Panorama

Every founder member of NATO has a myth of having thought of it, and they would all laugh at each others' if they knew about them. NATO has never been purely defensive; it was founded six years before the Warsaw Pact, for example, and if it ever was an academically serious contention that the Soviet Union had had either the means or the will to invade Western Europe, then it has not been so this century.

Britain keeps troops in the Baltic states as a tripwire, because only if our own personnel had already been killed would we consider going to war for those places. We still might not do it, though. Nor has NATO ever been about freedom 'n' democracy; at least one of its founder members would have failed that test spectacularly, while very recent senior Nazi officers were prominent in it from the start. And of course NATO's expansion, along with that of the closely related EU, gave Vladimir Putin all the excuse that he needed to invade Ukraine, itself replete with the heirs of Adolf Heusinger and indeed effectively run by a sort of Schnez-Truppe. War is very good for the business of major donors to politicians, and if this had been an unprovoked attack, then there would be no felt need to keep describing it as such.

Ukraine would certainly never now be admitted to NATO, and the rump state that it will very soon be would be lucky to be let into the EU. Yet having already secured the backing of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the centrist caricature that is Mark Rutte will now become Secretary General of NATO because that is the will of Viktor Orbán. Centrism and right-wing populism are con tricks to sell exactly the same economic and foreign policies to different audiences by pretending to wage a culture war. In Britain, centrists and right-wing populists alike have hitherto supported NATO, which subjects British military personnel to officers who were themselves subject to Orbán and to Erdoğan, or indeed to the likes of Rutte or of whoever was really deciding anything while Joe Biden was nominally the President of the United States. Such figures' say in those matters ought to be unacceptable to those who had hitherto accrued to Boris Johnson or to Nigel Farage. 

Having turned 60 on Wednesday, Johnson was yesterday sulking in the Daily Mail that even Keir Starmer now said that Jeremy Corbyn would have been a better Prime Minister than Johnson was, and that no one apart from Johnson found that remotely remarkable. Based on his remarks about Ukraine, even Farage would have to give that answer if the question were ever put to him. But when would Farage be interviewed again? He has probably burned his bridges with the BBC by being right about Ukraine, and thus at least implicitly about NATO, although being so will do him no end of good among the voters at whom he is aiming. Some people are paid an absolute fortune to talk about politics when they know nothing at all about it.

Yet Farage is still wrong about Gaza among much else, and the Leader of the Opposition in 2029, or for many practical purposes from next month, should not be anyone who had ever been Auntie's favourite uncle. Farage may very well win Clacton, but the re-election of George Galloway at Rochdale is a racing certainty. Short Money is £19,401.20 for every seat won at the most recent General Election, plus £38.75 for every 200 votes gained, with a further £213,132.53 in travel expenses divided among the Opposition parties on the same basis. It would not be your possibly ropey local candidate who decided what to do with that money. It would be the Leader. Wherever you can, including here at North Durham, vote for the Workers Party of Britain.