The latter has even drawn a rebuke from the general secretary of the United Nations. In a statement that condemned “large-scale missile and drone attacks” by Russia on Ukrainian cities, António Guterres said he was “deeply concerned by the continued escalation of the conflict (and) also condemns the recent Ukrainian drone attacks on several regions of the Russian Federation, which reportedly resulted in civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure.”

Britain is supplying the drones that in recent months have been used by Ukraine to strike more than 20 warehouses of Russian online retailers, Wildberries and Ozon, killing numerous civilian employees and others in the neighbourhood. Volodymyr Zelensky has justified this as retaliation. But Guterres was unequivocal: “Attacks against civilians and civilian infrastructure are a clear violation of international humanitarian law and must stop immediately.”

The UN general secretary’s comments were not reported in British media, which instead has given fawning coverage – complete with a guitar-playing photo-opportunity - to Burnham’s visit to Ukraine on the 35^th anniversary of its independence. Zelensky treated him as a celebrity, but some Ukrainians were less than impressed. Iuliia Mendel, who was the president’s press secretary from 2019 to 2021 and now works as a journalist, said afterwards: “Western leaders support threats instead of diplomacy; they wish to destroy Russia no matter how many Ukrainian lives it costs and how far Ukraine is degraded.”

In a separate interview for the business magazine Intellinews, Mendel accused the West of backing “a strategy of Ukraine’s obvious defeat along Afghan lines.” She said:

“Twenty years of war and a trillion dollars in Western aid produced dependence in Kabul rather than sovereignty, an absence of genuine leadership, tolerance of the corruption that hollowed out Kabul’s institutions, and the censorship deemed necessary for ‘support’. The result was an Afghan government that, after many years of Western backing, could not stand against the Taliban on its own.

“Today’s Western strategies are moving Ukraine down that very same road. Our institutions are buckling under corruption and a self-assured autocracy; our people are fleeing and losing their faith; and Russia keeps advancing. We lose territory and we lose people every single day, without pause—and with them, our chance at a future.”

Mendel’s bleak assessment is borne out by the facts. The country’s population has plummeted from more than 50 million in the 1990s to around 30 million now, a trend that began before 2014 and has accelerated with the exodus of refugees, the death toll and regions being under Russian control. Corruption is endemic and reaches deep into Zelensky’s inner circle, forcing the resignations of his chief of staff last November and his deputy chief of staff two weeks ago. European private investors are, meanwhile, showing little interest in the latest “privatisation push” - required for membership of the EU - turning their noses up at the dozens of bargain basement assets listed on Ukraine’s State Property Fund website.

So, do Ukrainians agree with Mendel that Zelensky should be pursuing a peace deal rather than escalating the war? In the absence of elections and with opposition parties banned and peace activists imprisoned, there is precious little opportunity for meaningful debate. Nevertheless, polling published on June 30 by Gallup found that 66% of Ukrainians want to end the war as soon as possible, while only 24% support continuing the fighting until victory – a reversal from 2022, when 73% favoured continuing and 22% wanted negotiations.

The most dramatic indicator of the meltdown in support for the war is the unwillingness of Ukrainians to fight. Earlier this year, the Ukrainian government admitted that the country has two-million draft dodgers and hundreds of thousands more who are absent without leave. Army recruiters now often face large protests and physical resistance as they try to round up men for the war.

The question all this begs is: what would Ukrainians now settle for? A separate poll - which found support for a diplomatic versus a military solution running even higher at 75% to 20% - also presented a series of ‘resolution scenarios.’ It revealed considerable flexibility on what would be acceptable in relation to territory and NATO membership (see below), especially as the poll did not include people living in the Russian-speaking regions of Luhansk, Donetsk and Crimea.

The tragedy for Ukraine is that nearly all these scenarios are worse than has previously been on offer. The option of Russia withdrawing in return for agreement that Ukraine will not join NATO – which 72% now say is acceptable or worth considering – was Russia’s pre-2014 stance. Even after that, in the 2015 Minsk agreement, there was an opportunity for Ukraine to restore “full control of the state border” provided that it allowed “interim self-government for the Donetsk and Luhansk regions,” pending constitutional reform that would give those Russian-speaking regions more autonomy. However, the former German chancellor, Angela Merkel, admitted in an interview in December 2022 that Minsk was “an attempt to give time to Ukraine...to become stronger,” and Zelensky has subsequently said that he had no intention of implementing Minsk after becoming president in 2019.

Since the “full-scale” Russian invasion in 2022, Ukrainians have been encouraged by Zelensky and hawkish Western politicians to believe that outright victory – including membership of NATO – is within grasp. Yet each new military campaign – the counter-offensive in 2023, the conquering 300 square miles of Russian territory in 2024 and now the drone blitz on Russian cities - has only triggered a more severe response and worsening of Ukraine’s position. As Branco Marcetic explained in a piece for Responsible Statecraft two weeks ago:

“It’s a consistent pattern: a combination of wishful thinking and misinformation does just enough to keep the idea of a military victory alive, undermining the chance for painful but necessary negotiations, and ultimately rebounding in ever worsening ways on Ukraine and its people. The major human, economic, and social costs for Ukraine of continuing war, meanwhile, remain invisible to much of the Western public, which is instead fed a recurring diet of headlines and rhetoric assuring it that victory is close at hand.”

A few days after Marceti’s article appeared, Latvia’s prime minister, Andris Kulbergs, illustrated his point by saying that he does not believe in a peace agreement. Speaking at a press conference after a meeting of the so-called ‘Coalition of the Willing’, he added: “Someone has to win, and it has to be Ukraine. Someone has to come out on top. And that is why we discussed today that we have wasted too much time talking about peace agreements.”

Is that what Burnham also believes? Does he think that talking about peace agreements is a waste of time? Alarmingly, his rhetoric in Kyiv linked being with Ukraine “all the way” to its borders not being “changed by force.” It’s a position that rules out compromises that Ukrainians would – judging by the polling - support or consider. It is also hypocritical in that separatists who wanted to change Yugoslavia’s borders by force were backed by Britain, including by the RAF bombing civilian targets in Belgrade in 1999, in one case killing 16 people working at a television station.

The situation in Ukraine is clearly deteriorating. Zelensky’s decision to bomb retail warehouses across Russia has only prompted devastating strikes on similar facilities in Ukraine. Meanwhile, conscripts are being taken in handcuffs to the battle front to face likely death in a grim war of attrition that Russia is slowly winning. Zelensky himself may not even survive much longer as president. Not only is he tainted by corruption allegations against his top aides, he has also faced protests recently for sacking Mykhailo Fedorov as defence minister.

Relieved of his duties, Fedorov is now using his military expertise to make money by launching a “defense-tech” company to produce battlefield robotics, low-cost AI missiles, and jet-powered interceptor drones in which US billionaire Alex Karp is the lead investor. Speaking about his involvement this week, Palantir’s boss revealed that he had been working with Fedorov for “half a decade” and has been “absolutely inspired by what you and Ukraine have pulled off.” Saying he will be “very proud” to help the new company, he claimed it would be “defining for the world, bringing (Fedorov’s) knowledge and acumen about the art of war as a ‘product’ to allied countries.”*

The addition of a right-wing, war-mongering tech boss to the Ukrainian mix is chilling. But will it give Burnham pause for thought? His message to the Ukrainian people in Kyiv was that “the UK is behind you today and for as long as it takes.” But, if he really means that, he should start actually listening to them and mount, urgently, a diplomatic offensive to de-escalate the war and breathe life into peace negotiations. A coalition of the willing for peace - not war - is what Ukrainians desperately need.

Further information: Those interested in how the issues between Ukraine and Russian might be resolved will find a policy note produced by the Quincy Institute in Washington useful.

*Footnote - In a further sign of tensions within Ukraine’s ruling circles, the chairman of the Public Control Council at Ukraine’s Bureau of Economic Security has accused Fedorov of a revolving-door conflict of interest. He says that, while in government, the former defense minister championed Palantir’s deep integration into Ukraine’s defense and intelligence systems and is now using that relationship for private commercial advantage.

Cold War Puerto Rico

Join me on Tuesday 15^th September at noon (EST) or 5pm (GMT) for a discussion on my new book – Cold War Puerto Rico - with Anibal Arocho, the librarian at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies in New York, whose archives I used for my research. Details here.

Cold War Puerto Rico: Anti-Communism in Washington’s Caribbean Colony is published by the University of Massachusetts Press.

For orders in Britain and Ireland only, Cold War Puerto Rico in paperback is available at the special offer price of £20.00 including postage via my website (which has a PayPal/credit card facility) ORDER

From any other country, Cold War Puerto Rico in paperback or Kindle can be ordered through most bookstores, via the publisher or on Amazon ORDER

“What [Howell] uncovered, and presents capably in this rich and informative work, is the story of Puerto Rico’s struggle for autonomy and the American repression that repeatedly smothered it, all while claiming to uphold the principles of international self-determination. . . . Howell’s story of state surveillance and suppression—and of the costs Washington is willing to incur to hold a Caribbean stronghold—is more instructive now than ever.” - Jacobin

The Keir Starmer version of the story departs from Mullin’s original in that he had no intention of challenging the status quo. Those we colloquially call ‘the powers that be’ had every reason to think they had in Sir Keir a man who would obligingly deliver whatever was expected of him. The trouble was that on one big issue – arms spending - he wouldn’t bow fully to their demands and on another – the Mandelson affair – he had become a liability who even picked a fight with one of their own, Olly Robbins.

Starmer’s unpopularity was a product of many factors, from policies that punished pensioners, the disabled and children to his penchant for freebies and nice suits. He angered Left MPs by suspending dissident backbenchers and lost support from MPs hand-picked for loyalty by putting their seats at risk. They probably were going to oust him this summer without any external assistance.

But was there more going on than met the eye? The powers-that-be appear, at some point, to have decided that Starmer had to go, but they could not leave the choice of a successor to chance. The possibility of a leadership election in which hundreds of thousands of individual and affiliated Labour members would have a vote was unthinkable. Even though a rule change had raised the percentage of Labour MPs needed for someone to be nominated, there was still a possibility of a politician who would not completely toe the line becoming a candidate, winning the election and inheriting a massive parliamentary majority.

To those who think this is the stuff of fiction, I would acknowledge that the evidence of a plot by ‘the national security state’ – as they themselves call it - is circumstantial. But I think the pattern of events is too convenient for co-ordination between senior national security figures and their close political allies to be ruled out as a decisive factor in easing Starmer out and ensuring a smooth, vote-less transition to a successor who would accept their objectives.

Their main bone of contention with Starmer was arms spending. The announcement by Rachel Reeves in the Budget that annual defence spending would increase from £53.9 billion under the Conservatives in 2024-25 to £75.1 billion in 2029-30 did not go far enough for them. The first shot across Starmer’s bows came in January when an anonymous Ministry of Defence ‘source’ told The Times and The Sun that Britain’s armed forces would not be “war ready” by 2030 unless more was spent. They claimed that an extra £28 billion over four years was needed in a new Defence Investment Plan to meet their goals (see my previous Substack pieces for more detail).

Soon afterwards, Starmer’s position was severely weakened, first, by the arrest on February 4 of the man he had appointed British ambassador to Washington, Peter Mandelson, and then on February 26 by the Green Party grabbing a seat from Labour in the Gorton & Denton by-election. Labour had not been above 20% in the polls since October, and Starmer had become the least popular prime minister since the advent of ‘voter satisfaction’ polling in the 1970s. Just as the tea rooms of Westminster were buzzing through March and into April with discussion of a possible leadership contest, the issue was bound to have been exercising the minds of top officials in the security state.

Assuming Starmer was desperate to save himself, the sacking of Olly Robbins, the top official at the Foreign Office, as a scapegoat for his own decision to appoint Mandelson was hardly likely to have helped his cause in those circles. Robbins was one of their own. Having been the Cabinet Office director of intelligence under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, David Cameron appointed him deputy national security adviser, a role in which he helped create a US-style national security council and bullied the Guardian into curtailing its reporting of material leaked by Edward Snowden on US and British intelligence agencies.

Meanwhile, the military lobby’s scaremongering continued apace. On April 9, the media reported a claim by the Defence Secretary, John Healey, that three Russian submarines had been trying to spy on the UK pipelines and underwater cables “while the world was distracted by Iran.” The submarines, it turned out, were in the North Atlantic and the threat to cables around Britain’s coast was hypothetical.

Only four days later, a ghost from wars past entered the fray. George Robertson, who was NATO secretary general at the time of the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and who Starmer had brought back as a defence adviser, leaked to the Financial Times the text of a lecture he was due to give in which he accused Starmer and Rachel Reeves of “corrosive complacency” on defence, claimed “national security and safety is in peril” and said “we cannot defend Britain with an ever-expanding welfare budget.” The following week, three Tory former defence secretaries – Ben Wallace, Malcolm Rifkind and Penny Mordaunt – weighed in behind him.

Through all this, Andy Burnham was positioning himself as Starmer’s natural successor. Some on the left saw the Greater Manchester mayor as a potential saviour, convinced that he had left his Blairite past behind. While playing to that gallery, with rhetoric about Britain being on “the wrong path for forty years,” Burnham also signalled that - unlike Starmer - he would be amenable to giving military chiefs the money they wanted. In an interview with the financial news agency Bloomberg on April 29, which was covered by most of the media, he floated the idea of treating defence spending “exceptionally outside of the (fiscal) rules.”

Labour’s disastrous local elections results on May 7 increased the chances of Starmer being forced out. However, Burnham still appeared to be no nearer to solving his problem of not being an MP. The party had blocked him from standing in Gorton & Denton and no other by-elections were in the pipeline. Or so we thought, until something seemingly unthinkable happened: on May 14, one of the operatives behind Starmer’s rise – Josh Simons - facilitated his demise by announcing that he would be resigning as MP for Makerfield.

Simons was the director of pro-Starmer factional vehicle, Labour Together, from 2022 to 2024, earning him the reward of a safe Labour seat and a junior ministerial role. Revelations that in 2023 he had hired a public affairs agency to investigate Paul Holden and other journalists who were exposing Labour Together’s funding irregularities had forced him to stand down from the government, but only a week before the local elections Starmer’s ethics adviser had cleared him of any breach of the Ministerial Code after a cursory inquiry. That had left him well placed to return to government. So why would Simons suddenly forego his promising political career to help the person trying to bring Starmer down? The answer would later become clear.

In the meantime, as the manoeuvres in Makerfield were unfolding, senior government figures continued to intensify the pressure on Starmer over the arms budget.

· On May 16, Jonathan Powell, who was Blair’s cabinet secretary for ten years and had been appointed by Starmer as national security adviser, turned on his nominal boss by letting it be known to The Times that Britain “would struggle to maintain its position on the world stage without a significant increase in (defence) spending.”

· On May 24, Healey claimed to The Times that the RAF jet carrying him back from visiting British troops in Estonia had been “hit by an electronic warfare attack after flying near the Russian border.” The BBC recycled the story saying the plane’s GPS was jammed, which is probably what the UK would do if a Russian military plane was sighted off the white cliffs of Dover.

· On May 31, Healey was at it again with scaremongering reminiscent of the pretext for the Iraq war. Under the headline “Fears Russia could threaten the Artic and put London within range of hypersonic missiles,” the iNewspaper quoted him saying that Russia poses the “greatest threat to Arctic and High North security since the Cold War.” The Express carried the same story saying “sources say nukes could reach London in just 8 minutes.” Of course, a large part of Russia is actually in the Arctic, and Russian nuclear armed missiles have been able to reach London for decades (it’s called Mutually Assured Destruction), but Healey was happy to exploit people’s fears for his own warmongering and personal ends.

Much to the incredulity of most Labour members, the media also began touting Healey as a potential successor to Starmer. For Powell, Robertson and co, the Defence Secretary would undoubtedly have been the safest pair of hands. But, unlike Burnham, he would not command the broad support of Labour MPs needed to avert a leadership election. The next best thing was for him to be kingmaker to whom Burnham would be indebted.

Healey’s resignation on June 11, only a week before the Makerfield by-election, in which Burnham was now the Labour candidate, made certain that Starmer’s premiership was doomed. Sure enough, after Burnham won Makerfield – aided by tactical voting – it took only four days for Starmer to reach that conclusion and then only three more weeks for Burnham to garner the MP nominations he needed to ensure no one else could gain enough to force a contest.

During that interregnum, the former chief foreign policy adviser to four prime ministers, John Bew, warned Burnham to resist pressure from Labour MPs to focus domestic issues. In a revealing sentence, he added that there would be no need to worry if Burnham did take his eye off the ball because “the good news is that the British national security state – the agencies, senior officials, the military – is actually extremely professional comparatively.” Reassuringly for Bew, Burnham confirmed that he understood his brief. On July 8, he told The Times that he was on a mission to “rebuild Britain’s hard power to face a darker world.”

The top officials and officers of the national security state must have been delighted with the outcome. The lottery of a leadership contest had been avoided. Burnham was saying what they wanted to hear. Their man Healey had gained leverage by playing Judas. The two of them had been “talking regularly” (though only “since Makerfield”, Healey claims). And, once in Downing Street, Burnham handed him the Chancellor’s job, complete with a military adviser based in the Treasury for the first time.

Within forty-eight hours of taking office, Burnham was describing Healey’s appointment as a “signal of intent” on arms spending and was heading off the Farnborough Airshow to tell assembled arms companies – including several from Israel – that he would raise military spending to levels not seen since the end of the Cold War, even at “an opportunity cost” for other services.

So, was this all the product of a coup or just of a set of circumstances that were fortuitous for the national security state? The answer is probably a combination of the two. Coups – like revolutions - require favourable conditions. There is no doubt that Starmer had dug his own grave. His days as prime minister were numbered anyway, but his stubborn refusal to bow to all the demands of the Ministry of Defence made an enemy of people with far more media and Whitehall muscle than the Labour backbenchers he had been trying to pacify. It is inconceivable that national security big hitters like Robertson and Powell would move publicly against a sitting prime minister without clearing their lines. And, in Healey, they had a front man who could rally the support of Labour MPs on the Right who might otherwise be nervous about Burnham’s gambit of tacking left. His resignation ensured Starmer’s departure while smoothing the passage to a successor who would be even more malleable.

An intriguing question is the part played by Simons. I find it inconceivable that he acted alone and without an agenda in deciding to resign. Though the talk of him becoming Burnham’s policy adviser came to nothing, Burnham has appointed Alison Phillips, Simons’s successor as director of Labour Together, as the Downing Street deputy chief of staff. Clearly, the change of leadership has not eliminated the influence of that faction – indeed, they also funded Healey’s role as Shadow Defence Secretary to the tune of £39,216. Two perfectly-timed resignations is too much of a coincidence.

Was Burnham in the loop? Possibly not to begin with. It may be that he was simply the grateful recipient of any support coming his way, rather than in the thick of the conspiracy itself. He had craved being prime minister for years and must have relished the constant undermining of Starmer and the surprisingly favourable media coverage given to him. After winning Makerfield, he clearly knew who he had to keep onside and made a bee line for Healey.

In a sense, it doesn’t matter whether or not there was “a concert party”, as such things are called in financial circles. What matters is the substance: we now have a prime minister who has made clear that he will do the bidding of the national security state to a greater degree even than Starmer - who seems to have been surprisingly naïve about prime ministers serving at their pleasure. The Burnham administration is not therefore a shift to the Left but a boost for the arms lobby with very costly consequences for services, benefits and pensions and deadly risks for those in the firing line of yet more wars. Recognition of that is the first step towards resisting it. Andy is not our friend.

Cold War Puerto Rico

My new book, ‘Cold War Puerto Rico: Anti-Communism in Washington’s Caribbean Colony’, published by the University of Massachusetts Press, is now available.

For orders in Britain and Ireland only, Cold War Puerto Rico in paperback is available at the special offer price of £20.00 including postage via my website (which has a PayPal/credit card facility) ORDER

From any other country, Cold War Puerto Rico in paperback or Kindle can be ordered through most bookstores, via the publisher or on Amazon ORDER

“What [Howell] uncovered, and presents capably in this rich and informative work, is the story of Puerto Rico’s struggle for autonomy and the American repression that repeatedly smothered it, all while claiming to uphold the principles of international self-determination. . . . Howell’s story of state surveillance and suppression—and of the costs Washington is willing to incur to hold a Caribbean stronghold—is more instructive now than ever.” - Jacobin

If the government genuinely wants informed public debate, they might like to encourage the providers they consider “trustworthy” to clean up their act - especially after a month in which they have been banging the drum for more arms spending with a chilling unanimity that reminds me of the build up to the invasion of Iraq. On that occasion, what “trustworthy” news providers fed us turned out to be completely untrue. This time we already have evidence of their dishonesty in it now being admitted that the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines was a Ukrainian operation not a Russian one, as most of the media had originally suggested.

Trust could not be more important when it comes to matters of war and peace. Yet legacy media routinely interviews people who stand to gain personally from what they are advocating without telling us whose interests they really represent. The last few weeks have seen lobbyist after lobbyist given platforms to argue that even the eyewatering amounts the government already plans to spend on arms won’t be enough to stop, as one put it, Russians “stomping down your streets shooting children.”

That was the lurid language used by Admiral Lord Alan West on Good Morning Britain on June 12 as he tried to scare viewers into accepting that what he patronisingly called “nice spending” for breakfasts for children would have to be sacrificed to buy more weapons. Good Morning Britain chose to bill West only as a former admiral and not mention that he is on the advisory board of a major military supplier, Kraken Technology Group, along with Donald Trump’s former secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, and the appropriately-named Jonathan Moneymaker, who is also chairman of Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace, a Norwegian-owned company that produces anti-ship missiles and space weapons.

Kraken’s speciality is “uncrewed surface and subsurface vessel technologies to enhance maritime capabilities for US special operations forces.” In a recent statement, it says that it has “firmly established its footprint in Europe, successfully completing NATO’s Task Force, attracting simultaneous funding from the NATO Innovation Fund and the British Business Bank’s National Security Strategic Investment Fund; fulfilling large-scale orders across Europe’s NATO countries; and successfully integrating with the UK Ministry of Defence.”

West’s appearance on breakfast TV wasn’t his only attempt last month to put pressure on the government to ramp up arms spending. On June 8, he made a widely reported speech in the House of Lords claiming that Britain’s armed forces were “teetering on the brink of disaster.” And, in an interview on Radio Four last week, he embellished his fear-mongering by suggesting that failure to spend more on arms would result in “Russian Chechen stormtroopers coming down the street raping women.”

West was only one of the many arms lobbyists who were busy in June. With the government’s Defence Investment Plan (DIP) about to be announced, they were so ubiquitous I thought I would trawl through the overage to see how often “trusted” news outlets told their audiences who they really were. The answer so far is ‘never.’ Without exception, lobbyists were presented as “experts” without us being told they have a vested interest in more arms spending. Here are four more examples.

Admiral Sir Tony Radakin

Radakin retired from his role as the UK’s chief of defence staff only last September, but he was soon snaffled up by the world’s largest bank, J P Morgan, to join their advisory council. In reporting his appointment in April, European Business Magazine put it in the context of an “expansion of (the bank’s) ten-year, $1.5 trillion Security and Resiliency Initiative (SRI) across Europe and the United Kingdom.” It said:

“(This) is JPMorgan placing the balance sheet of the world’s largest bank behind a structural bet that European rearmament, energy independence, and supply-chain reshoring will absorb trillions of private capital over the next decade.”

Radakin being complicit in this lucrative “bet” did not, however, deter “trustworthy” media from inviting him to tell us how much to gamble – without mentioning his conflict of interest. On June 28, when asked by the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg what advice he would give Andy Burnham, the admiral-turned-US-banker not surprisingly said he had to show that he was “a strong ally of the United States.”

Lord Hutton

John Hutton, the former Labour MP (1992-2010) and defence secretary (2027-28), was frequently in the media in June, including writing for City AM and appearing on LBC (twice), Times Radio and Kuenssberg. None of them mentioned that he is a board director of Pearson Engineering, which manufactures military vehicles and is a subsidiary of Israeli government owned Rafael Advanced Defense Systems.

Commenting in February on Rafael’s 2025 performance, its chairman, Dr Yuval Steinitz, a former Israeli intelligence minister, said:

“We are publishing these results in the midst of a decisive war against an enemy that seeks our destruction. The past year and Operation Rising Lion in particular has once again underscored the critical importance of technological superiority to Israel’s security. Rafael’s advanced systems continued to play a central role in Israel’s most complex defense missions.”

Rafael had a record year in 2025 with sales surpassing $6 billion for the first time. As well as supplying Israeli forces attacking Iran and occupying the West Bank, Gaza, southern Lebanon and Syria, Rafael is a major supplier of military hardware to Germany and the UK and stands to gain massively from increased arms spending in Europe.

Hutton, who supported the Iraq war and has consistently voted for deploying British forces overseas, complained on Times Radio (June 30) that Starmer’s increases in arms spending were not sufficient to get Britain’s armed forces “war ready” by the end of this parliament. On LBC (June 11), Hutton accused Starmer of failing to keep the country safe and called his defence policy a “car crash.”

Lord Dannatt

General Dannatt, who was head of the British army from 2006 to 2009 and made a life peer by David Cameron in 2011, completed a four-month suspension from the House of Lords in April for “providing parliamentary services in return for reward.” Dannatt’s paid lobbying, which was exposed last year by the Guardian, included making representation for Teledyne FLIR, a US company that produces components for the F-35 jets used in Israeli airstrikes. As a paid member of Teledyne FLIR’s international advisory group, Dannatt had written to government ministers several times urging them to ensure that the security services “address the threat” posed by Palestine Action, which had targeted the company for facilitating genocide in Gaza.

On June 30, GB News and Good Morning Britain both gave Dannatt a platform without mentioning his lobbying role or suspension. On GB News, he attacked Starmer’s defence investment plan for “not providing the quantum of increase that our nation demands and our allies are calling for.”

James Rogers/Council on Geo-strategy

Dannatt’s suspension illustrates why the military-industrial complex has also created organisations that masquerade as independent think-tanks to do their lobbying. An example of this is the Council on Geo-Strategy, co-founded in 2021 by James Rogers and Viktorija Starych-Samuolienė, who worked together at the Henry Jackson Society, named after the US senator who opposed détente with Soviet Union during the Cold War. The Council on Geo-strategy is mainly funded by the arms industry, including big donations from Lockheed Martin UK and BAE Systems, but, when Rogers wrote for LBC and the iPaper in June to argue for even higher military spending, he was billed as an expert from a ’think-tank’ not as a lobbyist. As an aside, the Council on Geo-strategy has at least provided a suitable home for the journalist-turned-warmonger, Paul Mason, who is now one of their ‘Adjunct Fellows.’

There is no law against ex ministers, generals, admirals, journalists or anyone else selling their expertise to the arms industry. But legacy media should not be platforming lobbyists without telling their audiences of the vested interests they represent and then treating them with reverence as if they are impartial experts. On what planet is this how a trustworthy news source should operate?

Making sense of the numbers

For those not clear how much we’re spending the table below shows the figures for four years from the 81-page DIP document. RDEL is ‘resource’ spending or the running cost of the military, and CDEL is ‘capital’ spending or the cost of buying missiles, drones, warheads and other assets from the arms industry. The four-year total (TDEL) of £297.7 billion is £15 billion more than was announced by Rachel Reeves in the last Budget, which was itself taking spending on an upward trajectory. The military budget in 2029-30 will now be £79.1bn compared to £53.9bn in 2023-24.

To put this in context, the total military capital spending (CDEL) over the four-year period of £125bn is more than twice what will be spent on health and social care capital (£57.8bn) and four times as much as allocated for education (£31.4bn).

The arms lobbyists are still saying this isn’t enough. And the media are framing the debate as being between their view and the astronomical sums in the Starmer-Reeves plan. They give virtually no platform to those who would argue against the military madness and for more resources to be invested in trying to prevent or end wars. The challenge for us is to break that wall of silence – and the international anti-war conference in London last month shows that what we lack in power, money and access to ‘trustworthy’ media, we make up for in numbers, unity and spirit.

Cold War Puerto Rico

My new book, ‘Cold War Puerto Rico: Anti-Communism in Washington’s Caribbean Colony’, published by the University of Massachusetts Press, is now available.

For orders in Britain and Ireland only, Cold War Puerto Rico in paperback is available at the special offer price of £20.00 including postage via my website (which has a PayPal/credit card facility) ORDER

From any other country, Cold War Puerto Rico in paperback or Kindle can be ordered through most bookstores, via the publisher or on Amazon ORDER

To be clear, a huge hike in spending was already planned. Reeves’s Budget last November made provision for defence spending to rise in 2026-27 by 8.43% to £90 billion, compared to a 6.14% increase for health and the allocation for education shrinking by 0.68%. Alongside this, the government’s six-year capital spending programme allocates £166.4 billion to military hardware, nearly quadruple the amount for education (£43.8 billion) and double the spending on the NHS and social care (£82.9 billion).

However, this was not enough for Healey, the military top brass and assorted arms lobbyists. Soon after the Budget, they started planting claims in the media of a £28 billion ‘black hole’ in military spending accompanied by scare stories about Russian submarines lurking in the Atlantic and missiles being able to hit London (both of which have been the case for decades, just as Britain has submarines in the Black Sea and missiles that can hit Moscow).

To add spice to this propaganda-dressed-up-as-news, Healey made a personal appearance in the drama when a story was leaked to The Times claiming that an RAF plane carrying him back from visiting troops in Estonia three weeks ago had its signals jammed as it flew ‘near’ the Russian border. The Times blamed Russia, while the BBC recycled the story with the caveat that Russia was only “believed to be behind the attack.” Neither explained why Healey’s plane needed to fly so close to Russia’s border or acknowledged that Britain would undoubtedly react in a similar way if a Russian military jet carrying its defence minister flew near the white cliffs of Dover.

So, does the lobbying for more arms spending really have anything to do with a Russian threat? Both Keir Starmer and Healey claim that “there could be an attack by Russia on NATO as early as 2030.” But are we seriously supposed to believe that Russia wants to take on NATO when it is stuck in a virtual stalemate in Ukraine, its cities and infrastructure are being struck daily by Ukrainian drones, and its relatively small economy is already under severe strain from sanctions?

In April, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), which was established in 1966 and is widely respected as an independent source, released its annual review of global military spending. The SIPRI data for 2025 shows that the six leading European countries in NATO already spend more than twice as much as Russia on defence. Even though Russia has increased its spending to $190bn because of the Ukraine war, it is still being heavily outspent by the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Poland and Spain ($406bn). And this is before allowing for the fact that the US, despite Trump’s rhetoric, is only planning to withdraw 5,000 of the 58,000 troops it has stationed in Germany, Italy and the UK. Whatever one thinks of Russia, it is stretching credulity to suggest that its leaders – whoever they are by 2030 – would want a war with the West on these terms. There have to be other reasons for the pressure for higher military spending.

One of them is undoubtedly the fact that supplying the hardware for war is a lucrative business. Britain’s major arms companies have seen their share prices go sky high in recent years as they profit from supplying Ukraine at our expense. Why wouldn’t they want this to continue? They have their sights on making more missiles, drones, combat aircraft, naval vessels and armoured vehicles. However, as capitalists in a capital-intensive industry, they won’t invest in extra capacity without the certainty of a long-term order book. It is therefore no coincidence that Healey is resigning over the scale of a ten-year investment plan (a time-period that, incidentally, bears no relation to the claim that Russia could attack in four years).

The interests of the arms companies are unlikely, however, to be the only factor driving arms spending higher. Strategists who tend to call the shots within our elite also appear to be beavering away, anxious to ensure that Britain continues to be able to mount foreign military interventions, with or even without US involvement. Jonathan Powell, who was Tony Blair’s chief of staff from 1997 to 2007 and is now Starmer’s national security adviser, let it be known recently that he thinks Britain “would struggle to maintain its position on the world stage without a big increase in spending.” Similarly, the former foreign secretary William Hague has bemoaned as “shocking” how the Iran war had exposed that we have “little help to give” the US.

Hague was, of course, ignoring the fact that the US would have had great difficulty blitzing Iran as it has without being able to use its bases in Britain and Britain’s bases in Cyprus and Diego Garcia (Mauritius). Nevertheless, his comment does go to the heart of the problem from the elite’s point of view. The rhetoric may be about the imminence of a Russian threat, but the government’s Strategic Defence Review published last year talks about “shaping the global security environment” and specifies the Middle East and the Indo-Pacific as “priority regions.” Even its sub-title – ‘secure at home, strong abroad’ – gives the game away.

According to the review, from which the map above is taken, Britain still has 8,500 Ministry of Defence personnel stationed in bases across the world, notably in its ‘hubs’ in Cyprus, Gibraltar, Germany, Oman, Kenya and Singapore. In May, a British soldier was killed in a training accident in Iraq, a country whose Parliament told us to leave more than six years ago. On June 1, it was reported that we are supplying “hundreds” of anti-drone missiles to “specialist forces” in the Middle East to “counter Iran”, with whom we supposedly aren’t even at war.

The hard cash these weapons and worldwide bases cost is desperately needed to repair our schools, build more houses and bring down NHS waiting lists. It could also be used, as Ian Byrne MP put it this week, to help the two million children “growing up in food poverty in one of the richest countries on earth.” Byrne said that he looks forward to the day a minister resigns over this national disgrace, but I suspect we will be waiting a long time. Meantime, we should expect the media to continue to portray Healey as a hero, and we will have to rely on our own resources to counter the chorus fear-mongering from the merchants of war.

Steve Howell

Cold War Puerto Rico reviews

“Howell’s book retrieves Puerto Rico from historical obscurity and foregrounds the struggle of its people for independence. Fast-paced and well-constructed, it skilfully blends the political and personal, using the latter to illuminate the former.” - Andrew Murray, Morning Star

“Howell’s story of state surveillance and suppression - and of the costs Washington is willing to incur to hold a Caribbean stronghold - is more instructive now than ever.” – Alex Macarthur, Jacobin.

Published on May 1, 2026 by the University of Massachusetts Press. More details here.

For orders in Britain and Ireland only, Cold War Puerto Rico in paperback is available at the special offer price of £20.00 including postage via my website (which has a PayPal/credit card facility) ORDER

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Clarence-Smith should have referred to the Pentagon by its new title, the Department of War, because that would have taken us a little closer to understanding what she euphemistically called a disagreement about “guardrails for military applications.”

So what are these guardrails? And who would they protect? On closer examination, they are only about who should be put under surveillance using AI and how it can be used to kill people without harming those using it. If you think I’m exaggerating, let me quote fully the explanation provided by Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s founder. In a statement published in February, he said the dispute applied only to “a narrow set of cases” where “AI can undermine, rather than defend, democratic values” because they are “outside the bounds of what today’s technology can safely and reliably do.” Saying that there were two such cases that “should not be included now” (my emphasis), he continued:

“Mass domestic surveillance. We support the use of AI for lawful foreign intelligence and counterintelligence missions. But using these systems for mass domestic surveillance is incompatible with democratic values. AI-driven mass surveillance presents serious, novel risks to our fundamental liberties. To the extent that such surveillance is currently legal, this is only because the law has not yet caught up with the rapidly growing capabilities of AI. For example, under current law, the government can purchase detailed records of Americans’ movements, web browsing, and associations from public sources without obtaining a warrant, a practice the Intelligence Community has acknowledged raises privacy concerns and that has generated bipartisan opposition in Congress. Powerful AI makes it possible to assemble this scattered, individually innocuous data into a comprehensive picture of any person’s life—automatically and at massive scale.

“Fully autonomous weapons. Partially autonomous weapons, like those used today in Ukraine, are vital to the defense of democracy. Even fully autonomous weapons (those that take humans out of the loop entirely and automate selecting and engaging targets) may prove critical for our national defense. But today, frontier AI systems are simply not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons. We will not knowingly provide a product that puts America’s warfighters and civilians at risk. We have offered to work directly with the Department of War on R&D to improve the reliability of these systems, but they have not accepted this offer. In addition, without proper oversight, fully autonomous weapons cannot be relied upon to exercise the critical judgment that our highly trained, professional troops exhibit every day. They need to be deployed with proper guardrails, which don’t exist today.”

Most of the above is self-explanatory, but I think a few points need emphasising. Firstly, Amodei is concerned only about surveillance of Americans and is not opposing AI’s use against the billions of other people across the planet, including for targeting them in war or for extrajudicial execution. Secondly, his reticence about the use of “fully autonomous weapons” similarly relates only to how their unreliability puts Americans at risk and not the possibility that foreign civilians could be killed. Thirdly, in both cases, his caveats are time-limited: he does not rule out surveillance of Americans if the law catches up with the technology, and he is willing to work with the Department for War to develop “guardrails” for the use of fully autonomous weapons.

As noted in my last Substack post, Amodei was an early advocate of the creation of a US-led coalition that would use AI “to achieve robust military superiority (the stick) while at the same time offering to distribute the benefits of powerful AI (the carrot) to a wider and wider group of countries in exchange for supporting the coalition’s strategy to promote democracy.”

This coalition has now been launched and named Pax Silica. Operating under the direction of a former Palantir executive, Jacob Helberg, its 14 founder members include Britain, and its claim to the mantle of democracy is shown to be hollow by the inclusion of the Israeli Apartheid regime and two of the Gulf autocracies, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

Amodei is doing very well out of positioning Anthropic as the good guys of AI. The company is expected to list on the US stock exchange later this year when its valuation is predicted to be at least $1 trillion. That extraordinary figure assumes the company’s $47 billion of annualised revenue will continue to grow exponentially and start yielding the huge profits generated by the likes of Meta (which, for comparison, made an operating margin of $83 billion on revenue of $201 billion last year.)

In Britain, Palantir and the chilling views of its founder, Alex Karp, have been the focus of the AI debate. Such has been the outrage that the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has cancelled one of their contracts and pressure is growing to end their role in the NHS. This understandable preoccupation with Palantir should not, however, fuel the idea that Anthropic is somehow an ethical alternative. Both companies are part of the US military-industrial complex and both are closely tied to Israel. Amodei is more subtle than Karp but, arguably, that only makes him more dangerous.

Steve Howell

Cold War Puerto Rico reviews

“Howell’s story of state surveillance and suppression - and of the costs Washington is willing to incur to hold a Caribbean stronghold - is more instructive now than ever.”

Alex Macarthur, Jacobin.

“Indispensable reading for anyone concerned with imperialism, the repressive functions of the liberal state, or the long and unfinished history of Caribbean anti-colonialism.”

Mark Waller, Cold Type.

Published on May 1, 2026 by the University of Massachusetts Press. More details here.

For orders in Britain and Ireland only, Cold War Puerto Rico in paperback is available at the special offer price of £20.00 including postage via my website (which has a PayPal/credit card facility) ORDER

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So, what is Pax Silica? I had never previously heard of it. After reading Bertrand’s post, I searched online to discover – much to my surprise - that on December 11, 2025 the UK had been one of the first 14 countries to sign up to it. As far as I can tell, this happened without prior debate in Parliament or British media coverage. My search did, however, take me to a statement by Labour Friends of Israel welcoming the UK and Israel becoming founding members of what it called an “alliance” aimed at “securing and strengthening AI and technology supply chain.” The LFI statement said that Pax Silica aimed to protect sensitive technologies and infrastructures “from access or control by hostile nations” and quoted Avi Simhon, an economic adviser to the Israeli government, saying that the partners in this alliance were “working to fortify the global AI industry.”

Fortify? Deny “hostile nations” access to AI. This is not the language of a benign project aimed at spreading the benefits of AI globally. Given that the US casts the net wide when dubbing nations hostile, this could mean weaponizing AI against not only the usual suspects such as Iran and China but also any country that steps out of line from, say, South Africa to Spain.

The thinking behind Pax Silica was sketched out 18 months ago by Dario Amodei, the billionaire chief executive of Anthropic, developer of the Claude chatbot. In an essay published in October 2024 he argued that it was “very important that democracies have the upper hand on the world stage when powerful AI is created (and) set the terms by which powerful AI is brought into the world.” He said:

“The best way to do this is via an ‘entente strategy’ in which a coalition of democracies seeks to gain a clear advantage (even just a temporary one) on powerful AI by securing its supply chain, scaling quickly, and blocking or denying adversaries’ access to key resources like chips and semiconductor equipment. This coalition would on one hand use AI to achieve robust military superiority (the stick) while at the same time offering to distribute the benefits of powerful AI (the carrot) to a wider and wider group of countries in exchange for supporting the coalition’s strategy to promote democracy.”

To be clear, for those not familiar with the US geo-political lexicon, ‘democracies’ are the Western capitalist powers and ‘promoting democracy’ is regime change. When US billionaires talk about “democracies using the stick”, it could encompass anything up to and including obliterating entire civilisations.

The hypocrisy of Amodei’s portrayal of Pax Silica as a vehicle for “democracies” to win the AI battle with states he dubs “authoritarian” is predictably laid bare by a casual glance at the list of members. Two of them, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, are sheikhdoms. Israel is hardly a democracy if you are Palestinian or Lebanese. Along with the UK and The Philippines, the other members are: Australia, Finland, Greece, India, Japan, Norway, South Korea, Singapore and Sweden.

The US wants the European Union to join Pax Silica but it is yet to decide what to do. Last week, the European Commission confirmed that it is in talks with the US to “explore EU participation in this initiative” and that it hoped to be able to join soon. However, even the pro-Washington Atlantic Council thinks “achieving a grand strategic agreement on AI at the transatlantic level appears unfeasible” as things stand. In a briefing paper published in April, it blamed this on three factors: the unpredictability of US policy on trade and relations with China; differences between the US and the EU and within the EU on China; and the fact that the US under both Biden and Trump has given “insufficient weight to the interests” of allies.

On the latter, it said:

“The lowest point in transatlantic relations regarding AI probably occurred when the Biden administration introduced extensive export controls on AI chips from the United States, known as the ‘AI diffusion rule.’ The export controls did not only target ‘countries of concern’: namely, US geopolitical rivals like China. It also set up a tiered approach to other countries, including allies, dividing them into aligned allies who would have minimal restrictions on access to AI chips; a larger group of countries which would face stricter licensing and allocation limits for these chips; and ‘countries of concern’ which would face strict controls or denials on access to advanced AI technology. While many EU countries were designated as key allies and partners of the United States with a high level of security and trust standards, many EU member states were still subject to harsher rules.”

In a nutshell, US weaponization of AI and its tendency to treat allies as rivals or vassals has created tensions that are now tainting its latest gambit of trying to dragoon countries into joining the Pax Silica cartel.

An entirely different view of how AI should be managed has been provided the Pope. In a recently published and very long encyclical letter, Magnifica Humanitas, Leo XIV said he wanted to free AI from “the mentality of ‘armed’ competition, which today is not limited simply to the military context, but is also an economic and cognitive phenomenon.” Saying in paragraph 110 that he wanted “to employ the expression ‘to disarm’, which is close to my heart,” he continued:

“To disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern. To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity. It means freeing technology from monopolistic control and opening it to discussion and debate, therefore making it human-friendly and restoring it to the plurality of human cultures and ways of life.”

The depth and humanity of the Pope’s comments are a powerful counterweight to the barbaric self-interest of Pax Silica. They also stand in stark contrast to the absence of any debate – deep or otherwise – in the British Parliament.

Feel free to correct me, but – to date – I have found only one Parliamentary reference to Pax Silica. On January 13, 2026, Labour MP Liam Byrne submitted a written question asking the government whether it plans to support and provide funding to it. The answer provided by the Foreign Office was that the UK had signed the Pax Silica Declaration but that “no financial contribution has been made.” This smacks of being a cosy box-ticking, back-covering exercise to put Pax Silica on the parliamentary record so that MPs generally can’t say they did not know.

But why hasn’t there been a proper debate? Britain throwing its lot in with Pax Silica is potentially the most consequential economic decision this government will take. It is arguably more significant than relations with the EU or fiscal rules or anything else politicians frequently get exercised about. We may not have yet made a financial contribution to Pax Silica but the ramifications of being locked into a US-dominated AI cartel are mind boggling and could shape our lives and living standards for decades to come.

One possible reason for the deafening silence is that the government is already facing growing controversy about its dealings with Palantir - and it must know we are all only one or two clicks away from discovering that Helberg is a former employee of that very company. From 2023 to 2025, the man in charge of Pax Silica was senior adviser on national security to Alex Karp - the CEO of Palantir, who boasted that “occasionally we kill people.” One of Helberg’s qualifications for being Karp’s adviser was, presumably, that he is the author of a book published in 2021 called The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power. His own power base is a lobby group he set up in 2023 called the Hill and Valley Forum, which is sponsored by Palantir, Google, Nvidia and most of the other tech corporations.

Britain’s membership of Pax Silica puts us at the mercy of right wing tech bros like Karp and Helberg. It is clearly well past time for more searching questions in Parliament than the one asked by Byrne.

Cold War Puerto Rico book tour

Following the publication of my new book, Cold War Puerto Rico, on May 1 by the University of Massachusetts Press, I have been in the US for five events in four cities (New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington) that put the spotlight on how the US has retained control of its Caribbean colony for 128 years and why this is both a great injustice and important internationally. For more on the book, the Jacobin’s review is a good place to start.

For orders in Britain and Ireland only, Cold War Puerto Rico in paperback is available at the special offer price of £20.00 including postage via my website (which has a PayPal/credit card facility) ORDER

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Below is the Cold War Puerto Rico event at the Julia de Burgos bookstore in Philadelphia.

Trump probably does not know his US history well enough to realise that he is not the first president to revamp the Monroe Doctrine for imperialist purposes. In 1954, President Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, also claimed the historical precedent to frame all dissent in Latin America as a foreign conspiracy to legitimize US intervention. This extension of the Monroe Doctrine came as Puerto Rican nationalists staged an armed attack on the U.S. Capitol to protest the island’s colonial status, triggering another wave of repression on the island, with both communists and nationalists being arrested regardless of any evidence of involvement in the shooting.

Below is an extract from the chapter on these events in my book, Cold War Puerto Rico. The extract was published earlier this week by The Internationalist. The book itself is published today by the University of Massachusetts Press and is available online via Waterstones, Barnes & Noble, Amazon and the online retailers for independent bookstores in the United States and the UK. For people in the UK and Ireland only (because of mail costs and tariffs), I have a limited number available via my website (using PayPal or credit card), which will probably prove cheaper than any other outlet because I’m passing on my author discount.

On Monday, March 1, 1954, four Puerto Rican nationalists—Lolita Lebrón, Rafael Cancel Miranda, Andrés Figueroa Cordero, and Irvin Flores—met at Grand Central Station in New York City and boarded a train for Washington, DC. On the same day, in Caracas, the Organization of American States (OAS) was about to start its tenth conference, with the US secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, determined to keep Puerto Rico off the agenda and put “a strong anti-Communist resolution” at the top of it.

Dulles had a hemispheric game plan, for which Puerto Rico would be militarily vital. The purpose of his resolution was to secure OAS legitimacy for US intervention in any country in the Americas against political forces that the United States deemed to be not “indigenous” but part of “an international conspiracy.” He presented this in Washington as an extension of the nineteenth-century Monroe Doctrine, with the populist pretext for asserting US transcontinental power switching from defense against European colonialists to defense against “foreign ideologies.” US National Security Council records sum up Dulles’s cynical goal as follows: “In short, he argued that Communist subversion and subsequent control of any of the American Republics was tantamount to external aggression against such a Republic. Efforts, therefore, to counter such Communist subversion could not rightfully be described as American intervention.”

The nationalists traveling to Washington would probably have been unaware of Dulles’s wider agenda, but their choice of date was no coincidence. The United States wanted to suppress debate at the OAS about Puerto Rico’s status, having only three months earlier secured the UN vote that deemed the island to be self-governing. Venezuela’s pro-American regime had duly obliged by denying visas to independence advocates and arresting those who lived locally. In the face of this, Lebrón and her associates were intent on breaking the oppressive silence with what she called a “cry for victory in our struggle for independence.”

On arriving in Washington armed with pistols, the four nationalists made their way to the Capitol Building and found seats in the visitors’ gallery of the House of Representatives. At 2.30 p.m., with 373 members voting on a resolution below, Lebrón started firing her pistol toward the ceiling, shouting “Viva Puerto Rico!” After emptying her gun, she threw it down and began to unfurl a Puerto Rican flag. Her comrades, meanwhile, had fired their weapons downward, toward the floor of the House, wounding five representatives. Altogether sixteen shots were fired before Lebrón, Cancel, and Figueroa were overpowered by police. Flores escaped, only to be arrested a few hours later.

As if to illustrate the nationalists’ point about the island’s subservient status, Puerto Rico’s resident commissioner, Antonio Fernós-Isern, was not in the chamber because he did not have a vote. Even when—as a trained doctor—he rushed to the Capitol to help the injured, he was stopped by police and confined to his office in what is now called the Longworth House Office Building. In an interview with the Baltimore Sun, Fernós-Isern immediately resorted to red scare tactics, describing the attackers as “communist dupes,” adding rhetorically, “Can it be the doing just of Puerto Rican Nationalists?” The next day, Luis Muñoz Marín arrived in Washington to denounce the shooting as “savage and unbelievable lunacy.” After a difficult meeting with President Eisenhower, he pledged that “the authorities of the Commonwealth would intensify their co-operation with federal authorities to end this madness” and flew back to San Juan on March 5 to launch another clampdown.

Muñoz Marín’s first target was Albizu, whom he had pardoned six months earlier on condition that he not commit any further violations of the Gag Law. After the shooting in Congress, however, Albizu did not hesitate to praise the attackers, describing Lebrón as “a Puerto Rican heroine.” In an interview with El Imparcial, he said: “Lolita Lebrón and the gentlemen who accompanied her on that day of sublime heroism, have warned the United States, emboldened with their atomic bombs, that duty compels them to respect the independence of all nations; to respect the independence of Puerto Rico. And that Puerto Ricans will enforce the respect to that sacred right.”[1] At dawn the day after Muñoz Marín’s return, the police laid siege to Albizu’s house using tear gas and eventually captured him after what the press described as a two-hour gunfight. He would not be released again until a few months before his death in 1965. While Albizu was being arrested, the police rounded up thirty-six other nationalists at twelve locations across Puerto Rico.

With the next dawn came the turn of the communists. Jane Speed, described by the United Press for good measure as “red-haired” as well as part of the “red high command,” was among the first to be arrested. The police were, however, thwarted in capturing her husband, César Andreu, by the quick thinking of Jane’s seventy-seven-year-old mother, Mary, who lived with them. “Maga,” as she was known, had fought some tough political battles herself in 1930s Alabama, but she could not argue with the police because she did not speak Spanish. Instead, turning this handicap to her advantage, she played the part of an aristocratic gringa—using her five-year-old grandson, Nico, as interpreter—to delay the officers while César, who had been working in a back room, hid from them.

By the time Nico Andreu - seen here when we met in Puerto Rico in 2023 - was six years old his parents, Jane Speed and César Andreu Iglesias, had been arrested four times.

That morning, five other communists were captured: Ramón Mirabal Carrión, who had taken over from Santos Rivera as the party’s general secretary; Cristino Pérez Méndez, leader of the party’s municipal committee; Manuel Arroyo Zeppenfeldt, a retired print worker who had produced the party’s publications since the 1930s; Consuelo Burgos de Sáez Corales, a central committee member and the partner of union leader Juan Sáez Corales; and Félix Ojeda, the editor of the party’s paper who had previously been a Socialist Party member and worked for a former resident commissioner, Bolívar Pagán. All of the six arrested were well known to the FBI. Some were known personally to Muñoz Marín as former political allies. It seems highly unlikely that either the FBI or Muñoz Marín genuinely thought they had any connection with the Capitol shootings—never mind having evidence for it—given their long-standing public disagreements with the nationalists over tactics.

The PCP had attempted to preempt being targeted. Within forty-eight hours of the shootings, four party leaders had gone to the offices of one of Puerto Rico’s daily newspapers to make their position clear. The next morning, on March 4, while Muñoz Marín was still in Washington and before any arrests had been made in Puerto Rico, El Mundo reported that Pablo García Rodríguez, Juan Sáez Corales, Juan Santos Rivera, and Ramón Mirabal had visited their newsroom to say that the allegation that “communists participated in or inspired the shootings” was “false and ridiculous.” Their statement read:

“The unfortunate incident that occurred in the chamber of the House of Representatives is being taken by the government and the North American fascists as a pretext to intensify the terror and persecution that is taking place in the United States, in Puerto Rico, and in Latin America against the entire progressive, democratic, and national liberation movement. Our Partido Comunista Puertorriqueño, like any party that is guided by the principles of scientific socialism, is opposed to acts of terrorism as a method of struggle.”[2]

Despite this, the authorities stuck resolutely to their game plan: arresting communists served Washington’s need to portray every manifestation of disaffection with the United States in Latin America as an alien communist conspiracy, aided by compliant US media outlets. When Puerto Rico’s police chief claimed that the communists had been “openly sympathetic to the violently anti-American Puerto Rican nationalists,” the United Press reported it without qualification on its wire service, and it was reproduced as fact in newspapers throughout the United States, Latin America, and beyond.[3]

Faced with this misinformation, the CPUSA published its own statement in Spanish aimed at the Puerto Rican diaspora in New York which echoed its sister party in arguing that terrorism as a tactic is “harmful to the goals of the struggle of the working class and oppressed peoples.” The statement argued that “the first press reports clearly indicate that the McCarthyists are trying to take advantage of the incident to fabricate a ‘red plot’ . . . and intensify the attacks against the ENTIRE Puerto Rican national liberation movement, in Puerto Rico and in the United States.” Accusing the US attorney general, Herbert Brownell, and J. Edgar Hoover of “personally directing a wave of terror,” it claimed they had given Muñoz Marín “strict orders to unleash persecution against all those who favor Puerto Rican independence.”[4]

Of the four who had visited El Mundo, only Mirabal was among the first group of communists arrested. The other three, like César Andreu, managed to evade capture in this “well-timed” roundup. Thus, of the “red high command,” the authorities failed to locate and arrest the party’s president, Santos Rivera; its treasurer, Pablo García; and arguably its best-known figures, Andreu and Sáez Corales. With those four having eluded the police, the United Press reported that the Puerto Rican justice secretary, José Trías Monge, had “launched an island-wide search for four other red executives” in which a force of two thousand officers was being deployed to “knock out the communist leadership.” This search proved as ineffective as the language was colorful. Nine days later, the four had still not been found, despite the police being stationed at intersections stopping “any person who looked like the wanted communists” and the army “being prepared for any emergency.”[5]

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[1] Ivonne Acosta Lespier, La Mordaza (The Gag Law): The Attempt to Crush the Independence Movement in Puerto Rico, 1948-1957 (DS Editores, 2018), 212-214.

[2] “Rojos Boricuas: Niegan que Inspiraran Atentado Congresistas”, El Mundo, March 4, 1954.

[3] See, for example, Panama City (Florida) News, March 8, 1954.

[4] Jesús Colón papers, box 24, folder 4, Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, New York.

[5] Jesús Colón papers, box 24, folder 4.

Trump’s attitude is like a parody of Rudyard Kipling’s most famous poem, “The White Man’s Burden,” which is apt because the poem was written to celebrate the US annexation of the Philippines, Guam, Cuba and Puerto Rico from Spain in 1898. In portraying Empire as a thankless task, Kipling wrote that America would not find its “new-caught sullen peoples” very grateful and would have to accept the “old reward” of “the blame of those ye better, the hate of those ye guard, the cry of hosts ye humour.”

The US did not, at the time, risk Cuban wrath and gave them nominal independence. Filipinos mounted fierce resistance to US rule but did not gain independence until 1946. Both Guam and Puerto Rico are still US possessions for reasons that are obvious from a glance at an atlas: they are priceless military outposts guarding the world’s two great oceans.

My father, Brandon Howell, lived in Puerto Rico in the 1940s. He had gone there to work for Rexford Tugwell, the close ally President Roosevelt appointed to introduce New Deal reforms after previous governors had used deadly force to crush nationalist protests in the 1930s. In the freer climate of Tugwell’s liberalism and with the US and Soviet Union being allies against Hitler, my father evidently thought nothing of combining his official duties as a planning official with extra-curricular activities for Puerto Rico’s communist-led unions. The FBI had been spying on Puerto Rican activists since the 1936, but the only precaution Brandon took was to use the pen names Pepe and Diego Munoz for cartoons he produced for union and communist publications (see the example below with the FBI laboratory’s label on it).

Despite the repression of the 1930s, hopes for independence were rising. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill had signed the Atlantic Charter in 1941 committing themselves to “respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live.” But it would soon become clear that what Washington had in mind was independence for – and access to – Britain’s colonies, not freeing its own. Tugwell made this explicit in 1945 by claiming that the island “could not exist alone” and saying that, in any plebiscite on its future status, “fairness to everyone requires that the Congress offer the choices it is willing to accept rather than to require that Puerto Ricans should petition for status with the risk of rejection.”

At the heart of the issue was Puerto Rico’s value to Washington as a fortress from which to enforce its domination of the Western Hemisphere. The US military presence on the island had expanded dramatically during the 1940s with the construction of the Roosevelt Roads naval base and the expropriation of most of the nearby islands of Vieques and Culebra to serve as bombing ranges. They would be vital assets in the wars and interventions that were to come – including, most recently, for the attack on Venezuela to kidnap its President Maduro.

Somehow the US had to appear to decolonise Puerto Rico while actually retaining control of it. But this required a credible indigenous advocate with the means to suppress those who dissented. By 1948, those ingredients were in place: Puerto Rico’s pre-eminent politician, Luis Muñoz Marín, was already advocating a solution that fell short of independence and had in his back pocket what became known as the Gag Law to deal with troublesome opponents. Washington seized its chance to allow Puerto Ricans to elect their own governor confident Muñoz Marín would win and open negotiations for what he called a ‘free association’ that devolved some powers without changing the island’s status as an unincorporated US territory. It would allow Washington to have the final say on everything, but Puerto Ricans were not to be given a vote in US elections because that would negate the pretense of de-colonisation.

In 1950, with negotiations on Puerto Rico’s status reaching a critical stage, a pre-emptive revolt by nationalists was crushed by US National Guards and followed by Muñoz Marín using the Gag Law to round up supporters of independence, regardless of whether or not they had participated in the uprising. Two years later, even as a ‘free association’ deal with Washington was being sealed in a take-it-or-leave-it referendum, dozens of its opponents were still incarcerated.

Meanwhile, the island’s communists presented Hoover and Muñoz Marín with a different difficulty because they supported independence but opposed the insurrectionary tactics of the nationalists. In March 1954, after four nationalists had fired guns in the US Capitol Building in Washington - injuring five members of Congress - Muñoz Marín had ten communist leaders arrested. But he soon had to release them because there was no evidence whatsoever connecting them to what had happened.

This was a turning point that led to the repressive tools commonly associated with “McCarthyism” being openly and directly used in Puerto Rico. Later the same year, Hoover sent his agents out to round up eleven Puerto Rican communists, including eight of those arrested the previous March, in order to indict them under the Smith Act, the US legislation on which the Gag Law was based.

Above: Left - César Andreu Iglesias on one of the four occasions he was arrested and imprisoned; Right - Jane Speed de Andreu and Consuelo Burgos de Saez Corales handcuffed together on their way to the Federal courthouse in San Juan for a Smith Act hearing.

This use of a US statute only served to underline just how lacking in autonomy the island really was. Over the following three years, the defense lawyers - who were not themselves communists - would repeatedly chal­lenge the indictments on this politically sensitive point until eventually, as if to amplify the irony, the charges were dropped because the US Supreme Court had issued an interpretation of the Smith Act that rendered successful prosecution unlikely.

Hoover was not ready, however, to give up his mission to crush Puerto Rico’s Communist Party along with any remaining organized support for independence. As the Smith Act prosecutions were collapsing, and with Muñoz Marín sidelined, he set his agents to work investigating who should be subpoenaed to appear at hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) on “Communist Activities among Puerto Ricans,” which his conservative allies in Congress dutifully scheduled for November 1959.

HUAC’s deci­sion to sit for three days in San Juan caused an outcry, with prominent figures across the political spectrum arguing that it did not have jurisdiction in Puerto Rico. Once underway, HUAC met with what Clark Foreman, a civil rights advocate and director of the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, called “the most unified and absolute resistance” in the committee’s history. Having cut short its proceedings on the final day, HUAC left the island to face headlines in the US saying they had been humiliated. Nevertheless, instead of heeding the sensitivities about Puerto Rico’s status, they ploughed on with securing a congressional decision to cite the thirteen witnesses for contempt the following year. But that tactic also failed when, nearly three years after the hearings, a federal court ruled that Congress had not explicitly included Puerto Rico in HUAC’s remit, while conveniently leaving intact the principle that it could have done so.

Finally, having found legal channels unproductive, Hoover turned to covert action. In 1960, he decided that Puerto Rico would be a test bed for extending COINTELPRO, a program developed four years earlier to disrupt and divide what remained of the US Communist Party. The fact that the island was chronologically the second target of COINTELPRO reflected the concern in Washington about what one FBI memo called the “increasing boldness” of the independence movement and the “courage given to their cause by Castro’s Cuba.” From this point on, he would not be content with “mere harassment” but wanted the FBI to “disrupt the activities of these organizations” by sowing division and conflict.

My father left Puerto Rico in 1948 and opted to leave the US altogether in 1949 to take a job at the University of Liverpool, but he stayed in touch with Puerto Rican friends such as César Andreu Iglesias and Jane Speed, who were both imprisoned multiple times in the 1950s and were among the eleven communists indicted under the Smith Act. When I was growing up in London, he often talked about his life there in the 1940s and old friends from that time, including César, would visit us. But it was only after he died in 1987 that I discovered how heavily involved politically he had been from papers he left behind.

After visiting San Juan myself in 2007, I started researching this in earnest. I made contact with Leila and Nico Andreu, I obtained - after a battle and on appeal - FBI files revealing he’d been under surveillance for 30 years, and I visited archives at UC Berkeley (where he’d studied), in San Juan (on a second visit), in New York (at Columbia and the Center for Puerto Rican Studies) and at Liverpool University.

Much to my surprise, I discovered that histories of Cold War repression and COINTELPRO either do not mention Puerto Rico at all or relegate it to a footnote or passing reference. This neglect helps feed the idea that Puerto Rico’s status – which has not changed since 1952 – is a product of ‘consent’. In writing Cold War Puerto Rico, I hope to have made a small contribution to correcting that perception.

Cold War Puerto Rico is now available in paperback via the publisher - the University of Massachusetts Press - and all major retailers at the RRP of $34.95. I have limited stock available at the special offer price of £20 including postage (but this applies to orders from Britain and Ireland only due to US tariffs and other costs). - see below.

Britain and Ireland only: Cold War Puerto Rico in paperback at the author’s special offer price of £20.00 including postage ORDER

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“An engaging and important historical contribution.” - Sandy Plácido, Associate Professor, Rutgers-Newark

“Most histories of McCarthyism ignore Puerto Rico. Most histories of the Puerto Rico independence movement focus on the Nationalist current. Steve Howell’s book makes a major contribution to filling these gaps.” - Rafael Bernabe, author of Obstinate Star: a History of the Puerto Rico Independence Movement.

“What Steve’s done here is shine a light on a story that’s far too often brushed aside. Puerto Rico’s struggle isn’t just some footnote to Cold War history; it’s about real people whose lives were torn apart for daring to stand up against colonial rule…Anyone who cares about justice and democracy should read this book.”- Maryam Eslamdoust, General Secretary, TSSA Union.

“This deeply researched and expertly written account of red scare politics in Puerto Rico offers an impressively panoramic yet surprisingly intimate portrayal of mid-twentieth-century U.S. colonialism and anti-communism.” - Dr Hugh Wilford, author of The CIA: An Imperial History, Professor of U.S. History, California State University, Long Beach

Being a vassal is a thankless task. The US would not have been able to mount such a ferocious attack on Iran if it had been denied use of British bases. Keir Starmer put his neck on the line to corral his cabinet into agreeing to it. And yet Donald Trump has acted like a dinner guest who complains about the service. While bombing Iran from British runways, the US president has sarcastically dismissed his host as not being “Winston Churchill” and said that he doesn’t need “people who join wars after we’ve already won.”

Trump’s criticisms belie the fact that RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk has been facilitating the US build up for an attack on Iran since early January. His only grounds for grumbling were that there was a 48-hour delay to Britain serving up RAF Fairford and Diego Garcia, the British base on an island in the Indian Ocean, for use in bombing Iran directly.

In one way, the US president’s attacks have suited Starmer in that they have allowed him, for once, to appear to be on the right side of British public opinion. According to the latest YouGov polling, opposition in the UK to US military action against Iran has jumped 10points to 59percent with only 25percent in favour.

However, any credit Starmer gained initially by ruffling Trump’s feathers soon evaporated as it became apparent that his claim to be permitting the US to use British bases only for “defensive” purposes was a sham. People did not have to be military experts to realise that he has no way of controlling where the bombers flying from Fairford or Diego Garcia are actually going to drop their cargo.

Even the normally Starmer-aligned Guardian struggled with the concept, saying in an editorial that “if British territory is used for more than defensive strikes in Iran, the Commons should vote.” But how would we know? The Left Labour MP, Richard Burgon, has tried to get to the bottom of this by tabling Parliamentary questions that ask if “the UK Government will have the ability to approve or refuse individual targets before the US conducts strikes” and then assess them “to ensure that the action is consistent with international law?”

It is, of course, hard to imagine Trump ever conceding that he needs Starmer’s permission each time a bomber takes off from a British base. But this charade is compounded by a much more fundamental problem: permission to use Diego Garcia is not morally or legally even in the UK’s gift because it does not have sovereignty over the Chagos Archipelago of which the island is part and has yet to ratify a deal to lease it back for military purposes.

Asked for an advisory opinion by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) at the Hague decided on February 25, 2019 that the UK must end its administration of the archipelago “as soon as possible” because it had unlawfully separated it from Mauritius prior to granting independence in 1968. The ICJ’s 44-page opinion – approved by a 13 – 1 vote, with only a US judge dissenting - noted that the whole of Mauritius, including the Chagos islands had been treated as a single “non-self-governing territory” since the UK had acquired it from France under the Treaty of Paris in 1814. Having given “heightened scrutiny” to the issue of consent, which is crucial when there is a power imbalance between coloniser and colonised, the ICJ said that the detachment of the archipelago from Mauritius “was not based on the free and genuine expression of the will of the people concerned.”

On May 22, 2019, the UN General Assembly welcomed the ICJ’s decision and told the UK to “unconditionally withdraw its colonial administration from (the Chagos islands) within six months.” The UN concluded that the UK’s administration of the archipelago since 1968 has constituted “a wrongful act” and that it should “cooperate with Mauritius to facilitate the resettlement of Mauritian nationals” in the archipelago, including those of Chagossian origin who had been forcibly removed in the 1970s and 1980s.

These crystal clear ICJ and UN decisions are the reason why – dragging their feet – the previous and current UK governments have had to negotiate an agreement with Mauritius. Signed last May, the deal restores Mauritian sovereignty over the Chagos islands while allowing the UK to lease back Diego Garcia for a period of 99 years. The UK will not ratify it, however, until its agreement with the US on the operation of the military base has been updated.

Cue Trump. In January, the president called the deal “a great act of stupidity.” After discussing it on a call with Starmer on February 4, he switched to saying it was “the best he could make” but threatened military action against anyone “who endangers US operations” if it “ever falls apart.” Two weeks later, he U turned again with an epistle on Truth Social saying that if this land is “taken away from the UK…it will be a blight on our Great Ally” which should “remain strong in the face of Wokeism.”

Ever pleased to echo Trump, Nigel Farage joined the fray, calling the deal a “sell-out” and falsely claiming it would give Mauritius “veto power over US-UK use of Diego Garcia.” Apart from the fact that having a 99-year lease actually puts the base on a stronger legal footing, the idea that Mauritius – with a population of 1.3 million and one of the poorest countries in the world – could challenge the might of the US is obviously preposterous.

Many Mauritians would no doubt be happy to see the base closed, but the deal does at least reverse the injustice of the archipelago being wrongfully retained by the UK in the 1960s and will provide Mauritius with some precious revenue in years to come.

For the British and American people, however, there is the different question of whether or not we want our countries to have a military base in the Indian Ocean at all. Diego Garcia is tainted not only by its illegal occupation by Britain and the displacement of those living there, it is also discredited by its central role in decades of regime change wars and its use as a staging post for people being “rendered” through the base to be detained at Guantanamo Bay.

In 2008, the then UK foreign secretary, David Miliband, said that the US had admitted using Diego Garcia for its post-2001 rendition of alleged terrorists, despite earlier denials. Michael Hayden, the CIA director at the time, claimed that an “error in the US records search” was to blame for the failure to supply accurate information in the first place but insisted that only two flights had stopped to refuel. Seven years later, however, Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to the former US secretary of state Colin Powell, told Vice News that the island was known to have been used for the US government’s “nefarious activities” when other sites were too full. He said he had learned this after leaving office from four senior intelligence sources who had indicated that the base was home to “a transit site where people were temporarily housed, let us say, and interrogated from time to time.”

Diego Gracia had first come into its own in the 1991 Gulf War as what the international policy think tank, Chatham House, calls “a critical, high volume launchpad for US air operations.” In 2003, the US built hangars at the base for up to six B-2 bombers – a third of the US fleet - that allowed it to conduct missions directly from the island over Iraq and Afghanistan. The B-2’s manufacturer, Northrop Grumman, boasts that it is “the only aircraft to combine long-range, stealth and a heavy payload on a single platform” and that it still holds the record for “the longest air combat mission in history” for being airborne for 44 hours in Afghan airspace.

We are now seeing history repeat itself with US B-2s dropping 2,000Ib bombs on Iran that send a pressure wave that kills or ruptures the organs of anyone within to 400-metre radius. To put it politely, it stretches credulity to suggest that a bomb with such destructive power can ever be defensive. But, even if that was plausible, there is no way the UK government can realistically ensure that every target on every mission falls into its definition of “defensive” which is a questionable concept in itself.

Given the history of Diego Garcia military use exclusively as a forward base for regime change wars, why would a UK government committed to having no part in such wars want to retain it? In the 1960s, the UK government under Harold Wilson declared its intention to withdraw from East of Suez, a process accelerated by the National Liberation Front in Yemen gaining control of Aden in November 1967 and triggering an ignominious evacuation of 3,500 British troops. Tony Blair and succeeding prime ministers have reversed that decision and increased the UK’s military presence in the Gulf, where Oman is now one of the country’s six key military ‘hubs’ overseas.

Such is the anti-war mood now in the UK that even Farage’s Reform UK has begun to retreat from giving Trump’s war a blank cheque. Farage was quick to criticise Starmer for not immediately allowing the US to use British bases, but the party’s shadow chancellor, Robert Jenrick, has now reverted to the rhetoric of Trump before he became president in saying “the liberal interventionists of the early 21st century failed our own people” and that Reform opposes “drawn out wars in faraway places.”

The duplicity of Reform stands in stark contrast to the consistency of the former Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, who has vigorously opposed regime-change wars and has now tabled legislation – backed by 25 independent, Labour and Plaid Cymru MPs - requiring parliamentary approval for the use of UK military bases. Meanwhile, asked about the Diego Garcia deal, the Green Party’s leader, Zack Polanski, is arguing that the UK needs to “disentangle from the United States and that includes a review of US bases.”

This piece was originally published by Jacobin on March 13, 2026.

Note: My new book, ‘Cold War Puerto Rico: Anti-Communism in Washington’s Caribbean Colony’, published by the University of Massachusetts Press, is now available via my website at the special price of £20 including postage (UK and Ireland only). For those in Puerto Rico, the US and elsewhere, the publisher is offering a 20% discount on the recommended retail price of $34.95 via their website by using the code UMASS20.

For nearly forty years, little has happened in Britain’s Labour party without the 72-year-old Lord (as he still is) pulling at least some of the strings. From early ally of Tony Blair to Britain’s ambassador to Washington, he has enjoyed enormous success and heavily influenced political discourse. But now he’s a pariah, disowned even by proteges and long-term allies, and facing three investigations: one into his role in Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s appointment as a trade envoy in 2001, a second into possible fraud while a member of the European Commission from 2004 to 2008, and a British police probe into misconduct in public office.

Meanwhile, Mandelson’s lucrative consultancy business, Global Counsel, has collapsed leaving his 21 percent stake worthless after clients bailed out in droves. He had stepped down as the consultancy’s chairman in May 2024 as part of a restructuring that saw Jim Messina, the former Barack Obama aide, join the board when his own firm, Messina Group, took a twenty percent stake in a deal valuing Global Counsel at around £30 million.

In making his investment, Messina either did not know or did not care that media outlets in Britain had already revealed that Mandelson maintained an association with Epstein after his conviction for soliciting prostitution from a minor in 2008.

Similarly, Starmer, who has now admitted he knew of the longevity of Mandelson’s Epstein link, did not consider it to be an obstacle to appointing him to Britain’s top diplomatic role. Mandelson took up the post in February 2025 but was sacked by Starmer only seven months later after the first batch of Epstein emails released by the US Justice department revealed more details of his ambassador’s fraternisation with Epstein post-conviction.

Aided by friends in the media, Mandelson attempted to rehabilitate himself in January. The BBC indulged him with a long interview in which he portrayed himself as an innocent fool for trusting Epstein. The Times even continued to treat him as a credible political commentator by publishing a piece in which he praised Donald Trump and argued that “in one night, the US had achieved more in Venezuela than the so-called rules-based order did in decades.”

The reprieve was, however, short-lived. The release three weeks ago of more Epstein files revealed that Mandelson had sent the paedophile market-sensitive information while Britain’s business secretary and had even suggested encouraging Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JP Morgan, to “mildly threaten” one of his own cabinet colleagues over plans for taxing bankers’ bonuses. Whatever the formal outcome of the three investigations, Mandelson is now so toxic that it is hard to imagine any way back into public life for him.

Mandelson’s political career can be divided into three phases: consigliere to Tony Blair in the New Labour project from the 1980s to 1997, controversy-prone cabinet minister and European Commissioner from 1997 to 2010, and arch-conspirator against the Left since 2010.

The first phase began in 1985 when Mandelson was appointed Labour’s director of communications. It was a role that allowed him to give politicians aligned with his agenda media exposure, and he soon started promoting Blair, who had been elected to Parliament two years earlier. On becoming an MP himself in 1992, Mandelson backed Blair in a successful Labour leadership bid, opening the way for the two men to create what they called ‘New Labour.’ Essentially a cosmetic exercise - the policy substance being a continuation of Margaret Thatcher’s neo-liberalism - the role of Blair and Mandelson was to package it, literally, in red roses for the party faithful and voters already eager for a change of government.

Labour’s election victory in 1997 opened a new phase in Mandelson’s career with him immediately becoming a roving minister without portfolio and then, a year later, being promoted to the cabinet as secretary of state for trade and industry. His elevation was, however, short-lived: in December 1998, he was forced to resign after it emerged that he had not declared an interest-free loan of £373,000 from a ministerial colleague to buy a house. Ten months later, Blair brought his ally back as Northern Ireland secretary only for him again to be forced to resign after just over a year amid allegations that he had used his position to help a wealthy Indian businessman apply for British citizenship. Blair gave Mandelson a third chance in 2004 but at the safe distance of Brussels where he became one of Britain’s European Commissioners, a role he held until Blair’s successor Gordon Brown surprised Westminster by appointing him business secretary in October 2008.

The third phase of Mandelson’s political career, after Labour’s election defeat in 2010, saw him orchestrating a battle against the Left, whose support had been replenished by millennials angered by the Iraq war and the imposition of austerity after the bank crash. Mandelson backed David Miliband to replace Brown as Labour leader but he was beaten by his brother Ed, who was supported by the Left. When Labour lost again in 2015, Ed Miliband resigned, triggering a leadership ballot that an outright Left candidate, Jeremy Corbyn, won comfortably.

Mandelson despised Corbyn and made no secret of it. With Blairites still in control of the party machine and dominant among its MPs, Mandelson and his allies made life extraordinarily difficult for the new leader. After voters backed Brexit in a referendum in 2016, Mandelson blamed Corbyn and encouraged a vote of no confidence in him by Labour MPs. Corbyn won the resulting second leadership election but there was no respite. In February 2017, Mandelson said: “I work every single day to bring forward the end of (Corbyn’s) tenure in office…Every day I try to do something to rescue the Labour Party from his leadership.”

Towards the end of that month, I started working for Corbyn as deputy director of strategy and communications. When I emailed Mandelson to tell him this, he replied saying: “It pains me more than I can say that you should be making such a sacrifice but it’s your life.”

It would prove to be anything but a sacrifice. When the prime minister, Theresa May, called a surprise General Election that Spring, it allowed Corbyn to escape the stifling confines of Westminster and do what he does best: go out across the country and rally support for his ideas. To the surprise of many, though not those of us working on the campaign, Labour won its biggest popular vote for twenty years and gained enough seats to deny the Tories a majority. As May clung to power by negotiating a deal with a group of Northern Ireland unionist MPs, Mandelson admitted that he had underestimated Corbyn and told the BBC: “An earthquake has happened in British politics and I did not foresee it.”

With Corbyn’s position buoyed by relative electoral success, Mandelson changed tack and turned his attention to reversing Labour’s policy of accepting the result of the EU referendum. Shrewdly, he knew the issue could be Corbyn’s Achilles heel because it split his support base: while many Labour activists were strongly Remain, the electorate in the majority of parliamentary seats held by Labour had voted Leave. When Labour’s conference decided to support a second referendum in 2018, the party doomed itself to being punished in Leave areas in any subsequent election. And, sure enough, it was when the vote came in December 2019.

The election defeat delivered Mandelson’s primary goal: Corbyn had to resign. But who would he support to replace him? When asked this early in 2020 on a Guardian podcast in which we both took part, Mandelson avoided giving a straight answer, and I sensed something Machiavellian afoot. At the time, Starmer was describing himself as Corbyn’s friend and offering continuity on policy. The endorsement of the arch-enemy of the Left would not have been helpful. However, when the list of donors to Starmer’s campaign was published after voting closed, nearly all of them were long-standing wealthy allies of Mandelson.

It was therefore no surprise that a year into Starmer’s leadership, the Sunday Times reported that Starmer was “putting his faith” in Mandelson “to inject a dose of New Labour’s ‘winning mentality’” into his team. Soon afterwards, Mandelson’s influence became obvious in shadow cabinet selections, the ditching or dilution of progressive policies and the suspension of Corbyn, who was still an MP, from the parliamentary party.

For Mandelson, the general election in 2024 was an opportunity to complete his nine-year mission to wipe Corbyn off the political map. With the former leader standing for re-election to Parliament as an independent, Mandelson told Times Radio that he would be going out personally to campaign for the official Labour candidate. Once again, Corbyn surprised him by winning comfortably. Meanwhile, across the UK, though Labour had gained fewer votes than under Corbyn, divisions on the Right had handed the party a huge parliamentary majority.

So, would Starmer reward Mandelson? Sure enough, the call came before the year was out. Being ambassador to Washington, and mixing with world leaders in the White House, must have seemed a stratospheric note on which to end a career with so many up and downs. But one fatal flaw would soon catch up with him. In a letter to me in 1973, Mandelson wrote: “I am a bourgeois at heart…the people whose company I enjoy most are those from a strictly bourgeoise and intellectual background.” More than half a century later, it is an uncannily apt epitaph to his political career.

This piece was originally published by Jacobin on March 1, 2026.

Note: My new book, ‘Cold War Puerto Rico: Anti-Communism in Washington’s Caribbean Colony’, will be published by the University of Massachusetts Press on May 1. UK pre-orders via my website are at the special price of £20 including postage. The publisher is also offering a 20% discount on the recommended retail price of $34.95 via their website by using the code UMASS20.

Reinforcing this message last week, the State Department posted a photograph of Rubio on X with the message: “The United States and Europe belong to a civilization that stretches over continents, crossed over oceans, and persisted for thousands of years: from Athens to Rome to America. Western Civilization must embrace its noble legacy if it is to reverse its decline.”

This drew a sharp rebuke for Britain’s first black woman lawmaker. Diane Abbott, who holds the title Mother of the House as the longest-serving female member of Parliament, accused Rubio of “trying to forge a white supremacist version of human history” and said: “Language was first spoken in Africa. Language was first written in West Asia. Mathematics originated in Africa, so too the first translation. The first 2-storey building was also in built in Asia.”

In his Munich speech, Rubio had described colonialism as “a great civilization” that had sent “its missionaries, its pilgrims, its soldiers, its explorers pouring out from its shores to cross oceans, settle new continents, build vast empires extending out across the globe.” To resounding applause, he told European leaders that America would always be “a child of Europe” and then illustrated this with a curious collection of examples.

Credited in turn were the Italians with Christianity, the English for their language and political and legal system, the Germans with farming and beer, the French with exploring the north American interior and the Scots-Irish with Davy Crocket, Teddy Roosevelt, Neil Armstrong and Mark Twain (evidently, overlooking his opposition to imperialism).

Predictably, of course, there was no place in this fairy tale for indigenous nations who had been ethnically cleansed to make way for colonisation. Nor was there any mention of the 7.9 million people whose slave labour created the wealth of King Cotton and whose notional freedom required a civil war in which around a million Americans died.

But what about Spain? Rubio could not credibly omit his own heritage from the story, especially as the Mediterranean members of NATO are as important geo-politically as the Anglo-Saxon ones. Spain, he said without apparent irony, was responsible for “our horses, our ranches, our rodeos – the entire romance of the cowboy archetype that became synonymous with the American West.” And, for good measure, he added that his own European ancestors would never have imagined that “one of their direct descendants would be back here today on this continent as the chief diplomat of that infant nation.”

This hackneyed allusion to the American Dream begs examination of the actual history. From the outset, the architects of empire viewed Spanish-Americans as inferior and institutionalized their second-class status. When the United States expanded westward, it treated the land it conquered as ‘incorporated territories’ eligible to become ‘states’, but only once there were enough Anglo-Saxon settlers to outnumber both indigenous inhabitants and, in the south-west, the Mexicans from whom the land was taken in 1848. This meant that Arizona and New Mexico were not admitted to the Union until 1912.

However, while incorporated territories were destined for statehood once the right ethnic mix was eventually achieved, the colonies seized directly from Spain in 1898 were a different matter. When the Philippines, Cuba, Guam and Puerto Rico became US possessions, there was much debate about what to do with them. Cuba was allowed nominal independence, but with the US retaining – to this day - 45 square miles for a military base at Guantanamo. Filipinos mounted fierce resistance that was crushed by US forces in what one senator described as “a foul blot on the flag,” but they eventually gained independence in 1946. Guam and Puerto Rico were, meanwhile, retained as US possessions for their geo-political value in the Pacific and Caribbean respectively, prompting the need to resolve what their legal status should be.

The solution of giving these outposts of “unincorporated” status was proposed by Abbott Lawrence Lowell in an article for Atlantic Monthly in February 1899. The Harvard law professor advanced the thesis that people being created equal was “quite a different matter” to them being equal politically. While “the Anglo-Saxon race was prepared for (political equality) by centuries of discipline under the supremacy of law,” he claimed that “the Spanish race” had not acquired “the habits of self-government.” Puerto Ricans, he continued, “must be trained for it, as our forefathers were trained, beginning with local government under a strong judicial system, and the process will necessarily be slow.”

Puerto Rico’s unincorporated status was legally formalised in 1901 when the Supreme Court decided that oranges imported from the island into the United States should be subject to duty because “neither military occupation nor cession by treaty makes the conquered territory domestic territory in the sense of the revenue laws.” In the words of Justice Edward Douglass White, Puerto Rico was “foreign to the United States in a domestic sense” because it was unincorporated and therefore “merely appurtenant thereto as a possession.”

This judgement continues to underpin Puerto Rico’s status. It was not altered by giving Puerto Ricans US citizenship in 1917, conveniently making them eligible for conscription. It was camouflaged in 1952 when – to quash accusations of colonialism at the United Nations – Congress gave the island limited self-government. And it was exposed as a sham when Washington imposed direct rule in 2016 after a debt crisis that even a US city would have been allowed to manage independently by filing for bankruptcy protection.

The hostility from some quarters toward Bad Bunny’s appearance at the Super Bowl brought to the fore confusion that was bound to arise from the idea that a place can be owned by the US but not part of it. Attitudes have changed little since Lawrence Lowell’s day: Puerto Ricans are okay as fodder for war or for their land’s military value, but they are un-American when they assert their cultural identity. It is no wonder that more and more of them are now demanding political equality through self-determination.

Rubio attributing ranches and rodeo to his ancestors was quaint, and might go down well with some European politicians clutching at Atlanticist straws, but having someone of Hispanic heritage at the centre of US power does not make it any less a racist endeavour. As another Harvard professor, Samuel P Huntington, put it in 2004: “There is no Americano dream. There is only the American dream created by an Anglo-Protestant society. Mexican Americans will share in that dream and in that society only if they dream in English.”

This article was first published by The Nation.

Note: My new book, ‘Cold War Puerto Rico: Anti-Communism in Washington’s Caribbean Colony’, will be published by the University of Massachusetts Press on May 1. UK pre-orders via my website are at the special price of £20 including postage. The publisher is also offering a 20% discount on the recommended retail price of $34.95 via their website by using the code UMASS20.

The Epstein files have provided a rare window into the parasitic world of the people who rule Britain and the United States, the two countries that in succession have dominated most of the rest of the planet for nearly two centuries. It has been exposed as an amoral cesspit in which money has become increasingly detached from the productive forces that give it value and in which a political class has emerged that is in thrall to those who control the financial system.

This is personified by an, as yet, unscathed character in the saga, Jamie Dimon, the long-standing chief executive of JP Morgan, a bank with $4 trillion of assets under management. Dimon telephoned Britain’s then chancellor, Alistair Darling, in 2009 to threaten punitive action over plans to tax bankers’ bonuses. The Epstein files reveal that this course of action was treacherously suggested by Darling’s cabinet colleague Peter Mandelson. Despite this bullying already being on the record from 2011 in Darling’s book, Beyond the Brink, it does not appear to have done Dimon any harm: in the 17 years since, he has been a regular visitor to Downing Street under successive prime ministers and only four weeks ago jointly hosted an event at Davos with Rachel Reeves, the current chancellor.

Apart from snippets in memoirs, we do not usually get to know how we are ruled until government papers are released thirty years later and most of the protagonists have long left the stage. In this case, the problem for Starmer was that Mandelson was not only still on the stage, he had also chosen most of the cast and written much of the script. Starmer’s appointment of Mandelson as Britain’s ambassador to Washington was itself a reflection of how beholden he was to the disgraced peer. After sacking him from the role over his links with Epstein last September, he might have weathered criticism of his judgement. But he faced renewed outrage two weeks ago when files were released that revealed Mandelson providing Epstein with market sensitive information and his advice that Dimon should “mildly threaten” Darling.

It is a measure of Mandelson’s previous influence that, within days, Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, and director of communications, Tim Allan, had resigned because of their close association with him. Briefly, it seemed that Labour lawmakers were ready to oust the prime minister too. Starmer’s moment of greatest jeopardy came last Monday when Labour’s leader in Scotland, Anas Sarwar, called on him to stand down. But no further dominoes fell: Wales’s first minister, Eluned Morgan, declined to back Sarwar, and Labour members of the UK parliament gave Starmer a stage-managed standing ovation at their weekly meeting that evening.

Yet Starmer’s position remains precarious. On February 26, Labour could lose a Westminster by-election in Gordon and Denton, a constituency in Greater Manchester that it won comfortably in 2024. On May 7, there are also elections for the Scottish and Welsh parliaments and some local councils in England in which a Labour meltdown is a serious prospect. Labour has been in power in Wales since its parliament was established in 1999 but polls suggest it is set to come third in May behind Plaid Cymru and Reform. In Scotland, Labour governed for the first eight years of the parliament’s life but lost to the Scottish Nationalist Party in 2007 and has been in opposition since.

Sarwar wanted Starmer gone to give Labour a chance of a comeback in Scotland, but those looking to succeed him would not have relished facing the electorate so soon. As veteran left-wing MP Diane Abbott put it: “I think the idea is let (Starmer) stay there and take responsibility – we’re going to have catastrophic elections anyway.” Another factor behind the apparent closing of ranks is that one of the main leadership contenders, Angela Rayner, needs time for a tax investigation into her property dealings to be settled, and another, Wes Streeting, is a protégé of Mandelson’s for whom a delay provides an opportunity to reinvent himself. Streeting’s first move was to publish WhatsApp messages between him and Mandelson in which he said “Israel is committing war crimes before our eyes.” But this backfired immediately with former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn saying that, if he knew that, “why did he keep serving in a government that was arming them?”

The other politicians widely considered as front-runners to replace Starmer include former Labour leader and current energy secretary, Ed Miliband, and the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood. The Greater Manchester mayor, Andy Burnham, would have support but he is not an MP and was blocked by Starmer-allied officials from being the candidate in Gorton and Denton. A further name being touted by the right wing media is the defence secretary, John Healey, whose hardline stance on arms spending and “war readiness” aligns with theirs.

Disastrous election results alone would be enough to trigger new demands for Starmer to go, but any one of the other controversies dogging him could equally end his premiership. Each day brings something new, but the top four at present are: the awarding of a £240m military contract without a tender to Palantir, the producer of surveillance software for Israel’s slaughter in Gaza, after Starmer visited their offices with Mandelson last year; Starmer’s decision to proceed with appointing a former aide, Matthew Doyle, to the House of Lords even though he knew he had publicly campaigned for someone charged with – and subsequently convicted of - child sex offences; the ongoing fall-out from the separate police and parliamentary investigations of Mandelson; and revelations that Labour Together, the party faction that orchestrated Starmer’s leadership bid in 2020, had hired a public relations firm to identify and find “leverage” over the sources used by journalists investigating hundreds of thousands of pounds in undeclared donations. The latter is now the subject of an inquiry by the Public Relations and Communication Association, the professional body for the industry.

If there is a leadership election, Labour members and members of affiliated unions will have a vote, but candidates will need to be nominated first by twenty percent of the Labour’s 405 MPs. That threshold was raised from ten percent in 2021 to preclude a repeat of what happened in 2015 when Jeremy Corbyn secured enough MP nominations to get on the ballot and was then comfortably elected.

Absent their own candidate, Left Labour MPs are likely to join those dubbed “soft left” in coalescing around either Rayner or Miliband, both of whom have something of a chequered history. Rayner served in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet but distanced herself from him after winning the contest for deputy leader when Starmer was elected in 2020. She had to resign from that role and as deputy prime minister last year after her property tax issues were revealed. Miliband was leader when Labour was in opposition from 2010 to 2015 and, to his credit, inflicted a surprise defeat on David Cameron’s conservative government in 2013 when he instructed Labour MPs to vote against Britain joining a US-led military intervention in Syria. However, a year after Corbyn was elected to succeed him as leader, Miliband backed moves to oust him and supported Owen Smith, the unsuccessful rival candidate, in a second leadership contest.

Miliband denies having any ambition to be leader again, but his recent interviews have made a pitch that he knows will be popular with the party’s grassroots. While saying he supported Starmer continuing, he called for the situation to be “a moment of change” and said Mandelson should never have been appointed because it undermined Labour’s mission of “standing up for the powerless and not the wealthy and powerful.” In his role as energy secretary, he also announced plans to spend £1bn on community-owned green energy schemes. Using language echoing Corbyn, he said the scheme was “answering the call for a different kind of economy that works for the many.”

Miliband or Rayner could well defeat a candidate from the right but their much bigger challenge would be to deliver meaningful change. In trying to do this, they will face two major obstacles.

Firstly, the powerful big business circles that the Epstein files have shed light on will resist fiercely. The Financial Times has already signalled this by claiming that there is no mandate for a leftward shift, and the Corbyn years demonstrated how even modest proposals for public ownership and taxing the wealthy will come under ferocious fire. There is popular support for such policies - as shown by the Greens being ahead of Labour in some polls - but Labour’s link with the unions would also need to be revived to give a left-leaning leader organised backing. Corbyn had strong support from the largest private sector union, Unite, but was undermined by Unison, the public services union. With Unison now having elected a left-wing general secretary, Andrea Egan, both big battalions could weigh in behind progressive policies.

The second obstacle would be a lack fiscal headroom unless they ditch plans for a massive increase in arms spending. As it stands, Britain is set to increase its military budget from 2.3 to 3.5 percent of GDP by the 2035 with a further 1.5 percent being spent on infrastructure and civil preparedness. Each percentage point adds about £30 billion annually to government spending. Last year, Starmer handed the job of justifying this to Lord Robertson, who was Tony Blair’s defence secretary and then NATO’s secretary-general at the time of the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Media coverage of Robertson’s defence review focused on the possibility of war with Russia, but his report also prioritised the Middle East and the Indo-Pacific and said 8,500 military personnel stationed should continue to be based abroad in ‘hubs’ as far away as Oman, Kenya and Singapore. This issue will be a defining one: a new leader will not be able to invest significantly more on the NHS, education and other services to benefit ‘the many’ unless they revisit plans to ramp up arms spending, which in turn would require a radical change of foreign policy.

This article was first published by Jacobin.

Note: My new book, ‘Cold War Puerto Rico: Anti-Communism in Washington’s Caribbean Colony’, will be published by the University of Massachusetts Press on May 1. UK pre-orders via my website are at the special price of £20 including postage. The publisher is also offering a 20% discount on the recommended retail price of $34.95 via their website by using the code UMASS20.

For Labour right-wingers, from Ernest Bevin to Keir Starmer, Atlanticism has always been a sacred cow. The constitution of Labour First even has “maintaining our special relationship with the USA” as one of its four defining beliefs. For generations, Labour careerists have made pilgrimages to Washington to be trained in the finer points of US geo-political strategy and to sign up for lobby groups such as the Henry Jackson Society.

It must, therefore, have been heartbreaking for them to hear Canada’s prime minister eviscerate the rules-based order at Davos. Calling it a “fiction” from which “the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient”, Mark Carney admitted that countries like Canada went along with the “pretence” because they prospered from it. With Trump having torn up the rule-book and cancelled the benefits, Carney has concluded that “this bargain no longer works.” He said: “Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition... We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn’t mourn it.”

It would be a mistake, however, to see this rupture purely as a product of Donald Trump’s more brazen approach. He plays the role of bully and provides the colourful rhetoric, but the forces fracturing the alliance are not of his making. We are at a critical moment that has been long in the making, driven by inherent contradictions within NATO and wider global developments.

To understand the contradictions, it is important to appreciate the nature of the beast from the outset. The war-time alliance between the US and Britain, on which NATO is based, was one-sided and contained ingredients that could have caused a rupture at any point since had it not been for the willingness of successive British governments to bow, more often than not, to US hegemony.

When Winston Church and President Roosevelt signed the Atlantic Charter in August, 1941, Japan had not attacked Pearl Harbour and the Soviet Union had only just become a British ally. With Churchill desperate for the US to enter the war, Washington seized the opportunity to secure commitments that would weaken the British Empire to US advantage after the war was over. Churchill had little choice but to accept clauses that implied a commitment to de-colonisation and to dismantling the Britain’s protectionist system of Imperial Preference.

Like the latter day “rules-based order”, the Charter’s fine words about “the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live” were hypocritical. Washington had no intention of giving independence to Puerto Rico – where it was building a huge military base and expropriating land for bombing ranges – nor of forsaking the 19^th century Monroe Doctrine under which it asserted the right to dominate the Western Hemisphere. The signing of the Atlantic Charter was a charade that set the scene for the pantomime that came to be called the ‘special relationship’.

During the Cold War, that relationship continued on the same unequal and uneasy path, with rivalry surfacing from time to time, particularly in the Middle East where the US progressively eased Britain out of its pre-eminent position. In a rare show of independence, Britain declined to send troops to Vietnam, but that was mainly because it was fighting its own colonial wars in Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus and Yemen, culminating in the ignominy of having to evacuate British troops hastily from Aden in 1968 as Yemen’s national liberation front took over.

With the empire contracting, Britain’s relative economic strength within the alliance diminished. When the Atlantic Charter was signed, US gross domestic product had been only three times Britain’s. By 1990, the ratio had grown to five. Now it has risen to more than seven.

After the demise of the Soviet Union, the way was clear for the US to pursue its ambitions more aggressively through a succession of regime change wars. This assertion of military power was, however, deceptive. The wars stretched the resources even of the world’s largest economy, with Afghanistan alone costing the US an estimated $2.3 trillion.

As US debt spiralled, the uneven development of capitalism was by the second decade of the 21^st century producing major threats to its ascendancy. In Europe, rapid growth of Germany’s technologically advanced industries was being fuelled by cheap Russian gas. In Asia, China had overtaken Japan to become the world’s second largest economy.

The German problem has abated with the Ukraine war. The imposition of sanctions against Russia and the sabotage of Nord Stream 2 have conveniently made Germany and the rest of Europe dependent on US supplies of liquefied natural gas.

The China challenge is, however, a much bigger headache and has prompted a major foreign policy rethink in Washington that is now supported by most Republicans. While Trump’s aggressive rhetoric may make this appear to be an assertion of strength, the administration is actually proceeding from the premise that global domination is unrealistic and that the US should not pursue goals that are “peripheral or irrelevant” to its interests.

Embodied in a National Security Strategy published in November, this “flexible realism” prioritises the Western Hemisphere – hence Venezuela and Greenland – while also “preserving freedom of navigation in all crucial sea lanes” and preventing “an adversarial power from dominating the Middle East.” Europe, it says, should “stand on its own feet” because it enjoys “a significant hard power advantage over Russia by almost every measure, save nuclear weapons.”

This is not a strategy for less war but for the wars that the US deems to be more central to its interests in order not to drain resources from reviving its hollowed-out economy for the battle with China. For Britain, it means the so-called special relationship is already as good as dead. For Europe, it similarly means that NATO has been rendered redundant and will have no future at all if the US succeeds in annexing Greenland over Denmark’s objections.

Some in Europe are responding to this by wanting to beef up the EU’s military role and coalitions of the willing for war in Ukraine or other battles. But a NATO B team is not the answer. The creation of another military bloc by what Carney calls the “middle powers” is simply more of the same Western-centric group-think that has brought us too many wars and attendant refugee crises.

Left MP Richard Burgon has made a timely call for the government “to forge an independent foreign policy based on peace, cooperation and international law.” That policy should include Britain engaging as much with the Global South and the BRICS countries as we do with members of NATO. It should seek to strengthen the United Nations and other multi-lateral bodies, supporting them in applying international law consistently, including to Israel. And it should revive the spirit of détente that during the Cold War meant leaders of countries in conflict would talk to each other and prevent tensions from escalating into disastrous conflagrations.

To adapt a well-known phrase, Britain has nothing to lose but its transatlantic chains. We have a more just and peaceful world to win.

Note: My new book, ‘Cold War Puerto Rico: Anti-Communism in Washington’s Caribbean Colony’, will be published by the University of Massachusetts Press on May 1, 2026. The book is already available for pre-order through major retailers such as Barnes & Noble and Waterstones. The recommended retail price for the paperback is $34.95 but UK pre-orders via my website are at the special price of £20 including postage. The publisher is also offering a 20% discount for pre-orders via their website by using the code UMASS20.

The narrative has now been complicated by President Trump’s designs on Greenland but only in creating an argument about who is best placed to counter a supposed Russian threat. In any scenario, the pretext for more arms spending remains the same scare stories.

The UK’s plan to increase our military budget from 2.2% of national income to 3% by 2030 and then to 3.5% by 2035 does not sound that much until you convert it to cash. Each half percent is more than £15 billion. A budget of 3.5% equates to more than £105 billion annually of military spending. And that’s just what they are now calling the ‘core’ budget – a further 1.5% or £45 billion a year is to be spent “to protect our critical infrastructure, defend our networks, ensure our civil preparedness and resilience, unleash innovation, and strengthen our defence industrial base.”

In no other area of government spending would so much cash be doled out with so little debate just on the say-so of those with a vested interest in it. The media constantly reproduces dire warnings from retired generals and politicians - who are often directors of companies in the arms supply chain - as if they are fact and beyond challenge. Comment is practically never sought from organisations or experts with a counter view. And even patently absurd assertions are broadcast or printed without question, presumably because either the journalists are ignorant or they assume we are.

Take a recent claim by the First Sea Lord, General Sir Gwyn Jenkins. He appeared on the BBC’s six o’clock news in December to tell us that “despite the cost of the war in Ukraine” Russia continues “to put hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of investment into their submarine fleet.” Hundreds of billions of dollars? Seriously? Russia’s entire annual defence budget was $149 billion in 2024, and most of that went on prosecuting the war in Ukraine.

Even if Sir Gwyn meant that the spending was over a number of years, it was pretty obvious that he was getting carried away. In fact, he negated his claim by implication when he went on to say that Britain was “still ahead in the Atlantic, but it’s not by as much of an advantage as I would like.” In other words, either Russia is spending its money very badly or the “hundreds of millions” figure was preposterous. And yet it was then reproduced as hot news by almost every British media outlet.

Worryingly, it looks like this kind of spin is only going to get worse. Sir Gwyn has now hired the former the Sunday Times’s deputy political editor, Harry Yorke, to be his ‘naval assistant’. Given that Yorke cut his teeth as a political reporter by producing an endless stream of pieces for the Telegraph smearing Jeremy Corbyn when he was Labour leader, I doubt we can expect an improvement in the accuracy of his boss’s interviews.

This naturally takes us to drones, a subject about which facts are flimsiest and fear-mongering is often fiercest. When a drone incursion forced the temporary closure of Copenhagen airport in September, government ministers in Denmark differed in the degree to which they were prepared to point a finger at Russia. While the prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, said Russian involvement “could not be ruled out”, his defence minister, Troels Lund Poulsen, admitted there was no evidence to suggest Russia was to blame and said the devices had been launched locally.

This uncertainty over the facts did not deter the bellicose British media. From the Sun to the Guardian, the headlines linked the drones to Russia. Editors covered their backs by adding a question mark here or inverted comas there to acknowledge the factual uncertainty, but most readers would not notice such tricks of the trade. Left with little doubt that Russia was to blame, they would be nicely softened up for a European Union proposal that billions should be spent creating a “drone wall” across the continent.

There was, however, one exception to the ‘blame Russia’ consensus. A Dutch daily newspaper, Trouw, joined forces with an online publication called Dronewatch to actually investigate the Copenhagen and other drone sightings. Having identified 61 reports of drones near airports, ports and military sites in 11 countries in the period between September 9 and November 27 last year, they discovered that most of them relied solely on human witnesses and many turned out to be misidentifications. Finding “hard evidence” of a Russia link “scarce,” they said:

“Only three cases involved confirmed Russian drones - all in countries bordering Ukraine: Poland, Romania and Moldova. This means that the often-mentioned link to Russian hybrid warfare in Western Europe is still unsubstantiated.”

So, why the scaremongering? European leaders would surely reveal the evidence if they had it. But I have not found a rebuttal of the Dronewatch report in any media outlet. For this piece, I asked Denmark’s foreign ministry for a comment three days ago, but I still haven’t received a reply.

Given the lack of evidence, we are left to speculate. Is it plausible that President Putin is planning to take on the whole of Europe? Is he really likely to be trying to provoke a confrontation with neighbours while being bogged down in a war of attrition in Ukraine? Does he not know that EU countries and Britain already spend much more between them on arms than Russia and are also economically stronger? It’s possible that we are encountering a huge miscalculation by an irrational Russian leader, but I think other explanations are more likely.

Generally, when what we are being told does not make any sense, I ask myself whose interests are being served. In this case, one answer is obvious and the other is buried in the detail.

First, the obvious answer: arms spending generates mouthwatering returns for the merchants of war. That’s why increases in the share prices of the major arms manufacturers have been vastly outstripping those of other big companies. The index for the top 100 companies listed on the London Stock Exchange has increased by 52% over the last five years ago. A wealthy person who had invested a million pounds in a fund tracking it in January 2021 would therefore have seen its value grow to £1.52million. However, if that person had invested their million in BAE Systems, the shares would now be worth £4.20 million. And if they had invested in Babcock International, the value would be £6.72 million. In other words, shares in the two leading British arms manufacturers have increased respectively by six and nine times as much as those of their big business peers over the last five years.

The alarming thing is that to sustain these valuations, never mind increase them further, these companies have to continue to see high levels of demand for their products. Some of that will come from government plans to spend heavily on military capital – four times as much as they do on education and twice as much as on the NHS (see my post on November 30, 2025). But there comes a point when the only way to maintain demand is by using the products and therefore having to replace them. Politicians talk about higher arms spending being a ‘deterrent’ against war, but that’s of no use to the manufacturers. They need a never-ending flow of profits. Wars are essential to their business model.

Clues to the second set of interests being served can be found in the government’s Strategic Defence Review. When it was published last June, media coverage was limited largely to the rhetoric in it about the scale and imminence of a Russian threat. You might therefore assume that resources would be directed almost exclusively at defending Britain itself. But they aren’t. Great weight is attached to shaping the global security environment, with the Middle East and the Indo-Pacific specified as the priority regions. And to support this, the review boasts that the Ministry of Defence has 8,500 personnel stationed in bases abroad, notably its ‘hubs’ in Cyprus, Gibraltar, Germany, Oman, Kenya and Singapore.

The debate on this goes back a long way. In 1967, Britain was forced to evacuate 3,500 troops from South Yemen having lost control of Aden to the country’s national liberation front. The following year, in what became known as ‘withdrawal from East of Suez’, Harold Wilson announced the scaling back of Britain’s military presence in Singapore and Malaysia. This policy was largely retained until Tony Blair committed British forces to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. As those wars began to abate, David Cameron made the East of Suez deployments permanent again by establishing or expanding Britain’s bases in Bahrain, Oman and the United Arab Emirates.

So, who interests are these costly deployments serving? It does not take a genius to work out that they must have something to do with oil and with helping to prop-up autocracies that have helped keep profits flowing from the region for decades. They are clearly not to meet an imminent Russian threat to Britain itself.

We are being played. Talk of Russian drones entering our airspace and submarines lurking in our waters is unsettling. It’s natural to want to feel secure. But the scare stories don’t stack up, and the reality is that a large proportion of Britain’s military spending goes on operations thousands of miles away. Meanwhile, we are told that there is not enough money to pay doctors properly or to repair our crumbling schools. A proper debate on our priorities is long overdue.

Note: My new book, ‘Cold War Puerto Rico: Anti-Communism in Washington’s Caribbean Colony’, will be published by the University of Massachusetts Press on May 1, 2026. The book is already available for pre-order through major retailers such as Barnes & Noble and Waterstones. The recommended retail price for the paperback is $34.95 but UK pre-orders via my website are at the special price of £20 including postage. The publisher is also offering a 20% discount for pre-orders via their website by using the code UMASS20.

On the strength of this, you might expect elections to be top of the list of US demands now that it has kidnapped President Maduro and is threatening his interim successor, Delcy Rodríguez, with paying, as Trump menacingly put it, “a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro” if she doesn’t toe the line. But an election is not even on the list.

When asked about this on NBC’s Meet The Press on Sunday, Marco Rubio said elections would be “premature” and that the US priority to secure “more compliance and co-operation than we saw under Nicholas Maduro.” The US secretary of state continued:

“What we are focused on, right now, is all of the problems we had when Maduro was there… We’re going to give people an opportunity to address those challenges and those problems. Until they address it, they will continue to face this oil quarantine, they will continue to face pressure from the United States, we will continue to target drug boats…”

On ABC’s This Week, Rubio made clear that the primary US demand was for “changes to the governance in of the oil industry”, that “Western companies – not Russian, not Chinese companies – will be very interested” and that “our refineries on the Gulf coast are the best in terms of refining this heavy crude, and there’s actually a shortage of heavy crude around the world.”

If there were still any doubt US priorities, it was eliminated by Trump when a few hours later he told journalists that the oil companies had been consulted before the attack and that “they want to go in and they’re going to do a great job.” Asked about opposition leaders returning to the country, he added: “We haven’t gotten to that. Right now, what we want to do is fix up the oil.”

This blatant grab for oil is all being done in the name of the Monroe Doctrine, as if using a high-brow title gives it legitimacy. But there has never been anything legally or ethically legitimate about the 5^th US president declaring that “the American continents… are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.” James Monroe’s doctrine was not anti-colonial: it was a declaration of imperial intent that would later that century be the pretext for a war with Spain that led to the colonisation of Puerto Rico and brought Cuba under Washington’s hegemony.

The so-called Trump “corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine is not the first updating of the 1823 policy. In fact, paradoxically, it was in Caracas that one of Rubio’s predecessors as US secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, revamped it for Cold War purposes in 1954. At a conference of the Organization of American States in the Venezuelan capital, he secured support – with only Guatemala voting against and Mexico and Argentina abstaining - for “outlawing foreign ideologies in the American Republics.” On his return to Washington, he told the US National Security Council that this meant “Communist subversion and subsequent control of any of the American Republics” being deemed “external aggression” and that “efforts, therefore, to counter such Communist subversion could not rightfully be described as American intervention.”

The US acted on the new Monroe Doctrine three months later by overthrowing the government of the only country that had voted against it. Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán’s government in Guatemala, which had been in dispute with the US over compensation to the United Fruit Company for property confiscated as part of a land reform programme, was brought down by CIA financed and trained rebels, forcing him into exile in Mexico.

Capitalist property rights – not democracy - are invariably at the heart of such matters. Land was the issue in Guatemala. Oil is blatantly the US motive in Venezuela. This is why giant global corporations need a state they can call their own. It is misleading to describe them as ‘multi-nationals’ or ‘transnationals’ because they are usually attached to a specific coercive apparatus and rely on it to enforce their interests. They may not be averse to hiring mercenaries from time to time, but even the largest of them could not afford to mount an operation like the one that captured Maduro, which we are told involved 150 aircraft launched “from 20 different bases on land and at sea across the Western Hemisphere.”

At same time, a state gives the interests that control it a semblance of legal cover. In the case of Venezuela, when the US seizes oil tankers in open seas, it refers to them as being “sanctioned” and justifies it by saying they have a “court order”. But this means only that a US court has upheld sanctions imposed by the US itself.

The Trump administrations National Security Strategy, published in November, makes clear that Latin American countries generally can expect more of this de facto piracy. In the section on the Western Hemisphere, it warns “we will deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability…to own or control strategically vital assets in our Hemisphere” and says this will require “a readjustment of our global military presence to address urgent threats in our Hemisphere.” After bemoaning how previous administrations had allowed “non-Hemispheric competitors” to make “major inroads” that “disadvantage us economically in the present, and in ways that may harm us strategically in the future”, it adds:

“The United States must be preeminent in the Western Hemisphere as a condition of our security and prosperity… The terms of our alliances, and the terms on which we provide any kind of aid, must be contingent on winding down adversarial outside influence – from control of military installations, ports, and key infrastructure to the purchase of strategic assets broadly defined.”

A foretaste of this came a few weeks into Trump’s presidency when he made an issue of alleged “Chinese control” of the Panama Canal and threatened to take it over. Soon afterwards, the Hong Kong based owner of the two ports at each end of the canal sold them to a group led by US investment firm BlackRock in what was claimed to be a “purely commercial” deal. Venezuela was clearly next on the US list.

It remains to be seen how Rodriguez deals with the extraordinary pressure she and her fellow ministers are under. Trump’s threat of a fate worse than abduction cannot be taken lightly. US forces killed more than forty people, including civilians, in their weekend attack on Caracas. They have also already executed more than 100 people in air strikes on small boats in the Caribbean. Rubio says the US will continue to seize oil tankers carrying Venezuelan oil and that this means the country will run out of storage capacity and will have to stop pumping oil.

In a statement published on Sunday evening, Rodriguez reaffirmed Venezuela’s commitment to peace and peaceful coexistence. She continued:

“Our country aspires to live without external threats, in an environment of respect and international cooperation... We prioritise moving towards balanced and respectful international relations between the United States and Venezuela, and between Venezuela and other countries in the region, premised on sovereign equality and non-interference.”

Inviting the US to collaborate “on an agenda of cooperation oriented towards shared development within the framework of international law”, she pointed out that “peace and dialogue, not war” had also been Maduro’s message.

It is not for leftists in the West to pontificate about what Venezuelans should do or should not do. It is even less appropriate, in the heat of a battle, for us to engage in a blame game about what has happened. US intelligence agencies are experts in dividing and demoralising people by covertly spreading rumours and planting what we would now call ‘fake news’ in the media. In the hours immediately after the US attack, Reuters news agency posted a report saying it had been told by “four sources” that Rodriguez was in Moscow, prompting suggestions that she had fled. When that was shown to be untrue, claims surfaced about her having had dealings with the Americans behind Maduro’s back.

One progressive journalist covering the situation was right to express frustration at “betrayal and blame speculation” that diverts energy from “condemnation and action against the original U.S. terror.” She added: “Fixating over what cannot be verified, rather than what is and that which can be verified, is part of the enemy’s information operation. We’ve lived this playbook repeatedly. US terror is verifiable and requires a response.”

She’s right: it does. And our response has to be to expose and mobilise the maximum opposition to Trump’s oil grab and to demand the immediate release of Venezuela’s kidnapped president.

Note: My new book, ‘Cold War Puerto Rico: Anti-Communism in Washington’s Caribbean Colony’, will be published by the University of Massachusetts Press on May 1, 2026. The book is already available for pre-order through major retailers such as Barnes & Noble and Waterstones. The recommended retail price for the paperback is $34.95 but UK pre-orders via my website are at the special price of £20 including postage. The publisher is also offering a 20% discount for pre-orders via their website by using the code UMASS20.

Trump’s remarks are in stark contrast to the pretexts used for the invasion of Iraq, when US leaders strongly denied oil was a factor. The situation also differs in that US polls show 70% of US voters oppose war with Venezuela as do most Democrat and even some Republican politicians. Joaquin Castro, a Democrat and a leader of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, described the naval blockade of Venezuela’s oil tankers as “unquestionably an act of war that the American people do not want.” Thomas Massie, a Republican, said: “When Trump says Venezuela stole oil from the United States, he’s talking about projects by oil companies that were nationalized by the government of Venezuela two decades ago. No one campaigned on using our soldiers to overthrow Venezuela to make these oil companies whole again.” A move to force the White House to gain Congressional approval for military action was defeated on Wednesday, but the margin of only two votes is a far cry from the bipartisan backing for previous wars.

One of the launchpads for Trump’s brazen grab for oil, Puerto Rico, is itself a case study of colonial daylight robbery. Conquered by the US in 1898, it was an early victim of a doctrine - named after Jame Monroe, the fifth US president - that asserted US hegemony over the entire American continent. For 127 years since, the Caribbean island has been exploited as a source of cheap sugar, a highly profitable tax haven for US corporations, and a base and testing ground for multiple wars. Now, Trump has deployed F35 bombers there that can strike deep inside Venezuela. In an Op-Ed for Tribune magazine reproduced below, I looked at how Puerto Rico illustrates the miserable fate that awaits Venezuela if the US succeeds in installing a subservient regime.

Puerto Rico: a grim Monroe Doctrine case study

Like a name dropper at a party, Donald Trump likes to associate himself with famous forerunners. In his inaugural address in January, it was the 25th US president, William McKinley. Earlier this month, he issued what he called the ‘Trump corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine on the 202nd anniversary of the fifth president asserting US continental hegemony. Quoting James Monroe’s message to Congress that ‘the American continents… are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers,’ Trump said: ‘With those mighty words, every nation knew that the United States of America was emerging as a superpower unlike anything the world had ever known.’ The Monroe Doctrine, he continued, is being ‘reinvigorated by my Trump Corollary’ and US leadership in the Western Hemisphere is ‘coming roaring back stronger than ever before.’

Roaring is the word. In Puerto Rico, the sound of F-35s landing at the Roosevelt Roads airbase is the fearsome manifestation of Trump’s words. In September, in the early build up for a possible attack on Venezuela, the Pentagon deployed the B version of the jet to the base. Last week, it reinforced them with F-35As, which have a longer range and can drop 2,000-pound bombs on their targets rather than the measly 1,000-pounds carried by the Bs. Given there are no F-35s aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford, the huge aircraft carrier Trump has sent to the Caribbean, the deployment to Puerto Rico underlines the island’s role as a staging post for a possible attack on Venezuela.

Still poverty-stricken and powerless, Puerto Rico is a tragic case study of the reality of the Monroe Doctrine. When Monroe issued his edict in 1823, the US lacked the naval capacity to enforce it. By the time McKinley became president in 1897, the US was ready to take on Spain and did so the following year with clinical efficiency in a war that lasted only sixteen weeks and included invading Puerto Rico. Under the subsequent peace deal with Spain, the Treaty of Paris, the US kept the island, ousted Spain from Cuba and also gained Guam and the Philippines.

Washington was clear from the outset that Puerto Rico would not be treated in the same way as the land it had conquered through Westward expansion. A Supreme Court ruling designated the island an ‘unincorporated territory’ and used the term ‘foreign in a domestic sense’ to describe how it would belong to the US without being part of it. Puerto Ricans did not gain US citizenship until 1917 when it conveniently boosted First World War conscription.

By the time of the Second World War, Puerto Rico had become a vital source of personnel. With some 65,000 of them having served, many Puerto Ricans saw it as payback time. The signing of the Atlantic Charter by the US and Britain in 1941 had given hope that independence was on the horizon. It declared that the two countries would ‘respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live’ and that they wished ‘to see sovereign rights and self- government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them.’

As with the Monroe Doctrine, however, US anti-colonialism was a one-way street: it saw the Atlantic Charter as being aimed at the empires of the European powers, not its own colonies. Even Rexford Tugwell, a liberal who President Roosevelt had appointed Puerto Rico’s governor, urged Puerto Ricans not to demand something the US would not give them. In his annual address in February 1944, he warned that Washington could penalise Puerto Rico financially if it broke away and said that ‘fairness’ requires the US Congress to offer in a plebiscite only ‘the choices it is willing to accept’.

Puerto Rico’s military value to the United States had by this time gone far beyond the supply of conscripts. Thousands of families had been cleared from the islands of Culebra and Vieques to make way for bombing ranges and Roosevelt Roads had been built as an airbase and to provide anchorage for the US Navy’s South Atlantic Force.

The pro-independence parties were divided, but Washington had an ally in Puerto Rico’s pre-eminent politician, Luis Muñoz Marín. When Puerto Ricans were allowed to elect their own governor in 1948, Munoz Marin won with a promise to secure a ‘free association’ with the US that was presented as the best of both worlds: self-government with the supposed economic benefits of the colonial link.

This ‘free association’ came, however, with the double standards that would epitomise the post-war ‘rules-based’ order. In negotiations on the new arrangement in 1950, the US refused to allow international observers to monitor a plebiscite that was due to be held to accept or reject it. Seeing the direction of travel, nationalists mounted a revolt, but it was swiftly defeated by the FBI and the US military. Afterwards, thanking Muñoz Marín for his co-operation, the FBI assured him that ‘due to the strategic importance of Puerto Rico…it was recognized in Washington that needs for personnel in Puerto Rico should be given priority attention’.

Initially, the US left it to Muñoz Marín to suppress anti-colonial opposition using legislation known as ‘the gag law’. As the Cold War proceeded, however, he became increasingly reliant on the FBI deploying the repressive tools devised for the red scare in the US itself. Communists were indicted and imprisoned, HUAC held hearings in San Juan, and COINTELPRO — the FBI’s covert programme for disrupting and dividing progressive organisations — was rolled out to ensure that plebiscites held in the 1960s delivered the desired results.

At the same time, the economic benefits were short-lived. The model implemented by Muñoz Marín was a prototype for what we would now call neo-liberalism. New Deal public investments were privatised, and growth relied on attracting inward investment by offering US corporations tax incentives and cheap labour.

Operation Bootstrap, as it was called, increased US domination and the flow of profits, interest, and dividends out of the island. Since the 1980s, around a third of Puerto Rico’s gross national product has gone to non-residents every year. In cash terms, the surplus leaving the country in 2024 was £40.2 billion — enough in one year to halve the debt that triggered a default in 2015 and the imposition of direct control over Puerto Rico’s finances by a US-appointed board. Meanwhile, more than twice as many Puerto Ricans (39.6 percent) live in poverty as in the US’s poorest state, Louisiana (18.9 percent).

The sorry saga of Puerto Rico’s ‘free association’ with the US provides a small foretaste of the bigger disaster that awaits Venezuela if Trump succeeds in overthrowing President Maduro. His favoured replacement, Maria Corina Machado, plans to privatise the country’s assets in a $1.7 trillion sale that would be the ‘single biggest economic opportunity for decades to come in this region.’

No doubt some Venezuelans, weary of nearly a decade of US sanctions that have driven oil production down by 75 percent, find Machado’s sale of the century appealing. As in Puerto Rico, however, any short-term benefits will soon be wiped out as US corporations extract a return on their investment and a new regime, imposed by force, will show its true anti-democratic colours. It’s just another Monroe Doctrine scam — and the world must stand with those resisting it.

Cold War Puerto Rico: Anti-Communism in Washington’s Caribbean Colony

University of Massachusetts Press

The publisher is offering a 40% discount on pre-orders of my new book until January 4. Due out in the spring, ‘Cold War Puerto Rico’ tells the story of how Washington used the tools of ‘McCarthyism’ to keep its Caribbean fortress as a colony. Published by the University of Massachusetts Press, the recommended retail price for the paperback is $34.95 but you can get the 40% discount (reducing the price to $20.97) by ordering it through their website using the code ‘holiday’. This will work well for people in the US and Puerto Rico. For UK pre-orders, I am selling the book via my website at the special price of £20 including postage.

They were nearly unanimous in playing the divide and rule card. “Spiteful raids on strivers to lavish billions on Benefit Street,” screamed the Daily Mail. “The Benefits Street Budget - Families will foot handout bill for skivers,” echoed The Sun. “High welfare, high tax,” was the more sedate variation on the same theme from The Times.

Few of them even bothered to mention that the annual cost of abolishing the cap – and lifting more than 600,000 children out of poverty – will be a relatively paltry £2.3 billion in 2026-27. Of total annual tax revenue in 2026-27, it is less than a fifth of one per cent (0.176%).

It’s true that, in extending the freeze on tax thresholds by three years to 2030-31, Reeves has hit workers and pensioners hard, but scrapping the two-child cap is far from being the reason for that. In fact, she could have lifted the cap and not penalised “strivers” at all because the welcome increases in taxes on landlords and betting more than cover it.

So why has she extended the freeze on tax thresholds? At the lower end of the scale, millions more people will pay tax. Meanwhile, better paid workers who get an increase that takes them over the £50,000 mark will see their earnings above that level taxed at 40%. It is hardly a vote winner, but it is what you have to do if you are creating a war economy.

Reeves glossed over the subject. In a 7,000-word speech lasting over an hour, she devoted just two sentences to military spending. And yet the real story – and the main reason for the tax increases on working people – is that this was a war budget.

Is that an exaggeration? Let’s look at the facts. According to the House of Commons Library, military spending peaked in the mid-1980s at the height of the Cold War, then declined in the 1990s before rising sharply under Tony Blair because of the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. With those wars abating, it declined briefly and then increased again until it returned to Cold War peak levels in real terms in 2023-24.

With military spending having increased further in 2024-25 and 2025-26, Reeves’s starting point last week was already higher than at the height of NATO’s confrontation with the Soviet Union. Now, she plans to go much further.

The 152-page document accompanying the Budget shows military spending rising 8.43% to £90 billion in 2026-27, compared to a 6.14% increase for health and the allocation for education shrinking by 0.68%. The 2026-27 arms budget includes £25.9 billion of capital spending, which is a rising proportion of the overall cost. Cumulatively over the six years from 2024-25 to 2029-30 (see table below), capital spending on arms - £166.4 billion - will be nearly quadruple the amount spent on education (£43.8 billion) and double the spending on the NHS and social care (£82.9 billion).

And these figures do not include military support to Ukraine, which comes out of the Treasury Reserve. To date, the UK has already given Ukraine £10.8 billion and Keir Starmer has committed us to continue paying £3 billion a year every year until 2030-31 or “for as long as it is needed.”

None of this is ever properly debated. None of it made the front pages the day after the Budget. British politics suffers from not having a single major political party that will challenge the line that we are not spending enough on ‘defence’, which is being fed to us via the media by ‘intelligence sources’, retired generals and assorted arms lobbyists presented as ‘independent experts’.

It’s never enough for them. And, to justify it, they manufacture scare stories that most people do not have the time to deconstruct. Take the recent one about a “Russian spy ship” being inside “British waters”. The media gave it wall-to-wall coverage. The Guardian’s headline said “Russian spy ship enters British waters” and its report claimed that this was “part of a pattern of Russian incursions into Nato-controlled territory.” The story was based on what was billed brazenly as “a pre-budget speech” by John Healey, the defense secretary, who claimed that it “vindicated the government’s increase in defence spending.”

But did it? Healey chose his words cunningly. He said the ship was “on the edge of UK waters…having entered the UK’s wider waters over the last few weeks.” The distinction is critical. As former diplomat Craig Murray explained in a blog, a country’s ‘wider waters’ extend 200 miles from its coast and are known as its Exclusive Economic Zone because they entitle it to the fisheries and mineral resources in those seas. However, they are not the same as a country’s territorial waters, which extend just twelve miles from its coast and are subject to its laws.

Pointing out that a country’s Exclusive Economic Zone is deemed part of the high seas, Murray said: “There is freedom of navigation on the high seas. Foreign ships, including foreign military ships, may come and go as they please. Nor is there any ban on ‘spying’ – exactly as there is no restriction on spying from satellites.”

British vessels often enter the Exclusive Economic Zones of other states, as Healey well knows. Only two months ago, a Royal Navy frigate, HMS Richmond, accompanied a US guided missile destroyer, USS Higgins, through the straits between China and Taiwan, which are only 81 miles wide at their narrowest point. The operation drew protests from China, but a Pentagon statement said the vessels were beyond China’s territorial waters and that the operation “demonstrates the United States’ commitment to upholding freedom of navigation.”

HMS Richmond is patrolling the Far East as part of a Royal Navy ‘strike group’ led by the aircraft carrier HMS Prince of Wales. You may wonder what that has got to do with Britain’s defence and why we are spending money on it while cutting spending on education. If you do, you will sadly find that only a handful of our MPs are willing to question the costly and dangerous war games of our political leaders.

Long ago, it was possible for Britain to ‘rule the waves’ while boasting of creating a welfare state at home. Today, with the super-profits of imperialism much diminished, our rulers can no longer afford both. They have stigmatised the word ‘welfare’ while preparing us for warfare. The Budget underlines the fact that we face a choice: either we can have social democracy or we can have war - but we can’t have both.

Afterword: Fibs and fairy tales

General Franco was “a pariah on the world stage,” the Times told us (November 17, 2025) in an editorial to mark the 50^th anniversary of the death of Spain’s notorious dictator. But was he?

Backed militarily by Hitler and Mussolini, General Franco came to power in the 1930s by overthrowing the Spain’s democratically-elected government in a bloody civil war in which around half a million people were killed. He continued to rule Spain with an iron fist up to his death in 1975.

During that period, Spain was not a member of NATO. But that was for cosmetic reasons. In 1953, the United States and Spain signed the Pact of Madrid. This gave the US five bases in Spain in return for economic and military aid to the Franco regime. Far from being a pariah, General Franco even hosted a state visit by US president Dwight Eisenhower in 1959.

Fibs and Fairy Tales will be an occasional afterword on my posts. Feel free to make suggestions - due credit will be given.

Cold War Puerto Rico

The publisher is offering a 40% discount on pre-orders of my new book until January 4. Due out in the spring, ‘Cold War Puerto Rico’ tells the story of how Washington used the tools of ‘McCarthyism’ to keep its Caribbean fortress as a colony. Published by the University of Massachusetts Press, the recommended retail price for the paperback is $34.95 but you can get the 40% discount (reducing the price to $20.97) by ordering it through their website using the code ‘holiday’. This will work well for people in the US and Puerto Rico. For UK pre-orders, I am selling the book via my website at the special price of £20 including postage.

This was awkward for the British media. For weeks, they had been pumping out headlines on what they called the China spy scandal – the collapse of the prosecution two men accused of passing information to China. There were virtually no dissenters to the view that the charges being dropped was bad news. The only issue for the media was who to blame for the failure to convict the two defendants, as if the small matter of their actual guilt was not in doubt.

For the prosecution to go ahead, Britain had to have deemed China to be an enemy to which passing information would be a breach of the Official Secrets Act. The conservatives accused the government of deliberately withholding from the Crown Prosecution Service the evidence of enemy status needed for a conviction. The government countered that the conservatives had not classified China as an enemy when they were in power.

From my survey of the media, Keir Starmer came off worst. Fairly typical headlines were the Times’s “China spy fiasco reveals cowardice at No 10” and the Telegraph’s “Starmer’s abject China cowardice threatens the West’s very future.” For the Daily Mail, columnist Dan Hodges asked: “How could Keir Starmer get away with lying about China when Boris Johnson was hauled over the coals for a piece of cake?”

Amid these accusations of lying and cowardice, there was at least a little levity from one journalist. Tom Peck, the political sketch writer for the Times, took us back to 2015 when China was seen as Britain’s economic saviour and David Cameron took President Xi for a pint at a pub near Chequers. “The whole point of that exercise,” Peck wrote, “was to prove that China definitely wasn’t a threat, but the chairman never actually got his round in, did he, so the clues were there.”

That pub visit came at a time when the West generally was eager to get a slice of the surplus capital China had been accumulating since being admitted to the World Trade Organization in 2000. Not long afterwards, however, the political climate in the US shifted markedly. In the build up to the US elections of 2016, both Bernie Sanders and Trump – from very different perspectives – made cheap imports from China an issue and blamed them for the de-industrialisation of the Midwest ‘rust belt’ states. On being elected, Trump introduced the first wave of tariffs on China, marking the start of a new Washington consensus that President Biden not only continued but escalated.

True to form, Britain fell into line. Xi was not invited again. The friendly images in the media were replaced by scaremongering over China attacking our infrastructure and stealing our technology (as if they needed to). Voices in the media and business favouring trade were drowned out or denounced as Beijing apologists and useful idiots.

Amid the furore over the China ‘spy’ case, our commentariat appears not to have noticed the emerging change of policy in Washington. To be fair, Trump’s rhetoric is sometimes difficult to read. So, it’s perhaps understandable that journalists peddling an anti-China line have been wrong-footed. The Telegraph’s Sherelle Jacobs was certainly caught out badly, having written shortly before the summit that the government’s “refusal to break with China has explosive geopolitical implications.” She thought that Britain’s “inaction over China” could send Trump “over the edge” and claimed that “if anything ends up destroying the Special Relationship it will be our gutless cosying up to Beijing.” She must have been mortified when Trump described his meeting with Xi as “the G2 summit”, relegating the G7 – of which Britain is a member – to second class status.

Britain’s most strident China hawk, Iain Duncan-Smith, seems – for now - to have gone to ground. On Thursday, as news was breaking of the Trump-Xi summit success, the former Tory leader was still attacking Starmer for refusing to define China as a “systemic threat” and speaking darkly of “an axis of totalitarian states” with China “at the heart.”

Duncan-Smith’s hope had been that Trump would set aside his ‘America first’ pragmatism and join the crusade to confront China. In an interview with Sky during the US president’s state visit to Britain in September, he said that if the countries that believe in “freedom, democracy and the rule of law” don’t unite “the totalitarian states… will dominate the world and it will be a terrible world to live in.”

This is rich, even by Duncan-Smith’s standards. He apparently thinks that the rule of law means people are guilty of spying until proven innocent, even if – judging by the leaks – the evidence amounts to no more than allegations of passing on Westminster gossip for no remuneration. And, given his strident support for Israel, he probably does not care that the world is already terrible to live in for those Gazans who have managed to survive two years of genocidal slaughter by a country that, in his world, is one of the good guys.

Duncan-Smith is a leading light in the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, which was set up in 2000 to “confront” the rise of China and promote the interests of Taiwan. No doubt he was pleased that, while Trump was in China, Taiwan’s president was hosting a delegation from AIPAC, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee. In a post on X, Lai Ching-te said he looked forward closer Taiwan-US-Israel cooperation to “deepen strategic partnerships, invest in advanced technology and enhance our defense capabilities.” That does not sound to me like an axis that would promote democracy and the rule of law.

It remains to be seen what Trump’s China game plan is. The trade agreement arising from his summit with Xi has yet to be finalised. There is talk of Xi visiting Washington. Whatever happens, a couple of things are clear. Firstly, Britain’s long-standing policy – whoever occupies Downing Street - of hanging on to America’s coat-tails is a recipe for being badly bruised when there is a sudden change of direction. Secondly, if the US has had to treat China with respect, it is absurd for Britain to act as if it is ready to send gun-boats up the Yangtze again.

Britain needs trading partners. You do not have to be a fan of the USA’s billionaire-dominated politics or its endless wars to recognise that Britain should trade with the world’s largest economy. Equally, you do not have to be a fan of China’s one-party system or its friendly relations with Russia to believe that it is important to engage constructively with the world’s second largest economy. Trade is not only essential for the growth and jobs, it can also foster greater understanding between nations. The danger with trade wars is that they can lead to deadly ones.

Note: My new book, ‘Cold War Puerto Rico: Anti-Communism in Washington’s Caribbean Colony’, will be published by the University of Massachusetts Press on May 1, 2026. The book is already available for pre-order through major retailers such as Barnes & Noble and Waterstones. The recommended retail price for the paperback is $34.95 but UK pre-orders via my website are at the special price of £20 including postage. The publisher is also offering a 20% discount for pre-orders via their website by using the code UMASS20.

It would take the incumbent prime minister, Theresa May, nearly a month to complete a shabby deal with Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party that allowed her to cling to power. Had Labour added a further seven seats to its net gain of thirty, the ten DUP MPs could not have saved May, and Corbyn – as leader of the next largest party with 262 seats - would have been entitled by precedent to attempt to form a government.

That prospect was an anathema not only to Labour’s normal political enemies but also to Corbyn’s opponents within the party, many of whom still controlled the its bureaucracy and bank accounts. The team running the election campaign – including myself – were only too aware of this; the Labour right had been attempting to undermine Corbyn since he was first elected leader in 2015. Even during the campaign itself, we had continually faced obstruction internally as well as leaks and smears that could only have come from insiders.

This created an atmosphere of suspicion. We didn’t know what else we didn’t know. Though some of the sabotage was obvious, we did not know, for instance, that in Ergon House, a building not very far away, the Labour bureaucracy had been running a secret, parallel campaign to support candidates hostile to Corbyn premised on their belief that Labour would lose badly, Corbyn would be forced to resign, and their chosen politicians would become the new leadership.

Thanks to Paul Holden’s meticulous journalism, we now know more about the misuse of funds during the 2017 campaign as well as subsequent conspiracies by Labour insiders aimed at bringing Corbyn down. The Fraud is a hefty 544-page book, supported by a website with nearly 800 additional notes and documents. It tells the story of this sorry saga from that general election to the present day. Some of its findings add to what has already emerged through leaks, court cases and an internal inquiry chaired by a prominent lawyer, Martin Forde, who refused to be part of a cover-up. Much of it is completely new and is so shocking that the principal architect of the post-2017 subterfuge, Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, is now coming under pressure to resign.

The Forde Inquiry confirmed leaked evidence that the Ergon House parallel campaign existed, but its condemnation of it was confined to saying it was “a breach of an implied duty of good faith.” This is putting it mildly, considering that the money secretly siphoned off had been donated in response to appeals signed personally by Corbyn and that the party constitution is clear that “all Party election campaigns report to the leader.”

Holden has now discovered that party funds were used clandestinely on a much larger scale than Forde had established. Over and above the Ergon House staffing and spending, he says that “a select group of seventeen MPs were allocated extra funds for a mailer….and for spending on Promote, the party’s system for buying social media advertising” and that this privileged group included Sir Keir Starmer.

The official campaign, meanwhile, was starved of funds. As Holden notes, I was told late in the campaign that only £50,000 was available for Get Out The Vote publicity in Conservative-held seats we considered winnable. This limited me to targeting only twelve. Had some of the misused money been spent to fund publicity for more target seats, it would have made a difference and possibly even allowed us to win enough of them to stop May’s DUP deal - given the average deficit in the seven next most winnable ones was just 451 votes.

While the impact of this subterfuge on the course of history is open to debate, there are questions about its legality that could be answered through a proper investigation. Under UK election rules, a distinction is made between national and local campaign spending, with the latter being subject to low limits that, in 2017, were in the range of £12,000 to £16,000 per constituency. Campaign material that promotes a particular candidate comes under the local limit.

Holden says that he has been able to identify six of the constituencies that “definitely received money from Ergon House” and that this was declared as national spending. If this money was spent on publicity that named the candidate, it should have been declared in the local return. Holden has established that the company Ergon House used to print flyers for these constituencies still holds the proofs for them but the Labour party, which owns the copyright, has not responded to repeated requests to release them.

This lack of openness makes a mockery of Starmer’s pledge, on being elected prime minister, to restore trust in politics. It is bad enough that money donated by supporters of the official Corbyn-led campaign was secretly misused, but the party’s failure to be open about exactly how it was spent and declared to the Electoral Commission shows a complete disregard for financial propriety.

Corbyn’s relative success in 2017 left the saboteurs in disarray and allowed him a brief period of respite from overt internal opposition. Behind the scenes, however, a new plot was being hatched by McSweeney. Though hardly known outside London Labour circles in 2017, McSweeney was, as Holden puts it, “a long-time protégé of Peter Mandelson,” having worked for the now-discredited former British ambassador to Washington on Labour’s 2001 election campaign.

McSweeney instantly saw in the 2017 result what he perceived as a threat: the possibility that Labour under Corbyn could win a general election that might come at any time given the instability inherent in a hung Parliament. Moving fast, he joined forces with Steve Reed, an MP with whom he had worked previously, to reshape a small, seemingly benign, group called Labour Together into a vehicle to bring Corbyn down.

Publicly, Labour Together would continue to portray itself as a force for dialogue across the party’s factions. McSweeney even gave a presentation to Corbyn along those lines. Behind the scenes, having raised money from a handful of wealthy donors, Labour Together employed McSweeney and two staff and set about trying to ensure that Labour would not win the next election under Corbyn and preparing for a leadership contest when he was forced to resign.

Labour Together’s primary tactic for undermining Corbyn was to exploit the issue of anti-Semitism. Holden says that it was directly involved in creating two organizations - the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) and Stop Funding Fake News – which planted allegations of antisemitism against Corbyn supporters in the media. As well as being the company secretary of Labour Together from July 10, 2017 to April 4, 2020, McSweeney was a CCDH director from October 19, 2018 to April 6, 2020. He resigned both positions immediately after Starmer was elected Labour leader and he became his chief of staff.

While this underhand activity is unsavory, it is not unlawful. However, McSweeney does have some explaining to do about how it was all funded and whether or not he withheld donor information from the Electoral Commission knowing that he should report it. The rules on this are clear in that Labour Together is defined as a ‘member’s association’ within the Labour party and therefore required to report donations it receives or makes above £7,500 within 30 days.

Holden has established through an FOI disclosure that an Electoral Commission official told McSweeney this during a telephone conversation on December 6, 2017. However, he did not report donations made between June 2017 and September 2020 worth £739,492, and it was left to his successor, Hannah O’Rourke, to declare them, prompting the Electoral Commission to fine Labour Together £14,250.

It is not in doubt therefore that Starmer’s chief of staff broke electoral law, but why? One explanation – arguably the most likely one – is that the rich donors who gave the money were known to be on the right of the party and revealing their names would have blown a hole in Labour Together’s cover story that it was not anti-Corbyn. This would in turn have tainted Starmer once he was associated with McSweeney.

The link between Labour Together and Starmer was, according to Holden, forged in the summer of 2019 when McSweeney joined private discussions on his possible post-Corbyn leadership bid. By that time, Corbyn’s support base had split over whether to stick to the 2017 policy of accepting the result of the Brexit referendum or to attempt to reverse it through a second vote. When Labour opted for the latter, Boris Johnson - who had taken over from Theresa May as prime minister - shrewdly called a general election knowing that roughly a third of Labour voters favored leaving the EU.

A crushing defeat was inevitable. When it came on December 12, 2019, Corbyn resigned and Starmer was first to declare his candidacy to take over, with McSweeney running his campaign. The strategy was simple: Starmer disingenuously presented himself as the continuity candidate and a loyal friend of Corbyn. His policy pledges were almost identical to those made by Rebecca Long-Bailey, the Corbynite candidate. He was deceiving Labour members but was able to get away with it because he had only become an MP in 2015 and did not have the baggage of a long voting record or of being in government in the Blair era.

Today, no one has any illusions. During the years since he was elected Labour leader, and particularly his 15 months as prime minister, Starmer has revealed himself to be cut in the mold of Blair rather than Corbyn. But Labour is paying for his political deceit with a collapse in support. McSweeney, meanwhile, is facing questions to about his own integrity and fitness to be in such a powerful Downing Street role.

For anyone who hoped in the years after 2015 that a genuine socialist could become Britain’s prime minister and reverse decades of neoliberalism, The Fraud is a painful read. The problem for the Starmer-McSweeney project is that, having achieved its initial goal, it has now been shown to be an empty vessel with nothing to offer – to use Corbyn’s 2017 campaign slogan – the many not the few. The issues and ideas that gave rise to ‘Corbynism’ have not gone away. Those of us who want to see radical change, though somewhat dispersed in where we are putting our political energy, have not gone away either. Holden’s book will, over time, serve us well by increasing understanding of the lengths to which our enemies will go to thwart change and the tactics they are prepared to use.

Review of The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney, and the Crisis of British Democracy by Paul Holden, OR Books.

Note: My new book, ‘Cold War Puerto Rico: Anti-Communism in Washington’s Caribbean Colony’, will be published by the University of Massachusetts Press on May 1, 2026. The book is already available for pre-order through major retailers such as Barnes & Noble and Waterstones. The recommended retail price for the paperback is $34.95 but UK pre-orders via my website are at the special price of £20 including postage. The publisher is also offering a 20% discount for pre-orders via their website by using the code UMASS20.

You will probably recall that the Western media blamed Russia for sabotaging an asset that was 51 percent owned by Gazprom, one of its own companies. Almost unanimously, they peddled the line that this act of self harm was really a clever ruse by Vladimir Putin to punish the West. CNN claimed the sabotage had “raised suspicions” that he was “moving up to the next notch on his escalatory scale to hike pain on his foes.” It said: “If confirmed, Russian attacks on external pipelines would deepen fears that Putin is ready to widen operations outside Ukraine at a time when he is also seeking to scare Western publics with his nuclear rhetoric.”

The three countries closest to the pipeline attack - Germany, Sweden and Denmark – opened investigations into who did it, but the Scandinavian states gave up in February 2024 without identifying any suspects. Germany, meanwhile, persisted – possibly because two of its energy companies, Wintershall Dea and E.ON, each had a 15.5 percent stake in the pipeline – and issued an arrest warrant in August for a Ukrainian diver living in Poland, Volodymyr Zhuravlyov.

Last Friday, however, a Polish judge ruled against the extradition of Zhuravlyov to its neighbouring NATO ally on the grounds that if Ukraine had destroyed “enemy pipelines” their actions were “justified, rational and just.” Backing the judge, Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, said “the case is closed.” His foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski, argued that Ukraine had “legitimately” sabotaged the pipelines to strike back at “the aggressor’s ability to finance the war.”

Poland’s position is factually flawed because, although the pipelines were still pressurised at the time of the attack, no gas was actually being delivered via either of them, and there was no prospect of Germany allowing them to operate in defiance of Western sanctions on Russia. The sabotage therefore had no bearing on Russia’s ability to finance the war.

It was, however, highly convenient for the United States, which had long opposed the project and had much to gain from it being sabotaged. According to veteran journalist Seymour Hersch, the White House had set up a task force three months before the Russian invasion of Ukraine “to come up with a plan for the destruction of the two Nord Stream pipelines.” Thanks to Poland, we are unlikely to find out any time soon if the hand of Washington was behind the Ukrainian diver who will not now face prosecution.

What we do know for sure is that the US has profited massively from the sabotage: Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) as a proportion of European gas consumption has doubled to 37 per cent since 2021, and US fossil fuel companies have more than doubled their share of Europe’s LNG market to 45 per cent.

In a nutshell, this is a saga of a would-be NATO member (Ukraine) apparently blowing up oil infrastructure belonging partly to a NATO member (Germany) and a fellow NATO member (Poland) blocking the prosecution of a suspected perpetrator while another NATO member (the United States) enjoys the very lucrative spoils of the sabotage. Péter Szijjártó, the foreign secretary of Hungary, also a NATO member, said Poland had “not only released but is celebrating a terrorist” and had sent a message that “if you don’t like an infrastructure in Europe, you can blow it up.”

Two years ago, the German newspaper, Der Spiegel warned that there was a lot at stake in the investigation of who was responsible for sabotaging the Nord Stream pipelines. It said:

“If it was a Russian commando, would it be considered an act of war? According to Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, an attack on the critical infrastructure of a NATO member state can trigger the mutual defense clause. If it was Ukraine, would that put an end to Germany’s ongoing support for the country with tank deliveries or potentially even fighter jets? And what about the Americans? If Washington provided assistance for the attack, might that spell the end of the 75-year trans-Atlantic partnership?”

‘Partnership’ has always been a misleading word in this context. The US might not have orchestrated the sabotage of the pipelines but it certainly served its interests to make Germany - its leading European competitor - dependent on US gas. President Trump is different from his predecessors only in being more brazen about ‘putting American first’ and not exempting ‘allies’ from the consequences.

Meanwhile, it remains to be seen what impact the latest developments will have on Germany’s relations with Poland and Ukraine. So far, Germany’s leader, Friedrich Merz, has not commented on Poland’s stance, prompting the former Bundestag member, Sahra Wagenknecht, to ask: “How can Chancellor Merz remain silent about this when the head of government of our neighbouring country approves the release of a suspected participant in the state-terrorist explosion of our energy infrastructure?”

So, what are the implications of this for our own security? NATO’s mutual defence clause, Article 5, is supposed to provide us with assurance that NATO allies will come to our aid if attacked. But it is deliberately ambiguous. While it says that “an armed attack against one or more of them… shall be considered an attack against them all”, it requires each NATO member only to take “such action as it deems necessary” to assist the country triggering the clause.

In reality, Article 5 is the worst of all worlds. It could have been invoked in 2022 by Germany on the strength of the false claim that Russia was responsible for sabotaging its pipelines and thus dragged NATO directly into war with a nuclear adversary. In a different scenario, if Britain itself faced a real threat and had good reason to trigger Article 5, it provides no guarantee that the US and other leading members of NATO would come to our aid.

Keir Starmer says that his commitment NATO is “unshakeable.” Judging by the sabotage of Nord Stream and Poland’s celebration of it, the alliance itself looks dangerously shaky and unable to fulfill its claimed role. Basing our security on this flawed arrangement is madness.

As outlined in my last Substack, there is a compelling case for leaving NATO simply because of its track record of disastrous regime-change wars that have killed tens of thousands of civilians and created a global refugee crisis. Over and above that, however, NATO isn’t even working on its own terms. The protective umbrella that it is supposed to provide is actually full of leaks – and the sooner we admit it, the sooner we can start building the international political infrastructure needed to prevent war. This happened in the 1970s when the Cold War gave way to a period of détente and the creation of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. A British government with a pro-peace, independent foreign policy could play a leading role in making it happen again.

Note: My next book, ‘Cold War Puerto Rico: Anti-Communism in Washington’s Caribbean Colony’, will be published by the University of Massachusetts Press on May 1, 2026. The book is already available for pre-order through major retailers such as Barnes & Noble and Waterstones. The recommended retail price for the paperback is $34.95 but UK pre-orders via my website are at the special price of £20 including postage. The publisher is also offering a 20% discount for pre-orders via their website by using the code UMASS20.