Trump’s shock and awe has Starmer cowering

by Ken Ferguson

• More mature Voice readers may remember where they were when they first encountered “shock and awe” as massive explosions lit up the Baghdad skyline on our TVs as the Iraq war opened.

As we now know tens of thousands died, years if instability echoing to this day resulted and perhaps most significantly the consequences for countries like the UK of serving as the obedient junior partner in matters military and political have been pitilessly exposed.

Now a quarter of a century on from the war that set the tone of politics for the present era with a far right extremist running amok from the White House we see the brutal reality of US imperialism stripped of any diplomatic fig leaves.

From “taking” Gaza, buying Greenland and incorporating Canada as the 51st US state to intimidating entire countries from Jordan to South Africa any idea that the United States will respect business as usual is now for the history books.

For us in Scotland this new situation presents both challenges and opportunities.

As usual the standard response from the ever flexible Westminster gang is when asked by the US to jump the reply is how high?

Ministers and acolytes of the rapidly sliding Starmer regime are falling over each other to disown their all too recent words of condemnation of Trump confessing their error and kneeling for forgiveness.

Odious Mandelson
Gold medal winner in this humiliating contest is the odious Lord Mandelson whose recantation of his past utterances plumbed new depths of venality that make the skin creep.

By way of explanation we are soothingly assured that such crawling is necessary in the “national interest” and that those of reaching for the sick bag are hopeless dreamers. No.
This is a shameless crawling to an administration based around bullying, racism and threats and blows away all the pretence of His Majesty’s government, parliamentary sovereignty, Gold Stick in waiting and all the other pantomime Westminster figures.

It recalls the reaction of Galileo when he recanted the truth on the motion of the planets to the inquisition. Asked why he did it, he responded: “They showed me the instruments of torture.”
Or in this case, loss of pelf and power.

As we go to press, we face a prospect of renewed war in Gaza as the diplomatic mask slips and the US / Israel ethnic cleansing plan is revealed accompanied by economic threats to those who oppose it.

The Ukraine war will be concluded with deal between Putin and Trump which will give the US open access to Ukraine’s rare metal resources and leave Putin’s territorial gains largely intact. If necessary the power brokers shaping events will dump Zelensky if they think he stands in the way of their plans.

Then of course as Trump’s shock and awe distracts the media as we face the economic consequences of the use os tariffs (Trump’s favourite word) and his swathes of trashing international bodies such as the UN and the World Health Organisation.

Clearly faced with this range of challenges and dangers a firm and fearless defence of jobs and peace should be the policy of the UK government which is so fond of intoning blessings to the national interest.

‘Sleekit, timorous, cowering…’
Instead we have Starmer, who makes Burns’ “wee sleekit, timorous, cowering beastie” look like a lion. Years of soft soap and spin about the muscle of the British state and the safety and security — backed by our ‘independent’ US owned nuclear weapons — now lies exposed as yet another fable in the annals of ‘Great Britain’.

Yet as the Labour supports melts faster than snow on Scotland’s global warmed ski slopes the con persons who engineered last summer’s undemocratic landslide under the fraudulent ‘Change’ offer press the government to move ever more rapidly rightwards.

The betrayal of the WASPI women, the enforcing of child poverty with the two child cap and, outstandingly, the slashing if the pensioners’ winter fuel allowance are but the most prominent examples of this approach.

Sadly this is only the tip of a very unsavoury iceberg which has seen the supposed workers party increasingly deployed as outriders for Thatcherite deregulation and placed at the service of greedy planet trashing capitalists.

The third Heathrow runway with its attendant mega costs financial, social and environmental is a stand out example of where this goes.

The bitter reality of the fruits of this approach are all around us but two examples may help.
Grenfell Tower burned 72 people to death because lack of regulation saw it clad in highly flammable insulation which turned the building into a death trap for which, years later, nobody has been held responsible.

Beaches and rivers in much of England run with human waste as the privatised owners hoover up bloated bonuses as they neglect to renew ancient structures to avoid leaks.
Offer a socialist alternative

The months between now and next year’s Scottish Parliament need to see urgent work on presenting a coherent socialist alternative to the increasingly bankrupt pro-market and increasingly racist offers from the unionist parties dominated by priorities set by a hysterical right wing media with an agenda of cruelty.

All around us we face crisis in the NHS, council cuts, soaring rents alongside a chronic housing shortage, trains and buses expensive and unreliable and fuel poverty alongside massive green energy resources.

Offering a socialist alternative is the way to defeat both the Labour pretenders and the far right of Tories and Reform and open the way to an independent socialist Scotland putting people and planet before profit.

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