Britain has the worst government at the most dangerous possible time

Telegraph

19-02-2025

This is a critical moment that calls for heroic leadership, and yet we are saddled with a Cabinet of hypocrites, phoneys and cowards. Donald Trump is pulling the plug on Ukraine, and seemingly attempting to oust Volodymyr Zelensky (who he has wrongly dubbed a 'dictator'), but Britain has nothing useful to contribute other than fake outrage, sentimental chest-beating and pledges it cannot afford. Trump appears to be conceding far too much to Russia, and yet we can't do anything about it. Labour's sanctimoniousness cannot hide its complicity in Ukraine's betrayal: our political class is no better than the rest of Europe's freeloading political elites.
If Keir Starmer really cared about the security of the West, and the fate of Kyiv, he would tear up his entire agenda. He would announce a rearmament programme à la 1934, and the reconstruction of a homegrown military industrial supply chain. He would go for growth, ditch Rachel Reeves and Ed Miliband's Leftist idiocy, suspend net zero to cut energy costs, slash taxes and deregulate. He would drastically increase the size of the Armed Forces, transform procurement, and embrace AI and modern warfare technology. He would reverse his splurge on the welfare state to pay for vastly more military personnel. He would fix our nuclear deterrent. With US foreign policy now centred around the promotion of free speech, he would cancel Britain's most illiberal laws and reposition himself as America's comrade-in-arms. He would stop sucking up to China, and prepare for trade dislocation.
All of this would allow him to travel to Washington holding his head high, reminding the president that of course Ukraine didn't start the war, conceding that Trump is right to demand a greater military contribution from European countries and offering grown-up, realistic solutions.
Alas, the Prime Minister is the wrong man at the wrong time. Starmer is temperamentally and ideologically unfit to stand up for the free world and to lead a historic rearmament of Britain, his judgment impaired by his background as a radical Left-wing human rights lawyer, his instincts invariably wrong or stuck in the 1990s, his understanding of history, economics, geopolitics and the American psyche lamentable.
No true war-time prime minister would humiliate our long-suffering Armed Forces by doubling down on the persecution of soldiers in Northern Ireland, or focus obsessively on handing the Chagos, host to key military bases, to an ally of China, citing ludicrous 'international law' considerations and picking the wrong side in the new struggle of the Great Powers.
No real war-time leader would choose to prioritise spending more on welfare and his public sector client groups while refusing to allocate more to defence, as if the non-existent peace dividend still existed. No statesman would glibly propose sending peacekeeping troops or typhoons to Ukraine at a time when the British Army is smaller, per capita, than it has been for 300 years, when our military is catastrophically bereft of ships, of planes, of munitions, of drones, tech and money, when generals fear that we could barely cope with the shortest of conflicts.
The 'liberal international order' died for good under Barack Obama, when Bashar al-Assad unleashed his chemical weapons in 2013, Putin invaded the Donbas in 2014 and America signed the Iran deal. The US was no longer in charge and no longer cared. Why did Britain, when all of this was happening even under the Democrats, continue to run down its Armed Forces? The old order had certainly long since expired by 2022, when Putin launched his despicable full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and when Hamas attacked Israel in 2023, under Biden. Trump is merely confirming what anybody with half a brain should have understood.
America was briefly the world's hegemon after winning the Cold War, but 9/11 and the Iraq and Afghanistan fiascos, combined with the vertiginous rise of China, put paid to it. We are back to spheres of influences, to Great Powers carving up the world: Trump appears to be a fan of the latter incarnation of the Monroe Doctrine. Tragically, the Atlantic Charter, which committed the UK and US to the principle of self-determination, is forgotten. Just as regrettably, imperialism appears to have returned, as practised by Trump with Denmark and Greenland, Canada and Panama, as well as by China with its belt and road initiative. Trump seems keen on a reprise of Yalta or Potsdam: Ukraine's fate, like that of Eastern Europe after 1945, will be decided by others.
America is back to old habits in other ways: it didn't intervene in the First World War until 1917, and it took Pearl Harbor for it to enter the Second World War in 1941. With or without Trump, we shouldn't expect it to step into every war in Europe or every conflict in the world any longer. It's our own fault: Britain and Europe should have volunteered to spend a lot more on defence years ago. Nato, which worryingly now feels on its last legs, was never meant to be a way for Europe to sponge off America.
Even Trump's attempt at extracting hundreds of billions of dollars worth of raw materials from Ukraine in compensation for US help isn't entirely novel, though it is certainly astonishingly blatant. The US has frequently asked for something in return for its assistance, in a transactional way: decolonisation, money, the dollar's hegemony, access to raw materials. The First and Second Gulf Wars were triggered by America's perceived self-interest: Kuwait produces oil, and 9/11 had to be avenged.
America is pivoting to the Pacific: it wants to avoid at all cost Chinese hegemony in the region. It sees Russia as a lesser issue – despite its close alliance with China – that Europe should deal with itself.
Labour's foot-dragging about increasing military spending from 2.3 per cent to 2.5 per cent is thus morally idiotic. Poland, a country that is on the front line, intends to spend 4.7 per cent of GDP on defence this year, at the cost of a large deficit. It boasts 200,000 plus soldiers, more than any Nato country other than the US and Turkey. That's a real commitment. If Poland can do it, why can't we? Or are ministers not telling the truth when they claim to care about Ukraine? We are truly stuck with the worst possible Labour Government at the most dangerous of times.