THE past week has posed sharply the confrontation between peoples and governments across Europe.
In Britain, striking workers brought London to a standstill on Budget day.
You wouldn’t know it from British broadcasters, but the size of the huge union demonstrations thronging the streets of the capital was clear from aerial footage shown by European TV channels.
Closeted in the Palace of Westminster a tin-eared Chancellor had nothing to offer on pay or public services.
In France, the streets erupted as President Emmanuel Macron rammed through a deeply unpopular attack on pensions by decree, overriding parliamentary processes.
In Germany, health workers walked out in a 48-hour strike for pay rises and against plans to cut hospital beds and jobs that form part of a wider assault on public healthcare.
In Greece, rage at a crooked political elite whose record of cuts and privatisations is rightly held responsible for the deaths of 57 people in the Tempe rail crash has seen mammoth demos sweep the country and pitched battles provoked by police.
What do these governments have in common? A cost-cutting agenda that is breaking public services, impoverishing the majority and killing people, whether through eroded safety systems or delayed ambulances.
What else? A seemingly inexhaustible supply of funds for an arms race that threatens a new world war.
The Greek government that supposedly cannot afford to maintain a safe transport network has increased military spending by more than 60 per cent since 2019.
The German government which can’t help hospitals with a projected €4 billion black hole caused by soaring energy prices last year announced an extra €100bn for the armed forces.
The French government that claims its pensions are unaffordable said in January it would raise its defence budget by over a third in the next few years and the British Chancellor who smirks that a “persuasive” Defence Secretary has convinced him to chuck another £11bn at the military has nothing in the kitty for nurses, teachers or civil servants.
These are choices, and it is vital that message is popularised on strike demos and at union meetings.
The government’s case rests on the illusion that we have no choice.
That there is no money for the NHS. That we have to raise arms spending in a more dangerous world.
But who is making that world more dangerous? Did years of Nato military build-ups on Russia’s borders prevent the terrible war in Ukraine or provoke it? Is Britain’s security enhanced by plonking aircraft carriers off the Chinese coast, or does it place us needlessly in the line of fire if the United States decides to start a Pacific war?
Because we face choices of another sort. Tailing along in the wake of US foreign policy is cutting Britain off from a changing world.
Last year a record 1,104 scientists and postgraduate students were denied visas to work here, a near-tenfold rise on the figure just two years earlier and a hundred times more than in 2016, as institutional hostility to China severs ties with a scientific giant. The prospects for international co-operation in fields like climate change or eradicating disease dwindle accordingly.
The China-brokered Saudi-Iran deal shows a wider reorientation, as emerging economies move out of Washington’s orbit. And the calls for a negotiated peace in Ukraine from Brazil, India and China show the Nato camp is at odds with world opinion.
Our subservience to Washington is costing the earth. Accepting the higher arms spending it dictates means accepting British workers will keep getting poorer. Its diplomatic consequences isolate us on the world stage.
An independent foreign policy — one that breaks free from a declining empire, apparently prepared to start a world war to maintain its supremacy — would give us options.
Options on trade, options on co-operation, options on spending that are currently being denied us.
