UK Vassal state to the US or European partner?

FEBRUARY 28, 2025

Dave Levy ponders the bleak choices facing the Starmer Government.

The Trump administration’s proposals that the USA and Russia make peace in Ukraine without Ukraine being present at the table and mandating European NATO to provide peacekeeping forces are a return to great power politics unrestrained by the rule of law.

Left wing fools who consider Putin’s Russia to be the successor of the socialist Soviet Union must be very happy.

This attack on the EU was reinforced by the Vice President, J D Vance’s speech to the Munich security conference, where he criticised the EU and member state governments for suppressing free speech, failing to halt illegal migration and running in fear from voters’ true beliefs. He refused to meet the German Chancellor and yet met with the leader of the far right AfD (Alternative for Germany).

We all know his arguments on free speech are partisan; they want American rich people’s voices to be heard and amplified by privately-owned social media companies and fear Europe’s regulation of them based on a demand for truth. We also note the hypocrisy of the US ‘free speech’ advocates’ attacks on ideas, books and teachers in schools, universities and libraries in the US. His comments on not relying on foreign technology providers by which he meant China, may come to haunt him as Europe examines its supply chains on the basis of national security grounds.  

Trump’s call for European NATO to increase their defence budgets to 5% of GDP is a naked attempt to build budgets for the US arms industry, just as the UK’s requests to have a side treaty on defence and security with the EU is also at least partially based on the economic interests of BAe.

Trump’s arguments about what does his money, that is, the arms shipments to Ukraine, buy, has a moral vacancy but it is clear that the view that ‘the business of America is business’ has returned to the White House. The crudity with which Trump pursues his views of US fiscal and commercial interests is echoed by the UK Labour Government in positioning its ‘EU reset’,  arguing for changes in agreements which only benefit Britian from their limited, primarily electoral, point of view. 

The choices facing the Starmer administration are bleak. Starmer has promised to send British soldiers to Ukraine although this promise was made before the threat of US withdrawal from NATO had been made. Starmer seems to be seeking to avoid Trump’s tariff increases but on defence the choice is stark. The UK can either continue to act as a vassal state of the United States and as their unsinkable aircraft carrier, or develop more effective partnerships with the European Union. It should be noted that Vance has questioned the need for NATO joint command.

Starmer’s ambition on EU cooperation is limited. Many have argued that the UK should use the withdrawal agreement review clauses to re-enter the customs union and the single market. The suspicion is that the single market is a step too far because of the latter’s requirements for a free movement of labour and Labour’s fear of the Tories and Reform UK.

Today’s military questions and the need for ‘security of supply’ strongly imply that the UK should join the European Space Agency and possibly the European Defence Agency. The proposed military and security side treaty is looking less and less attractive to both sides. 

In order to protect our democracy against the attacks from US social media companies and US-owned AI search engines, the UK needs the umbrella of the EU’s competition and digital regulators. This means membership of the single market. At what point do we say: we need our MEPs, Judges, Commissioners and Council seats back – or will we just be rejoining the EU one agency at a time?

Dave Levy is a member of Lewisham North CLP and blogs at https://davelevy.info/blog. He is a member of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy National Committee.

Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/number10gov/54355300993/. Creator: Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing Str | Credit: Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing Str Copyright: Crown copyright. Licensed under the Open Government Licence Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Deed