Starmer’s Nuclear U-Turn: A Tale of Mass Deception

Starmer’s Nuclear Hypocrisy: Flip-Flopping His Way to No.10

The hypocrisy reeks thicker than cheap cologne on a used car salesman. Our esteemed politicians prattle on endlessly about integrity and truth, all while exhaling noxious plumes of deception thick enough to choke the most gullible among us. Whether the falsehoods tumble from Rishi Sunak’s mouth or the drearily monotonous tones of Sir Keir Starmer, the lies flow unconstrained by partisan allegiance – fuelled solely by an insatiable lust for power at any cost.

But few have proven themselves more masterful at this insidious art of mass deception than the current Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer himself. We’ve grown depressingly accustomed to Starmer’s dizzying acrobatics of flip-flopping positions, his cavalier disregard for even the flimsiest of campaign promises, his Orwellian talent “for “doublespeak” redefining language to retroactively align with his ever-shifting opportunism.

As he Flip-flops his way towards Number 10, Starmer is more than happy to perpetuate the facade that Labour remains equivocal about the UK’s nuclear arsenal.

He claims to be a stark contrast to his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn, who took an unwavering stance as a lifelong opponent to such instruments of genocide, relentlessly pilloried by the establishment for daring to voice a conscience on the subject.

Corbyn articulated his position during a leadership debate saying: “I think the idea of anyone ever using a nuclear weapon is utterly appalling.”He says as prime minister he would be “working to avoid that”. He highlights other threats – cyberwarfare, terrorist attacks like Manchester, “globally ungoverned spaces like Libya” and environmental disasters. Pressed about whether or not he would ever use nuclear weapons, he says ‘he wouldn’t fire nuclear weapons first’.

For many, including those like myself who served in the British Army’s once elite nuclear missile regiments, Corbyn’s stance struck a reasonable chord. We too were indoctrinated to view our nation’s apocalyptic arsenal as a deterrent – an option of brutally final resort, to be contemplated only when all other paths had been incinerated. A weapon of mutual destruction that kept the warmongers in check.

However, in the fog of geopolitical brinksmanship, such nuanced perspectives are all too easily caricatured as naive pacifism by the bloodlust-addled warmongers holding the reins of power. Cooler heads branded as effete appeasers, cravenly shrinking from the impossible decisions that real “leadership” demands.

Lest we forget, even the iconic Clancy novels that glorified our atomic contingencies still portrayed their use as a grim, unconscionable last resort – a decision no sane person could revel in, only deeply mourn. An appalling possibility to be averted at all costs, by any means necessary.

Keir Starmer accuses Stop the War coalition of siding with NATO’s enemies Link

For daring to articulate that reality, Corbyn was crucified by the very class of technocrats and politicos who style themselves “serious” enough to casually incinerate cities with but a judicious stroke of the pen. An unforgivable sin in their eyes – to harbour the slightest moral compunction over reducing millions to searing cosmic silence on an ideological whim.

So let the record show, when assessing the respective nuclear stances of the two: it was Corbyn alone who demonstrated the lucid restraint and conscience so desperately required of anyone entrusted with the power to extinguish human civilization itself. While his successor…Starmer claims to have no compunction in using nuclear missiles, well, at least that’s his position for today…

At which you have to ask, is this just not a ‘Flip-Flop’, another character displayed by the chameleon, Starmer to portray ‘his Labour Party’, a ‘changed’ Labour Party or just more of Starmer and his think tanks saying what they think the public wants to hear, regardless of conviction?

That Was Then This Is Now

Just eight years ago, around a dozen current Starmer frontbenchers merrily voted against renewing Britain’s nuclear deterrent. Parliamentary records lay bare the uncomfortable truth that many of the figures now claiming unshakeable commitment to Trident once harboured severe reservations, if not outright opposition.

David Lammy, Angela Rayner – potential future holders of the nation’s highest offices should Labour prevail – their past dissent preserved forever in Hansard. An inconvenient reality for a leader so desperate to recast his party as a frothing-at-the-mouth caricature of bellicose jingoism.

But far be it from Sir Keir to let such contradictions impede his relentless march towards the corridors of power. With his prodigious talent for deception, he’s recast himself as NATO’s most fervid cheerleader – conveniently whitewashing his own documented history of advocating for the very dissolution of the alliance he now lauds as democracy’s saving grace.

“To condemn NATO is to condemn the guarantee of democracy and security it brings, and which our allies in Eastern and Central Europe are relying on, as the sabre-rattling from Moscow grows ever louder,” the Labour leader sermonised in a recent diatribe.

To truly stop war, you need to show you are serious about standing up for peace.https://t.co/fsOOHSbcOP

— Keir Starmer (@Keir_Starmer) February 10, 2022

Glorifying the very alliance he advocated abandoning just decades prior when Secretary of the staunchly anti-militarist Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers, an organisation that has coincidently expelled Starmer.

The brazen hypocrisy would be almost impressive if it weren’t so perniciously destructive. Sir Keir Starmer, erstwhile socialist barrister and one-time scourge of the military-industrial complex, has expertly contorted himself into NATO’s most ardent apologist. His moral piety rings increasingly hollow with each jingoistic pronouncement extolling the virtues of the nuclear behemoth he once sought to dismantle.

But in this digitised world, Google is your friend…

Let the record show, this is the same Keir Starmer who proudly urged “Britain and other capitalist countries” to shed their “weapons and strategies of genocide” and instead adopt a “non-nuclear, non-aligned defence policy as the precondition for the preservation and extension of human rights.” Words plucked verbatim from a 1989 resolution he ushered through as a rising star within the Haldane ranks – a motion explicitly backing the UK’s unilateral withdrawal from NATO and the scrapping of its nuclear deterrent.

While Keir Starmer was Secretary of the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers, the group passed a resolution calling on “Britain and other capitalist countries” to disarm.

It added that the Labour Party should “adopt a non-nuclear, non-aligned defence policy as the precondition for the preservation and extension of human rights”.

The motion essentially backed scrapping Britain’s nuclear deterrent and leaving the Nato defence alliance.

The group claimed the policy was “key to victory at the next general election”.

The motion as passed was printed in issue No9 of the Socialist Lawyer publication in autumn 1989.

10. Soviet Peace Proposals
The Haldane Society welcomes the announcement by President Gorbachev at the United Nations on 7 December 1988 that the Soviet Union would, on the first anniversary of the treaty eliminating intermediate and short range nuclear missiles, unilaterally reduce its conventional forces in Warsaw Treaty countries by 50,000 persons and 5,000 tanks.

The Haldane Society demands that Britain and other capitalist countries follow suit by abandoning weapons and strategies of genocide; and urges the Labour Party to adopt a non-nuclear, non-aligned defence policy as the precondition for the preservation and extension of human rights, and the key to victory at the next General Election.

It was that year the Soviet Union started its collapse.

The fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 was a pivotal event in world history which marked the falling of the Iron Curtain and one of the series of events that started the fall of the Soviet Union

The dissolution of the Soviet Union (1988–1991) was the process of internal disintegration within the Soviet Union (USSR) which resulted in the end of its existence as a sovereign state. It brought an end to General Secretary (later also President) Mikhail Gorbachev‘s effort to reform the Soviet political and economic system in an attempt to stop a period of political stalemate and economic backslide.

By late 1991, amidst a catastrophic political crisis, with several republics already departing the Union and centralized power waning, the leaders of three of its founding members declared that the Soviet Union no longer existed.

Eight more republics joined their declaration shortly thereafter. Gorbachev resigned in December 1991 and what was left of the Soviet parliament voted to end itself. Along with the Revolutions of 1989 in the Eastern Bloc, the dissolution of the Soviet Union marked the end of the Cold War.

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Labour’s Nuclear Flip-Flop: The Evolution of Starmer’s Stance

How quickly such convictions evaporate when the tantalising air của Number 10 Downing Street wafts by. Today’s Starmer waxes prostrate in his subservience to the military leviathan, warning “there is no equivalence between a defensive alliance that has never provoked conflict and those who would inflict the appalling cost of war on others.”

An Orwellian inverse of his former self’s clarion call to abandon the “genocide” perpetrated in the name of such specious doctrines as “self-defence.” A blatant rewriting of history itself to sanctify the very forces he once railed against with every fibre of his declared socialist being.

The naked audacity of his metamorphosis seems to know no bounds. Having neatly shed the skin of his anti-NATO, anti-nuclear activist origins, Starmer now parrots bromides extolling the virtues of “standing up for peace” and “and the right to self-defence” – in his newfound zeal for the military-industrial arms complex he’s currently cheerleading genocide while “Gaza” is carpet-bombed into oblivion.

With the oily charisma of a third-rate con artist, we’ve no doubt Starmer will Flip-flop his way to Downing Street through a relentless barrage of hollow bromides and focus-grouped platitudes. And when he does, holding the levers of real power at last, one can only tremble at the Faustian bargains he’ll eagerly embrace in service of perpetuating the status quo he once purported to despise.

But such nuanced realities ill-suit the frothing-at-the-mouth caricature he’s carefully cultivating. The eminently “serious” statesman, tough on threats and unshakeable in his dutiful subservience to the military-industrial behemoth he once despised as an existential horror.
It’s the ultimate triumph of vapid realpolitik over principles.

A wholesale abandonment of conviction in service of greasing Starmer’s seemingly inexorable ascent to the precipice of global power. Behold the Trojan Horse of electability – as he sheds the last tattered vestiges of the progressive values that once animated his socialist soul.

For the British people, our sole salvation lies in breaking the duopoly stranglehold of the two arrantly neoliberal parties over our political discourse. Only a resurgent movement of progressive independents and ideological underdogs can hope to counter the tide of corporate avarice that’s laid waste to our public services, our workers’ rights, our very conception of the common good.

So brace yourselves, my friends. The charlatan comes, peddling faux-progressive wares more reeking of snake oil with a distinctive blue look rather than the reddest of red formulas. Our only hope? Cast off the shackles of manufactured consent and dare to dream of a society that favours the many over the rapacious interests of the few.

Our only salvation, it seems, lies in shattering this suffocating duopoly of Labour and the Conservatives. A strong parliamentary voice of independents and emerging parties may be our sole bulwark against Starmer’s hollow posturing and the inevitable avalanche of betrayals to come.

Unless the body politic awakens from its complacent slumber, we are doomed to be ruled by chancers and charlatans – champagne socialists preaching austerity constant public cuts and private profits while they wallow in unearned privilege.