A Necropsy for Britain

Necropsy – meaning: an examination of a body after death.

Today Sir Keir Starmer has confirmed that defence spending will rise to 2.5% of GDP, an additional £13.4bn per year. This means big cuts to other areas of spending, starting with foreign aid spending, which be slashed by billions. Consider this when you are told that there is not enough money for public services, that immigration is the root cause of your woes or that the most vulnerable in society are the ones who must bear the brunt of cuts and austerity.

It’s such a short-sighted view of the world that our ‘security’ can be maintained by slashing foreign aid, as if we live in a vacuum.

As I said over at Fifty-Six Degrees North:

“… the issue of immigration is a far deeper one that is being presented. The idea that we can ‘solve’ immigration with check guards and border patrols, or rounding people up as Donald Trump and Alice Weidel want, is a fantasy. If Angela Merkel’s decision to offer sanctuary to a million Syrians facing bombing and disaster from their own dictatorship is, for some, the origin to this backlash, it also tells us a tale of a precarious and deeply uncertain world. Late capitalism has provided the conditions for massive rupture and climate catastrophe, resource wars and states of perpetual violence. People are always going to flee such conditions in desperation. Any solutions that do not centre around building lasting peace, reducing and eliminating conflict and solving climate crisis are not solutions at all. Building ever higher walls, or concocting ever-more elaborate or sadistic solutions (Rwanda) does nothing to solve the problem it only appeases the growing community of hatred that’s being cultivated for domestic electoral gain.”

What is true of immigration is just as true of ‘defence’.

But now we have sabre-rattling and the Magic Money Tree which always jingles with coins whenever someone says the secret world ‘military’. The move signals a further u-turn by Starmer as he dances to Trump’s tune.

Starmer in 2021: No Prime Minister should cut foreign aid.

Starmer in 2025: I’m cutting foreign aid. pic.twitter.com/CFezX2FDpW

— PoliticsJOE (@PoliticsJOE_UK) February 25, 2025

In fact, back in 2009 Gordon Brown stated: “We will pass legislation that the British government is obliged to raise spending on aid to the poorest countries to 0.7% of our national income. Others may break their promises to the poorest, with Labour Britain never will.”

Time after time Starmer jettison’s promises like clockwork. In opposition he promised to “freeze energy bills” – as Prime Minister he is allowing Big Energy Companies to increase bills by more than twice the rate of inflation. The Labour government looks increasingly beleaguered and unattached to any coherent strategy or core values. They look buffeted and battered by events, and appear to have no plan to counter the rise and threat of Reform, other than to mimic them.

As Europe falters and a New World Order emerges which nobody yet understands, Britain appears uniquely and specifically isolated. We have moved from being a vassal state, where the US has its nuclear weapons parked, to one that has all of the downsides of this relationship but none of the advantages. And Starmer’s confusion and incoherence is infectious.

Writing in The Herald Neil Mackay calls it ‘panicked folly’, he’s not wrong:

“Whoever is advising Sarwar should be sacked. Scottish Labour’s policy and communication teams need purged asap. They must be working for the SNP. Scottish Labour is in free-fall. Support has haemorrhaged, with many voters going to Reform. That explains Sarwar’s panicked folly. Polls show Sarwar getting just 18 MSPs at the next election, tied with the Tories. The SNP would take 55 and Greens 10, creating another independence majority. It’s all over for Sarwar, which makes him something of an outlier in modern politics, as he’s the only privately-educated millionaire going backwards in the polls. Scottish Labour has been killed by a combination of Starmer’s robotic policy cruelty, and Sarwar’s charisma-free acquiescence. Labour both north and south apes Reform. It might work somewhat in England, it’s simply backfired in Scotland.”

Despite this chaos Anas Sarwar took this week to announce that there would be no future referendum regardless of the result of the next election.

Speaking on the BBC’s Sunday Show on the final day of his party’s conference in Glasgow, Mr Sarwar said Scottish Labour would “prove the pollsters wrong” in 2026 and win the election. He added there would be “no independence referendum in the term of the next parliament” and that other issues should take priority.

It’s an odd position to take: “I will decide the consequences of an election even if I lose”. It’s basically saying to the Scottish people, what you vote and what you think doesn’t matter. This is a very dangerous position for Sarwar to take and will likely hasten electoral disaster and a career-ending result.

In among Sarwar’s posturing was the strange idea this week to mimic Elon Musk (!) with a bizarre McDOGE proposal that came out of nowhere. But, as Aaron Bastani has pointed out, if there was anywhere that there was a proven track record for massive waste and over-spending it’s the UK military. Bastani points out that Britain already spends £10 BILLION more a year than the French on defence. Yet they have more soldiers & a fully independent nuclear capability.

As Zara Sultana – consistently one of Labour’s best MPs (and predictably ostracised for exhibiting principle) has pointed out this tacking to the right in response to the rise of the far-right is counter-productive. She said: “The German election — where the far-right AfD doubled its votes & came second — should be a warning for Labour. Working-class communities need tangible improvements & hope — not more austerity or pandering to Reform in a race-to-the-bottom on immigration.” And, also: “Energy bills are set to rise again by 6.4% this April — while companies have raked in over £457,000,000,000 in profits since 2020. Your skyrocketing bills are funding their obscene gains. It’s time to end this scam and put people before profit. Nationalise our utilities NOW.”

Of course we in Scotland were promised a reduction in energy bills by the fantastical project that was GB Energy, another exercise in jingoism from a broken British project. Sarwar’s attack on Scottish democracy will backfire massively, and what we are watching is the end days of Britain, and its necropsy.

This recurring theme of the constant capitulation to the far-right is taken up by Luke Savage here ‘The centre (right) will not hold‘. In it he lays out the contradictions of the politics being played out in Germany, and here in Britain by reference to an op-ed by our own Gordon Brown from last year in which he bemoans several recent instances of would-be European moderates capitulating or attempting to appease the extreme right.

Savage explains: “Brown’s argument speaks to something both real and alarming: namely, the extent to which many European conservatives (and supposed liberals like Emmanuel Macron) are now reorienting themselves — particularly around the issue of immigration. Brown’s op-ed also offered a sobering survey of recent far right momentum, from Italy and France to Austria and Holland.”

“To his examples we can now add a further one. In this weekend’s German federal election, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) — extreme even by the standards of the European far right — achieved its greatest success to date.”

The thrust of Brown’s argument — explains Savage is “that appeasement by so-called moderates has only boosted the extreme right — is particularly applicable in the German context.”

But Savage goes on to point to the weakness of Brown’s case: “Having provided a lengthy list of recent outrages and far right successes, Brown proceeds to offer us a few counter-examples with the aim of showing that its forward march is not inevitable. One of them — the re-election of Ursula von der Leyen as president of the European Commission, by an executive rather than a popular body no less — is simply bizarre. I don’t feel well informed enough to comment on his Polish or Spanish examples, but for reasons that are very likely partisan Brown also includes the victory of the Labour Party under Keir Starmer in last summer’s British general election (which, having pivoted hard to the right itself on the issue of immigration, is now either trailing the far right Reform party or just slightly ahead of it depending on which poll you look at).”

Savage concludes:

“Much of this feels like pretty thin gruel. But, more to the point, Brown’s condemnation of “the insidious surrender of the centre to far-right prejudice” doesn’t see fit to mention the left at all. In France, where he himself begins the story, it was a broad front coalition consisting of La France Insoumise, the Socialist Party, the Ecologists, the French Communist Party, and others which held back the far right National Rally. In his own country, it’s the much-abused left of the Labour Party and other left wing forces outside of it (including the Greens and various independents) that have most strongly resisted Farage-ism and the appeasement strategy he rightly criticizes.”

“This blind spot in the story renders Brown’s case somewhat rudderless by the end, leaving him to again censure moderates and call somewhat intangibly for a renewed progressive agenda that emphasizes “jobs, standards of living, fairness and bridging the morally indefensible gap between rich and poor.” Insofar as such an agenda exists in meaningful form, it has not meaningfully been offered by most parties of the nominal centre, centre left, and centre right for many years. Where it has been taken up by parties or politicians of the left, it’s been actively combatted by much of the nominal mainstream — which in some places has applied the cordon sanitaire principle as strongly (or even more strongly) to the left than to the extreme right.”

And here is the supreme irony and herein lies the death of Britain. Gordon Brown, as we have explored repeatedly, was the union’s last chance, the Great Clunking Fist, the voice of Scotland, the Great Reformer etc etc etc.

Yet the irony is that it is the Left not the Right that have been kept in check, by none other than the Labour Party, and it is under the Union that the “morally indefensible gap between rich and poor” has flourished. Britain can either be a place which is responsive and expansive, or it can be a place which is reactionary and unresponsive and it has proven itself over and over to be the latter.

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