Keir Starmer: a dead man walking

Guardian: June 1, 2025 – note the “military Keynesianism” spin ¹

Even with the eyewatering costs of Berlin’s slavish desire to please Washington at the expense of its own citizens factored in, the German economy is still in better shape than Britain’s. That’s due in no small part to the ascendance of finance over industrial capital in the latter being more longstanding and, galvanised by Mrs Thatcher’s reforms, more thoroughgoing. ^{2 3 4}

Nevertheless, Britain’s own slavish desire to please Washington at the expense of its citizenry ⁵ continues apace whoever sits in 10 Downing Street, whoever in the Oval Office. (If you didn’t do so when it featured in my post five days ago on Ukraine: a NATO division of labour (a), check out the segment between 15:58 and 17:10 of Brian Berletic’s podcast last week. Yes, Germany and France do show abject compliance, but the prefect tones and body language of UK Defence Secretary John Healey – seated across the table from headmaster US counterpart Pete Hegseth – knock all rival contenders for Fawning Toady of the Decade into a cocked hat.)

Guardian June 2, 2025. No prize for guessing where Mr Healey will hawk his “consultancy skills” after leaving office.

Germans can expect falling living standards and slashed welfare budgets so that US elites, who rule one of the most unequal countries on the planet, may continue to exploit said planet in the name of “defending it from authoritarianism”. ⁶ But what of Britain? To match Chancellor Merz’s eagerness to please Washington, Starmer too must turn on those – Britain’s struggling millions as opposed to its ruling oligarchs – whose interests he risibly purports to defend.

But wriggle room for the most unpopular UK prime minister since polling began – and just think of the recent competition for that honour! – is, as this eleven minute discussion shows, roughly the size of a shoebox.

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1. Even a “centre-left” government as de facto right wing as Starmer’s must dress up so “guns-not-butter” a diversion of desperately needed welfare and civil infrastructure spending as job-creating “military Keynesianism” as per the Guardian screen grab I opened with. Echoes here of the Mario Draghi EU/EC paper discussed in my post of September last year, The Super Mario plan for Europe.
2. For more on this see my series of posts, Why read Michael Hudson?
3. Another reason for Germany being the strongest economy in Europe, once we discard as idealist bordering on racist (think Greece 2015) accounts of a postwar German recovery propelled by Teutonic industriousness and thrift, was set out by Yanis Varoufakis in The Global Minotaur. Germany became Europe’s lead economy for the same reason Japan became Asia’s: the most powerful interests in the USA, facing down domestic opposition to ‘rewarding the WW2 aggressors’, wanted it that way and had the means – Bretton Woods and Marshall Plan – to make it happen.
4. I despise the EU but with peg on nose voted “remain” in the 2016 referendum. The timing, the appropriation by reactionaries, and the car crash manner of Brexit worsened those underlying ailments of a state captured by rentiers, its population living on borrowed time, cheap flights and the soaring house prices of a Ponzi economy in which those who Actually Make Things are a species on the verge of extinction.
5. I use the term “citizenry”  guardedly. In point of literal fact Britons are Crown subjects.
6. In yesterday’s Guardian Simon Tisdall castigates Trump for being insufficiently hawkish on China. I’ve engaged before with the Sinophobic outpourings of this cheerleader for muscular imperialism. He actually takes seriously the myth of a flawed but honest broker – ‘the worst except for all the others ‘ – policing the planet, clumsily and even (!) venally at times, but ultimately so you and I can sleep easy in our beds. Here’s what he wrote in his piece yesterday:

   Xi Jinping, has reportedly told his generals to be ready by 2027 to conquer the self-governing island, which he regards as stolen sovereign territory. US officials warned last week that China already has sufficient capability to invade now, with amphibious landing craft, D-day-style floating docks, paratroopers and expanded air combat and missile forces in a constant state of readiness.

   Call me too charitable but I do think Tisdall believes this stuff. The best propagandists for empire are those who, steeped in a lifetime of Western assumptions of superiority, really do believe it fights for irreducible values of decency and fair play.  But just four words in, he, with all the resources of Guardian Media Group behind him, resorts to a weasel cop-out, “reportedly”, I could never get past the steel city editorial board. More importantly, at no point in this warmonger’s talk of armed-to-the teeth “invasion” by the red yellow peril are we reminded of the simple truth that almost every country on earth, US and UK included, acknowledges Taiwan as part of the PRC.