The ever-increasing war psychosis of Reject Labors

With each passing day, Britain's war psychosis seems to deepen.

This week, Defense Secretary John Healey spent an hour explaining to MPs the activities of a Russian spy ship off Britain's coast, and the navy's efforts to track its progress.

Healey, not naturally inclined to martial posturing, nonetheless did his best, solemnly declaiming a message to Russian President Vladimir Putin: We see you, we know what you are doing, and we will not hesitate to take strong action to protect this country. .

What exactly was the purpose of this performance? Assuming the Russian ship acts as described, it does not appear to violate international law.

Furthermore, intelligence gathering is a reality and there is not a single great power that does not engage in it. London is home to a very important building on the south bank of the Thames, devoted entirely to spying for MI6 headquarters.

While operations such as the 2018 Salisbury poisonings, widely attributed to Russian military intelligence, cannot be tolerated, the most normal reaction to routine activities like that of the Russian ship is to keep an eye out, but not to make a public fuss.

This no longer appears to be Labour's approach. Rather, they attack anything that can be used to inflame international tensions.

It's probably no coincidence that Healey's attempt to freak out the nation coincided with Donald Trump's first week in office.

Britain has been the most belligerent power in NATO, bar none, in its attempts to maintain the conflict in Ukraine. Last week Keir Starmer, who sends a hard-to-spare £3 billion to Ukraine in military aid each year, signed an improbable century-long pact with kyiv. .

He is certainly worried that Trump could strike a deal to end the war, which Ukraine could not sustain without money and weapons from Washington. Starmer, like Rishi Sunak and Boris Johnson before him, demands total defeat for Moscow, which every serious analyst understands. not on the cards.

So Healey's ostentatious saber rattling is at least partly intended to remind Washington how horrible the Russians are and why they even tried to peek at Britain's submarine cable network.

But there is more than that. Militarism is the Labor Party's preferred response to a range of problems.

He claims to want a reset of relations with the European Union, but rejects one EU proposal after another, ranging from youth exchange programs to participation in a tariff-free manufacturing supply chain pact. customs, suggested this week.

Instead, the government hopes to thaw ties only by promoting military initiatives with key EU states like France and Germany.

Once again, some Starmerites advocate an arms buildup, extravagant to the point of madness, to revive otherwise elusive economic growth.

An alliance between Trump and journalist Paul Mason, in his latest incarnation as a contributor to a think tank financed by the arms industry, demands that 5% of gross domestic product be devoted to the military, more than double of the current figure.

Mason claims that this totally unfeasible project would lead to a manufacturing boom, to the benefit of his new sponsors.

This would certainly lead to the devastation of public services since the bond markets would never tolerate the financing of such a program from public debt and since, according to all recent precedents, the orders would largely go to corporations anyway. American.

But all this is only made easier by the beating of the war drums of Healey and others. For Labor, all paths seem to involve militarization. The unions and the left must reject this miserable program of ever more weapons and little butter for the cause. our future.