The UK: Will it become a hermit country wandering in a delusional fun house?

The blunderbuss British government of Keir Starmer, now wallowing in the upper teens in the polls, struggling to keep a paper-thin lead over the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats, and the Greens, all of them badly trailing the new-fledged Reform Party, give a lesson almost every week in what both traditionally leading UK political parties have now refined into the relentless task of committing political suicide. With perfect bipartisanship, the UK is now lumbering determinedly through its seventh consecutive failed government in less than 20 years. Gordon Brown had the excuse of closing for Labour after ten more or less passable years with Tony Blair. David Cameron promised “full-on treaty change” with Europe and came back from Brussels with less than Mr Chamberlain did from Munich. He gambled everything on the impossibility of the British leaving the European Community and departed to the political graveyard at a high rate of knots on the morning after the Brexit referendum.

Theresa May defined departing Europe as proclaiming departure while unambiguously continuing within it. This charade took almost three years to play out. Boris Johnson “got Brexit done”, responded well on Ukraine, but so completely failed to grasp that 10 Downing Street was not a comedy routine at the London Palladium as he had played his previous positions as Foreign Secretary and prior to that mayor of London. He was ground to powder by his own party more mercilessly than any of his modern Conservative predecessors, whose last leader to leave voluntarily in good health and good standing with the voters was Stanley Baldwin in 1937. The thoroughly unfeasible Liz Truss was narrowly elected to the succession as a Thatcherite, produced an excellent Thatcherite budget, which she failed to defend from the wimps and quasi-socialists in her own back benches and was dismissed after 45 days. Rishi Sunak ran a Labour government for the Conservative Party and appeared to be relieved when his sojourn in Downing Street was ended in a tidal wave of votes.

Starmer gained less than two per cent in the polls from the previous election for Labour, but the other parties so fragmented the vote that he emerged with a freakishly large parliamentary majority. What has followed has been a Gong Show of false starts, ludicrous posturing, financially unseemly relationships, kaleidoscopic and dervish-like policy changes, and an almost completely incomprehensible foreign policy. Starmer was thoroughly spooked on the Greenland issue and put on his suit of armour and clanked about purporting to be ready to assist in the military defence of Greenland and Denmark against the United States. Having applauded the successful American attack upon the Iranian nuclear military programme in the summer, and the first phase of the Gaza peace agreement, the UK government continued to waffle shamefully in the craven European relativism between the legitimate democratic Jewish state of Israel and the terrorist invaders of Hamas.

Like most of the West, and therefore not more contemptibly than many other countries, including France and Canada, the UK refuses to recognise that until those Arab extremist elements that will never accept the legitimacy of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state are eliminated or completely subdued, there will be endless terrorist provocations and Israeli reprisals. The complete disarming, removal, or outright extermination of the Hamas terrorist apparatus is a sine qua non to any local peace agreement more ambitious than a brief cease-fire. The UK government has more or less accepted that Iran bankrolls and supplies its terrorist puppets, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. It has implicitly and tacitly accepted the accuracy of the American position that Iran must not be permitted to become a nuclear military power and must cease to subsidise  terrorism in the Middle East and elsewhere.

This makes the most recent antics of the Starmer regime seriously astounding: The UK has denied the right of the United States to use the airbase on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia as a staging area for potential attacks upon Iran if its negotiations with the United States to assure the end of its nuclear military programme and of its assistance to terrorist organisations are unsuccessful. At the same time, the United Kingdom has been trying to hand over Diego Garcia and neighbouring islands to the politically unpredictable local island country of Mauritius. President Trump has advised the British government not to proceed with that plan. In the meantime, it has made other arrangements for the massive increased air support that the United States has moved to the Middle East to deal with Iran if necessary.

But it is not easy to imagine what kind of alliance Starmer and his advisors think the justly celebrated special relationship dating back to Roosevelt and Churchill will have been transmogrified into if the United Kingdom takes a position of obstructive neutrality as between the United States and Iran on the issues of Iran’s nuclear military programme and its support of international terrorism. The cold terror of the Labour government at any perceived affront to the militant elements of the British Muslim community upon which the Labour Party is compromisingly dependent electorally is now strangling the ability of the prime minister and the Foreign Office to serve the British national interest. If Starmer tears up the alliance with the United States, Britain, one of the very most historically distinguished nationalities in the world, will become a hermit country wandering in a delusional fun-house.