Tag: Politics

“Island of Strangers” my arse! Labour List’s apologetics for Starmer’s dive into the gutter

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

On my way back from the shops yesterday, I passed two neighbours chatting in the street outside their houses. A woman in a hijab with her small child was bantering about ice cream with the bloke next door, who was audibly Eastern European. They obviously knew each other well, and got on. Friends, not starngers.

This is in Thurrock, an area that was Brexit central, with a 72.6% leave vote in 2016. I find that, nevertheless, this is an area that is converging with Brent, where I normally live, the most ethnically diverse borough in the country. My neighbours in both places are not simply diverse, they are also ethnically mixed. As is my family.

When I used to analyse the ethnic monitoring stats for the school I used to work at in Islington, the fastest growing group was “mixed”. So, far from immigration making us an “island of strangers” many of us are getting on well enough to be as intimate as you can get.

In this context, and in the wake of Keir Starmer’s pedestrian dog whistling about immigration on Monday, Labour List’s article Local elections: Reform took four times more Labour seats than other parties is disingenuous. It implies, without stating it, that the loss of SEATS to Reform must mean that there is a loss of VOTES to them. And what follows from that is that there is a need – in the framework of the sort of electoral pragmatism that cares not what platform a Party stands on so long as it wins on it – to “address the concerns” of Reform voters in order to win those votes back.

This is a fallacy for three reasons and one principle.

  1. Reform has the momentum on the Right, and cannibalised the Conservative vote. Whether they will eat the whole Party before the next General Election is open to speculation, but it seems likely. These elections were held for the most part in Tory held areas that have been Conservative since the Jurassic and have now voted for a different, even worse, kind of Conservative Party (in the hopes of getting back there).
  2. The Labour vote did not migrate to Reform in a big way. It mostly stayed at home. Feedback from the doorsteps in the Runcorn and Helsby by election was that it was the cuts to winter fuel allowance that was the biggest demobiliser; so people who voted for a change from austerity and “hard decisions” taken at the expense of the poorest last Summer, were now less than enthused by what the Party had to offer.
  3. The government has been trying to cosplay Reform for some time, even to the extent of putting out ads boasting about how many people they have deported in Reform colours (which would be taken by most people as a Reform ad anyway, so self harm in more than one respect). The week of the elections saw announcements on a tougher line on immigration from Yvette Cooper on the presumption that the approach “Reform is right about immigration, we are trying to stop it, vote for us to stop Reform” would do anything other than legitimise them; and demoralise anti racist Labour voters. And, so it came to pass…

Tony Blair remarked after the 2017 General Election that if Corbynism was the way to win, he didn’t want to take it. Given the interests that have made him an extremely wealthy hollowed out husk of a man, this is hardly surprising. But the point applies in the opposite direction. Anyone even pretending to be on the Left who starts trying to exploit – and create – false divisions in our communities is doing the Right’s job for it. For the Labour Party, a lurch onto Reform’s xenophobic turf is a jump into quicksand.

The next lot of local elections will be in the cities. Reform is likely to still make the running on the Right. Labour, if it carries on trying to compete with it on its own terms, while presiding over austerity and an arms drive, instead of making a sharp turn to wealth taxes and investment in infrastructure, public services and green transition, will shed a collosal number of votes, to the Greens, to Independents (especially purged former councillors) even to the Lib Dems in some places, and many will stay at home.

Apologetics of the type that Labour List just published, will help drive that outcome.

How might the war end? Discordant voices from Ukraine.

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

“I don’t want anyone else to die,” Natalya says, crying. “Our little trooper is the youngest of all those who lie here.” “Here” is the military cemetary in Lviv. Her son was 18.

What follows are a series of quotes from an article in Meduza based on interviews with people across Ukraine. Meduza is a Latvian based English and Russian language news blog with an unofficial motto “make the Kremlin sad”.

Despite that. what is striking about this selection is how the views expressed differ from the limited range of Ukrainian voices we get to hear in the official media here; which is why I have highlighted them in concentrated form in this blog.

I want to stress that for each of these views in the full article – which is worth reading – there is another arguing for carrying on fighting until the 1991 borders are restored, “otherwise what have we been fighting for?”

In these arguments, the deaths of the future are sanctified in advance and made imperative by the deaths of the past. None of the people who put this view, however, argue that it is possible. It is posed more as as a moral imperative, a revulsion against sacrifice in a lost cause; thereby carrying within it the prospect of a backlash not only against any peace terms that Ukraine accepts, but also those who have conducted an ultimately futile war. So the question “WHAT have we been fighting for?” is inextricably entwined with,“WHO have we been fighting for?” especially as the Kyiv oligarchy’s US puppet masters measure up the country’s natural resources as compensation for defeat.

“This is a separatist city; there are many zhduny here,” he ( a young soldier in the Ukrainian army) says of Sloviansk (a city in Northern Donetsk, close to the front line now) using a Ukrainian term for people who are “waiting for Russia.” “Even the local grandmas look at me like they want me to drop dead.” 

According to Oleksandr, Sloviansk residents with pro-Russian views no longer speak openly “because they understand it will cause them grief.” But Lera says that in some local Telegram groups, they refer to the Russians as “ours,” and local taxi drivers and shopkeepers often use the word “ruble” instead of “hryvnia.” 

This confirms that pro-Russian views in eastern Ukraine are a reality, not a “Putin talking point”. In other parts of the country, sentiments like these are expressed.

“If I were [in the politicians’ place], I’d have come to an agreement already, to be honest. I just want the war to end.”

“Yes, we’d like the 1991 borders to be ours, but not [if we have to fight] to the last Ukrainian. If so, let everything remain as it is. Not at this price.”

Borys says he wishes “Zelensky would stop this.” He thinks that Ukraine’s occupied territories should receive neutral status or become part of Russia, so long as the majority of Ukrainians are left alive; joining NATO isn’t worth such losses, he says.

“I think we should start negotiations [with Russia] and then decide the fate of [the Donetsk and Luhansk] regions through an honest poll. So people can decide for themselves which country they want to be in,” chimes in his friend Ihor, 18. 

“Are we going to sacrifice a million [people] for Crimea? And then what will we get?” Valetov continues. “I’m going to say something [that sounds] bad, but the people in Donetsk and Luhansk are no longer ours — with the help of television and Telegram, you can flush everything [Ukrainian] out of people’s minds in 11 years.”

She worries that politicians have gradually turned the war “into a business,” and she doesn’t understand how the money sent to help Ukraine is spent. “I have a lot of friends at the front whose [relatives] equipped them,” she says. “[It’s like,] You want normal body armor and a good helmet? Get it yourself.” 

“I don’t understand why our boys are at the front, but guys from Donetsk come here in their big flashy cars and live it up,” she cries (Maryanivka is about 500 kilometers, or 310 miles, from the front line in Donbas). “Why don’t they go there and defend their territory?!”

Ukrainians are tired of the war for many reasons, including because many of them donate money to support the army only to hear about constant shortages of weapons and equipment. She’d like the war to end with Ukraine getting back its occupied territories, but “if it were going to happen, it would have happened long ago,”

“Do you know what a Pyrrhic victory is? I don’t want such a victory,” he says. “But if our territories are given to Russia, this would be a capitulation, which isn’t right either. Therefore, just freeze the conflict. But on one condition: our country introduces the death penalty for embezzlement today. I’m no supporter of the death penalty, but I think it’s time.”

“They’re stealing our boys!” cries Yevhenia (name changed). Her draft-age son “was taken right from the bus stop” to basic training, even though he should have received an exemption as his grandmother’s caregiver. Yevhenia says her son failed to submit his documents to the military enlistment office in time. “If I’d known that would happen I never would’ve let him go out!” she says, practically in tears.

“It feels like they just want to destroy us,” he explains. “Not just the Russians, but our command, as well. We’ve been sitting at the front endlessly. It’s as if they’re saying, ‘There’s no one to replace you, [so] you have to die here.’”

According to Stanislav, morale is low and soldiers are just trying to survive. “Anyone who talks about peremoha should grab a Kalashnikov and go for it,” he says, using the Ukrainian word for “victory.” “On the Zaporizhzhia front, the Russians are making concrete and fortifying their positions with it. How are we going to break through? I’m horrified at the thought of going on the attack there. We’ll just drown in blood.” 

Asked what to do about the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics,” Stanislav argues that the easiest solution is to “amputate” the Donbas region. Mentioning the fact that Ukrainians live there makes him roll his eyes. “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” he says with a sigh.

Rearmament is a preparation for war, not peace.

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

Questions in the YouGov daily chat are invariably manipulative, but today there was one that was ludicrous.

In the event of a wider war in Europe, involving the UK, how do you think you would cope? Well? Badly? Other?

My response was, as a wider war in Europe, involving the UK couldn’t help but go nuclear, we’d all be dead. FFS get real! I normally keep polite on these polls, but really!

We are now, of course, in an extraordinarily dangerous situation in which a drive towards war is being presented as an attempt to secure peace and all right thinking people across all mainstream parties and media are agreed on it.

Discussions in the media are framed within the presumption of a Russian threat. No one questions the premise, largely because its false and s doesn’t stand up under the remotest scrutiny.

The same programmes sometimes have military speakers like Lord Dannat who assert that “Russia’s military is on its last legs”, as a way to argue that sustaining the war, in the way that the US is no longer willing to do, would soon lead to a NATO win, presumably with one last heave.

The incompatibility of this wishful thinking with the otherwise dominant line that a peace deal in Ukraine would lead to the Russians steamrollering across Europe is never noticed. Its almost as if they are doing it on purpose.

Without making any false assumption of an impending Russian collapse, lets look at the actual balance of forces between Russia and the European NATO powers.

According to GFP – strength in numbers, the leading annual global defense review since 2005 (in their own words) the European members of NATO, excluding the USA and Canada, are spending $445.7 billion on their militaries this year,

Russia is spending $126 billion. So, the FT assertion that Russia is spending three times as much as “Europe” is the opposite of the truth.

That means that without the USA and Canada, European NATO countries are already outspending the Russians by 3.5 to 1 on their militaries.

Add Ukraines $54 billion and the ratio gets to 4 to 1. That looks like this.

Put teeth on this and it looks like Pacman.

Add the USA and Canada’s $936 billion and it gets to just over 11 to 1, but even without them, given this imbalance, it is patently ludicrous to argue that the Russians, already outspent on this scale, have any capacity to attack NATO countries in Europe, even if they wanted to, which they have repeatedly pointed out that they do not.

Therefore, if the aim is “peace” and “defence”, even assuming a continued hostile stance between the EU and Russia, with no attempts to reset the relationship, reduce tensions and find a mutually acceptable modus operandi that would ensure a lasting peace, rather than a pause to tool up for Round Two, there is no need for increased arms spending. The orthodox militray presumption is that a succesful military attack require the attackers to have a 4:1 superiority. That leaves aside the political issue that an attacking power would have to have some degree of popular support to sustain an occupation. As the US and its allies found out in Iraq, even a crushing technological and military superiority is not enough to sustain a grip on a country if the people you are occupying hate your guts and want you to leave.

The current balance in military material is shown by this graphic from Germany, which shows an upward trend in spending from 2014 onwards, and also the greater NATO force in every form of weaponry, even if the US is removed from the equation. The only area in which Russia has more material that European NATO is in satellites and, narrowly, short range rockets; in military personnel, artillery, tanks and other AFVs, ships, aircrafyt and combat helicopters, Euro NATO already has a very powerful advantage; with a million more soldiers, three times as much artillery and attack helicopters, five times as many tanks and six times as many ships.

So, the proposed increases in military spending are not about “defence”.

Particularly not the massive EU military spending pledge by Ursula Von Der Leyen today. 800 billion Euros. Thats $860 billion. Add that to the current spending and you get to $1360 billion.

Compare that to current Russian military spend and you get this.

This is not preparation for defence, it is preparation for war; a war that, with Russia prepared to use nuclear weapons to defend itself, would kill all of us if it were to be engaged in. With the current UK “defence review” arguing that we are in a “pre war situation”, we should take the insanity of those that rule us sufficiently seriously to oppose them.

Post script: the state of public opinion

A YouGov poll reported in the Guardian (7/3/25) shows that the propaganda is working, up to a point.

  • 60% of respondents in the UK thought – falsely -that Russia would attack other European countries within the next ten years. The figures for France and Germany were more sceptical, Italy even more so. Rather important therefore for the reality of the actual balance of forces to be kept from them.
  • Even with this view however, only 24% of respondents in the UK thought that the current level of military support to Ukraine (£3 billion) should be increased and, despite the avalanche of emotive coverage in the last week or two, fewer than half in the UK support an increase in “defence” spending; which will mean increasing resistance to doing so as the cuts needed to sustain it start to bite. Support for increases is also a minority view in France, Spain and, especially, Italy.
  • Only between a quarter and a third in each country believe that the European powers can substitute for the US, which makes the other positions a Potemkin village of a posture with nothing behind it.
  • There is now a lot of hostility to the US within European populations; with 58% -78% now considering it to be “a big or fairly big threat to peace and security in Europe”.

Why George Monbiot is wrong about the war

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

George Monbiot’s comments about the war in Ukraine on BBC Question Time last week are completely disorientated, and disorientating for anyone who swallows them.

His columns in the Guardian are often a haven of well argued, deeply felt sanity in a time when the impasse of capitalism, the decline of US hegemony and the ever mounting climate crisis are driving most columnists in most papers well off the rails and up the wall, but the one entitled A Trump win would change my mind about rearmament (Guardian 5/7/24), was profoundly confused, and underpins the line he took on QT.

He argues that Trump’s Second Coming should “end… our abiding fantasies about a special relationship” without reflecting that, in abusive relationships, abiding fantasies are often clung to harder to avoid having to face facts. There is no doubt that the British ruling class will cling to it as hard as it needs to.

As it is, few, now, have any delusions that this relationship is one of equals. A deferential cringe is built into it, and everyone knows it. The relationship was abjectly summarised by Tony Blair when he told the British Ambassador to Washington to “get up the arse of the White House and stay there”. We have seen what this looks like on film. “Yo! Blair!”

What makes it “special” is being one of the closest US henchmen in their global dominance: one of the “five eyes” countries that share Intelligence gathering (the US and what used to be called the “White Commonwealth”) that is at the core of their system of alliances.

George spells out what this has been about, listing just a few of the brutal and deadly military interventions and coups “we” have been party to since the Second World War – Afghanistan, Iraq, Gaza – with the US as number one and the UK desperate to believe that its number 2.

Although he recognises that these alliances, with NATO as its core, defend a rules based order that “favours capital over the democratic state”, he doesn’t draw the structural conclusion that this also constitutes a Global North military bloc forged to keep the Global South in its place. So, the interventions he mentions were, and are, not random pieces of malevolence that just happened to happen, but systematic attempts to assert global power and dominance. This is posed in these countries as “defence”.

The military forces at their disposal are the tools do do this job, and the stronger and bigger they are, the more they can get away with doing it.

So if, as George argues, our principle is that we are opposed to “imperialism, fascism and wars of aggression”, we have to recognise that not only do we live in a core imperialist state ourselves; one that has committed many wars of aggression in our lifetimes, but that that state is integrated into the system of alliances that guarantees the existing unjust global order.

We therefore have to restrain its capacity to carry out these wars as an act of solidarity with its victims in the rest of the world; in the first instance those in Gaza.

Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz was a guest at the NATO summit in July and Israel has had representation at the alliance since Turkiye lifted its veto in 2016, and a cooperation agreement since 2017. The ongoing US, and UK, arms and intelligence supplies during the genocidal IDF operations in Gaza underline what this alliance is for.

George argues that the UK and EU have “leant on the US for security”. What this means is being part of the world’s most aggressive and high spending military alliance. NATO accounts, with its allies in the Pacific, for between 67 and 75% of global military spending (depending on how you measure it). The strongest powers within it – the US, Japan, Germany, France – are boosting their military spending rapidly (Germany and Japan doubling theirs); while simultaneously complaining that it is not “realistic” to expect them to stump up their promised $100 billion annual contribution to help the Global South develop sustainably. In fact, just the increase in NATO military spending since 2015 amounts to $543 billion a year (with a total spend in 2023 of $1341 Billion). So, building up military capacity gets five times as much commitment as the promise to alleviate climate breakdown in the Global South – a promise that has never been fulfilled.

That looks like this.

George, nevertheless, argues that a Trump restoration would be “a threat to our peace, security and wellbeing” not so much because the US would

  • go full rogue state on climate – with an estimated 4 billion tonnes of additional emissions from pro fossil fuel policies and attempts to break up the Paris process – “drill, drill, drill!”
  • give Israel carte blanche to double down on the Gaza genocide – “you’ve got to finish the problem”
  • or seek to provoke a war with China,

but because he thinks he would break up NATO, supposedly in cahoots with President Putin; citing his remark that he would be quite happy for Russia to invade any NATO member not spending as much on its military as Trump wants it to and would “end US support for Ukraine” which would “allow Putin to complete his invasion” teeing up “an attack on a NATO country within five years”.

This is where George’s argument aligns with that of other Guardian/Observer columnists and editorials, including the increasingly frenzied Simon Tisdall; one of whose columns last year condemned German Chancellor Olaf Scholz as “overly fearful of nuclear escalation”. Perish the thought that anyone would be worried about that. Tisdall’s critique of last year’s NATO summit was, as ever, that it did too little to escalate the war in Ukraine. No fear of nuclear escalation for him; arguing for no fly zones in the West of the country and missile strikes into Russia, for an alliance that is not “afraid of a fight” in face of the threat that an incoming Trump Presidency would try to force a peace by accepting a partition of pre 2014 Ukrainian territory because he is, as the Observer editorial puts it on the same day, “a keen admirer of Vladimir Putin”.

This profoundly misreads whats going on. Trump is in no kind of bloc with Putin. He’d like to break Russia from its alignment with China, though that ship has long sailed. What Trump is trying to do now is to bully subordinate European allies into taking most of the military weight in Europe off the US. This is so it can concentrate on China; which he sees as the main challenge to the US world order. This will be costly for the countries that do it, but that is of no concern to Trump. Thats the price they have to pay to stay in the kind of “special relationship” with the US that allows them to be at the table and not on the menu, even if it means they will be increasingly relegated farther below the salt.

Trump is not a diplomat. He does not issue quiet threats on secure telephone lines to allow appearances to be kept up, as Joe Biden did for Obama. He is a corrupt wheeler dealer with mob boss characteristics. He doesn’t spare anyone’s feelings. He bullies openly, so everyone is clear who the boss is. Remember his official visit in 2018? That calvalcade of armoured limousines that was longer than the Mall? Those hideous Osprey aircraft repeatedly buzzing London’s airspace?

And it is already working. 23 of NATOs 31 non US members now hit the 2% target, “more than twice as many as two years ago” according to Jens Stoltenburg and the only way is up, with Germany already committed to 3.5%. Job almost done.

So, when George says the “UK and Europe will need to find the means of defending ourselves against a Trump regime and its allies” he misses the point that the UK and EU countries are the allies of the US and, as everyone in the new cabinet is keen to point out, the UK will accomodate to whoever is in the White House because it has to, so they will remain core allies of “the Trump regime” too. David Lammy is quite explicit about that, saying that Trump is “often misunderstood” over NATO, and pledging increased UK spending to stay in the club. Increases in military spending by European countries is exactly what Trump wants. It won’t be used “against a Trump regime” but to facilitate it, and cover its back in Europe so it can go after China.

The key point for the climate and labour movements therefore is that the policy choice to sink or swim with the US alliance will clash with having to break from it to resist climate breakdown. A very concrete way that this is posed is, when it comes to priorities, will the Starmer government jump to Trump’s tune and increase military spending to 2.5 or 3% or even 5% of GDP, or does it put those resources into its mission for clean energy by 2030? They are unlikely to be able to do both.

Trump wants to pull some US military resources out of Europe to concentrate on China because the US can’t do both any more. Thats why commentators like Tisdall are spinning fantasies. NATO has been unable to supply Ukraine with enough material to “win”, because it can’t.

Some pro EU commentators like Timothy Garton Ash argue that this gives the EU the chance and need to step up and become a serious military power in its own right and George now argues “I now believe we have to enhance our conventional capacities, both to support other European nations against Russia and…perhaps to defend ourselves”.

This presumes that the Russians are at war because they are on some crazed mission of global conquest. In fact, their stance throughout has been to seek mutual security pacts so that they don’t feel under threat from NATO; which, at the moment, they do. This has been the case since Gorbachev proposed a “Common European Home” in 1991. The US and NATO have never accepted that and it has been a US mission to break up any mutually beneficial economic arrangements, partcularly between Russia and Germany, the better to maintain US dominance of the continent.

Seeking such a peaceful arrangement, following a ceasefire in Ukraine, using the war as a terrible example of what everyone in Europe should agree that we need to avoid, is the preferable, alternative course to rearmament and war preparation.

Because George should think about what he’s saying. If there is a war in Europe, even if it stays conventional through some miracle, it will look like Eastern Ukraine or Gaza on a gigantic scale. The attempt to “defend ourselves” militarily will be suicidal, even if nuclear weapons can be kept out of it. War won’t “defend” anyone. Mutually assured destruction can be done conventionally if alliances are not “afraid of a fight”. The danger in proposals to seriously retool the UK, and other, military industrial complexes to be able to fight just such a conventional war of attrition with Russia by the end of the decade, is that this carries its own momentum and will become a self fulfilling prophecy, displacing diplomatic alternatives. If the UK military gets into a position to “fight and win a war in Europe”, the UK ruling class will be tempted to try to do so.

An alternative approach that would avoid economic ruin and a step by step escalation towards war, would be to welcome the US departure and seek mutual security arrangements with Russia in a “common European home”, as Gorbachev put it. A localised version of that was, after all, what the Russians were asking for in the Winter of 2021, which NATO refused even to discuss.

The US uses NATO to maintain its own dominance over Europe – political, military, economic. Which is why Trump’s threats to reorder it, with the US pulling back its commitments to nuclear and air cover and the European powers expected to dramatically increase conventional forces on the ground could end up as an own goal.

A recent poll showed strong majorities in the UK in favour of both NATO and retaining the UK’s nuclear weapons. This is because these are framed as a way of keeping the population safe from overseas threats.

This begins to crack – and you get a mass anti war movement – when that mask slips. In 1980, the incoming Thatcher government, eager to turn the screw in the Cold War and gain compliance with stationing US medium range cruise missiles in the UK, scored a spectacular own goal by issuing a civil defence booklet to every household in the country called “Protect and Survive”, as a guide on how to survive a nuclear war (with no more equipment than you’d find in the average garden shed). After decades in which the “nuclear deterrent” had been motivated as a way to make nuclear war unthinkable, it suddenly became apparent to every household in the country that 1. the government was actively contemplating having one and 2 that the self protection measures outlined in the booklet – like making a do it yourself shelter (for one) by unscrewing your bathroom door and putting it over you as you took shelter in your bathtub – were absurd.

Millions of people realised that it was our government that was putting them at risk and the sense of vulnerability that had always generated a strong anti nuclear and anti war sentiment in Glasgow – as the nearest city to the Holy Loch base of Polaris, and then Trident, submarines – became more widespread – and linked up with the reaction against the monetarist crash that also came in with Thatcher. “A few more years of this government”, as one old campaigner in Bermondsey put it, “and we’ll all be living in tents surrounded by cruise missiles”.

See also, https://urbanramblings19687496.city/2023/07/02/ukraine-ecocide-and-complicity-or-why-the-climate-movement-should-not-allow-itself-to-become-a-fig-leaf-for-nato/

Trump’s approval ratings are lower than for any other President at this stage – apart from himself

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

On Air Force 1 overflying the “newly renamed Gulf of America” last week, Donald Trump boasted that his approval ratings were at 49% and “no one has ever seen numbers like this before”. Seemingly so. His numbers are worse than those of any other post war President, apart from himself last time.

We won’t die for Trump – or Rutte – or Kinnock.

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

Donald Trump and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte want NATO members military expenditure increased to “Cold War levels” and for member countries to adopt a “wartime mindset” in order to prepare for a perceived threat from Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.

Neil Kinnock has just stated that 3-4% would be a “realistic” level to reach.

Part of this mindset is a preparedness to sacrfice health, welfare and pensions to fuel the military machine required to fight a war with Russia in Europe that would be suicidal for all involved if it actually broke out.

The UK’s “Defence Review” is framed in a similar “pre war framework”, posing Russia, China, Iran and North Korea as “the deadly quartet”; a good name for a jazz band, but geopolitically infantile.

The threat is posed most sharply in relation to Russia, largely because NATO is now evidently losing its proxy war in Ukraine. This impending defeat is being posed as a lever to militarise European society on the presumption that a Russian win there means that they will then threaten to invade the rest of Europe.

This is simply insane.

If you look at the balance of military expenditure between NATO and Russia, even after a sharp increase in Russian spending forced by the war to 7-8% of GDP, the imbalance in NATOs favour is overwhelming, because the combined GDPs of the NATO countries are almost incomparably bigger than Russia’s (which is smaller not only than the USA among NATO countries, but also Germany, the UK, France, Italy and Canada and barely larger than Australia).

If the argument from all quarters on high in this country is that “the world is becoming a more dangerous place”, its quite clear from this which countries are making it so in Europe. If the Russian level of expenditure shown in the yellow column is posed as a terrible threat by NATO, how much more threatening is NATOs current expenditure for the Russians?

To underline this with stark figures, with overall NATO spending in 2024 at $1185 billion and Russia’s at $109 billion,

  • for every dollar the Russians spend, NATO spends just under $11
  • and the European NATO powers alone spend £755 billion between them, which is just under $7 for every dollar spent by the Russians.

So, the question posed by this is already, who exactly is under threat from whom?

Trump and Rutte, and now Kinnock, propose to raise NATO military spending to “Cold War levels”. That was around 5% of GDP between 1970 and 1987. That would double the imbalance above and set NATO up for an offensive war with a collosal military advantage of 14 to one, even if the US kept out of it, and 22 to 1 if they were involved.

This reality is revealed by the decision of the EU to break its own fiscal rules and raid its levelling up funds to finance war preparations which, among other things, involves strengthening bridges so that “tanks may pass safely”. Were they concerned that columns of Russian tanks would be steamrollering West they would be weakening bridges so they couldn’t pass at all.

This is leaving aside the political feasibility of a Russian offensive, even if it were militarily feasible – which it obviously isn’t.

It beggars belief that a war of this sort is being envisaged with a nuclear power. The same people who argue that the UK’s nuclear weapons “keep us safe” and shouted at Jeremy Corbyn “would you press that red button, Mr Corbyn?” seem to think that a land war in Europe which, given the balance of forces, would be aimed at regime change and the balkanisation of the Russian Federation and have nothing to do with “defence” would not lead to the trip wires for use of these weapons being crossed.

It is a suicidal course.

It would also impoverish us in the meantime.

  • 5% of UK GDP is £126 billion (using 2023 figures).
  • 2023 military spending was £54 billion.
  • So, the additional cost of meeting this target in full would be around £70 billion. Even getting half the way to it would require a transfer of £35 billion, which would have to come from “other priorities”: and not just “a small amount” as Rutte puts it. Kinnock doesn’t say what he would cut. He should be asked.

Every item cut instead would improve people’s lives. The best that can be hoped for increased military spending is that it doesn’t give our lords and masters the tools to end them.

All this flows from the strategic self subordination of Europe to the United States. As this recent article argues, the new situation for Europe is that the US is leading them into war with the continent’s strongest military power, Russia, at the same time as it deliberately undermining European rivals’ economies. It amounts to a US policy of subordinating Europe through a combination of military and economic warfare.

This is a lethal combination for Europe, the most serious threat to the entire continent since at least the end of the Cold War and in a broader sense since the end of the Second World War.

So, the fight against war, and the fight against austerity, to defend our conditions of life will have to go hand in hand.

Why defeating NATO aggression in Ukraine will be decisive for Europe’s future

US Presidential Election Final Score: what comes next?

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

My last blog did not take account of just how slowly votes are counted in US presidential elections. While the result has been obvious from the grey dawn of Nov 6th, and the outlines of the vote equally apparent, a precise accounting has had to wait until now. Even now (Nov 27th) the vote count stands at 99.7%, so there’s roughly another few hundred thousand votes to tot up, but these won’t make much difference to the broad conclusions that were reasonably obvious, and therefore broadly misrepresented in the media, from day 1.

First of all, contrary to my initial blog, Trump did gain votes from 2020. But not many. His total was just over 77 million this year, compared to just over 74 million in 2020; so, a gain of just under 3 million votes.

Similarly, Kamala Harris lost a lot of votes on Joe Biden’s total in 2020, down from just under 81.3 million to just over 74.4 million; so a total loss of 6.9 million votes.

Turnout was down overall by about 3 million votes.

So, the core conclusion that this was more a Democrat slump that a Trump surge still holds. This matters because some of the conclusions coming from Democratic Party reinforce the strategic choices that led them to lose. There are basically three strands to this.

  1. They are in denial about “the economy”, arguing that people under $100,000 a year, whose real wages were lower at the end of the Biden term than the beginning were suffering a delusion because “economic indicators” were going so well. Putting this across as people not “feeling” how well they were doing, when they were actaully doing pretty badly, is a form of gaslighting that, evidently, doesn’t work.
  2. They seem to think that the problem with Kamala, campaigning with the Cheyneys, “I own a Glock”, “border state prosecutor”, “Israel has a right to go after the terrorists” Harris was that she was too “woke”.
  3. They are having a tactical discussion about whether Biden should have withdrawn earlier – obviously he should – and whether they should have had a primary process – neither of which addresses the fundamental problem that any candidate wedded to the same strategy would have faced the same defeat.

This denial is designed to move the Democrats onto the same ground as the Republicans on the spurious argument that there was a significant shift towards them. There wasn’t. It is not a strategy to remobilise their lost voters, let alone an attempt to pose answers that meet the needs of working class voters. Quite the opposite.

It reflects a deeper reality that – their protestations that Trump is a fascist nothwithstanding – they would prefer to lose than contradict the demands of their donors, let alone challenge core US imperial imperatives; which is the fundamental purpose of both parties and the reason why the US political structure is set up the way it is; to squeeze out any genuine challenge that might express the popular progressive majorities that exist for, for example, Medicare for all, Abortion Rights, Serious action on climate, raising the national minumum wage, ending US support for the war in Ukraine and the genocide in Gaza and opposing a wider war involving Iran.

Polling showed, for example, that taking a harder line with Israel would have won Harris significant votes in the swing states.

What we had instead from the Biden adminstration was a performative 30 day ultimatum – due to expire conveniently after the election – for Israel to allow more aid into the Gaza strip on pain of having (some) arms cut off – because even in performative ultimatums, you wouldn’t want to go too far in case the wrong signal gets picked up – in the hope that this gesture would bring back some of the votes that their single minded support for Israel had alienated.

Needless to say, when the 30 days were up, in the middle of Israel’s most ruthless offensive yet – implementing the “General’s Plan” to completely clear the whole of Northern Gaza of its Palestinian population, making it a free fire zone and totally shutting down of any supply of food, water or medicine – the US declared that enough aid was being allowed in for them to keep praising Netanyahu and passing the ammunition.

The psychological shock to a lot of people in the mainstream of politics is that 2020 was supposed to be a “return to normalcy” from the insane aberation of four years of Trumpian excess, after which the Pax Americana could be reasserted on its customary tried and tested basis, with all its familiar landscape intact. The problem is that it can’t, now that the US is no longer the world’s largest and most dynamic economy, the old rules won’t work anymore, so what people thought Biden was now looks like an interegnum in a “new normal” in which the US takes off its masks and stands before the world in all its hideous nakedness as a climate denying rogue state, reduced to having to bully its allies to increase military spending and banking on increasingly overt threats to try to bluff its way out of decline.

This is unlikely to work, but is extremely dangerous and damaging nonetheless.

Beyond the grotesque and demeaning soap opera of his cabinet picks, like putting the former head of the Worldwide Wresting Federation in charge of Education, which could be filmed by Hollywood as the Joker taking control of the Gotham City Mayor’s office.

  • If Trump imposes 60% tariffs on China and 20% tariffs on everyone else “on the first day” the knock on effect on the world economy will be severe – causing an economic squeeze and political turmoil among allies as well as opponents, sharply rising prices in the US itself and a hard hit to living standards. Those who voted for him under the impression that they would be better off – and many did despite misgivings about his other policies – a response identified as a definite trend by exit pollsters – are in for a shock and are likely to turn.
  • The same applies to mass deportations, if they are carried out. Removing hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, from the workforce would be seriously disruptive economically, even discounting the immensely divisive and traumatic social and political impacts across communities.
  • If Trump carries out his promise to reverse major US climate policies passed during Joe Biden’s presidency, this could push $80bn of investment to other countries and cost the country up to $50bn in lost exports, according to a new study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University.
  • The required ramp up of military spending among allies, in the context of an economic squeeze generated by the tariffs, would also create increasingly febrile and feverish politics even within the US’s core supporters; as we are already seeing in Japan.

The decline of US power has entered a bumpy and perilous period and the election of Trump is a symptom of that. Standing on much thinner ice than the media is suggesting, the harder he tries to grip, the more things will slip through his fingers; the harder he tries to assert US power, the more he will expose how much it has already slipped.

Its not a Trump surge. Its a Democrat slump.

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

Correction: As of 14/11/24 Trump’s total vote is just under 76 million and Harris’s just under 73 million. That means Trump’s vote has risen by 2 million while the drop in Democrat support is around 8 million.

It is important to base analysis on facts not wishful thinking, so, once the final final count is in, I will rewrite this blog.

Nevertheless, the main argument remains valid.

A small increase in the Trump vote, perhaps 2% or so up on 2020, is not a surge, and remains a very thin mandate for the sweeping changes he intends to bring in. He is standing on thin ice and it is likley that the measures he will take will blow up in his face.

The drop in Democrat support, at around 10% of their 2020 vote, remains very large.

The media chatter about fundamental realignments in US politics has an air of the UK in 2019, but where is Boris Johnson now?

Between the 2020 election and the 2024 election, with nearly all votes now counted, Donald Trump’s vote FELL by a nearly a million, from 74.2 million to 73.4 million*. This is not the surge the media are reporting.

But, the Democrat vote slumped by 12 million, from 81 million to 69 million. So, this was more a Democrat defeat than a Trump victory.

In some ways it is a Republican victory despite Donald Trump.

As this was based on a squeeze on worker’s living standards with real wages lower now than when Biden was elected, and an anger and fear about the slide in US global standing (Biden first lost significant support at the time of the Afghanistan withdrawal) Trump will find that he is standing on thinner ice than the media are projecting because his economic policy of tax cuts for the rich and tariffs on imports will hit living standards even harder, mass deportations will spark mass anger, as will the devastation brought by wholesale environmental deregulation, not to mention the impacts of letting RFK loose on health.

With Republican control of the Senate, the House and the Supreme Court, there will be no checks and balances on this, so the madness will be able to run in full spate until at least the mid term elections in 2 years time. At which point, its likely that the reaction will be severe.

The decision of the Democrats to campaign on what might be called a “Red Wall” strategy,

  • trying to appeal to conservative leaning voters with conservative leaning policies on immigration,
  • having campaign sessions with Liz Cheney,
  • keeping quiet about climate – even after the Florida hurricanes –
  • remaining muleishly pro-Israel, to the extent that Bill Clinton, campaigning in Michegan, argued that the Palestinians had it coming because they didn’t agree to the bantustan he proposed at Camp David, proved incapable of holding the base they had in 2020.

This parallels the experience of the UK Labour Party, which has relentlessly carried out the same orientation since Keir Starmer was elected leader, with the result that Labour amassed half a million votes fewer in the General Election this year than in 2019 (down from 10.2 million to 9.7 million) only managing to get a huge majority in the House of Commons because the Conservatives had presided over a decline in livings standards even greater than that in the US over the same period, and the right wing vote, for the first time in modern history, was split right down the middle between the Tories and Reform; putting this governmnet too on very thin ice – as local council by elections are showing sharply.

The core lesson for the UK is that an incumbent government that proves incapable of at least maintaining living standards is going to be kicked out. “Its the economy, stupid”.

Idiocies of the Week

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

Its Conservative Party Conference week, so we are spoiled for choice.

Liz Truss announced that she wasn’t going to back any of the 4 candidates for Party leader. The sighs of relief from the candidates could be heard from coast to coast.

Kemi Badenoch – and has no one noticed that her name is an anagram of Bad Enoch (its even in the right order) – said that she was shocked that so many recent immigrants to this country “hate Israel”. Given that Israel has spent the last year killing over 41,000 people and bombing Gaza to rubble, accelerated the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, been indicted for genocide at the International Criminal Court and, to return its 60,000 internal refugees to their northern border, has just killed another 1,000 people in Lebanon invaded the country and displaced a million people there, what’s not to love?

Her team in the leadership campaign released an odd pamphlet arguing that 21st century politics is different from 20th century politics because – although everything can best be understood in the form of a triangle – in the old days the triangle was divided horizontally and the bottom of society supported the Left while the Right defended the top, today the triangle is divided vertically; to indicate that both Left and Right have support from top to bottom, but without any acknowledgement that the right still defends the interests of the people at the top, while it is the role of the Left to fight for the bottom.

Confused? You will be. Just to make things even clearer, in their diagram the Left is on the Right and the Right is on the Left. This might indicate that the Tory Right approach the world in an inverted way, but it also might simply be a Freudian slip, implying that somewhere deep in their heart of hearts they know that the Left is, ultimately, right.

Another way of looking at it is that they don’t know which way is up. Bottoms up chaps!

Another gem from Badenoch is that her way of dealing with the problem that highly educated people tend to lean Left is to have fewer highly educated people. All those “pointless university degrees” that make people think have got to go.

Meanwhile, Miriam Cates, speaking on Politics Live, unravelled the full insanity of the Right’s line on immigration. On the one hand the country can’t afford to have all these people coming in, but at the same time it needs people coming in to fill job vacancies because, in Cates’ view “we’re not having enough babies”. So, the country isn’t full up after all. Breed damn you! Breed!

Jo Coburn, the anchor of Politics Live, noted that the Tories were obsessively discussing immigration while most of the electorate are concerned about energy bills and the cost of living, the NHS and the state of public services; without reflecting that Politics Live itself obsessively discusses the issue “we can’t talk about” almost every time it comes on. Anyone would think there was an agenda somewhere to push this under everyone’s noses at every opportunity, carpet bombing us with BS.

Robert Jenrick – a small, cheap embodiment of petty minded mean spiritedness, best known for his order as immigration minister to paint over a mural in a child refugee centre to make it less welcoming – dropped an honest bollock when he said that the problem with the European Court of Human Rights is that it meant that UK Special Services were having to shoot terrorists rather than arrest them because the EHRC would order them released. While this is an absurd claim in itself, its notable that none of the people who criticised Jenrick for this statement denied that UK Special Forces do indeed breach the Geneva Convention in this way. There are a number of cases from Afghanistan that the SAS kept locked away for years to maintain the fiction that they didn’t happen. But its now well known that they did. But to everyone from his rivals for the Tory leadership to “a Labour source”, its just terribly bad taste, and awfully insulting to our brave boys to say that they have done what they have done.

Jenrick also criticised the police for dealing with peaceful demonstrators calling for an end to genocide and a ceasefire in Gaza more gently than rioters who were trying to burn refugees alive in hostels, threw bricks at the police, attacked people in the streets and trashed their neighbour’s houses. Quite inexplicable.

And two from last week.

A delegate at the Reform Conference, interviewed on Politics Joe, opined that the rivers are polluted, not because of the water companies failing to invest – “I think they are being scapegoated” – or too much toxic runoff from farmers overfertilising their fields – its because all those immigrants are coming over here and overwhelming our overloaded sewage system with all their poos. Talk about S*$t.

And David Lammy at the UN last week saying “I know Imperialism when I see it”. A question for David. When you go to work as the British Foreign Secretary at the Foreign Office, and you walk past that statue of Robert Clive, and stride along corridors resplendently decorated with paintings of Britannia and all the rest of it (which you can see here), perhaps through the “Durbar Court”, and you look at all that, what exactly do you see?

Judge not, lest ye be judged.

Posted on by urbanramblings19687496

In Colin Welland’s 1989 adapatation of Andre Brink’s novel A Dry White Season, the barrister played by Marlon Brando comments “Justice and law, Mr. Du Toit, are often just… well they’re, I suppose they can be described as distant cousins. And here in South Africa, well, they’re simply not on speaking terms at all.”

Judge Christopher Hehir, in his conduct of the case against the Just Stop Oil defendants, Roger Hallam, Daniel Shaw, Louise Lancaster, Lucia Whittaker De Abreu, and Cressida Gethin, who he has just sent down for 4 to 5 years in prison for “conspiracy to cause a public nuisance”, has done his best to make people realise just how true that is of the UK too.

His summing up is almost beyond satire in its sophisticated mulishness. Talking of the breakdown of the climactic conditions needed for human civilisation to survive, this bewigged buffoon said, “I acknowledge that at least some of the concerns are shared by many, but the plain fact is that each of you has some time ago crossed the line from concerned campaigner to fanatic”.

Lets break that down. “some of the concerns are shared by many”. The issue is not “concern” at climate breakdown it is the FACT of climate breakdown. This is not in serious dispute. Even the outgoing government’s “Impartiality guidance” for teachers noted that climate denial is not serious science and should not be taught.

Parliament has voted that we are in a “climate emergency”. This does not seem to have got through to Mr Justice Hehir.

So, this is not about opinions. Nor is it about how “many” people share them. It is a matter of UK law that the government has to decarbonise society by 2050. The last government’s plans to meet this target have been ruled inadequate by the UK High Court TWICE in the last two years. The consequences of a failure to meet this target will be considerably more severe than the £750,000 worth of disruption that the M25 protest is estimated to have caused. Would the Judge think it reasonably therefore to bang up Rishi Sunak, Claire Countinho, and the “Net Zero Scrutiny Group” (now happily depleted by the democratic process) for “conspiring” to put the UK well off course for reaching them, as they did in the more salubrious surroundings of the Cabinet Office, and probably on a few zoom calls as well?

It is also a matter of International legal obligation under the Paris Agreement that countries are working together to make this work. Except that the course taken by the last government clearly, in the judgement of the Climate Change Committee – the cross Party body set up to hold government to account for its actions, “signalled a slowing of pace and reversed or delayed key policies” which put the UKs progress below the curve.

In the context of an emergency that has not not been treated as an emergency, in which a lackadaisaical business as usual laziness was passed off as “pragmatism”, any “concerned campaigner” might reasonably conclude that more serious action was needed to make it plain that this is not OK, that the majority opinion, that wants more action on climate not less, should be heard. A “fanatic”, on the other hand, is someone who holds a view unreasonably and in the face of evidence to the contrary. The “plain fact” is that there is no evidence to the contrary in the case of climate breakdown. We can feel and see it happening around us. The consequences of failing to act to limit the damage will be catastrophic. Providing the protection of the law to, for example, banks that finance climate wrecking fossil fuel investments and making an example of people who, for example, take a demonstrative hammer to one of their windows, with punitive multi year sentences for a bit of cracked plate glass shows the same sense of proportion that, 220 years back, hanged Luddites for smashing stocking frames.

A keen advocate of crushing dissent on climate or Palestine by criminalising it has been the last government’s “Security Adviser”, Lord Walney, or plain old John Woodcock MP as he used to be. An acid test for whether the new government will continue down this path will be whether Walney retains his role and continues to be given credence. He should be sacked.

A basic principle of common law is that, for it to retain consent, it has to be seen to be “reasonable” to “the average man (or woman) on the Clapham onmibus”. The lengths to which the judge in this case went to silence the defendents in court, ruling that defendents were not allowed to speak to the jury about why they had done what they did, underlines his fear that the judgement of their 12 peers would be that this was a reasonable and proportionate response to the scale of the crisis and the paucity of action taken to address it. Defendents allowed to put this kind of public interest defence, however unpopular many of the JSO actions have been, have tended to be aquitted by Juries in the last few years. Can’t have that. Where will it all end?

When a judge orders the arrest of people standing outside the court holding placards affirming the rights of juries to hear the whole truth, for contempt of court, it is clear that the legal process as an arbiter of justice is being held in contempt by such a judge; which invites popular scorn for “the rule of law”, “Fundamental British Value” or not.

Mae West put it rather well in 1927.

Judge: “Miss West, are you trying to show contempt for this court?”

Mae West: “On the contrary, your Honor, I was doin’ my best to conceal it.”