A Belligerent Pauper State

Ben Wildsmith

The Labour conference opened today on a curious note. Ten weeks after the election, Leader of the House, Lucy Powell, reassured delegates that the new government wasn’t the same as the one they had just annihilated.

The counter-narrative to this week’s stories of freebies and questionable donations was first on the agenda.

‘Don’t let anyone tell you we are all the same, conference, because we are not,’ Powell affirmed.

At a fringe event, meanwhile, Mick Lynch of the RMT called for Rachel Reeves to abandon the Tory fiscal rules that bake austerity into government plans.

‘They cannot keep the bosses and media happy every day. They’ve got to step out of the straitjacket they’ve put themselves in economically with these fiscal rules. They’ve got to be bolder. It’s got to start with Rachel Reeves changing her position. If you use Tory fiscal measures, you’ll get Tory results.’

Defensiveness

An event that should be celebratory, given the majority Labour has achieved, seems uneasy and marked by defensiveness.

On one hand, conference was treated to Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Darren Jones, suggesting that Labour should be aiming for five terms in power, taking us to 2049. Those who detected a hint of self-doubt in that brittle grandiosity could shelter under the wise counsel of Sunderland MP, Lewis Atkinson.

Worrying over how the party presented itself to working-class voters, Atkinson urged delegates to follow his own example. He had, only last Friday, campaigned in a council estate wearing his Sunderland AFC shirt. It was part of his determination not to ‘be visually a turn-off to working-class voters’.

Can we pause for a minute, here? Between being asked to speak at conference and mounting the rostrum today, Mr Atkinson must have sat down to write his initial draft, reworked it, run it past his colleagues and loved ones, then finally had it approved at the top level of government.

Is it not a matter of wonder that nobody involved in this process had the compassion to tell him, ‘Lewis, love, you’re sounding like a right wanker here, cut that bit out.’?

If you’re despairing that the new government represents any change at all, however, you should be careful what you wish for.

In one very consequential way, Labour is charting a drastic new course.

A couple of weeks ago, we saw a carefully choreographed period of political theatre regarding the use of UK Storm Shadow missiles for strikes inside Russia. Anonymous sources were quoted as claiming that a deal had been done to allow this move, preparing the way for Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, to travel to Ukraine for talks with US Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken.

We were alerted that a joint visit to Kyiv was unprecedented because of security concerns, priming the pump for a major announcement. The following day, Keir Starmer visited Washington to meet with the animated corpse of Joe Biden and the press gathered to hear the big reveal.

Act of war

It never came. Russia had told the United Nations in session that the use of NATO weapons on Russian territory would be considered an act of war. The Americans, mindful that UK missiles contain American components, judged that threat to be serious.

Today, Lammy used a fringe conference speech to urge allies to demonstrate ‘nerve and guts’ over Ukraine.

This, you’ll agree, appears to be a role-reversal for the UK in its dealings with America. The accepted wisdom has been that the UK’s natural position, vulnerable as it is, lies in reminding its bellicose ally of the virtues of caution.

Now, it seems, our government is being reined in by the White House.

Labour’s positioning on this is baffling for several reasons. Leaving aside the UK’s particular vulnerability to Russian reprisals, the policy is at odds with the government’s wider modus operandi.

Ukraine is spoken of in moral terms, as a duty we must uphold to retain our national integrity. In the same speech, however, Lammy explained that weapons sales to Israel will continue, despite that nation facing charges of genocide in the International Court.

Granny-freezing careerists

It stretches credulity that the granny-freezing careerists of Keir Starmer’s Labour are seized with moral fury over one of these wars, to the point of exposing us to existential threats, yet so nuanced over the other.

Additionally, we’re broke, aren’t we? The means testing of winter fuel payments to the elderly was sold to us as unavoidable as, had it not been enacted, there might have been a run on the pound. The parliamentary debate on the issue, upon which no Welsh Labour MP rebelled, took place the day before David Lammy’s trip to Kyiv.

On that trip, he pledged an additional £600 million in funds for Ukraine, over and above the £3 billion annual stipend already agreed. That figure accounts for half of the savings made by cutting the payments to pensioners.

I’m under no illusions about the threat Putin’s Russia poses to the UK and its allies. I am, however, mightily confused by a government that is simultaneously alarmist about it whilst leading the charge into its consequences.

We are telling the world, Putin included, that we are so economically ruined that we can’t heat our homes. Meanwhile, we are urging escalation on the dog-end of an American administration that could conceivably be replaced by a suspected Putin ally in less than two months.

The rebuttal to most conspiracy theories is that people fail to factor in the directionless incompetence of governments when constructing them.

In this instance, we should hope that explanatory factors are being withheld from us because presenting the UK as a selectively belligerent pauper state cannot surely be the government’s intention.