skip to main |
skip to sidebar
K
eir Starmer’s off to Washington next week to win support for a European plan to send 30,000 British and European Union troops to Ukraine as “peacekeepers” if and when a truce is agreed to end the Ukraine war. Though this force would allegedly be there to guarantee Ukraine’s independence its real role would be to preserve the British and European Union’s economic interests in a post-war Ukraine that Donald Trump clearly sees as no more than an American protectorate.
The war-lobby that reflects the most venal and aggressive sections of the British ruling class has gone into top gear with Labour, Tory and Liberal Democrat worthies all urging Starmer to “stand up” to Donald Trump. The Atlanticists who used to hail American presidents as leaders of the “free world” have closed ranks with those who look to an alliance with Franco-German imperialism to bleat on about “betrayal”.
“It's time for Starmer to stand up for Britain and our allies in Europe” says Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey. Former Tory defence secretary Gavin Williamson says that “we cannot let fake news and a false narrative become accepted. That has to be rebuffed at every moment. And if that causes some people offence, well, that's their problem”. And Tony Blair’s former spin doctor, Alastair Campbell, calls Donald Trump a “pathological liar, a narcissist” who is “concerned only about himself, his wealth and his power” in the Independent last week.
None of this is likely to sway those now at the helm of US imperialism. The initiative to start high-level talks between the Russian and American foreign ministers in Saudi Arabia was not the whim of The Donald or a tiny clique of American oligarchs but a decision that reflects the needs and demands of the wing of the American ruling class that wants to cut its losses in Ukraine to enable them to strengthen their grip over the Middle East in their bid to control the entire global energy market.
In reality there never was a “free world” and the “special relationship” the British bourgeoisie upheld was largely a figment of their own imagination. They feign suprise at Trump’s moves to build detente with the Russian Federation but the Trump camp made no secret of this in the run-up to the US presidential election last year. The simple fact is that Starmer and the rest of the pack in Europe didn’t think Trump would win.
As we’ve said before secret diplomacy is rarely the best pathway to peace. But both the Russian and American sides are clearly working towards a win-win agreement over Ukraine. If that ends the war with a peace settlement that recognises the rights of the Crimeans, southern Ukrainians and the people of the Donbas to live in the Russian Federation well and good. It will clearly benefit the Ukrainian and Russian people.
The Pope calls for an end to the fighting and the Stop the War campaign tells us to stop the war. Pope Francis wants take his appeal directly to Vladimir Putin and Patriarch Kirill, the Primate of the Russian Orthodox church. But he may have to wait a long time for a response from the Kremlin to pious appeals for peace that ignore the root causes of the conflict.
To be fair the Pope did speak of an “anger” in the Kremlin which could have been “facilitated” by “the barking of NATO at Russia’s door”. But the Vatican has not addressed the central issue of the right of the peoples of the Donbas to self-determination.
The Stop the War movement shamefully takes an even weaker position demanding the “withdrawal of Russian troops, an end to the military escalation by the NATO countries and for all efforts to be focused on finding a negotiated solution to this terrible war” which is more or less what NATO wants as well.
The conflict in Ukraine has rightly heightened fears of escalation that could take Europe and possibly the world to the brink of nuclear war. But the cause of peace is not helped by those in the anti-war movement who blame the Russians for the crisis, ignore the legitimate demands of the people of the Donbas and fail to recognise that this war began in 2014 when the legitimate Ukrainian government was overthrown by fascist gangs supported by Anglo-American and Franco-German imperialism.
The hidden hand is always at work amongst the fake left within the labour and anti-war movement who essentially argue that peace is only attainable on imperialist terms. These sinister forces have long acted as cheer-leaders for NATO and neo-colonialism.
They serve the war party within the United States –the most venal and aggressive sections of the American ruling class that seek to dominate the entire world in the name of “globalisation” and the “new world order”.
Some Americans call them them “deep state” – the war lobby that cuts across all party, regional or religious divides to serve the interests of the big corporations and finance houses of American imperialism.
We must be clear on this. The call for an unconditional Russian withdrawal from Ukraine is just the demand of US imperialism and its lackeys. It would not bring peace but simply leave the anti-fascist Ukrainians and the people of the Donbas to the tender mercies of the Azov brigade and the other Nazi militias of the Kiev regime. Needless to say it doesn’t provide a serious basis for any peace talks and it’s not going to happen – full stop.
Now, more than ever, is the time for a clear call from the anti-war movement for an end to the fighting and a just and lasting peace in eastern Europe. This can only come with a neutral and de-Nazified Ukraine that recognises the independence of the Donbas republics, Crimea’s decision to join the Russian Federation and equal rights for all the people of the regions of the Ukraine.
Russia’s intervention in Ukraine will, hopefully, mark the beginning of the end of a crisis that was entirely the product of imperialist intrigue.
In 2014 Anglo‑American and Franco‑German imperialism brought down the elected government of Ukraine. They propped up a fascist regime in Kiev that has banned communist and other left-wing movements, in pursuit of violent sectarianism that forced the Crimean republic to secede and the people of eastern Ukraine to take up the gun and proclaim their independence.
These days the Ukrainian government is little more than a US protectorate. Its refusal to implement the Minsk accords and its endless breaches of the cease-fire agreements could only have happened with the blessing of its American mentor.
The imperialists pose as defenders of ‘human rights’ and ‘international law’ when it suits them but ignore these lofty principles when it comes to the Palestinians under the heel of a brutal Zionist occupation.
They talk about NATO as if it were some sort of benevolent society set up to guarantee democracy and security in Europe, when it is just another US-led military machine that has brought death and destruction to innocent Africans, Asians, Arabs and Latin Americans over the years.
These are the people who claim to uphold what they call ‘democracy’ whilst turning a blind eye to the Ukrainian fascists that prop up the puppet government in Kiev and see themselves as the heirs to those who worked with Hitler during the German occupation in the Second World War.
The Russian move was a timely response to the constant provocations of the Kiev government that has blocked all progress towards resolving the conflict in eastern Ukraine over the last eight years. It has, however, provoked a predictable response from the imperialist camp that is now bleating on about the rights of small nations which they claim for Ukraine but deny when it comes to millions of people that they have attacked and tried to enslave over the last 70-odd years.
Question More
Sir Keir Starmer is calling for a ban on the Russia Today (RT) TV station as part of his self-appointed role as cheer-leader for imperialist aggression. The Labour leader says RT is pumping out “misinformation” and pro-Putin “propaganda” and therefore it should have its broadcasting licence withdrawn.
Starmer first raised this demand two years ago. This time he’s got the backing of Nicola Sturgeon, the Scottish First Minister, who is peeved at the fact that her nationalist rival, Alex Salmond, has a regular slot on the Russian channel.
But no-one is forced to watch RT and if anyone doesn’t like what they see they can simply switch off or over to another channel. As RT’s Afshin Rattansi says: “We should be hoping that NGOs for free speech – from [Reporters Without Borders] and Amnesty International – will be there to defend this channel against Sir Keir Starmer and the British Labour party who want to ban free speech.”
So we shouldn’t be surprise to see BoJo posing as a great statesman in Kiev in a desperate attempt to show his usefulness to the Biden administration and divert domestic attention away from the ‘partygate’ scandal. But Johnson has, not surprisingly, failed to shake off the pack of Tory back-benchers baying for his blood or attract the attention of Vladimir Putin or the man in the White House Johnson is so keen to impress.
Johnson knows that the real reason that so many Tories are turning on him is because they believe they will never be able to restore the ‘special relationship’ that many of them think is vital for the survival of British imperialism as long as he remains at the helm.
Johnson may think that posing as US imperialism’s chief henchman à la Blair is the way to get back into Biden’s good books. But BoJo, who is still remembered as “Britain’s Trump” in Biden’s circles, needs to do much more than this to restore Britain’s standing with the current President of the USA. Rather than wasting his time talking to a nonentity like Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky, Johnson would be better off working to improve relations with Ireland by ending the impasse with the European Union over northern Ireland’s Irish Sea ‘border’. But that is something Johnson clearly cannot do.
The long and winding road
Sad to see that Ken Livingstone, who was hounded out of the Labour Party by the Blairites and Zionists, has applied to join the Greens instead. Some will argue that there was nowhere else for him to go. Others that the Greens are indeed a genuinely left alternative to Labour.
Meanwhile, reports that Jeremy Corbyn is planning to form a new party – reports almost entirely coming from the Starmer camp that want him out anyway – have fired calls from the usual suspects for the establishment of yet another left social-democratic alternative to Labour. But, needless to say, this will go nowhere without the support of the trade union movement and the unions are simply not interested.
Past efforts have dismally failed. Arthur Scargill, the militant miners’ leader, did his best with his Socialist Labour Party (SLP) whilst even the RMT’s money wasn’t enough to get their Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) off the ground.
There’s no point even in standing communist candidates. It is literally divisive. The old Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) abandoned the revolutionary road when it adopted the {British Road to Socialism}. Other left electoral platforms such as Respect, the SLP and TUSC all essentially express the same theory.
The parliamentary election system in Britain is essentially a two-party system. At this stage the main working-class demands are for social reforms, and we believe that they are best carried out by reformist parties such as the Labour Party. We see the main struggle being within that party and the trade unions, and as long as Labour retains its organic links with the trade unions our policies are unlikely to change. Lenin himself said, at the time of Ramsay MacDonald in the early 1920s, that the British Labour Party was a very strange party, unlike any other social democratic party in Europe. The ‘strangeness’ is that Labour gets nearly all its members and funding from the trade unions. This is still the case.
