Raise Our Voices Above The Throng

Russia cannot launch a drone attack on a commercial plane at a civilian airport in peaceful Germany, and the old East Germany at that, but its troops will be marching up your street and mine any day now unless we blah blah blah? Get a grip. Tara McCormack has:

Another fortnight, another British Prime Minister, but there is one firm point of continuity: Ukraine. Keir Starmer’s last day in office was spent in Kyiv, where as a parting gift he announced another £255 million of funding, reaffirming his ‘unwavering’ support for the war effort. Just seven days after Andy Burnham took office, he hosted President Zelensky as his first international visitor, intoning that Britain was still ‘one hundred percent’ behind him. The signal to the Euro-Atlantic establishment was clear. Whichever fraction of the British political class happens to be in government — Johnson or Sunak, Starmer or Burnham — they will continue this endless proxy war.

These incantations are becoming increasingly absurd as the conflict drags on inconclusively. John Healey, now pulling the nation’s purse strings, has said that the defence of Britain begins in Ukraine. The House of Commons Library estimated that Britain’s financial assistance to the country as of February of this year was £21.8 billion, with £13.06 billion in military financing. This includes offensive military equipment and long range strike capabilities. In 2024 Starmer allowed Ukraine to use British-French Storm Shadow missiles to strike deep into Russia, in what amounted to a significant escalation. NATO weapons and intelligence are used by the Ukrainians to strike energy facilities, warehouses and other targets on Russian territory.

The ever-pliant British media feeds us a steady stream of propaganda to deny the bleak reality of this forever war. Ukraine is always ‘turning the tide’ with high visibility tactics (such as its current campaign against Wildberry warehouses) or its eastern counteroffensives. Each new weapons system sent by NATO is hailed as the ‘game changer.’ Meanwhile, Russia is always on the verge of collapse. We are told that its soldiers eat each other when they are not fighting among themselves with shovels. Now their life-span on the front line has supposedly shortened to a mere twenty minutes.

And yet the game never changes. Russia continues to slowly extend its territorial gains, capturing just over a thousand square miles in the past year. Ukraine continues to suffer heavy losses. Small villages change hands in bloody battles whose ultimate purpose is increasingly obscure. We are told that the citizens of Ukraine are still standing strong against the aggressors and need our backing. But the truth is that the majority of Ukrainians now want to see an end to the war. Hundreds of thousands of conscript-age men have fled the country while others are being dragged off the streets and forced to serve in the army. ‘Busification’ is the name for this policy of forced mobilisation for a war-weary population. It goes without saying that the children of the wealthy and connected rarely have to suffer it.

As the media tries to convince us that Russia will inevitably lose to its much smaller neighbour, it also tells us that Russia is somehow an existential threat to Britain. Pity poor Lord Alan West, who has been tasked with justifying the new surge in weapons spending by spinning all kinds of lurid tales about the coming invasion. Welfare is unimportant, he said at the start of July, compared to the need to keep Putin’s storm troopers from crossing the Channel. A month later he replayed the same motif, asking why we would bother to spend more on school breakfast clubs in the UK if the well-fed children will emerge happily from their meal only to be shot by bloodthirsty Russians stomping down our streets.

The British political-media class have worked hard to establish a consensus behind this maximally belligerent posture. Those who depart from it are vilified in the same time-honoured way, as with the attacks on Diane Abbott this week after she mentioned the obvious fact of a ‘NATO campaign against Russia’, while those who urge the government to arm itself to the teeth are spared the same scrutiny. When the CEO of BAE systems, Europe’s largest weapons manufacturer, claimed that Britain is ‘complacent’ about the threat of war, how many journalists pointed out the conflict of interest?

Nor can one find mainstream discussion of the dangers posed by the intense proxy war we are waging. Were Russia providing long-range weaponry to a third country striking energy facilities and cities within Britain, we would of course be at war by now. What happens if Russia decides to end its policy of containing the conflict to Ukraine and to strike at NATO weapons depositories in Poland and Romania? We already know the answer. Armies start wars and citizens finish them. It may be in the interests of the British political class to pursue a policy of escalating conflict with a nuclear-armed Great Power — if only to please Washington — but it is not in ours.

That’s why peace advocates should be pushing for an end to the proxy war with Russia as soon as possible. While we will get little hearing in Parliament or in the mainstream press, that makes it all the more necessary to raise our voices above the throng of reckless jingoists. A foreign policy rooted in the interests of the British people would support a negotiated end to the conflict and an immediate halt on weapons and funding to Ukraine. For the past four and a half years, those committed to this unwinnable war have been on the moral high ground. It’s about time that we dislodged them.