OUR ALLIES ARE FLAILING
What U.K. vote means to us
The political chaos that has paralyzed the United Kingdom with the crippling of Theresa May’s Conservative government at the polls Thursday is an instructive illustration of the disruptive anxiety and exhaustion sweeping the West that Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland warned about in her address to the House of Commons this week.
A “hung Parliament” has left the Conservatives without a majority in Westminster, and without anything like the renewed mandate May had hoped the election would give her in the looming “Brexit” negotiations with the European Union, scheduled to begin in 10 days.
The surprising surge of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party is no herald or harbinger of a similar leftpopulist uprising in Canada, but the trajectory of British politics presents grave implications for the institutions of global peace and prosperity that Freeland properly acknowledged as having guaranteed Canada’s good fortune for the past 70 years. Corbyn’s long-march insurrection against the British political order, which broke through two years ago with his overthrow of the Labour Party establishment, is animated by exactly the discontent that Freeland attributed to “an exhaustion in the West of the belief among working people, the middle class, that the globalized system can help them better their lives.”
While Freeland made reference to American voters opting out of global leadership by electing Donald Trump in last November’s presidential elections, Corbynism arises from the same disillusionment. “At the root of this anxiety around the world is a pervasive sense that too many people have been left behind,” Freeland noted, “betrayed by a system they were promised would make them better off, but hasn’t.”
Still, just as Canada is not the United States – the perfectly respectable, newly elected Conservative leader Andrew Scheer is no Donald Trump – Canada is not Britain, either. Justin Trudeau’s Liberals got themselves elected by campaigning more or less to the left of the NDP, and the Liberals are still governing from a broadly liberalleft standpoint. Justin Trudeau is no Theresa May.
There’s certainly space available on the “left” in Canada. Public opinion polling shows an enormous public appetite for levying far heavier taxes on the rich, for instance. It’s no great stretch to imagine a reconstituted New Democratic Party gambling on a replication of Corbyn’s election manifesto, with its suite of re-nationalizations, free daycare and tuition and other 1970s-era social-democratic boilerplate. Corbyn proposed to pay for all this by slapping a 50 per cent tax rate on annual earnings above the equivalent of about $215,000, and hiking the corporate tax rate from 19 per cent to 26 per cent.
It’s the rest of the Corbynite package that would be kryptonite to most Canadians.
It involves a pattern of squalid associations and sordid ideology of exactly the kind that NDP leader Tom Mulcair, to his credit, has managed to isolate and quarantine at the edges of the NDP. It’s not just that elements of Corbyn’s Labour Party that are “institutionally anti- Semitic,” as a British Parliamentary Committee reported last year.
It’s not just that Corbyn has referred to Hamas and Hezbollah as his “friends,” or his collaborations with Islamist homophobes, Holocaust deniers and hate preachers. It would be hard to imagine an NDP leader getting away with accepting the equivalent of $34,000 from Press TV, the English language propaganda channel of the Khomeinist regime in Tehran, as Corbyn did, while serving as an MP.
Trump, already notorious for his contemptuous remarks about the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, refused to commit the United States to NATO’s mutual-defence clause during a meeting with NATO heads in Brussels two weeks ago. That’s nothing. Back in 2011, Corbyn was advocating what he called “a campaign against NATO’s power, its influence and its global reach.”
Throughout the recent British election campaign, Corbyn managed to dodge questions about where he stands on NATO, exactly, but as recently as two years ago he was arguing for NATO’s dismantling: “It’s a Cold War organization. It should have been wound up in 1990 along with the Warsaw Pact.”
In March 2014, the Kremlin placed Freeland, Scheer, then-NDP MP Paul Dewar and 10 other Canadians on a “banned” list for their outspoken support of retaliatory sanctions following the Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea. The following month, Corbyn wrote an article for the Morning Star newspaper defending Russia, blaming NATO and “the U.S. drive to expand eastwards” for the Ukraine crisis. Russia’s actions were “not unprovoked,” he wrote.
While Corbyn was a leader of the British “anti-war” protests against the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, Corbyn also opposed the UN intervention in Afghanistan, the UN-authorized Libyan no-fly zone, the British intervention against the ISIL, and the 1999 NATO intervention in Kosovo. Several NATO countries have lately deployed troops to the Baltic states in an exercise aimed countering Russian threats in the region. Canada is sending a battle group to Latvia. The United Kingdom has contributed 800 troops in Estonia. Corbyn opposes the NATO mission in the Baltic altogether. He says Britain hasn’t been involved in a just war since 1945.
This is not to plead the case for the ashen-faced, incompetent and duplicitous Theresa May. Even with Corbyn’s Labour Party losing the election on Thursday, the United Kingdom is deeply polarized and divided against itself, and the British political scene is now more or less as dysfunctional as American politics have become under Trump. The Conservatives are expected to hang onto power only barely, and only with the help of the 10 Ulster Democratic Unionist Party MPs.
Nobody knows what the U.K.’s position will be if and when negotiations to disentangle the U.K. from the European Union begin. With the recently concluded Canada-European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), Canada is now on a more solid trade footing with Europe than the United Kingdom is.
That’s a good thing for Canada, but the global infrastructure Canada relies upon is brittle, and it’s collapsing. With all the fuss about the United States admitting to its NATO partners that it can’t be counted on, what’s gone unnoticed is that NATO’s second-largest military component consists of the Turkish Armed Forces. Over the past three years, Turkey has rapidly descended into a grotesquely authoritarian, comic-book revival of the longdead Ottoman caliphate. Turkey can’t be counted on anymore, either.
The United Kingdom and the United States are Canada’s oldest and most affectionate friends and allies, and now they’re barely functioning.
Freeland is not wrong to plead for a strengthening of the global rules-based order deriving from the UN, NATO, the World Trade Organization, the G7, and so on. But that world is getting smaller, every day.