Seumas Milne's Blog, page 12

Politics Weekly podcast: Ukraine crisis

It has been called the worst crisis to hit Europe in the 21st century'. The overthrow of the government in Ukraine and the subsequent incursion by Russian forces in Crimea has left European politicians fumbling for an adequate response.

So far, no more than warning shots have been fired as the deadlock continues. Meanwhile, Crimean citizens will be allowed to give their view on their future in a referendum on 16 March asking whether they want to join the Russian Federation.

Joining Tom Clark in the studio to discuss all of this: Guardian columnists Seumas Milne and Jonathan Freedland; and Marie Mendras, a scholar on Russian affairs and author of Russian Politics:The Paradox of a Weak State

Leave your thoughts below.

Tom ClarkJonathan FreedlandSeumas MilnePhil Maynard

The clash in Crimea is the fruit of western expansion | Seumas Milne

The external struggle to dominate Ukraine has put fascists in power and brought the country to the brink of conflict

Diplomatic pronouncements are renowned for hypocrisy and double standards. But western denunciations of Russian intervention in Crimea have reached new depths of self parody. The so far bloodless incursion is an "incredible act of aggression", US secretary of state John Kerry declared. In the 21st century you just don't invade countries on a "completely trumped-up pretext", he insisted, as US allies agreed that it had been an unacceptable breach of international law, for which there will be "costs".

That the states which launched the greatest act of unprovoked aggression in modern history on a trumped-up pretext – against Iraq, in an illegal war now estimated to have killed 500,000, along with the invasion of Afghanistan, bloody regime change in Libya, and the killing of thousands in drone attacks on Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, all without UN authorisation – should make such claims is beyond absurdity.

It's not just that western aggression and lawless killing is on another scale entirely from anything Russia appears to have contemplated, let alone carried out – removing any credible basis for the US and its allies to rail against Russian transgressions. But the western powers have also played a central role in creating the Ukraine crisis in the first place.

The US and European powers openly sponsored the protests to oust the corrupt but elected Viktor Yanukovych government, which were triggered by controversy over an all-or-nothing EU agreement which would have excluded economic association with Russia.

In her notorious "fuck the EU" phone call leaked last month, the US official Victoria Nuland can be heard laying down the shape of a post-Yanukovych government – much of which was then turned into reality when he was overthrown after the escalation of violence a couple of weeks later.

The president had by then lost political authority, but his overnight impeachment was certainly constitutionally dubious. In his place a government of oligarchs, neoliberal Orange Revolution retreads and neofascists has been installed, one of whose first acts was to try and remove the official status of Russian, spoken by a majority in parts of the south and east, as moves were made to ban the Communist party, which won 13% of the vote at the last election.

It has been claimed that the role of fascists in the demonstrations has been exaggerated by Russian propaganda to justify Vladimir Putin's manoeuvres in Crimea. The reality is alarming enough to need no exaggeration. Activists report that the far right made up around a third of the protesters, but they were decisive in armed confrontations with the police.

Fascist gangs now patrol the streets. But they are also in Kiev's corridors of power. The far right Svoboda party, whose leader has denounced the "criminal activities" of "organised Jewry" and which was condemned by the European parliament for its "racist and antisemitic views", has five ministerial posts in the new government, including deputy prime minister and prosecutor general. The leader of the even more extreme Right Sector, at the heart of the street violence, is now Ukraine's deputy national security chief.

Neo-Nazis in office is a first in post-war Europe. But this is the unelected government now backed by the US and EU. And in a contemptuous rebuff to the ordinary Ukrainians who protested against corruption and hoped for real change, the new administration has appointed two billionaire oligarchs – one who runs his business from Switzerland – to be the new governors of the eastern cities of Donetsk and Dnepropetrovsk. Meanwhile, the IMF is preparing an eye-watering austerity plan for the tanking Ukrainian economy which can only swell poverty and unemployment.

From a longer-term perspective, the crisis in Ukraine is a product of the disastrous Versailles-style break-up of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. As in Yugoslavia, people who were content to be a national minority in an internal administrative unit of a multinational state – Russians in Soviet Ukraine, South Ossetians in Soviet Georgia – felt very differently when those units became states for which they felt little loyalty.

In the case of Crimea, which was only transferred to Ukraine by Nikita Khrushchev in the 1950s, that is clearly true for the Russian majority. And contrary to undertakings given at the time, the US and its allies have since relentlessly expanded Nato up to Russia's borders, incorporating nine former Warsaw Pact states and three former Soviet republics into what is effectively an anti-Russian military alliance in Europe. The European association agreement which provoked the Ukrainian crisis also included clauses to integrate Ukraine into the EU defence structure.

That western military expansion was first brought to a halt in 2008 when the US client state of Georgia attacked Russian forces in the contested territory of South Ossetia and was driven out. The short but bloody conflict signalled the end of George Bush's unipolar world in which the US empire would enforce its will without challenge on every continent.

Given that background, it is hardly surprising that Russia has acted to stop the more strategically sensitive and neuralgic Ukraine falling decisively into the western camp, especially given that Russia's only major warm-water naval base is in Crimea.

Clearly, Putin's justifications for intervention – "humanitarian" protection for Russians and an appeal by the deposed president – are legally and politically flaky, even if nothing like on the scale of "weapons of mass destruction". Nor does Putin's conservative nationalism or oligarchic regime have much wider international appeal.

But Russia's role as a limited counterweight to unilateral western power certainly does. And in a world where the US, Britain, France and their allies have turned international lawlessness with a moral veneer into a permanent routine, others are bound to try the same game.

Fortunately, the only shots fired by Russian forces at this point have been into the air. But the dangers of escalating foreign intervention are obvious. What is needed instead is a negotiated settlement for Ukraine, including a broad-based government in Kiev shorn of fascists; a federal constitution that guarantees regional autonomy; economic support that doesn't pauperise the majority; and a chance for people in Crimea to choose their own future. Anything else risks spreading the conflict.

Twitter: @SeumasMilne

UkraineRussiaJohn KerryEuropeUnited StatesSeumas Milne
theguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Climate change deniers have grasped that markets can't fix the climate | Seumas Milne

The refusal to accept global warming is driven by corporate interests and the fear of what it will cost to try to stop it

It's an unmistakable taste of things to come. The floods that have deluged Britain may be small beer on a global scale. Compared with the cyclone that killed thousands in the Philippines last autumn, the deadly inundations in Brazil or the destruction of agricultural land and hunger in Africa, the south of England has got off lightly.

But the message has started to get through. This is exactly the kind of disaster predicted to become ever more frequent and extreme as greenhouse gas-driven climate change heats up the planet at a potentially catastrophic rate. And it's exposed the David Cameron who wanted to "get rid of all the green crap" and who slashed flood defence spending by £100m a year as weak and reckless to his own supporters.

Of course there have been plenty of floods in the past, and it's impossible to identify any particular weather event as directly caused by global warming. But as the Met Office's chief scientist Julia Slingo put it, "all the evidence suggests that climate change has a role to play in it". With 4% more moisture over the oceans than in the 1970s and sea levels rising, how could it be otherwise?

If it weren't for the misery for the people at the sharp end, you might even imagine there was some divine justice in the fact that the areas hit hardest, from the Somerset Levels to the Thames valley are all Tory heartlands. It's the same with the shale gas fracking plans the government is so keen on: the fossil fuel drilling and mining so long kept away from the affluent is now turning up on their Sussex doorstep.

How do the locals feel that their government cut flood defences for the areas now swimming in water in the name of austerity, while one in four environment agency staff is being axed and the environment secretary, Owen Paterson, slashed his department's budget for adaptation to global warming by 40%?

Not too impressed, to judge by the polling. But then, paradoxically, Paterson is in fact a climate change denier in what was supposed to be "the greenest government ever", a man who refused to accept a briefing from the chief scientific adviser at the energy and climate change department, reckons there are benefits to global warming and thinks "we should just accept that the climate has been changing for centuries". Of course he's not alone among Conservatives in being what one of his cabinet colleagues called "climate stupid". The basic physics may be unanswerable, 97% of climate scientists agree that carbon emissions are dangerously heating up the planet, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warn it's 95% likely that most of the temperature rise since 1950 is due to greenhouse gases and deforestation, the risk of a global temperature rise tipping above 1.5–2C be catastrophic for humanity.

But the climate flat-earthers are having none of it. As a result, what should be a pressing debate about how to head off global calamity has been reframed in the media as a discussion about whether industrial-driven climate change is in fact taking place at all – as if it were a matter of opinion rather than science.

The impact of this phoney controversy during an economic crisis has been dramatic: in the US, the proportion of the population accepting burning fossil fuels drives climate change dropped from 71% to 44% between 2007 and 2011. In Britain, the numbers who believe the climate isn't changing at all rose from 4% to 19% between 2005 and 2013 (though the floods seem to be correcting that).

The problem is at its worst in the Anglo-Saxon world – which has also historically made the largest contribution to pumping carbon into the atmosphere. Take Australia, which is afflicted by longer and hotter heatwaves, drought and bushfires. Nevertheless, its rightwing prime minister Tony Abbott dismisses any link with climate change, which he described as crap, and has repealed a carbon tax on the country's 300 biggest polluters. The move was hailed by his political soulmate, the Canadian prime minister and tar sands champion Stephen Harper, as an important message to the world. And in the US, climate change denial now has the Republican party in its grip.

What lies behind the political right's growing refusal to accept the overwhelming scientific consensus? There's certainly a strong tendency, especially in the US, for conservative white men to refuse to accept climate change is caused by human beings. But there shouldn't be any inherent reason why people who believe in social hierarchies, individualism and inequality should care less about the threat of floods, drought,  starvation and mass migrations than anyone else. After all, rightwing people have children too.

Part of the answer is in the influence of some of the most powerful corporate interests in the world: the oil, gas and mining companies that have strained every nerve to head off the threat of effective action to halt the growth of carbon emissions, buying legislators, government ministers, scientists and thinktanks in the process. In the US, hundreds of millions of dollars of corporate and billionaires' cash (including from the oil and gas brothers Koch) has been used to rubbish climate change science. That is also happening on a smaller scale elsewhere, including Britain.

But climate change denial is also about ideology. Many deniers have come to the conclusion that climate change is some kind of leftwing conspiracy – because the scale of the international public intervention necessary to cut carbon emissions in the time demanded by the science simply cannot be accommodated within the market-first, private enterprise framework they revere. As Joseph Bast, the president of the conservative US Heartland Institute told the writer and campaigner Naomi Klein: for the left, climate change is "the perfect thing", a justification for doing everything it "wanted to do anyway".

When it comes to the incompatibility of effective action of averting climate disaster with their own neoliberal ideology, the deniers are absolutely right. In the words of Nicholas Stern's 2006 report, climate change is "the greatest market failure the world has ever seen".

The intervention, regulation, taxation, social ownership, redistribution and global co-operation needed to slash carbon emissions and build a sustainable economy for the future is clearly incompatible with a broken economic model based on untrammelled self-interest and the corporate free-for-all that created the crisis in the first place. Given the scale of the threat, the choice for the rest of us could not be more obvious.

Twitter: @SeumasMilne

Climate changeClimate change scepticismClimate changeDavid CameronFloodingNatural disasters and extreme weatherSeumas Milne
theguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

A 'pause' in centuries of British wars is not enough | Seumas Milne

Britain's record of continuous conflict has no parallel. Now the elite is panicking that they can't get away with it any more

The generals are beside themselves, Whitehall's in a panic. After generations of continuous warfare, the British public has had enough. They're war-weary, the mandarins fret, and believe the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan have been bloody failures.

Worse, multicultural Britain is increasingly hostile to troops marching into countries from which British citizens or their families came, defence ministry officials complain, especially as one war after another has been waged in the Muslim world.

Add to that the unprecedented vote in parliament last year to stop an attack on Syria and the governing elite is convinced its right to decide issues of war and peace without democratic interference is under threat. As the former Tory Middle East minister Alistair Burt insisted: "Politicians need space and time to take unpopular action."

Most humiliating for London's securocrats, Barack Obama's former defence secretary has warned that British military cuts – which by some measures have put the country behind Saudi Arabia as the world's fourth largest arms spender – threaten the country's defence "partnership" with the US.

It's all come to a head as British combat troops prepare to follow the US and Nato camp followers out of Afghanistan, potentially bringing to a halt over a century of continuous war-fighting by the country's armed forces.

As the Guardian's tally of relentless warmaking shows, British troops have been in action somewhere in the world every year since 1914. It is an extraordinary and chilling record, unmatched by any other country. Only France, Britain's historic rival colonial power, and the US, at the head of the first truly global empire, come close.

It's not as if other major powers have sent their soldiers to fight abroad with remotely such regularity, or at all. But when it comes to Britain, the line of uninterrupted armed action in any case stretches far further back than a century.

As Richard Gott's book Britain's Empire recounts, its forces were involved in violent suppression of anti-colonial rebellions every year from at least the 1760s for the next 200 years, quite apart from multiple other full-scale wars. You need to go back before Britain's foundation as a state and the English civil wars to find a time when government-backed privateers, slavers and settlers weren't involved in armed conflict somewhere in the world.

There are in fact only a handful of countries British troops haven't invaded at some point. What is so striking about the tally of the past 100 years is that only in 1940 were British troops actually defending their own country from the threat of invasion.

And there is a telling continuum between Britain's conflicts in the colonial period and the post-cold war world. The same names keep cropping up, a legacy of imperial divide-and-rule: from Ireland, Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine to Sudan, Libya, Yemen and Waziristan.

There's very little in this saga that the British – let alone those at the receiving end, from Kenya to Malaya – can seriously take pride in, even if they knew about it. (Who, for example, remembers the killing of 15,000 Indonesian civilians by British troops as they restored Dutch colonial rule in 1945?) Even the supposed successes of liberal interventionism, such as Kosovo and Libya, are scarred by escalated death tolls, ethnic cleansing and dysfunctional states.

What is it about Britain? Are its people really more warlike than others? In reality, England's early development of capitalism and technology gave its elite the edge over colonial rivals, while its plunder and economic power was enforced by a dominant navy. That shaped British society and delivered wealth and clout to its rulers. But for the majority there were few if any benefits – one reason there was always a strong strand of domestic opposition to Britain's warmongering, from Charles James Fox to Keir Hardie.

It's the same, only more so, today. For the political and commercial elite, British warmaking under the wing of Washington is about state prestige, corporate profits and the protection of a system of global economic privilege. That was the clear message this week from the former first sea lord Sir Jonathon Band, who now works for US defence contractor Lockheed Martin and insists that Britain's commitment to buy 48 F-35 fighter aircraft "will certainly not be enough".

The armed forces aren't defending the population against any military threat, but endangering them by feeding terror and racism. It's scarcely surprising that opposition to endless wars has grown in Britain, as it has in the US and other allied states. The historian Linda Colley speculates Britain might even revert to the kind of scepticism about the military that prevailed in the 17th century before the years of unbridled imperial conquest – which would be a relief all round.

The top brass meanwhile claim withdrawal from Afghanistan will be a "strategic pause". Instead of a full pullout, the plan is for greater use of drones, special forces and trainers – until they can "get on to the horse again" and the public can be corralled to acquiesce in another "humanitarian" intervention.

That's likely to prove harder than before. Each war attracts less support than the last. Britain has a chance to turn its back on centuries of warmaking, shake off the mentality of junior global policeman and start to build a different relationship with the rest of the world.

Twitter: @SeumasMilne

MilitaryBritish ArmyUnited StatesDefence policySeumas Milne
theguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

We need a counterweight to City and corporate power | Seumas Milne

Any further weakening of Labour's links with the unions will only deepen the crisis of representation in the political system

Our political system is increasingly in the grip of corrupt corporate power. Whether it's the food industry dictating public health policy, school academy chains stuffing the pockets of directors' relatives, or the revolving-door appointments of politicians and civil servants to companies they previously favoured with contracts, it's the banks and corporations that call the shots in Whitehall and Westminster.

Most of David Cameron's Conservative party funding comes from the City. Former New Labour ministers, such as Alan Milburn – the ex-health secretary advising a venture capital firm involved in NHS privatisation, as well as both government and opposition – have won lucrative private sector contracts on the back of their years in office.

Meanwhile, the political parties outside parliament have drastically shrunk and are largely treated as a distraction from the serious business of power-broking and electoral marketing by the political elite. It's scarcely surprising that the public regard the whole carry-on as very little to do with them, or that there was such a strong reaction to the comedian Russell Brand's rejection of voting for parties whose differences were so "insignificant".

Since his election as Labour leader in 2010, Ed Miliband has gingerly tried to shift the terms of political trade and caused establishment apoplexy with his attacks on predatory capitalism and his plan to freeze energy prices. The Times reports corporate executives complaining that while Labour's Ed Balls and Chuka Umunna are "well regarded in corporate circles" and have been "heavily courted", they do not have "sufficient clout" to rein in Miliband.

That is the context of the permanent onslaught on Labour's links with the trade unions, the only force still connected to mainstream politics which sits outside the corporate merry-go-round and gives political access to working class people. That's why the media keeps up its Orwellian denunciation of elected union leaders as "bosses" and "barons", while company bosses are described as "business leaders" – and why every strike is treated as tantamount to high treason.

It's also why the only media and Westminster test of Miliband's Labour reforms is whether they cut union influence enough. At the moment they're not entirely sure, perhaps partly because most reporting of the issue is so wildly inaccurate. In any case, nothing short of the exemplary arrest of a few union leaders would satisfy some of Miliband's tormentors.

The reality is that the Labour leader was panicked into demanding sweeping changes to the union link by false allegations of rigging by the Unite union at the Falkirk parliamentary selection last summer. As the party's leaked internal report demonstrates, even the flaky evidence it provided did not back up those claims. What had in fact happened was that Unite had recruited several dozen industrial workers to the local party to help select a candidate who would break the monopoly of the existing parliamentary elite.

Miliband's reforms have avoided the more extreme options championed by Blairite diehards. But they risk failing in the Labour leader's aim of "letting people back into politics", quite apart from the threat to the party's income. True, the collective union link is maintained and MPs will lose their disproportionate voice in leadership elections.

But by setting up a new double hurdle for union political levy payers to keep the voting rights they already have, the danger is that fewer people will end up having a say than before. Just under 200,000 union levy-payers voted in Labour's 2010 leadership election, out of a total of around 323,000, many of them the shopworkers, bus drivers, nurses and building workers Miliband says he wants to get involved in politics.

Labour will now be lucky to get that number next time, which will probably be fewer than 10% of the 2.7 million currently eligible to vote. There will certainly be many fewer taking part in the London mayoral selection contest. Add to that the fact that the Labour leadership resisted giving the new "affiliated supporters" a say in parliamentary selections – where the future shape of the Commons is decided – and the conservatism of the reforms is clear.

They could be improved over the next five years, or instead lay the ground for the disintegration of the link if Labour were to lose the general election. Miliband has set himself the goal of increasing participation. But people will only take part if they see it makes a difference, and years of erosion of party democracy and New Labour neoliberalism have left many trade unionists ready to break the link themselves.

The paradox is that the more people walk away from the political parties, the more they are dominated by professional politicians, corporate interests and political insider dealing. What happens in the mainstream parties matters because they are the ones running the political system.

That point has even penetrated the moribund Tory grassroots, which have started to kick back against the Westminster elite by deselecting two MPs in a week. The real test for a Labour party revival will be whether Miliband is bold enough to throw his weight behind the kind of policies that would attract alienated voters, from a mass council housebuilding programme to universal childcare and 21st century rights at work.

That needs a stronger union voice and working class voice in politics, not a further hollowing out of Labour's organisation. The more the political elite is sealed off from any kind of political and social counterweight, the more control will be exercised by a City and corporate oligarchy.

Twitter: @SeumasMilne

Trade unionsLabourEd MilibandTUCLabour party leadershipSeumas Milne
theguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

In Ukraine, fascists, oligarchs and western expansion are at the heart of the crisis | Seumas Milne

The story we're told about the protests gripping Kiev bears only the sketchiest relationship with reality

We've been here before. For the past couple of months street protests in Ukraine have been played out through the western media according to a well-rehearsed script. Pro-democracy campaigners are battling an authoritarian government. The demonstrators are demanding the right to be part of the European Union. But Russia's president Vladimir Putin has vetoed their chance of freedom and prosperity.

It's a story we've heard in one form or another again and again – not least in Ukraine's western-backed Orange revolution a decade ago. But it bears only the sketchiest relationship to reality. EU membership has never been – and very likely never will be – on offer to Ukraine. As in Egypt last year, the president that the protesters want to force out was elected in a poll judged fair by international observers. And many of those on the streets aren't very keen on democracy at all.

You'd never know from most of the reporting that far-right nationalists and fascists have been at the heart of the protests and attacks on government buildings. One of the three main opposition parties heading the campaign is the hard-right antisemitic Svoboda, whose leader Oleh Tyahnybok claims that a "Moscow-Jewish mafia" controls Ukraine. But US senator John McCain was happy to share a platform with him in Kiev last month. The party, now running the city of Lviv, led a 15,000-strong torchlit march earlier this month in memory of the Ukrainian fascist leader Stepan Bandera, whose forces fought with the Nazis in the second world war and took part in massacres of Jews.

So in the week that the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army was commemorated as Holocaust Memorial Day, supporters of those who helped carry out the genocide are hailed by western politicians on the streets of Ukraine. But Svoboda has now been outflanked in the protests by even more extreme groups, such as "Right Sector", who demand a "national revolution" and threaten "prolonged guerrilla warfare".

Not that they have much time for the EU, which has been pushing Ukraine to sign an association agreement, offering loans for austerity, as part of a German-led drive to open up Ukraine for western companies. It was Viktor Yanukovych's abandonment of the EU option – after which Putin offered a $15bn bailout – that triggered the protests.

But Ukrainians are deeply divided about both European integration and the protests – largely along an axis between the largely Russian-speaking east and south (where the Communist party still commands significant support), and traditionally nationalist western Ukraine. Industry in the east is dependent on Russian markets, and would be crushed by EU competition.

It's that historic faultline at the heart of Ukraine that the west has been trying to exploit to roll back Russian influence since the 1990s, including a concerted attempt to draw Ukraine into Nato. The Orange revolution leaders were encouraged to send Ukrainian troops into Iraq and Afghanistan as a sweetener.

Nato's eastward expansion was halted by the Georgian war of 2008 and Yanukovych's later election on a platform of non-alignment. But any doubt that the EU's effort to woo Ukraine is closely connected with western military strategy was dispelled today by Nato's secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who declared that the abortive pact with Ukraine would have been "a major boost to Euro-Atlantic security".

Which helps to explain why politicians like John Kerry and William Hague have been so fierce in their condemnation of Ukrainian police violence – which has already left several dead – while maintaining such studied restraint over the killing of thousands of protesters in Egypt since last year's coup.

Not that Yanukovych could be mistaken for any kind of progressive. He has been backed to the hilt by billionaire oligarchs who seized control of resources and privatised companies after the collapse of the Soviet Union – and fund opposition politicians and protesters at the same time. Indeed, one interpretation of the Ukrainian president's problems is that the established oligarchs have had enough of favours granted to an upstart group known as "the family".

It's anger at this grotesque corruption and inequality, Ukraine's economic stagnation and poverty that has brought many ordinary Ukrainians to join the protests – as well as outrage at police brutality. Like Russia, Ukraine was beggared by the neoliberal shock therapy and mass privatisation of the post-Soviet years. More than half the country's national income was lost in five years and it has yet fully to recover.

But nor do the main opposition and protest leaders offer any kind of genuine alternative, let alone a challenge to the oligarchy that has Ukraine in its grip. Yanukovych has now made sweeping concessions to the protesters: sacking the prime minister, inviting opposition leaders to join the government and ditching anti-protest laws passed earlier this month.

Whether that calms or feeds the unrest will be clear soon enough. But the risk of the conflict spreading – leading political figures have warned of civil war – is serious. There are other steps that could help defuse the crisis: the creation of a broad coalition government, a referendum on EU relations, a shift from a presidential to a parliamentary system and greater regional autonomy.

The breakup of Ukraine would not be a purely Ukrainian affair. Along with China's emerging challenge to US domination of east Asia, the Ukrainian faultine has the potential to draw in outside powers and lead to a strategic clash. Only Ukrainians can overcome this crisis. Continuing outside interference is both provocative and dangerous.

Twitter: @SeumasMilne

UkraineRussiaEuropean UnionNatoEuropeSeumas Milne
theguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

70 years of foreign troops? We should close the bases | Seumas Milne

US forces in Britain aren't defending the country but lock it into an empire in decline. It's past time for some independence

It's almost never discussed in the political mainstream. But thousands of foreign troops have now been stationed in Britain for more than 70 years. There's been nothing like it since the Norman invasion. With the 15-month Dutch occupation of London in 1688-9 a distant competitor, there has been no precedent since 1066 for the presence of American forces in a string of military bases for the better part of a century.

They arrived in 1942 to fight Nazi Germany. But they didn't head home in 1945; instead, they stayed on for the 40-odd years of the cold war, supposedly to repel invasion from the Soviet Union. Nor did they leave when the cold war ended and the Soviet Union collapsed, but were invited to remain as the pivot of the anti-Soviet Nato alliance.

A generation later, there are still nearly 10,000 US military personnel stationed in Britain, based in dozens of secretive facilities. Most of them are in half a dozen major military bases – misleadingly named RAF this or that, but effectively under full American control: Lakenheath, Croughton, Mildenhall and Molesworth among others – along with the National Security Agency and missile defence bases such as Menwith Hill in Yorkshire.

British troops are now finally being pulled out of Germany. There is not the slightest suggestion, however, that US forces will be withdrawn from Britain in the forseeable future. But what are they doing here? Who are they supposed to be defending us from?

A clue as to what's at stake was given last week by Robert Gates, a former US defence secretary, when he warned that cuts in Britain's defence spending – still the fourth largest in the world – threatened its "full spectrum" military "partnership" with the US.

He's not the first American official to play on the neuroses of the British security elite, for whom the preservation of a lopsided "special relationship" with the US is the acme of their aspirations for the country. The London establishment's fear of US rejection reached fever pitch last year when parliament finally represented public opinion over military action and rejected what would have been a catastrophic attack on Syria.

Elite anxiety over risking American displeasure or neglect is matched by a growing fear that the British public will no longer tolerate the endless US wars it has dragged them into over the past 15 years. General Sir Nick Houghton, the chief of the defence staff, last month declared that the nation had become "sceptical about the ability to use force in a beneficial way", and must not lose its "courageous instinct". He was echoed by the Commons defence committee, which claimed that "one of the greatest strategic threats to defence" is the public's "lack of understanding of the utility of military force".

No wonder the government has been clamping down on protest rights at bases such as Menwith Hill, a key link in the US missile defence and drone programmes. And it's hardly a surprise that the British public – as in the US itself and other Nato states – has hardened against continued western warmaking, given its record of bloody failure.

Since the post-cold war world gave way to the war on terror, after all, Britain has joined the US in one war of aggression after another – in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya – with disastrous results. Military operations have been punctuated by campaigns of kidnapping, torture and murderous drone attacks. Nato has morphed from a self-declared defensive alliance into a latter-day colonial expeditionary force, under the cover of increasingly discredited humanitarian rhetoric.

Of course, Britain is very far from unique in hosting US bases. It is part of a global archipelago of American military garrisons, now present in a majority of the world's states: a modern-day empire by any other name. But along with France, Britain is the only US ally still able to "project force" globally and has long played the role of unsinkable aircraft carrier: a US forward base, from which military operations are routinely launched across the globe.

But whose interests are actually served by such a role? No doubt arms contractors are delighted, but it's hard to argue that it benefits the British people – let alone those on the receiving end of the US and British military. Politicians and securocrats claim it gives them influence over US policy, but they struggle to produce the evidence on the rare occasions they're asked to explain how. "The foreign policy elite still have a strong idea," as the Chatham House analyst James de Waal puts it, that intervention based on "values" is an "innate part of what the UK is all about". In fact, what successive governments have done is mortgaged Britain's security and independence to a foreign power – and placed its armed forces, territory and weaponry at the disposal of a system of global domination and privilege, now clearly past its peak.

As was made clear by ministers more than a decade ago, there are now no circumstances in which British governments envisage the use of military force, except in harness with the US. Even Britain's own colonial-era overseas bases, such as Diego Garcia, have long been handed over to the US military, while its inhabitants were expelled. Britain's fake patriots who bleat about the power of the European Commission are more than happy to subordinate the country's foreign policy to the Pentagon and allow its forces permanent bases on British soil.

From the American point of view, its network of intelligence and military bases in Britain may help keep the country tied to the US global network. There's no doubt that would be difficult to disentangle, and there is no shortage of pressure points to discourage even a modest disengagement. The idea of a British Rafael Correa – the Ecuadorean president who closed the US Manta airbase in 2007, saying he'd reconsider the situation if the Americans let Ecuador open a base in Miami – is still political science fiction.

But the withdrawal of British troops from Germany and this year's planned renewal of the US-British defence agreement offer a chance to have a real debate on the US military relationship – and demand some transparency and accountability in the process. There is no case for maintaining foreign military bases to defend the country against a non-existent enemy. They should be closed. Instead of a craven "partnership" with a still powerful, but declining empire, Britain could start to have an independent relationship with the rest of the world.

Twitter: @SeumasMilne

US militaryUS foreign policyUS defence spendingMilitarySeumas Milne
theguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Who's to blame for the crisis, bankers or benefit claimants? | Seumas Milne

Class is the real dividing line in British politics, but politicians only talk about the middle class. That will have to change

David Cameron's is a government of naked class interest. Its leading party is the political wing of the City of London. For all its Liberal Democrat fig leaves, it is waging war on the poor while slashing taxes for banks, corporate giants and the richest people in Britain. Its cuts have hit the most deprived, the disabled and women hardest.

In crucial ways – the scale of its attacks on social security, service privatisation and falling living standards for the majority – Cameron's coalition has outdone even Margaret Thatcher. Its austerity programme halted recovery for four years and has cut most people's real terms pay deeper and over a longer period than at any time since the 19th century. Wealth is being energetically redistributed up the income scale.

This is the government of foodbanks, payday loans and the bedroom tax. None of that is, of course, very popular. So to divert anger from the top to the bottom – from those who caused the economic crisis to its most deprived victims – Tory politicians and their allies have turned their fire on migrants and benefit claimants.

If they can convince enough people that the crash of 2008 and the stagnation since 2010 has been the result of too much welfare spending, rather than financial speculation and recovery-choking austerity, they're in with a shout at the next election. In this task, they have the advantage of a mostly pliable media running a daily campaign against "welfare" and immigration.

Latest up has been Channel 4's Benefits Street series about a deprived area of Birmingham, which kicked off with a Little Britain-style portrayal of unemployed claimants as criminals, scroungers and addicts. It's only one of a string of such shows whose themes are the meat and drink of Tory tabloids.

The reality of the social security system George Osborne is now aiming to cut by a further £12bn is very different. Most goes on pensions, and far more is spent subsidising in-work poverty wages and insecure jobs than the unemployed. But the distorting mirror of the press and current political debate means that, on average, people think 41% of the welfare budget goes to the unemployed, when the real figure is 3% – and that 27% is claimed fraudulently, when the government's own figure is 0.7%. That's about £1bn, compared to an estimated £70bn of tax evasion.

Which gives a clue as to which class interest the government is most concerned to protect. To listen to politicians and the media, you'd think the only class left standing was the middle class. By definition, there must be something above and below this mysteriously undefined class, but almost nobody in public life wants to mention what it might be.

Across the world, corporate elites routinely hail the growth of a middle class as the elixir of development and civilisation. In the US, it has long been the only mentionable class in political life. Britain is going the same way. But contrary to the media mythology of "we're all middle class now", most people continue to regard themselves as working class – 60% in the most recent British Social Attitudes Survey.

Those words, however, almost never pass the lips of mainstream politicians. They'll use all sorts of euphemisms, such as "hard-working people" (or "working people", if a Labour politician is being especially daring) – the implication being that everyone else is somehow part of a feckless underclass. Only Ukip's Nigel Farage, now fishing for disaffected Labour voters, uses the term regularly. For the rest, it's as if to conjure up the reality of working-class Britain – including its traditional association with unions, solidarity and demands – might be too alarming for other sections of the population.

Ed Miliband has this week promised readers of the Conservative Daily Telegraph that Labour would "rebuild our middle class", threatened by the living-standards crisis afflicting the majority in Britain. The rebuilding of the working class wasn't mentioned, only "people on tax credits, zero-hours contracts and the minimum wage" – in other words, poorer sections of the working class.

Whether the Labour leader meant his "squeezed middle", those on middle incomes (about £22,000 a year), deskilled professionals or the more affluent being displaced by the super-rich, he's right that a winning electoral coalition for Labour has always been based on an alliance of working class and middle-class support. But to treat working-class voters as the captive "poor" would only risk increasing political alienation and the toxic appeal of the populist right.

The same goes for the other side of the class coin. If the middle class is being squeezed, it's certainly not by manual or white-collar workers. But just as the working class has been airbrushed out of public debate, the ruling class responsible for the crisis still gripping Britain and most of the western world is also hardly mentioned in polite company – though it sometimes gets a walk-on part as the "elite", or the "establishment".

The crudeness of the class egotism and greed that has driven much of western politics in recent years means that can't last. In fact, class politics has been resurfacing in different forms since the crash – from the Occupy movement's targeting of the 1% to the rise of the left in Greece and the election of the progressive Democrat Bill de Blasio as mayor of New York.

In Britain, the social costs being exacted on behalf of a failed elite means class is "the real dividing line in British politics", as one Telegraph commentator puts it. Cameron and Osborne now insist they want to make small-state austerity permanent, and are threatening another £25bn of cuts as they demand welfare states be slashed across Europe. They're hoping the current increase in credit and consumption will boost real wages before the election and soften the sense of a recovery for the rich – though there's little sign of that as yet.

They're also trying to push those Labour frontbenchers who want to "shrink the offer" to the electorate to embrace more cuts and austerity. That would be self-harm. Whenever Miliband has challenged corporate and elite interests, from the energy monopolies to Rupert Murdoch, his support has grown.

The government and their friends in the media want to turn people's anger at poverty and insecurity against their neighbours. The alternative is to turn it against the bonus-grabbing bankers, tax-dodgers, rapacious landlords and employers who are actually responsible.

Twitter: @SeumasMilne

ConservativesBankingLabourEd MilibandDavid CameronSeumas Milne
theguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

First world war: an imperial bloodbath that's a warning, not a noble cause | Seumas Milne

Tory claims that 1914 was a fight for freedom are absurd – but then history wars are about the future as much as the past

They were never going to be able to contain themselves. For all the promises of a dignified commemoration, the Tory right's standard bearers held back for less than 48 hours into the new year before launching a full-throated defence of the "war to end all wars". The killing fields of Gallipoli and the Somme had been drenched in blood for a "noble cause", declared Michael Gove. The slaughter unleashed in 1914 had been a "just war" for freedom.

Hostility to the war, the education secretary complained, had been fostered by leftwingers and comedians who denigrated patriotism and painted the conflict as a "misbegotten shambles". Gove was backed by the prime minister, as talk of international reconciliation was left to junior ministerial ranks.

Boris Johnson went further. The war was the fault of German expansionism and aggression, London's mayor pronounced, and called for Labour's shadow education secretary Tristram Hunt to be sacked forthwith if he doubted it. The Conservative grandees were backed up by a retinue of more-or-less loyal historians. Max Hastings reckoned it had been fought in defence of "international law" and small nations, while Antony Beevor took aim at "anti-militarists".

This is all preposterous nonsense. Unlike the second world war, the bloodbath of 1914-18 was not a just war. It was a savage industrial slaughter perpetrated by a gang of predatory imperial powers, locked in a deadly struggle to capture and carve up territories, markets and resources.

Germany was the rising industrial power and colonial Johnny-come-lately of the time, seeking its place in the sun from the British and French empires. The war erupted directly from the fight for imperial dominance in the Balkans, as Austria-Hungary and Russia scrapped for the pickings from the crumbling Ottoman empire. All the ruling elites of Europe, tied together in a deathly quadrille of unstable alliances, shared the blame for the murderous barbarism they oversaw. The idea that Britain and its allies were defending liberal democracy, let alone international law or the rights of small nations, is simply absurd.

It's not just that 40% of men and all women in Britain were denied the vote in 1914 – unlike Germany, which already had full male suffrage – or that the British empire was allied with the brutal autocracy of tsarist Russia.

Every single one of the main warring states was involved in the violent suppression of the rights of nations throughout the racist tyrannies that were their colonial empires. In the decades before 1914, about 30 million people died from famine as colonial officials enforced the export of food in British-ruled India, slaughtered resisters in their tens of thousands and set up concentration camps in South Africa.

Britain was supposed to have gone to war to defend the neutrality of "plucky little Belgium" – which had itself presided over the death of 10 million Congolese from forced labour and mass murder in the previous couple of decades. German colonialists had carried out systematic genocide in what is now Namibia in the same period.

As to international law, Britain's disdain for it was demonstrated when Germany had asked by what right it claimed territory in Africa a few years before. London refused to reply. The answer was obvious: brute force. This was the "liberal" global order for which, in the words of the war poet Wilfred Owen, the ruling classes "slew half the seed of Europe, one by one".

In reality, it wasn't just the seed of Europe they sacrificed, but hundreds of thousands of troops from their colonies as well. And in case there were any doubt that all the main combatants were in the land-grabbing expansion game, Britain and France then divvied up the defeated German and Ottoman empires between them, from Palestine to Cameroon, without a thought for small nations' rights, laying the ground for future disasters in the process.

Gove and his fellow war apologists worry that satirical shows such as Blackadder have sapped patriotism by portraying the war as "a series of catastrophic mistakes perpetrated by an out-of-touch elite". The incompetence and cynicism of generals and politicians certainly had horrific results. But it was the nature of the war itself that was most depraved.

Fortunately, the revisionists lost the argument among the public long ago – just as Gove has largely lost his battle to impose a tub-thumping imperial agenda on the school history curriculum. They will keep trying though, because history wars are about the future as much as the past – and so long as imperial conflict is discredited, future foreign military interventions and occupations will be difficult to sell.

For the rest of us, this year's anniversary should be a reminder that empire in all its forms, militarism and national chauvinism lead to bloodshed and disaster. It also contains a warning about the threat from the rise and fall of great powers. China is no imperial Germany, but the US – allied with Japan – is a declining global power in a region in which it is tightening its military grip. It's not 1914, but the dangers are clear.

Twitter: @seumasmilne

• This article was amended on 14 January 2014. It originally stated that in 1914, most men did not have the vote. This has now been corrected.

First world warMilitaryMichael GoveConservativesHistory and history of artEducation policySeumas Milne
theguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Scapegoating migrants for Britain's crisis will damage us all | Seumas Milne

The Tories and Ukip are vying to terrify the public about Romanians and Bulgarians. What's needed is protection at work and a crash housing programme

It's the influx that never was. New Year's Day, we were told by rightwing politicians and press, would be the day the floodgates opened. Romanians and Bulgarians, free at last to work in Britain without restrictions, would come in their hordes. Beggars and benefit scroungers would be battering on our doors. The country would be swamped.

But when it came to it, there was no sign of them: no special coaches, no temporary camps and plenty of spare seats on flights from Bucharest and Sofia. It's not so hard to work out why. Romanians and Bulgarians have been able to live and work throughout the European Union since 2007. There are already about 150,000 in Britain, 2 million in Italy and Spain, and seven other EU countries lifted working restrictions yesterday, including France and Germany.

No doubt the numbers will pick up, though it won't be on the scale of the east European migration of the past decade. But for months, we have been subjected to a drumbeat of hysteria, as the Tories vied with the nationalist UK Independence party to terrify the public about the coming onslaught and promise ever more meaningless or toxic crackdowns, egged on by a xenophobic media.

Migrants will be charged for emergency hospital treatment at their bedside, the government announced – but that won't apply to EU citizens. The Daily Mail and 90 Conservative activists begged David Cameron to invoke an EU "safeguard clause" to keep the curbs on Bulgarian and Romanian employment in place, while Tory ministers claimed they were being blocked by the Liberal Democrats. It was grandstanding nonsense, as the European commission would have had to agree to it.

Cameron claimed he was going to clamp down on "benefit tourism", for which the government conceded there was in fact no "quantitative evidence". He then announced migrants would no longer be able to claim out-of-work benefits for three months – which is effectively already the case. The depraved nadir of this migrant-baiting Dutch auction was reached when Ukip's leader, Nigel Farage, made clear that his call for Syrian refugees to be allowed into Britain would apply to Christians only.

In reality, the politicians are posturing because they can't control EU migration, but need a scapegoat for falling living standards, shrinking public services and the housing shortage. Faced with the electoral threat from Ukip, the Tories and their friends in the media have reached for the tried and tested alternative of blaming foreigners.

That will only strengthen Ukip's appeal. But it will also degrade social life and undermine economic recovery, as the government tries to restrict the right of British citizens to bring in a non-European spouse to those earning over £18,600 a year and clamps down on non-EU students. After years in which the explosive link between immigration and race has been partly defused, expect abuse of Roma people, Europe's most shamefully treated minority, to be ratcheted up.

That's far easier for the government and its supporters than dealing with the causes of the crisis through which people experience mass migration. As Damian Drăghici, Roma adviser to the Romanian prime minister, put it this week, Britain should be more worried about bankers "stealing billions" than "Roma begging in the street".

The growth of large-scale migration is after all part of the system of corporate globalisation that took hold in the past 30 years and widened inequality both within and between countries. It's also been fuelled by 15 years of western wars and intervention from Afghanistan to Somalia. And in eastern Europe, the exploitation and migration of low-waged and skilled workers has been central to the neoliberal model imposed after 1989.

It's that model that crashed in 2008 after years of stagnating real wages had fuelled the rise of the populist right across the continent. Public opposition to immigration in Britain isn't just a product of xenophobia or media mendacity, as sometimes claimed, but people's response to its impact on a deregulated labour market, under-invested housing and slashed public services.

In the past decade, European migration was used as a sort of 21st-century incomes policy in Britain as employers ruthlessly exploited migrant labour to hold down wages – which have since been cut in real terms for four years in a row as a result of the crisis.

The ready supply of low-cost migrant labour was only one factor in the earlier wage stagnation, which was driven by globalised trade, technology and the decline of unions. But the determination to fight anti-migrant bigotry and racism can lead some to romanticise deregulated migration as an undiluted good on whatever scale.

That's clearly not the case for either source countries, which can be stripped of skilled workers and professionals by richer states, or migrants subject to abuse and discrimination. Immigration rules for EU states, such as Britain, are incidentally heavily skewed in favour of white migrants.

For host countries, the overall economic impact of immigration may be positive, even if Britain's growth was relatively sluggish before the crash. And press and politicians' claims that migrants are a drain on the public finances is clearly nonsense. They are far less likely to claim benefits than those born in Britain and they make a large net contribution in taxes.

But the class impact is something else. Whatever the effect on average wages, there is clear evidence that lower-paid and unskilled workers' wages are often squeezed or cut by the exploitation of migrant workers in, say, construction or care work – while well-off professionals typically benefit from cheaper restaurants and domestic cleaners. And the competition for scarce housing and overstretched public services is greatest in the poorer areas where migrants tend to live.

That's why the policies that are desperately needed for the majority to break the grip of a failed economic model would also help make regulated migration work for all: stronger trade unions, a higher minimum wage, a shift from state-subsidised low pay to a living wage, a crash housing investment programme, a halt to cuts in public services, and an end to the outsourced race to the bottom in employment conditions. Those changes are necessary in themselves – but are also essential to draw the poison from immigration.

Twitter: @SeumasMilne

Immigration and asylumRomaniaBulgariaEuropeGlobalisationEuropean UnionEconomicsSeumas Milne
theguardian.com © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds