Starmer's Moral Vacuity

Meanwhile, kids are going hungry and their parents and grandparents can't afford heat…

Last evening at the annual Lord Mayor’s Banquet Starmer gave a deluded and confused speech on foreign policy. So, what’s new?

He trotted out the usual insults against Russian President Putin, calling him an “erratic, increasingly desperate aggressor.” I’d call that projection. Continuing to fire Storm Shadow medium range missiles into Russia - but only when the US gave its UK poodle permission to do so - is erratic, aggressive and desperate because it won’t alter the fact that Russia is winning, which the West has admitted.

Sir Keir claimed supporting the corrupt Ukrainian regime “is deeply in our self-interest.” That’s patently false. Project Ukraine has crippled the UK economy. The UK pays the highest electricity prices in the world, four times more than the US and nearly 50% more than France and Germany. In the past five years, UK businesses have seen their bills soar by 124%. Starmer is in deep denial about the cause - the loss of stable and reliable supplies of Russian gas and oil to Europe.

The situation is made worse because the UK privatised its entire energy sector, allowing speculation and profiteering to run riot, but Starmer won't renationalise because his corporate donors won’t let him. They own him.

Starmer also claimed that “the future of freedom in Europe is being decided today.” The Ukraine conflict was never about freedom. It’s about preserving a flagging US hegemony by weakening Russia, which has failed,

and the EU, which has succeeded beyond Washington’s wildest dreams.

In a cursory nod to reality, Starmer mentioned peace negotiations:

“We must …. put Ukraine in the strongest possible position for negotiations so they can secure a just and lasting peace on their terms that guarantees their security, independence — and right to choose their own future.”

What he gets wrong is that any peace deal will be on Russia’s, not Ukraine’s terms. That’s how these things work. The victor dictates the terms. And they won’t be nearly as good as they would have been in the spring of 2022 when Boris Johnson, on orders from the US, told Ukraine to drop the Istanbul peace deal. Russia will settle for nothing less than keeping the four Russian-speaking oblasts - Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhia - that in 2022 overwhelmingly voted to join with Russia, the demilitarisation of what remains of Ukraine, its denazification and a security agreement that doesn’t threaten Russia’s existence.

Even the neoliberal Economist sees the handwriting on the wall.

About the other raging western-funded conflict, Israel’s genocide in Gaza and, increasingly, the West Bank, its carpet bombing of southern Lebanon and incursion into Syria, Zionist Sir Keir had little to say other than to “bring the hostages home” and increase “the flow of aid to those suffering.”

In October Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in the occupied Palestinian territory, Francesa Albanese, issued her second report, Genocide as Colonial Erasure.

Her key recommendations to Members States include:

• To enforce the absolute prohibition of genocide, commencing with a full arms embargo and sanctions

• To formally recognise Israel as an apartheid state, to reactivate the UN Special Committee Against Apartheid and to put Israel on notice of possible suspension of its membership (as per Article 6 of the UN Charter)

• To support investigations of international crimes, including on the basis of universal jurisdiction and to investigate and prosecute dual citizens involved in crimes in the occupied Palestinian territory
  

You can be certain Starmer will ignore all of these.

The moral vacuity of UK foreign policy mirrors that of its domestic policy. Everything Starmer’s regime does is in the service of the global oligarchs who run the teetering western ‘order.’ That’s why the UK as a nation state is on its way out.