UK election - Vote No to NATO

If you are in the UK you will probably be as alternately bored, depressed and frustrated at the lack of choice in the UK elections as I am. Break free by refusing to play along.

Photo by Steve Houghton-Burnett on Unsplash

Now that Rishi Sunak has called a UK general election I thought it would be a good time to consider the question of who to vote for. Of course, it may well be that UK readers will be of the opinion that the whole idea of democracy in the UK is a facade or charade. In the words of Emma Goldman ’If voting changed anything they'd make it illegal.’ That’s certainly an opinion I respect, having witnessed what happened with the likes of Syriza in Greece.  We have 4 significant parties in the UK, all of whom subscribe to varying degrees to neo liberal dogma. All, not coincidentally, also subscribe to being members of NATO. The SNP are the most recent of the NATO cheerleaders and, again, not coincidentally, their embrace of militarist Atlanticism came as they started their drift rightwards economically, (they went further left in terms of liberal virtue signalling, but as with most of what calls itself the left these days, that was cover for throwing the workers and the global south under the bus).

Recent events in Ukraine and Gaza have highlighted the utter cynicism of the powers that make up NATO. They have also highlighted the moral bankruptcy of the EU as it prostrates itself before Washington. We are up to around half a million casualties in Ukraine and still we keep throwing weapons into the fray to stop them coming to the negotiating table, in the vain hope that it will weaken Russia and advance Washington’s plans to maintain global hegemony for their donor class dominated turbo capitalist system. The war to supposedly defend Ukrainian sovereignty has ended up with the nation in hock to US finance, its lands being bought up by the likes of Blackrock and its government ministers appointed at the discretion of Washington. It has sold itself down the river lock, stock and barrel and by the time the vulture funds have finished with it the bulk of its remaining population will probably have fled the economic carnage which will follow the end of the martial carnage. There will be no sovereignty for Ukraine, just as there is no democracy in Ukraine, where Zelensky rules beyond his term, driving his nation ever on in a war he was originally elected to avoid.

Bizarrely, the war in Ukraine, which should have been the nail in the coffin of NATO, exposing it for the cynical fist of Washington consensus state corporate crony capitalism that it is, has led to a strange reaction by the UK and European pseudo-left. The UK Greens have softened their opposition to NATO (in Germany they can’t get enough of it, being the foremost cheerleaders of the disaster in Ukraine). Even the Scottish Greens, though stating correctly that it would be morally wrong to join NATO, have fallen for NATOs propaganda on the war. Elsewhere, Finland and Sweden have dropped their policy of neutrality, Ireland appears to be wavering (that includes Sinn Fein), all at a time when you think states would be more keen than ever to distance themselves from the Moloch that is NATO.

NATO, to me, is, like Gaza, a litmus test of where you stand on global and social justice, where you stand on genuine democracy and national sovereignty, where you stand on the state corporate stitch up that is late stage ‘rules based order’ capitalism.

The excerpt below from an excellent article by Pawel Wargan in the Monthly Review should put you in the picture…

‘On March 25, 1997, at a conference of the Euro-Atlantic Association held at Warsaw University, Joe Biden, then a senator, outlined the conditions for Poland’s accession to NATO. “All NATO member states have free-market economies with the private sector playing a leading role,” he said. Furthermore,

The mass privatization plan represents a major step toward giving the Polish people a direct stake in the economic future of their country. But this is not the time to stop. I believe that large, state-owned enterprises should also be placed in the hands of private owners, so that they can be operated with economic, rather than political interests in mind.… Businesses like banks, the energy sector, the state airline, the state copper producer, and the telecommunications monopoly will have to be privatized.^’

With the above in mind, how on earth can a NATO state claim to be a sovereign democracy? This is why nationalisation in Nato countries is almost anathema. This is why the EU, which has grown ever more servile to NATO, is increasingly neo liberal. Jeremy Corbyn questioned NATO and was crucified. Anyone on the left who claims to want socialism should despise NATO Anyone on the right who claims to want sovereignty would have nothing to do with NATO. Any environmentalist who opposes unrestrained growth for corporate profit should run a mile from NATO and its carbon fueled war machine imposing control over global resources. Any genuine liberal should be appalled by Nato, considering its support for fascists in Greece, Operation Gladio, the violent overthrow of an elected government in Kiev in 2014, the list goes on.

Look at the policies and debates in the UK election. Consider NATO foreign policy; genocide in Gaza, unending horror in Ukraine, a looming conflict with China, playing nuclear chicken by targeting Russian early warning systems. None of this gets a look in, it's off the agenda. Instead we get bland debates about whether or not there may be a tax rise. Call me an odd fish but I feel the imminent prospect of global annihilation might  need to be a bit further up the agenda. If it's not Starmer seeing how close he can get to Rishi without actually embracing him, it's the liberals with their crucial policy announcements on TV rights for Premiership football or proposals for new national parks. It’s surreal how limited the field of political debate has become. You may have noticed that not a single party in those TV debates advocates for neutrality and withdrawal for NATO. Those that do, have been effectively erased by the mainstream media, excluded from the debates and not featured in opinion polling (the one smaller party which has made a breakthrough in recent years is Reform, or whatever it is called today, since Farage has assured the powers that be that it is every bit as pro NATO and in hock to Atlanticist elites as the big boys. This has ensured wall to wall coverage, safe in the knowledge that, whilst they pose as outsiders, they are down with the establishment and will not rock the boat.

Don't go along with it. There are parties which do advocate withdrawal from NATO (mostly on the left as the ‘patriotic’ right tend to pledge allegiance to Washington), such as ALBA, TUSC, The Scottish Greens, George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain, Plaid Cyrmu and People Against Profit. If none of them appeal, or none of them are standing in your constituency, spoil your ballot paper, write ‘No to NATO’. People fought for your right to vote, to have a choice and some control over your nation's political destiny. If the mainstream parties will not offer you that choice, spoiling the ballot is the only way to express it.  Don't disenfranchise yourself by playing their game. Don't endorse a NATO that upholds an economic system that will reduce your kids to serfdom, if they survive its attempts to maintain nuclear hegemony through proxy wars and nuclear brinkmanship.