Labour is cosying up to the global far right figurehead
Keir Starmer and David Lammy are cosying up to Donald Trump to keep in with US imperialism (Picture: Keir Starmer on Flickr)
By Tomáš Tengely-Evans
Wednesday 06 November 2024
SOCIALIST WORKER Issue
Labour prime minister Keir Starmer and foreign secretary David Lammy fell over themselves to congratulate Donald Trump on Wednesday.
Starmer congratulated Trump on an “historic election victory”—and said he was looking forward to working with the president-elect in the coming years. “As the closest of allies, we stand shoulder to shoulder in defence of our shared values of freedom, democracy and enterprise,” he said.
Lammy posted on X, “Congratulations to Donald Trump on your victory. The UK has no greater friend than the US, with the special relationship being cherished on both sides of the Atlantic for more than 80 years.
“We look forward to working with you and JD Vance in the years ahead.”
Number 10 briefed journalists that Starmer would welcome Trump visit to Britain.
Lammy has previously praised vice president-elect JD Vance. “We share a similar working class background with addiction issues—and we’re both Christian,” he said in the summer.
Those remarks came just after far right Vance said Britain could be “the first truly Islamist country that will get nuclear weapons”.
When Lammy was trying to get on under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, he knew how to make the right noises to appeal to grassroots members. He had called Trump a “neo-Nazi sympathising sociopath” and “a tyrant in a toupee”.
What’s behind Starmer, Lammy and Labour cosying up to Trump, a figurehead for the global far right?
It stems from the Labour Party’s commitment to the British state—and its role as a junior partner to the US since the end of the Second World War.
The right and left of the Labour Party is committed to “Labourism”, the idea that what happens in parliament is most important to winning changes rather than working class struggles.
While the party may articulate working class people’s aspirations, it aims to take the reins of the British state and rule in the “national interest”. There is no such thing as a national interest between bankers, bosses, landlords and working class people.
But if you want to deliver reforms through the capitalist state, you have to prove that you’re a “responsible” manager of the system. It’s the politics of “nation” over class, which infects that Labourite tradition and trade union bureaucracy.
This means cosying up to the British state and bosses’ interests—and to the US.
It’s why Labour backs Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. It’s why the Labour Party has always supported Zionism even before Israel’s creation in 1948, in the hope that it would be an outpost in the Middle East.
And it’s why Lammy shook hands with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, giving Israel the green light to escalate its slaughter in Gaza.
As Lammy said, “The truth of our relationship is that it is a special relationship. We saw how special it was over the skies of Israel and Jordan where our militaries came together to stop those missiles falling on those two countries.”
What Lammy refers to was dangerous escalation in the Middle East between Israel and Iran, not some finest hour. And, more to the point, why does the US have a base in Jordan? Why does Britain have bases in Cyprus which allow it to fly missions over the Middle East?
Lammy’s only worry is that Trump wants too much of a “go it alone” strategy, which focuses on China at the expense of the Middle East and Ukraine.
But he’s hopeful that, by sucking up to the far right bigot, he can influence him. “There is a lot of rhetoric from Trump, but look at the action,” he says. “He was the first to give javelin missiles to Ukraine after 2015. He talked about withdrawing from Nato, but he actually increased troops to Nato.
“In a grown up world, in the national interests of this country, we will work as closely with him as we can and we will seek to influence him where we disagree.”
That’s what Labour’s grown up politics means—slaughter abroad and making working class people pay for it at home.
Let’s build working class struggles and the Palestine and anti-war movements where our strength lies—we can expect more war from Labour.
Labour’s special relationship with the US
Here are just a few examples of Labour governments backing murder for the sake of the “special relationship” with the US:
1949: The Labour government allows the US to set up permanent military bases in Britain and was key in setting up the warmongers’ alliance Nato.
1950: The Labour government sends British troops to fight in Korea, a proxy war between US imperialism and Russian imperialism.
Over 1,000 British soldiers—and three million Koreans—died. As the historian John Newsinger writes, “The only reason for this military commitment was to maintain the ‘special relationship’ with the US.”
1951: US Democratic president Harry Truman and Clement Attlee’s Labour government overthrow the democratically-elected Iranian government. The CIA and MI5 toppled the liberal Mohammed Mosaddeq, who’d nationalised British oil interests, and installed the Shah as an absolute monarch.
1964-70: There’s a myth that Harold Wilson, the then Labour prime minister, is the “man who kept us out of Vietnam”.
The Labour government didn’t send troops to Vietnam. But that was only due to the strength of the left and the Vietnam solidarity movement in Britain, which mobilised mass demonstrations in 1968.
Wilson said as much to US president Lyndon B Johnson in a telegram in 1967. “I would like you to understand our political situation here,” he said. “For two years, whether with a majority of three or a majority of a hundred, I have been able to hold my party.
“On the Thursday before (Soviet premier) Alexei Kosygin’s visit I had a hostile vote of 68 on a resolution specifically demanding that Her Majesty’s Government should associate itself with (a UN) appeal to you to stop the bombing unconditionally.
“The vote would have been much larger if I had not made a short personal appeal not to rock the boat.”
1999: In the 1990s the West intervened in the bloody civil wars in the former Yugoslavia.
Nato—led by Labour’s Tony Blair—launched a vicious bombing campaign lasting 78 days against Serbia.
General Joseph W Ralston, vice chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, was pleased with the policy. He said in September 1999, “Despite the weight of bombs dropped, Serbian civilian casualties were amazingly light, estimated at less than 1,500 dead.”
2001: The US’s real chance to assert its might came after the terror attacks of 9/11, when the US, Britain and Nato launched an invasion of Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban.
After 20 years, at least a quarter of a million killings and trillions of pounds spent on military assaults, the Taliban overthrew the Western-backed government.
2003: Tony Blair lied to make sure Britain joined the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 that murdered over a million people.
The Western invasion was an attempt by the US to send a signal to rival powers, such as China, that it was still top dog in the world.
Iraq was the only time a substantial number of Labour MPs rebelled against war—138 voted to delay the invasion, 84 voted against war.
Once again, that was due to the mass movement against the war organised through the Stop The War Coalition.
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