Penge, Paris, and Southport were linked by recent hostile Russian actions. A Russian criminal cyberattack badly disrupted blood services in Penge and south east London. It is likely, though unconfirmed, that Russian saboteurs or proxies attacked railways to disrupt the Paris Olympics. Russian bots and state backed media certainly amplified fake news that the far right exploited to exacerbate tensions in Southport and beyond following the terrible killing of three children.
These incidents along with attempted and actual assassinations on European soil, and provocative air and submarine activity remind us, we who are lucky enough to be far from the front in Ukraine, that the Russian regime is in conflict with us.
Russia is also part of a “deadly quartet” with common interests. China supplies the Russian war machine in Ukraine as does Iran and North Korea. China also snaps up oil at knock-down prices from Russia and Iran that would otherwise be stranded due to sanctions.
Our government’s Strategic Defence Review will analyse such threats and outline a NATO-first defence strategy under the leadership of Labour veteran, George Robertson, a former UK Defence Minister and NATO Secretary-General. External threats deserve the raw honesty that Wes Streeting applies to the NHS.
Leaders in Russia regard the freedom gained by colonised and oppressed territories after the collapse of the USSR as a humiliating loss. They now want to rectify this by seizing territory from their neighbours. But Russia has so far been deterred from crossing the borders into NATO countries. Article 5 of the NATO treaty says an armed attack against one or more members shall be considered an attack against all and that members will take “…such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.” That requires collective firmness.
My fear almost a decade ago was that a Corbyn government would bottle collective self-defence if Estonia, for instance, were attacked. The Corbyn team opposed sending British troops to Estonia until it was forced to cede defence policy to moderates in the shadow cabinet.
Corbyn’s comical response to Putin’s use of a chemical weapon in Salisbury in 2018 was that the UK government should ask Russia to check if the Novichok was theirs. At a stroke, Labour lost the 2019 election. Labour won the last election by destroying such nonsense and we nearly won Salisbury.
Our fear now should be Trump. If Article 5 is found wanting, NATO would be a lame duck. The most likely scenario where it is found wanting is if he US ceases to believe in it. We would lose the main means of our defence and become vulnerable to a war machine that has tied aggression to its own domestic survival and with ambitions in as far as Poland, certainly including the Baltics, Balkans and Caucuses.
Ukraine is not in NATO, as the Ukrainian’s themselves are most painfully aware. But there is no better way of discouraging the testing of article 5 than beating the Russians in a non-NATO country. Ukraine must prevail by, for instance, taking its fight to military bases and airfields within Russia with weapons supplied by the UK and others. Defeat for our ally could have calamitous consequences for all.
We need more active solidarity with Ukraine and a weightier debate on foreign and security policy. Sadly, there is timeless power in the insight from WB Yeats’ poem that “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
Our politics is tainted by the latter. It stalked the general election where we lost Thangam Debonnaire to a candidate whose campaign accused her of opposing a ceasefire in the Middle East. In fact, she’d opposed a scrappy motion that didn’t mention the Hamas massacre and then voted twice for wiser Labour motions for a ceasefire as the conflict between Israel and Hamas changed. She was not the only shadow cabinet member to suffer this or a similar experience and this is not a trivial thing.
The systematic intimidation of candidates in some constituencies is alarming and the subject of a rapid review by the Home Secretary. The safety of public representatives is paramount. It would also be retrograde if politics becomes based more on religious than class interests. Many decades ago, Protestant political parties in Liverpool and Glasgow drove sectarianism until Labour overcame it.
Palestinians and Israelis certainly deserve better than this heat and hate. One day, I hope, those concerned about them could proudly wear a badge comprising Palestinian and Israeli flags to support a sustainable two-state solution. Grassroots peacebuilders in Gaza and Israel are also heroes who deserve more attention and support.
Labour can expect juvenile sloganising from our enemies and needs a cordon sanitaire between us and groups such as the Stop the War Coalition and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.
The raw and honest truth is that the dangerous international situation requires deterrence, increased defence spending, and a national and European defence industrial base that can produce the munitions needed as more and more senior voices warn of impending war with Russia.
We are not alone in our unpreparedness. A bipartisan American Commission on the National Defence Strategy cites the “ongoing and persistent” nature of Russian hazards in space and cyber and fears that Moscow-aligned hackers could sow chaos should war break out.
It’s unclear what may happen next in Venezuela about which erstwhile leftist apologists have gone quiet. Or how Iran responds to the killing of the Hamas leader in Tehran. And that’s without any October surprise before the US general election and the impact of any Trump victory. We should prepare for all eventualities.
Elon Musk’s preposterous comments are annoying but more importantly we see how the open sewers of social media disease debate and ramp up anti-Muslim prejudice. They also enable hostile powers to divide us and, if it goes on, deter external investment.
Josh Simons MP advocates a functioning disinformation unit that can detect in real time artificial spikes where misinformation is spreading rapidly online, alerting the relevant authorities before online hate becomes physical violence.
Wider foreign and security policy requires a better-informed ecosystem of Labour organisations and thinkers who defy trite slogans and lies, develop thinking, and defend our government when the going gets tough. We need to reduce domestic chaos and division to achieve the modern equivalents of establishing the NHS and NATO in the 1940s for our common security at home and abroad.
For more on foreign affairs and their relationship to the domestic, this time with a focus on the U.S presidential election see: To Win, Harris Will Need to Follow Starmer’s Example
