Posts Tagged ‘Ukraine’

Starmer’s Labour offers genuine hope of restoring Britain’s credibility in the world

24/06/2024, 11:30:58 PM

by Rob Marchant

General elections tend to focus on bread-and-butter domestic issues that affect voters directly. But what would a Labour government look like in terms of its relations with the rest of the world?

Britain’s reputation in the world is surely poorer than it has been for decades – not because it is seen as bad by its neighbours and allies, but because it is looked at with a kind of sad sympathy, as you would a friend who had recently committed an act of self-harm and had not yet turned the corner into recovery. The UK is fundamentally liked and admired abroad more than some cynics might think, but these days it is rather in spite of the Tories than because of them. In particular, the premierships of Johnson and Truss have hardly worked wonders for the credibility of British governments abroad.

At such a time, Labour has a huge advantage, as in some other policy areas, of being able to make major, positive changes, by dint of simply not being the Tories, and therefore not hidebound by Tory obsessions, such as being triggered by any mention of, well, that great continent of which Britain’s landmass forms a part.

Whether or not you agreed with Britain leaving the EU – and most of the country, for better or worse, no longer thinks it was a good idea – in 2024, the country is clearly not ready to rejoin and neither is the party – wisely – positing this as something they will look to deliver. After all, they are not even elected yet, and self-evidently need not to scare the horses and put at that risk. But we are looking to file off some of Brexit’s sharp corners with some simple and specific pledges.

Where the manifesto says “new trade agreements”, it seems to be talking about sensible, focused measures with existing partners, rather than of the Tory-style, “the government announces a terrific new trade deal with Lichtenstein” variety.

For example, exporters of many kinds of perishable goods have been for the last two-and-a-half years been subject to pointless veterinary checks on every load, causing delays and increased costs which have harmed their business; checks which Labour will seek to remove. Neither will they have Britain commit reputational hara-kiri by putting it outside the European Convention on Human Rights, something that only the despotic regimes of Russia and Belarus have managed since its inception.

A major area which requires a high level of international coordination is Miliband’s familiar hobby-horse of the environment and clean energy; while one might speculate on the practicality of his grand schemes, at least Labour will not be beholden to the cranky climate-change deniers of the Tory right.

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Corbyn’s pacifism won’t really affect Britain from opposition, right? Wrong

02/09/2015, 09:50:36 PM

by Rob Marchant

Another week, another revelation about what a Corbyn-led foreign policy would look like. It is enough that Labour would, as it did in the days of George Lansbury, be directed into a position of “peace at any price”, even if that were saving lives from genocide in Kosovo and Sierra Leone, as a previous Labour government did.

This is not an exaggeration: it is hardly a surprise that the chair of Stop the War Coalition, by definition, supports the idea that any military action by the West under any circumstances is a bad thing (although, strangely, that organisation has shown itself not so against war when it is conducted by a non-Western power, such as Russia).

And so we have been treated in recent days to a reminder that Corbyn regards the death of Osama Bin Laden as “a tragedy”. While, in times of peace, it is right to uphold the right of anyone to a fair trial, Bin Laden was killed in war zone. And it is difficult to imagine many British citizens agreeing with that particular stance, let alone those of New York, where he contrived the death of three thousand.

Leaving on one side the fact that this statement was made on PressTV, the propaganda channel of a deeply unpleasant regime, it is extraordinary that we even have to make these arguments.

And then there was the concern articulated by Halya Coynash, one of Ukraine’s most respected human rights activists, that Corbyn had essentially adopted the Russian position on her country:

“His assessment of Russia’s annexation of Crimea coincides nicely with that presented by Russian President Vladimir Putin and on Russian television and he has simply ignored grave human rights concerns under Russian occupation.”

However, for some it is convenient to think that, should Labour elect Jeremy Corbyn as its leader in a few days’ time, his wacky foreign policy ideas would not do Britain any harm. After all, in opposition, what can a party leader do? And in the hearts of many of his most fervent supporters is the realisation that their man can never be Prime Minister.

This is a dangerously fallacious reading of the role of the leader of the opposition.

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IS is on the shores of the Med. Putin is rampant. Does anyone in British politics even care?

25/02/2015, 01:18:03 PM

by Rob Marchant

As if it were not enough that the EU’s two principal member states – in the form of their leaders, François Hollande and Angela Merkel – spent much of the last few weeks happily handing to Vladimir Putin parts of another European country on a plate in return for “peace”, chickens have now come home to roost in another benighted country only a few hundred miles from the EU.

It was not, as some have tried to maintain against all logic, that the West intervened in Libya and provoked a reaction against it. It was self-evidently that it did not intervene enough. In timidly restricting itself to a no-fly zone, it did not remotely attempt to help set up a functioning democratic state in the aftermath or prevent a power vacuum being filled by jihadists. In fact, NATO left early, against the wishes of the new government.

It is by now painfully obvious that wherever there is unrest in the Muslim world, jihadists will not be slow in moving in. The trick is not to let them get established. Proactive, not reactive; a stitch in time.

There is very little about Iraq on which critics and supporters of intervention agree, but most would concede that the Allies carried out a fairly effective military action and then botched the peace. For all the current crop of world leaders criticised their predecessors over that episode, it didn’t stop them repeating the exact same error in Libya.

By the time it got to Syria, of course, the alliance which had helped free Libya of Gaddafi had lost its appetite even for that kind of limited, genocide-preventing intervention. Hear no evil, see no evil. And what was the result of that? Well, genocide, naturally: 220,000 dead and counting.

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Ukraine: at some point, Labour will need more than warm words

16/04/2014, 09:06:43 AM

by Rob Marchant

To date on this blog, we have not spoken much about the events in Ukraine: reflecting, perhaps appropriately, the priority it currently has in the agenda of both the British public and its politicians. After all, foreign policy does not win elections in peacetime.

But given that we are surely living through the most tense moment of East-West relations since the height of the Cold War, it behoves us to take a moment to see how Labour might be affected.

Britain, like much of the West, is clearly living through a period of reluctance, even quasi-isolationism, with regard to foreign conflicts. Interventionism may not be dead, but it is most certainly having a nap. A perception that fingers were burned in Iraq and Afghanistan pervades almost all foreign policy thinking, to a greater or lesser extent. And nowhere is this to be seen more clearly than on the fringes of British politics.

On the left fringe, Stop the War Coalition and their fellow-travellers within Labour’s hard left have decided that the West is so fundamentally evil, that they must oppose it so strongly as to apologise for some deeply unpleasant regimes who oppose it (in this case, the borderline-despotic Russian regime). Exhibit A: the Stoppers’ Putin apology pieces, or their frankly bonkers assertion that NATO is “itching for war”, when in fact its constituent nations are going to great pains to avoid the merest hint of military involvement.

On the right fringe, there a few odd backbench Tories along with UKIP; owners of a “little Englander” mentality all, seasoned with an instinctive mistrust of the Establishment and a longing for the smack of firm government. This strange combination ends up with their views converging on, paradoxically – as we saw recently with the Putin-admiring Nigel Farage – the same lines as the left.

Then there is the mainstream of both parties; as we saw on the Syria vote, many of these on both sides are happy to opt for happy isolationism and call it statesmanship.

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