Socialist Resistance

An archive of socialistresistance.org, 2002–2022

After a century of slavish support Has Britain's movement finally learned its lesson?

by Pete Cooper  |  Socialist Resistance no5  |  page 16

This is scanned newsprint, not web text. The original PDFs carried no text layer at all, so every word here was read off the page by OCR. Expect dropped opening letters, run-together words and wrong characters. There was no contents page to cut the paper up by, so the articles were found from the size of their headlines: a headline may carry its kicker, and where an article ran beside a boxed panel a few lines of the neighbour can appear. The scanned issue is the authority; this text is here so the words can be found at all.

The aims of US foreign policy and its relationship with the attack on Iraq are now well documented. The US bid for world domination which was stalled in both 1945 by the threat of revolution in Europe and the colonial world, the emergence of the USSR as a world power, and finally the experience of US defeat in Vietnam is once again on the agenda of the Bush administration. This war is only the first step.

But what are the aims of their British junior partners? Is Blair simply Bush's poodle as is widely believed? Is his belief that Britain must pay 'a blood price' (not his for sure for its special relationship with the US merely insane, or is there a rational basis for

Far from taking leave of his senses, Blair, in a long line of Labour leaders, is defending the interests of British big business, first through the defence of British 'empire' and then the Atlantic alliance. However what is new in the situation is that the ruling class is divided over the issue and most importantly for the first time since Chartism, substantial sections of the population, including the labour movement, are moving into opposition to Britain's foreign policy. From imperial dominance through special relationship, to sidekick

From the middle of the 18th century until 1914, Britain was the pre-eminent world capitalist power, enjoying industrial, commercial and naval supremacy. However, by 1900, the rise of capitalist competitors, above all the United States and Germany, seriously posed a challenge at all these levels. Britain was forced to choose whose claims should be contested.

What had become very clear by 1900 was that Britain was quite incapable of tak ing on both its new rivals simultaneously and defeating them. This situation implied that Britain must reach a compromise with one of them.

That this was to be the United States rather than Germany was by no means a foregone conclusion, and a strategic debate in British ruling circles about how to deal with British imperial decline took place. A debate which was not finally settled until 1940.

The divisions over this issue related to