government now, which is unfortunate because their self-defeating post-election doom-and-gloom rhetoric and their policies have already sucked growth out of the economy.

The idea that we should cut public services to take part in an arms race - that is, guns rather than butter - is morally bankrupt. This is all based on a fiction, because if we’re going to end up at war with Russia, do people think it will be soldiers fighting a conventional war with conventional weapons, and it depends on how many soldiers and tanks and drones and hi-tech weapons each side possesses?

No, it will be likely nuclear armageddon. Personally I’m on Team ‘Human Civilisation Continuing’. Call me a utopian, but scrabbling around in nuclear irradiated rubble wishing I had been wiped out by the initial blast doesn’t hugely appeal. For a start, I haven’t got round to watching the latest season of White Lotus yet.

That isn’t by the way to dismiss the fact that Putin’s regine is a brutal authoritarian autocracy which launched a completely unjustifiable vicious war of aggression against Ukraine. It’s also, alas, true that what we call the Western bloc - after having colonised most of the world, enslaved and subjugated its people, stolen its resources, then rigged the world economy in its favour - has itself launched wars of aggression - for example, Iraq - unleashed violent chaos - for example, Libya - committed multiple war crimes - for example, Afghanistan - and now is arming and facilitating genocide - in Palestine, as well as Israel’s vicious wars, for example in Lebanon.

Do you know what: we don’t actually have to pick a side here! We can regard the elites of these great powers with contempt and desire the removal of the lot, and we can believe they are all drenched in the blood of innocent men, women and children.

Now I understand we are supposed to state a preference for the West because domestically it has supposed democratic norms, whereas Russia does not.

Well, what we call Western democracy is in aggressive retreat. The European Union counts Hungary as a member state, that’s not a democracy, the far right is on the rise across Europe, and that’s without mentioning the rise of right wing authoritarianism in the US. This argument is going to lose its salience in the coming years.

In any case, this isn’t relevant to how these states project their power. When a Palestinian child is blown apart by a bomb manufactured in the US, or dropped from a F35 jet whose key components are supplied by the UK, is that killing morally superior because the child’s killers have competitive elections?

There’s more. Starmer has publicly declared that he is prepared to send British troops - that is other people’s children - to Ukraine, even as he acknowledges that could put those troops “in harm’s way” if the war resumes.

Unfortunately this posturing has swiftly backfired because Olaf Scholz, the chancellor of Germany, said the suggestion was “completely premature”, “highly inappropriate” and that he was a “little irritated.”

Meanwhile Jose Manuel Albares, the foreign minister of Spain, said:

Nobody is currently considering sending troops to Ukraine. Peace is still very far away, and for one reason only – Vladimir Putin.” He added that decisions would “have to consider for what mission, who will comprise it, under what flag, with what mandate”.

This really is amateur hour from Starmer, whose whole ethos was “I’m the grownup in the room”. To just unilaterally throw out such a consequential proposal without discussing it first with the other countries who would need to supply troops for such a force is, frankly, shambolic behaviour.

Which brings us to what’s really happening here. I don’t actually think what’s making Starmer tick here is primarily about Ukraine. Starmer’s personal ratings are catastrophic. No prime minister in recorded polling history has had their support collapse so swiftly.

Keir Starmer and his aides clearly think that the way to turn that around is the threat of war, sprinkling some Churchillian dust on him, making him look like a statesman.

Well, there is far too much at stake to indulge the desperate posturing of a failing leader.

There are those who blindly cheer on deploying British troops in war zones, hoping we’ll just erase Iraq and Afghanistan as though neither happened. Well, some of us have memories rather longer than last week.

We live in a world, alas, dominated by bloodstained warmongers who have unleashed so much suffering and chaos. Some have spilled so much Ukrainian blood, some have spilled so much Arab blood - and some of us believe that spilled civilian blood is of equal weight.

We should reject slashing spending on our already decimated public services in the service of war, and we should reject once again sending British troops to potential catastrophe.

And to those who smear us as a result: We were right about Afghanistan. We were right about Iraq. We were right about Libya. We are not going to be browbeat into yet more disasters - this time with the very future of human civilisation at stake.