The taste of Donald Trump’s arse must be bitter on the lips of Keir Starmer this morning. All that frantic licking has, so far, made no difference at all. All the UK Government spin about the frantic licking being validated by the outcome is silly – the tariffs turned out to be formula-based and we got precisely what our formula said we should get, simply because we’re a net importer from the US.
And so the UK’s strategy is to increase the frequency and intensity of the licking in pursuit of a US trade deal. It is almost certain that this is going to mean further capitulation to the US, with proposed cuts to the Digital Services Tax (the tax on evil US social media companies) and increasing access to the US’s environmentally-dreadful food products – at the expense of our farmers.
Trump first, our farmers second. Trump first, our teenage boys second. Trump first, our disabled, our elderly and the globe’s most vulnerable people second. Trump first, Britain second. I can imagine the strategy discussion involved; ‘Look, Vichy France gets a bad name. It was the pragmatic, grown-up thing to do. After all, the French Resistance were vexatious nimbys and zealots who were thwarting growth.’
Why so pathetic? Two reasons. Well three if we include the fact that Starmer manages to be pathetic in more or less everything he does. The primary one is probably Trident. Atlanticists like Starmer believe that the first non-negotiable in government is maintaining the fig leaf of a fake nuclear deterrent at absolutely any cost. Since they are America’s missiles not outs, licking it is.
But perhaps the second reason may actually be more important; this is what Starmer is for, fundamentally. From his close relationship with the US State Department as he was helping them persecute Julian Assange onwards, he is effectively a ‘US global order proxy’. Everyone thinks the Labour Together project was to prevent Corbyn’s nationalisation agenda.
Nonsense. They weren’t interested in his domestic agenda (as we can see by the fact that they never actually had a coherent alternative). It was all about Nato, the US and Israel. That is why they really wanted Corbyn out (along with the arrogant belief that Labour really belonged to ‘people like them’, not the ‘fleas’).
Starmer is on his knees with his tongue out because that is his fundamental purpose in life. He is The Last Atlanticists whose primary goal is to ensure that (a) the US continues to dominate the world because (b) the UK will then be a vassal state to the state that dominates the world. There is no more sophistication to it than that.
The Democrats are demonstrating another aspect of Starmer’s capitulation; the old order have no answers
But this doesn’t explain the whole picture, because Starmer is not the only person channeling his inner white flag. I mean, look at the US Democrats. They got all excited because, after months of total paralysis, some guy stood up and said ‘naughty naughty Mr Trump’ solidly for a day. That’s it probably fixed then.
The Democrats are demonstrating another aspect of Starmer’s capitulation; the old order have no answers. Trump exists because of what they did, who they are and what people expected them to do next. When Trump left office they largely returned to what they do, who they are and did what people expected them to do next.
Worse than that, they all know that the thing they need to do to beat Trump is to pivot away from ‘the best thing to do for poor people is to make rich people richer and then hope for the best’ to ‘perhaps rich people are the problem’. But that’s like telling a Ranger fan to shift to Celtic. Economic populism is what they have defined their political careers against.
The Democrats default to capitulation because not capitulating would have got their hands dirty. In the same way, Starmer cannot envisage a world where he isn’t expecting the material conditions of British citizens to be guaranteed not by him but by the US global order. He has nothing else.
Of course, neither does the SNP. They’re all in on the licking game now as well. But this is not where the big shift is happening. Something of a watershed appeared this week, though it might take a little decoding for you.
The pretty well respected political news website Politico had a story saying that SNP officials briefed them that the SNP would ditch it’s anti-nuclear stance and get much more in line with Natoist militarism. Here’s the thing; Politico billed the briefer as ‘an official’. There are fairly specific rules for how you cover your source’s identity in political journalism.
For example, whenever it says ‘sources close to Mr X’ or ‘cabinet’ that just means Mr X or cabinet. It is either them briefing directly and pretending not to or they’ve got a close ally to go and say what they wanted to say themselves. ‘Senior party figure’ is for anyone who is not the leader but is a known face. ‘Official’ means it is official, it is a paid staffer doing paid staffer work.
Now in Westminster that can mean a couple of things because individual members of government sometimes appoint their own officials. Famously, it was Damien McBride who was a Gordon Brown official who did all the briefing against Blair. He was ‘an official’, but not a leader-appointed official.
That doesn’t apply to the SNP. Their officials are all pool officials appointed by the leader. This means that one of three things has happened. Either Politico have been remarkably and surprisingly loose with their terminology for no obvious reason, John Swinney’s officials have gone rogue and are undermining him, or he authorised the briefing. The last of these makes a lot more sense.
When your democratic tools are as blunt as ours are, surrender looks like a good idea
Swinney is in many ways the embodiment of surrender. It’s not because he’s a bad man, it’s because he’s a weak man with middling intelligence and no vision. He appointed Stephen Noon as his chief strategist, a man whose every strategy is ‘head down, don’t do anything but administer and fingers cross ed that in about 20 years…’. Appointing Stephen Noon is just replacing the Saltire on Bute House with a white flag.
Swinney will not fight London other than in soundbites. Swinney doesn’t know how to fight London. So he’s trapped in London’s world, London’s media, London’s preoccupations. In that world, compliance is easiest. Remember when they told you that ‘join Nato’ was the last SNP capitulation, the capitulation which would make all the others unnecessary?
Well that was never going to be true, so now the SNP is subsidising British weapons manufacturing corporations, supporting sharp rises in defence spending, talking about how brilliant Trump is and ditching unilateral nuclear disarmament.
In the US the universities are capitulating, the legal establishment is capitulating, the media is capitulating, the big corporations who aren’t already hot for the Trump agenda are making a comfortable peace with it.
Why? Why is this the Age of Surrender? Because we already laid down our weapons and we have nothing to fight with. The revolution of the 1980s (Thatcher, Regan, free trade, anti-trade union legislation, privatisation, supply-side economics) and the 1990s (Clinton, Blair, globalisation, IMF, TRIPS agreement, Citizens’ United ruling) achieved its goal. It dismantled government as a tool for change and made it a tool for managing corporate interests and the wealth of the wealthy.
Politically-speaking this wasn’t ‘swords to ploughshares’, it was handing all the swords over to rich people. They have all been pursuing a strategy of making democracy harmless, unable to interfere with commercial interests – for the collective good.
Now an idiot has all the swords and he actually wants to use them. Everyone else is looking going ‘fuck, he’s got all our swords and all we have left is our tongues’. Because when your democratic tools are as blunt as ours are, surrender looks like a good idea.
It never is though. The Age of Surrender won’t end up with the cowards and sycophants in control but with their demise. They will be swept from history and no-one will care. Which means as we canter towards that inevitable outcome, if you’re an SNP supporter or British or a US Democrat voter, this is not the end of your humiliation. It is only the beginning.
Then again, historically speaking, an Age of Surrender often ends up in an Age of Revolution. So it’s stomach held in, arse clenched, fingers crossed, because it’s going to be a long decade.