This article is reproduced from Counter-Prop with thanks.
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The death and destruction in Ukraine, the result of the proxy war against Russia by the western imperialist bloc under the command of its US master exposes once again the warmongering imperialist nature of the British Labour party.
Recent articles by Labour leaders unmask the craven nature of Labour’s ideological allegiance to empire and its desire for the destruction of governments and populations who defy it. Once again, we see it salivating: this time for Russian blood.
At its core, the Labour party is a party of treason against the class which it claims to represent. Bullets, bombs, missiles and drones that have torn flesh from the bodies of workers and their families across the globe have received the stamp of approval from the party of the British labour movement. Whether through complicity or direct leadership in the mass murders in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen, or its support for the starvation caused by sanctions against numerous countries including Iraq and Venezuela, the Labour party has the blood of generations of workers on its hands.
Labour fully supports the sacrifice of Ukrainians for the purpose of the western bloc’s goal: the destruction of Russia.
Shadow defence secretary John Healey, who has a long record of voting for war, recently celebrated in the House of Commons the pointless death of Ukrainians who could, even now, choose life: a concept Healey appears to not grasp, given that the Ukrainians in question are by all accounts still alive: “… bravery is led by President Zelensky personally, but it is typified by the military last stand of the troops at the Azovstal steel plant.”
Unable to conjure a single word approaching the notion of peace or the ending of conflict, and bypassing the widely recognised fact that the Ukrainian forces at the Azovstal factory are known to be Azov forces, murderous and radical [neo-nazi] nationalists who aspire to eradicate Russian-speaking Ukrainians, Healey offers Russophobia, propaganda and distortion to support the imperialist war against Russia.
In line with the Nato narrative, Healey tells us that Russia’s intervention in Ukraine is unprovoked, removing any common-sense or honest analysis of Russian motives. Honest analysis would require honest consideration of steps towards peaceful resolution, a process unacceptable to the US/Nato war machine, which has invested heavily in the destruction of Russia through colossal sanctions (to the detriment of western economies) and almost unlimited funding of weapons for Ukraine.
Like other Labour leaders, Healey has used the conflict in Ukraine to celebrate the Labour party’s historical role in in the creation of the imperialist Nato war machine, telling us: “Bevin was a central figure and essential force in its creation. He viewed Nato as a ‘constructive and defensive’ alliance of democracies. Labour values are embedded at the heart of Nato, with its founding treaty enshrining democracy, freedom, peace and the rule of law, as well as collective security. It embodies British and Labour internationalism at its best.”
Labour’s Ernest Bevin was a lifelong anticommunist. He supported the eradication of communists in Greece during and after World War 2. The communist movement in Greece, which had mass support, was crushed through the unified interventionist tactics of the British and US governments.
In December 1944, in Athens, Greek communists were massacred by British occupying forces in alliance with fascists and Nazis, while elsewhere British men and women were fighting against nazism. When Bevin became Labour foreign secretary in 1946, the murderous scheme of Winston Churchill’s Tory government to return Greece to reactionary powers and the Greek royal family was safe in Bevin’s hands.
We should ask the question: how much has the Labour view of Russia changed since the end of World War 2? Today, it is just as paranoid and terrified as it was when Clement Attlee, leading the Labour government, secretly allowed the USA to deploy atomic weapons in Britain so that Russian targets could be reached.
Labour is committed in its essence to corporatocracy, monopoly capitalism, and free markets, and equally committed to the annihilation of communist movements and countries, workers included, that challenge the power and domination of the British ruling class.
The Labour party now again fiercely defends western imperialism, exploiting Russia’s military operation in Ukraine to ramp up Britain’s military expenditure, pushing for an even more aggressive policy on the pretext of British ‘leadership’ in Europe, and enjoying the fruits of the war machine.
Labour shadow foreign secretary David Lammy has claimed: “UK leadership could be securing new security agreements with European partners that would allow British businesses to take advantage of new defence investment and help create a more capable European pillar in Nato.”
Such is the Labour leadership’s fanaticism over Nato that it has threatened any Nato-dissident party MPs with the withdrawal of the party whip [ie, expulsion] should they now criticise Nato. Such blasphemy cannot be tolerated by the party of war.
This is not new to Labour. The present leadership under Keir Starmer is continuing the decades-long practice of Labour leaders, demonstrated by Bevin and Attlee, to silence voices opposing imperialist war by punishing MPs – a punishment that includes expulsion.
Starmer, closing down any antiwar rhetoric in Parliament, has followed loyally in the footsteps of the recently ennobled serial war criminal and former Labour leader Tony Blair who recently described Russian president Vladimir Putin, without a hint of self-irony, in the following terms:
“He became the autocrat, accumulating personal wealth and unfettered power … though cold-blooded, still calculating … detached from reality, and with no one around him prepared to tell him the truth …”
The fact that Labour and Tories make up the two cheeks of the same imperialist posterior is not new. In his day, Bevin, like Lammy, could not be distinguished politically from his contemporary Tory opposite. Tory foreign secretary Anthony Eden said about Labour foreign secretary Ernest Bevin: “There were many discussions on foreign affairs. I cannot recall one single occasion when there was a difference between us. I hope I do not embarrass the foreign secretary when I say that.”
And so it is today. We see Boris Johnson and Liz Truss on one cheek and Keir Starmer and David Lammy on the other of the Nato posterior. Empire-building is a bipartisan affair. Therefore, delusional ramblings of the entitled Nato adventurists are echoed by both sides of the imperialist House of Commons:
“As members of Nato, our security border is not the cliffs of Dover, but the frontiers of our eastern European allies that border Ukraine.” (David Lammy, Labour)
“In today’s world, the road to Global Britain runs through eastern Europe.” (Tom Tugenhat, Tory MP, Chair of the foreign affairs committee).
In reality, the only border of interest to agents of imperialism, whether Healey, Lammy, Starmer or Tugenhat in 2022, or Attlee and Bevin in 1949, when Nato was formed, is the Russian/Soviet border. An independent and strong nation and people who can hold the western imperialist bloc to account is an unacceptable restraint on imperialist savagery.
Labour must be held to account for the atrocities it has committed in the name of British workers. Its historical and present role in the murder, starvation, torture and annihilation of working people and their children across the globe should be understood by all.
The British Labour party is a threat to humanity. It welcomed US atomic missiles onto British soil; it welcomed the birth of the British atomic bomb; and it welcomed the mass killing of communists in Europe and made an alliance with fascists and Nazis to achieve this goal. Now the current leaders are deeply invested, as traitors and enemies of the working class, in the same deadly adventurism, only this time its alliance is with Ukrainian Nazis, fascists and nationalists in Nato’s proxy war against Russia.
