Chatting to some stall holders at the Brent Green Day at the Kiln Theatre about how the vibe inside it, quiet, prosperous, with a clientelle that is evidently well to do – drifting over from various manifestations of Hampstead perhaps – is such a striking contrast to the hard bitten, impoverished, tough dramas of everyday life on the streets outside. The Kiln puts on a lot of challenging drama, addressing some of those issues, but rarely engaging with the people they affect, in a sort of performative bubble, it seems to me.
Outside Tescos a woman sits on her knees begging. A bearded, slightly wild eyed, man marches past and snarls “Why don’t you get up off your arse and get a job? How about that?” He marches on feeling better about himself no doubt. The woman just stares.
Further up, outside a pawnbrokers, a ragged looking bloke with wild looking hair and some missing teeth sits astride a Lime bike waiting for something and mutters at me as I walk past. I ask him what he said and he repeats “Do you buy gold?” I am wearing a preoccupied expression, a crumpled shirt, with at least one curry stain, and carrying an overfull rusksack and Morrisons plastic bag. I’m not my idea of a gold dealer. Deep cover perhaps? Or perhaps a different sort of “gold”?
When shameless Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu calls the UK government’s block on just 30 of 350 arms export licences to Israel a “shameful decision”, he is speaking as a man indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court and corruption, including including breach of trust, accepting bribes, and fraud, in Israel’s own courts. Watching him its hard to imagine that he has any self awareness at all.
He also seems incapable of grasping that his description of Hamas, as “a genocidal terrorist organization that savagely murdered 1200 people on October 7”, begs the question of how anyone objective would define his own armed forces; who have killed 40 times as many people since. A lot of weight is being put on the adverbs and adjectives in this description. Are those 40,000 deaths not murders? Are the killings not savage? Are the people of Gaza not being terrorised? Is this not genocidal? The International Criminal Court has made an interim ruling saying that it is.
The comment on this limited ban below by UK Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis (in italics) is similarly morally compromised; which is shown when you consider the situation in the round (not in italics).
“It beggars belief that the British government, a close strategic ally of Israel, has announced a partial suspension of arms licences, at a time when Israel is fighting a war for its very survival on seven fronts. The “war for its very survival” takes the form of a massacre in Gaza courtesy of US arms supplies and diplomatic backing, escalating ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, and a nervous stand off in the North with Hezbollah. Any other “fronts”, like the Red Sea, Eastern Med or Persian Gulf are being covered by gigantic US aircraft carrier task forces; with a few Royal Navy frigates to show willing.
But clearly, for Sir Ephraim, the over 40,000 people killed by the IDF in the Gaza strip since October 7th and the further 502 in the West Bank are not enough. Many more have to die to ensure Israel’s survival as an apartheid state. For Mirvis, because Israel is a “strategic ally”, we should be prepared to turn a blind eye to what it is doing and keep passing it the ammunition so it can keep doing it. The UK complicity here is its usual auxiliary effort to the main supply from the United States, which is rushing just under two arms shipments a day; which it would not be doing if it didn’t think doing so was in its own interests.
And that means that all too often the game that is played in the media is to treat Israeli victims as rounded human beings deserving of sympathy and identification, while Palestinian victims are just statistics. Because large numbers tend to blur in the mind, it might bring the reality home more to condiers just the casualties of the Israeli assault in the last three days.
On 1 September, 11 Palestinians were killed and tens of others injured when Safad school hosting Internally Displaced Persons was hit in Az Zaitoun neighbourhood, east of Gaza city.
On 29 August, nine Palestinians, including three children (of whom two were newborn), and two women (of whom one was pregnant), were killed when the upper floor of a residential tower was hit in western An Nuseirat Refugee Camp, in Deir al Balah.
On 29 August, five Palestinians were killed and at least 13 others injured in Deir al Balah.
On 29 August, five Palestinians were killed and others injured when internally displaced people’s (IDP) tents were hit in Wadi Saber area, east Khan Younis.
On 31 August, seven Palestinians from the same family were killed when a house was hit in As Sabra neighbourhood in Gaza city.
On 31 August, five Palestinians, including three females and a doctor, were killed when a house was hit in southern Khan Younis.
On 31 August, five Palestinians, including four females, were killed and 15 others injured when a house was hit in southern Khan Younis.
Mirvis goes on that such action has been forced upon it (Israel) on the 7th October, as if the genocidal scale of the reaction is not Israel’s responsibility and without reflecting that,
before Oct 7th, 20 Palestinians were being killed in the conflict for every Israeli
and the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank was proceeding slowly but surely in the face of world indifference.
This is odd because he is very well aware of the latter, having taken part in National Day demonstrations in East Jerusalem in which settlers march through Palestinian Streets while chanting “death to Arabs” and “may your villages burn”.
He emphasises that this is “at the very moment when six hostages murdered in cold blood by cruel terrorists were being buried by their families” – without reflecting that had Netanyahu not sabotaged the recent ceasefire deal those hostages would probably still be alive. This has not gone unnoticed in Israel itself, leading to a General Strike and furious demonstrations last Monday.
He also does not mention the 184 Palestinians killed over the weekend by the IDF. Does he think those 184 people were not killed in cold blood? Or that their killers were kind? And consider the numbers. 184 to 6. Thirty one times as many people. Nearly three Grenfells. Half a primary school full.
That ratio of 31 deaths to 1 indicates how little these lives weigh in the balance. Their names will not be published. Nor will their pictures. Their relatives will not be interviewed. Their stories will barely be acknowledged. So, Sir Ephraim can look, and not see. Truly eyeless in Gaza.
On the same page, on the same day, as part of his pitch for the Conservative leadership, Tom Tugendhat called for the UK to be “willing to stand by our allies” (Israel) by continuing to supply it with arms as it, according to Acting Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, Joyce Msuya, creates a “situation in Gaza that is beyond desperate… Civilians are hungry. They are thirsty. They are sick. They are homeless. They have been pushed beyond the limits of endurance – beyond what any human being should bear,” including
Severe overcrowding, coupled with the lack of clean water, sanitation facilities and basic hygiene items like soap, which is taking a heavy toll on children, with skin infections continuing to increase among them. As of 30 June, WHO had already recorded 103,385 cases of scabies and lice, 65,368 cases of skin rashes and 11,214 cases of chickenpox in the Strip.
With MSF support, the Palestinian Agricultural Development Association (PARC) has been providing emergency latrines, solar water pumps and basic health care to some of the displaced people arriving in the Al Mawasi area of Khan Younis. “Every day, we see between 300 to 400 people at the medical clinic, of which 200 cases are related to skin conditions,” explained PARC pediatrician Dr. Youssef Salaf Al-Farra, underscoring that children are the most affected by highly contagious skin conditions.
MSF claims that, for three months, it has been trying to import 4,000 hygiene kits, comprising items such as soap, toothbrushes, shampoo and laundry power, to improve living conditions in Khan Younis, but the importation has not been allowed by Israeli authorities (my emphasis).
As Tugendhat puts it, if you can’t “stand by an ally” at times like this when it is busily reducing children to misery, “what is the point of an alliance?” So true. Because in an alliance, what “our” allies do gets brushed under the carpet, understated, justified, euphemised out of existence.
UK defence secretary, John Healey’s comment that that Britain remained “a staunch ally” of Israel and that the ban on just 30 liscences out of 350 would not “have a material impact on Israel’s security” shows that he hopes this level of gesture will be enough to defuse the pressure of the solidarity movement on the government, while it continues to “stand by an ally” no matter what it does. It won’t be. Israel reacts so aggresively to these gestures not because they undermine its practical capacity to keep killing on a mass scale, but because they undermine its perceived legitimacy in doing so. When even “unshakable” allies like the UK feel compelled to take even a symbolic distance, the ground is moving under its feet.
The arrest of Medhurst – who was held for 24 hours – was under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act 2000 which makes expressing an opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organisation an offence punishable by up to 14 years in prison. This means that it doesn’t matter what is true. In a conflict in which
our government defines one side as “terrorist” and the other side as a “democracy with a right to defend itself”
and a context in which it is increasingly normative to describe inconvenient facts as ideologically driven opinions
reporting on facts that put that ally in a bad light can be framed as being supportive of a proscribed organisationespecially if they are true. I must admit a certain trepidation in writing this, in case 16 counter-terrorism officers in balaclavas descend my home at 7.30 in the morning, and sieze this laptop and my phone for “content posted online” like they did to Helen Wilkinson.
At the same time, the police look as though they are angling for a confrontation at Saturday’s first mass solidarity demonstration of the Autumn by putting such restrictions on its assembly point and timing that will give them many excuses to make arrests, no matter how peaceful the demonstrators are.
The statement condemning this has so far been signed by
In response to the 10% hike in energy prices this winter, the media last Friday was graced by two stunningly misleading statements, by Claire Coutinho and Ed Miliband, one after the other.
Claire Coutinho, said that cheap, non-renewable energy should be prioritised over carbon reduction targets to help struggling families this winter. This is the truth turned upside down and inside out.
To start with, perhaps Coutinho hasn’t noticed that the increase in energy prices this winter is being caused by increases in the prices of oil and gas. These are “non renewable” not cheap, and getting more expensive. Ceratinly more expensive than renewable sources.
Moreover, Eco experts reports that the IEA reported that in 2023, an estimated 96% of newly installed, utility-scale solar PV and onshore wind capacity had lower generation costs than new coal and natural gas and three-quarters of these new wind and solar PV plants offered cheaper power than existing fossil fuel facilities.
And renewables are becoming cheaper, while fossil fuels are becoming more expensive. Very profitable for that reason, however. Which is why Coutinho – formerly a senior fellow at fossil fuel funded right wing think tank Policy Exchange – wants to promote them.
So, doing what Countinho wants would increase bills, not reduce them and force struggling families to struggle even more. She either doesn’t know this, and is just a fool, or she does, and is cynically carrying on the Great Conservative Johnsonian tradition of bare faced lying, in the hope that if she brasses it out with enough self confidence no one will point out that she is speaking gibberish.
In an attempt not to be outdone, after rightly saying that this increase is partly a result of the Tory failure to invest sufficiently in renewables – assessed by Carbon Brief as now costing the average household around £40 to £60 a year – Ed Miliband went on to say that the prices are also going up because the UK is at the mercy of international markets controlled by dictators.
This trips off the tongue as one of those off the peg soundbites that requires no thought at all, and slides effortlessly along the the simplistic Foreign Policy groove shared by both front benches, and in so doing hides the fact that the increase in both oil and gas prices is caused by wars driven by Western allies; as it is designed to do.
the increase in oil prices is caused by fears of wider war in West Asia caused by Israel’s assassination of the top Hamas negotiator in Iran and several Hezbollah commanders in Lebanon; which at the very least sabotages ceasefire negotiations for Gaza, and at the most, could lead to a war across West Asian as the “democratic” far right government in Israel seeks to carry out the Samson doctrine on an apocalyptic scale. It pretty much an iron law that when US aircraft carrier task forces mass in the Eastern Med’ and Persian Gulf, oil prices go up in case there’s trouble ahead.
the price of gas started rising again this year because NATO is sustaining the Ukraine war instead of looking for a negotiated peace, and given an extra boost when the Ukrainian armed forces launched their reckless and doomed offensive into the Kursk region of Russia, further threatening gas supply. As the Financial Times put it The latest increase in the price cap is also connected to the war in Ukraine, with wholesale prices climbing over the past few months because of uncertainty over Russia’s remaining gas supplies to Europe. My emphasis.
The top suppliers of imported gas to the UK are Norway (by pipeline) and the USA (very expensive LNG, much of it fracked which has a carbon footprint as bad as coal).
My Dad was in the Air Training Corps towards the end of WW2 and for several years afterwards. It used to meet in the Main Hall at Grays Tech (now the Hathaway Academy) – where I was to stand through many an Assembly 20 years after.
The high point of being in the ATC, literally, was to get flight experience, usually in a Lancaster (painted white). The best of these was a trip in the ball turrent on the spine of the plane at the top. Some of these flights involved dogfight simulation, where a Spitfire or Mustang fighter would suddenly appear and act out an attack, so the bomber pilot would have to take evasive action, involving yawing, rolling and corkscrewing in a manner guaranteed to give everyone on board acute airsickness. My Dad felt he was very lucky to have avoided one of those.
In 1947, someone higher up in the RAF thought it would be a good idea to send keen cadets from the ATC to have a look at some of the places the RAF was based overseas. A brasshat came down and interviewed my dad and his cousin Len and, a little later sent a message through that they’d decided to send my Dad to Germany and Len to Egypt. Len’s Dad put a veto on that for him, but my Grandad didn’t. So, my Dad got a warrant to go to Northolt for the flight to Germany.
What’s weird about this is that they were sending 17 year old cadets off on their own, with no apparent plan or purpose beyond the trip as an end in itself. The aircrew Dad was flying with in their DC3 didn’t know he was coming, weren’t keen to have him aboard, and had no idea what to do with him. After a bit of discussion they decided to give him the title “Air Quartermaster”; and got him to dish out the sandwiches (dainty things from BOAC on the way out) coffee, and pass on messages – “we’re now over the Hague” etc. Air Safety demonstrations were not part of the job description, and he got to sit in the co-pilot’s seat which had an exellent view of the impenetrable cloud cover they were flying over.
When they arrived at Bucheburg (Bookyburg to them) the cloud cover was still solid and the pilot had to confer with the navigator to make sure they were in the right place – as the airfield was surrounded by hills on three sides; which at that time presented an obvious risk if he couldn’t see where he was. The Navigator being confident enough, they descended through the cloud flying in a spiral until they broke through to clear air beneath and landed.
On landing, no one knew what to do with my Dad, the crew had places to go and Frauleins to see and didn’t want a 17 year old cadet cramping their style, no one from the base was expecting him, nor had he been given any guidance on what he might do. One of the crew grudgingly took him to the bar on the base where the German barman protectively refused to serve Schapps when the crewman ordered it, possibly for the entertainment value – “not for the boy”. After a while the crew member went off leaving Dad to his own devices and to finish his beer. On a visit to the toilet he was approached by a German civilian who asked him for cigarettes – “Zigaretten?” – so he gave him three. In the late 1940s in Germany these were not usually to smoke, but use as currency.
He then walked a little way into the town, which was lively in a “Bachanalian orgy” sort of way. There were “no fraternisation” bans on relations with German civilians, but the RAF crews and the local women did not seem to be paying much attention to them. Leaning on a lampost at the corner of the street, taking some of this in, he was shouted at by a Military Policeman sitting in a jeep on the other side of the road. “Airman! Over here!” Standing in front of him the MP noticed the ATC patch on the shoulder of his uniform and asked what it was. The other MP in the back of the jeep said “He’s just a boy”, so the first one contented himself with telling Dad off for standing with his hands in his pockets. “It creates a bad impression”. Wouldn’t want that with a Bachanalian orgy going on.
The following morning at breakfast, the crew were sitting around regaling each other with tales of exploits and conquests from the previous night, some of which might have been true. Before the trip back Dad went for a walk to the hanger where the DC3 was waiting. The doors to the hold were open, giving off an overpowering smell of coffee – which implied a certain amount of off the books trading.
On the trip back – in which one of the passengers was a former German soldier in handcuffs heading for a war crimes trial – the “Air Quartermaster” had to dish out the sandwiches again – thick RAF doorsteps filled with Corned Beef this time – and, having landed was, as with every other step of this trip, left to his own devices to get home.
Other cadets must have had these trips, but there seems to have been no debriefing beyond the local ATC CO asking if it was a good trip. The expected (opaque) response “Yes Sir!” may not have been universal, because this particular experiment was never repeated. Unless it simply petered out in the same aimless way that it seems to have been set up.
Taking place in a torrential rainstorm, the opening ceremony at the Olympics was as much under the water as on it.
A parade of random sized boats with national atheletic contingents that reflected in size the wealth and power of the countries sending them – more for the USA, fewer for Djibouti – all grinning and waving gamely, processed up the Seine alongside cartoon giant heads emerging from the water like an animation by Terry Gilliam accompanied by performances for the TV audience on the bridges and buildings alongside.
These had a extraordinarily surreal feel that had the Rassamblement Nationale spluttering over their post election tarte au ressentiment. Aya Nakamura’s magnificent mash up with the band of the Republican Guard providing accompaniment, where their rigid ranks tapping out rhythm on snare drums broke into a mildly bopping circle around her, which Marion Marechal described as a “humiliation”, may have been inspired by the delirious and liberating scene in the Tin Drum where Oscar taps his drum as the Nazi leaders march into a rally, the band loses the beat for the bombastic march they are playing and settle into the Blue Danube instead; and the iron ranks of the rally break into a swirl of people waltzing. This would be appropriate given how much fuss the French far right made about her singing at the event because, having been born in Mali, she “isn’t French”. Not an issue they raised for Celine Dione or Lady Gaga oddly enough.
For me, the most striking performance was the one in the Conciergerie, the rather grim former prison on the river bank, in which every window was occupied by a Marie Antoinette figure in flame red, singing the “Ca Ira” from a head tucked under her arm, while some dreadful French heavy metal band hammered and shrieked a demonic descant from the balconies, and a boat representing the Paris coat of arms floated by underneath with a soprano at the front – who bore a disturbing resemblance to Rachel Reeves (same Laurence Olivier playing Richard III hair thing going on) – singing “L’amour est enfant de boheme” (Love is a Gypsy child) from Carmen. Lacking the historical context, the BBC commentators translated “Ca ira” as “all will be well”, when it was actually the chant of the columns of the French revolutionary armies as they went into the attack at the armies of the European Ancien Regime in the 1790s. “Ca ira!” We’ll get through! To underline the point, the performance ended with an explosion of red streamers. Take that aristocrats! How unlike the Olympic ceremony of our own dear Queen…
As the tiny Palestinian delegation sallied past, the commentators talked of how they were performing under the shadow of Gaza and added “we wish them well”. The best thing they said all evening.
I originally wrote this in December, shortly after Refaat Alareer was killed by the IDF, in the spirit of his poem If I must die but didn’t publish it at the time because I thought it didn’t do him justice.
But, now Netanyahu has repeated the line “We are in a battle of civilization against barbarism” in his deranged rant at the US Congress calling for more weapons to “finish the job faster”; so, time to fly the kite.
On the day this was written, Palestinian casualties stood at 18, 412. Today, it is more than twice that. What price “civilisation”?
Barbarism
In the battle of civilisation against barbarism
It is necessary for the civilised
To bomb the schools of the barbarians and kill their children
To bomb the homes of the barbarians and kill their families
To bomb the hospitals of the barbarians and kill their doctors and nurses
To stop the barbarians’ sources of fresh water, so they thirst
To stop the barbarians access to food, so they hunger
To cut off the barbarians’ access to medicines, so they sicken
To kill the barbarians teachers and poets to still their stories
To bulldoze the barbarians olive groves to empty their land
so you can say later that they were never on it
To flood the ground water with salt so nothing can grow
To bomb the barbarians libraries and archives to erase their history
in the futile hope that, this time, “the young will forget”
To drive the barbarians away from shelter
Make them move, again and again
To make sure that they despair
To strip barbarian prisoners to their underclothes and make them kneel in the dust
To kill a hundred or a thousand barbarians for every civilised casualty
Because it is so steep, few cars run up or down Fairfields Crescent. Its therefore tempting to walk down the middle of the road. A move that irresistibly conjures up a projection into an old Western like you are approaching three gunslingers with bad intent (and no lines). The heroic mythologies of John Ford aside of course, projecting ritual duel like six gun shoot outs – when the historic reality was that most people who died of gunshot wounds back then were shot in the back – it comes with a series of grand musical accompaniments in the head. The theme from The Big Country probably the grandest; and most thrilling. From 1958. The year before Sputnik ushered in the age of the Space Opera.
Half way back up Wakeman’s Hill from dumping our old, clapped out oven at the Community Skip; which appears every couple of months for two hours only at a convenient local spot – a wonderful innovation from the local council that prevents an awful lot of fly tipping – I spot a very thin, quite small, semi deflated Father Christmas suspended half way up the front wall of a house near the summit. Originally meant to look like he was climbing purposefully up with presents, encapsulating hope and anticipation, he is now hanging with his limbs dangling at awkward angles like an animal someone has shot, perhaps as a warning to other Santas not to try it. At any time of the year…
As Wakeman’s Hill is long and steep, and the old oven heavy and awkward, I took it down on the chassis of our shopping trolley, which worked extremely well. Wonderful invention. Everyone should be issued with one when they retire as a rite of passage. Let the wheels take the strain. It should be in Manifestoes at the next election; One Person. One Trolley!
Being away in Thurrock most of the time at the moment, local changes in Kingsbury jump out when you come back. One pleasing development is the number of Lime Bikes that are obviously being well used. A scattering outside the tube station, and some outside flats, showing that people are using them for short term commutes, probably regularly. Some are dumped on their side – which is slobbish of whoever does it – and I tend to pick them up even though my knee is too far gone to use them, as they should be presented by all of us as the community asset they are, not the piece of pavement clutter cyclophobes like to moan about on the local “Next Door” (let’s moan about something local) site.
Blairite retread George Robertson is set to lead Labour’s “Defence Review”, with former US Presidential advisor Fiona Hill on hand to keep it in line with US imperatives. The conclusions are flagged up in his premise, which is that the UK has to militarily confront a “deadly quartet” of China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. This is itself a variation on George W Bush’s “axis of evil” and flags up a sharp increase not only in direct military expenditure but also a pro war domestic agenda, trying to ramp up Cold War mentality and reflexes to enable a series of suicidal conflicts and silence dissent.
None of the four countries concerned are in a formal alliance and coordination between them is – needless to say – qualitatively below that which is permanently structured by the dominant US system of alliances, on “sharing arms, components and military intelligence”.
Taking his premise as a given – which we shouldn’t – this is the balance of military spending between the US and its allies (which includes the UK) and the so called “deadly quartet” 2023.
To spell this out. The US and its allies, who Robertson poses as being under threat, outspend the “deadly Quartet” by a factor of 3 to 1. So, who is the more “deadly”? If you were to put teeth on the US slice of this graph, it might reflect how US allies are seen in most of the world.
These figures were taken from NATOs own stats, and the wikipedia list of expenditure by country from SIPRI The NATO figures are worth a look because they show how rapidly NATO is increasing its spending (from $904 billion in 2017 to $1056 in 2021 to $1185 now) and that the number of countries spending 2% or more of GDP has doubled in the last year. The NATO figures, however, are lower than those in the SIPRI list. The US figure from NATO for 2023 is $755 billion, while for Sipri, it is a significantly larger $916 billion. So, the blue, biting pacman shown here probably has its jaws clamping down even more tightly.They also don’t include the exponential increases now being set by US allies, with Japan and Germany doubling their spending.
Robertson’s inclusion of Iran in the list also implicitly underlines the UK’s alignment with Israel. This is also evident in the current government continuing with Sunak’s attempt to exempt Israel from ICC jurisdiction and the fact that it is one of only two countries to be continuing with the defunding of UNWRA after Israel made unsubstantiated allegations about its staff being involved in Oct 7th. The other country (down from the original 16) is the United States – which is one definition of a “special relationship”. This alignment in the face of an ongoing genocidal attack on Palestinians in Gaza and escalating ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, requires the domestic demonisation of the solidarity movement in this country; which we are already beginning to see.
It beggars belief that there are people who are taking bets on a nuclear war taking place by 2025. While gambling addiction has its own dynamic, how does anyone placing one of these bets think they might be in a position to collect their winnings if it does?
The justified fear that the Ukraine war is heading in that direction is one of the factors in driving majorities in both North America and Europe to favour a ceasefire and negotiated peace over continued escalation.
A recent survey by the Institute for Global Affairs showed that more than twice as many people in Europe and the US supported NATO pushing for a ceasfire as opposed it.
The IGA notes that
In responding to Russia’s invasion, avoiding escalation with Russia is a top priority — especially among Europeans. Results suggest transatlantic support for a cautious response.
More support a negotiated settlement to end the war, with a plurality of Americans and Western Europeans citing the loss of life and casualties as a primary reason.
This is a broadly humane response that is the opposite of the course being taken by the G7 and NATO leaderships. It is perhaps no accident that all of the leaders at the G7 had a negative approval rating; ranging from Georgia Meloni on -10, through Joe Biden on -19 and Justin Tudeau on -33, Olaf Schultz and Rishi Sunak on – 44 to rock bottom Emmanuel Macron on – 52%. Even after just winning the UK General Election, as he arrives at the NATO summit in Washington, Keir Starmer’s rating is -3.
In fact, the same logic on the part of NATO that led to the war in Ukraine in 2022 is the logic that is heading inexorably over nuclear red lines, possibly before the Autumn. The problem with a nuclear balance of terror is that it only works until it doesn’t. And the calculated games of chicken only have to be got wrong once, and its the end for all of us.
It seems clear that the calculation in NATO in the Winter of 2021 that they did not have to take Russia’s attempts to end the smouldering Ukrainian civil war, and defang NATOs eastward expansion, with a
mutual security pact that would have guaranteed autonomy for the Russian speaking Donbass within Ukraine,
made Ukrainian neutrality permanent
and kicked negotiations about the status of Crimea into a possibly interminable negotiation process
seriously because they believed that either
Russian military threats were a bluff that could be called, or
that if Russia did intervene, that would be the opportunity they wanted for sanctions that would rapidly bring the Russian economy to its knees, creating domestic turmoil through which the well oiled processes of a colour revolution could lead to a “regime change” favourable to the US
were a complete miscalculation in both respects.
With the sanctions only supported by direct US allies,and largely blowing back on them, the Russian economy is doing fine, growing 5.4% in the first quarter of 2024 (compared with 0.6% in the UK, 0.4% for the US and 0.2% for Germany). And the military tide is turning slowly, remorselessly Russian, as the Ukrainian government is forced to resort to press ganging increasingly reluctant conscripts, sending them up to the line half trained, and suffering losses in soldiers and material that they can’t replace.
Faced with the prospect of defeat, the G7 and NATO are trying to up the military ante, rather than do what their populations want and seek a negotiated peace.
This is heading into very dangerous territory. Mark Rutte was confirmed as the incoming NATO Secretary General only after he assured Hungary that no Hungarian finance would be used for, or military personnel deployed to, Ukraine. That implies that other NATO forces will be, threatening the direct clash that could be a tipping point beyond the control of its instigators.
The decisions now being made at the NATO summit, with a dedicated NATO HQ being set up, promising an “irreversible path” to membership, cranked up arms spending, a no fly zone on the Western and Southern Ukrainian border, a green light for Ukraine to try to knock out Russian nuclear early warning systems that cover areas well away from Ukraine – a terrifying piece of irresponsible brinkmanship, as this makes a nervous nuclear armed power unable to tell if it is under fire or not in a context in which it is afraid it might be – deployment of NATO “instructors” within the theatre of conflict, and ever widening permissions given to fire NATO produced munitions into Russia are all edging towards catastrophe.
A letter to the FT by a number of academics and former diplomats, including Lord Skidelsky and Anatole Lieven, calling for a negotiated settlement to allow the world to be “pulled back from the very dangerous brink at which it currently stands” is a sign that the consensus at the top in favour of escalation is beginning to crack. This is likely to grow as the situation becomes more intractable and dangerous.
In this context, its important that positions taken in the Labour Movement do not rest too heavily on myths. A recent letter, Time to help Ukraine to win, signed, among others, by John McDonnell, Clive Lewis and Nadia Whittome, argued that failure on the battlefield has been down to inadequate supplies of munitions from the US and its allies, calling for the UK to “take a leading role” in supplying “all the weapons needed to free the entire country” and that, in the short term, this should take the form of obsolete MOD equipment being gifted instead of sold off, for a war crimes tribunal directed solely against the Russians and for Russian assets to be seized (stolen) by Western Banks.
There are four problems with this approach.
Myth 1. To “free the whole country” would actually be a reconquest of the Russian speaking areas that rebelled against the pro Western coup in 2014 and have been fighting it ever since, at a cost of thousands of dead from 2014 onwards; and, far from being a liberation, would constitute an occupation of those areas. This would not be pretty. Kyrill Budanov, head of Ukrainian military intelligence, has stated that this would require the mass reeducation of people “with a completely different mindset” and the “physical elimination” of some of them. Given what has happened in areas that Ukraine took back at the high point of its military efforts in autumn 2021, this does not have to be imagined.
Myth 2. McDonnell et al seem to assume that the taps can just be turned on from an infinite supply of military hardware. It can’t. The paradox of the NATO military Industrial Complex is that although it outspends the Russians 11 to 1, it characteristically produces immensely expensive and complex pieces of kit that require lengthy training, high levels of maintenance and can only be produced in relatively low numbers; and once they are used, at great expense, they are gone. This is highly profitable for the arms companies and is designed for short sharp wars against Global South countries, not long term grinding wars of attrition with near peers. Stocks are now run down, the obsolete equipment, like Leopard I and 2 tanks, Bradley AFVs and so on have been deployed and destroyed in large numbers. F16s – an aircraft first deployed in 1978 – are the next installment and will fare no better. Plans to increase production of, say, Patriot missiles, can only be incremental – from about 500 to 650 a year. That is why this position is a fantasy. The supplies sent to Ukraine have been the maximum that NATO could scrape together. The only way to shift this would be to completely retool arms manufacture, which would require massive investment over several years; and politically set a trajectory for war that would be very hard to stop. No one on the Left should support this.
Myth 3. The barrel has already been scraped for obsolete equipment. The MOD website Army Surplus Store section notes that as of May 2024 “There is currently no MOD surplus inventory for sale.”
Myth 4. McDonnell et al’s argument that “Ukraine deserves a just and socially progressive reconstruction in which trade unions and civil society can democratically participate. International support should help to restore and expand universal healthcare, education, rebuild affordable housing and public infrastructure, ensuring decent jobs and working conditions. No more advisors from the UK Government should be used to assist in retrogressive reforms of trade union and labour rights” is also, sadly, wishful thinking. The “reconstruction” of Ukraine will be a massive asset stripping fire sale, as its Western “backers” come for their loans like a flock of vultures. It has already been agreed between Western creditors and the oligarchs who have run the war, embezzled a good proportion of the “aid” and siphoned quite a bit of arms supplied into the international black market, that the “reconstruction” will be managed by Blackrock; whose priorities are not those of John McDonnell. Blackrock would, no doubt, wish for a succesful UAF offensive into the Donbass that would allow them to get their hands on the $12 Trillion worth or rare earths that are sitting below the surface there. Such an offensive is even less plausible now than when it was tried in 2022 and the UAF suffered terrible casuaklties to make marginal territorial gains of no strategic significance.
Myth 5. In this context, any notion that Ukraine’s debts will be cancelled is similarly wishful thinking. Its as if NATO powers aren’t in this conflict for themselves. As if it is some genuine genuflection to – a partially applied – principle of national self determintion. The West, will want its pound of flesh. One reason for the Ukrainian oligarchy to keep a hopeless war going is to postpone the time that the aid stops flowing and the debts come due. For NATO countries to unilaterally sieze Russian assets would be another nail in the coffin for any pretence at upholding a “rules based international order”, rule out any serious possibility of peace negotiations and be seen in the Global South as on a par with the appropriation of Venezuela’s assets by the same imperial powers.
Sections of the Left often put forward spurious – slightly fantasised – arguments in order to cover an accomodation to their imperatives of their own ruling class. The paradox of this is that the ruling class itself is more hard nosed. The section of the US ruling class that backs Trump wants to cut its losses, try to impose even more financially ruinous military spending on its European subordinate allies, so that, with or without a ceasefire in Ukraine, the US can concentrate on launching and even more ruinous war in the South China Sea.
That is where the US ruling class is heading. It is why a candidate like Trump, convicted felon and epic shyster, keeps afloat on a sea of money; and now looks like he is going to win, with all the “unpredictable violence” that Boris Johnson thinks is just what “the West needs”. This strategic shift is not because Trump is in some way “Putin’s patsy” but its actually a statement of weakness that the US no longer believes itself capable of fighting two and a half wars at once and prevailing in all of them. They have to concentrate on the biggest target, and if that causes problems for its subordinate imperial allies, so be it. To deal with the twists and turns of all this the section of the Left that finds itself cheerleading for NATO escalation will need to burn its delusions.
“In many ways, this looks more like an election the Conservatives have lost than one Labour has won.” John Curtice.
This is evidently the case for the Conservatives. Their support more than halved from 2019.
The splintering of the Tory vote almost down the middle between the Conservatives and “Deform UK” is their most serious split since the Corn Laws in the 1840s. And its a real split. It can’t be overcome by some fantasy of getting “the Conservative Family” back together and arithmetically adding the Conservative vote to the Reform vote (which, at 39% would be 4% larger than Labour’s share).
Farage has a programme to ruthlessly pursue the logic of Brexit, slashing and burning regulation and taxes and the welfare state, cracking down on unions, playing racist dog whistles on trombones in a manner calculated to cause social unrest and violence, and suicidally abandon any attempt to resist climate change; in a way that more traditional Conservatives would consider disruptive and dangerous to social order and profitability.
Add to that the fact that Reform’s economic policy is like that of Liz Truss, but without the restraint, and you get an environment that is too risky for slow and steady profitability. The problem for the wing of the Tories that don’t want to go for this kind of adventurist far right alternative is that the Tory grassroots are largely in that camp; which has meant bending to them in Parliament. So, that’s where the realignment of the Right is heading. This will be put on boosters if Trump regains the White House.
With Tommy Robinson’s thugs planning a street action in London to “take over” central London on July 27th, when Farage promises “something that willstun all of you” its hard not to think that rubber truncheons will be involved.
At the same time, when people say things like, Labour is now “once again in the service of working people”, or how changed Labour has regained popular trust, those statements stack up oddly against the number of people who could be bothered to get out and vote for the Party.
In 2017, under “shh, you know who”, Labour won 12,877,000 votes.
In 2019, under the same man, Labour won 10,300,000 votes.
Yesterday, under Starmer, Labour won 9,600,000 votes, more than half a million fewer than in 2019, still being talked about as “Labour’s worst result since 1935”.
Overall this amounts to 35% on the share of the vote, up less than 2% from 2019.
And this was on a turnout of 60%, down from 67% in 2019.
Most of this small rise is accounted for by a 17% rise in Scotland at the expense of the SNP.
Urban ramblings 