In 1966 Labour won a by-election in Hull by sending Barbara Castle there to promise to build the Humber Bridge. It tells you a lot about the modern Labour party that its 2025 version of this is to send Keir Starmer to promise World War 3.
He was visiting a shipyard in Glasgow, and announcing that while we still can’t have nice things, there’s a chance we might be able to fight Russia. Elsewhere in the city there’s a Scottish parliament by-election on Thursday, in which Labour is expected to do badly. The prime minister wasn’t actually joining the campaign trail, perhaps to save him embarrassment, or perhaps the result of a realistic assessment of how much help he would actually be. Instead he was present, as one of his predecessors liked to put it, but not involved.
He was there to give a speech about the government’s defence review, in which leading thinkers have set out how the nation’s armed forces can be upgraded from their current state, which largely rely on a combination of Airfix models and Dennis-the-Menace catapults.
It is Starmer’s gift to make any subject seem dull. If the government ever wants to encourage teenage celibacy, the prime minister should simply record some sex education videos. Durex would have gone out of business before he’d finished explaining what happens when a man and a woman (“or a man and a man, or of course a woman and a woman, or indeed a man and a woman and a … ”) love each other very much.
Starmer was truthful, but not what you’d call reassuring
So it was with war. The subject that has inspired some of the greatest poetry and rhetoric in human history became, in Starmer’s hands, deadeningly bureaucratic. It really is a skill to be able to announce a goal like creating “an army which is ten times more lethal by 2035” and make it sound like a pledge to reduce paper usage by 2 per cent over the next three quarters.
The mind wandered to imagine Starmer speaking of war through history: Sing, oh Muse, of the Plan for Change, how it spawned the Strategic Defence Review and the ambition to spend 3 per cent of GDP on defence in the next Parliament … We shall fight on the beaches, and — subject to economic and fiscal conditions — we shall fight on the landing grounds too.
To watch these events is to feel a great sense of pity for Starmer, who would doubtless like to do also sorts of nice things, but who took office when the only choices were nasty ones. Might British soldiers have to fight to defend Lithuania, the BBC asked him? “I very much hope not,” the prime minister replied. It was truthful, but not what you’d call reassuring.
He was going to turn us into a “battle-ready, armour-clad nation”, one that has “warfighting readiness as the central purpose of our armed forces”. What, we were left to wonder, had the central purpose of the military been before this? Flower arranging?
“Nothing works unless we all work together,” he intoned, quoting advice he was given by a sailor recently. What was true on a submarine, he went on, is true of a nation. In which case we’re stuffed.
Speaking of not really working together, Robert Jenrick was continuing his campaign to remind the Conservative Party that he’s available for any jobs that might suddenly become vacant. Last week he was bravely confronting fare-dodgers on the Tube — “You can say fuck off as much as you want,” he told one, in what was the most attractive offer a Tory has made to the nation in quite some time — and this week he was demanding we give guns to prison officers. Right now it’s not even clear that we can afford to give guns to the army.
Other reactions took the expected form. Reform’s Richard Tice announced that his party would raise defence spending faster, paying for it with magic beans (I paraphrase). The Stop The War pressure group, now three years into its effort to persuade Ukraine to surrender, complained that all this spending was unnecessary. “The fact that the Russian army failed to get to Kyiv in the first few months of the war is a sign of its limitations,” it said. Is it just my imagination that there was a hint of regret there?
And the Greens urged the government to “look at the deeper causes of insecurity, including poverty and climate breakdown”. It was sweet, but it ignored the fact that sometimes wars are the result of murderous dictators having large armies. Though of course here too we may find deeper causes. Perhaps we should encourage Vladimir Putin to go into therapy and explore his relationship with his father.
