48 Britain The EconomistNovember 9th 2019
J
eremy corbynhas the most radical views on national security of
any leader in the Labour Party’s history. He is a long-standing op-
ponent of both natoand nuclear weapons. He has called Hamas
and Hezbollah “friends”. Faced with overwhelming evidence of
Russian state involvement in the poisoning of two people in Salis-
bury, he first obfuscated and then demanded that Russia should be
involved in the investigation.
And yet the public has remained surprisingly indifferent to
these brutal facts. In the election of 2017, the right-leaning press
launched a fierce attack on Mr Corbyn’s foreign-policy views.
Readers yawned. This time the bombardment has started again,
but to no obvious effect. The only national-security question that
has caught fire is the government’s refusal to publish a parliamen-
tary report on alleged Russian meddling in British politics.
Mr Corbyn has been protected from proper scrutiny by three
convenient assumptions: that his heart is in the right place; that he
will drop his “ban the bomb” idealism when confronted with reali-
ty; and, third, that Labour moderates will be able to control him.
Let’s examine each of these in turn.
Mr Corbyn is, in fact, very far from the cuddly pacifist of Glas-
tonbury lore. The core of his beliefs is not opposition to war but op-
position to “Western imperialism”. His hostility to “imperial pow-
ers” (most notably America and Israel) is so fierce that he is willing
to make excuses for “anti-imperial powers” such as Russia and Syr-
ia, as well as terrorist organisations like Hezbollah and Hamas. His
support for national liberation movements stops short of support
for the people of Crimea, Georgia or Ukraine. His sympathy for vic-
tims of oppression turns cold when the countries doing the op-
pressing are Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuela
or, in the 1990s, Slobodan Milosevic’s Serbia. In a speech in 2014
celebrating the 35th anniversary of the Iranian revolution, he
praised the regime’s “tolerance and acceptance of other faiths, tra-
ditions and ethnic groupings”.
Mr Corbyn is no more likely to drop these views than he is to
join the sas. A geopolitics obsessive, he has been banging the same
drums since the late 1970s, if not before (his parents were subscrib-
ers to the propaganda sheet, Soviet News). If anything, his views
have hardened. In 1999 and 2000 he signed a number of parliamen-tarymotionscriticisingRussia’sinvasion of Chechnya. More re-
cently he has bent over backwards to excuse Mr Putin’s adventures
in his near abroad (and indeed in Salisbury). Since taking over as
Labour leader in 2015 he has surrounded himself with advisers,
such as Seumas Milne and Andrew Murray, who have spent their
lives on the farthest fringes of the far left.
What about the idea that all this is hot air? Labour moderates
(who constitute the vast majority of the party’s mps) will step in to
prevent Mr Corbyn from wreaking havoc, the argument goes. And
besides, he will probably be able to form a government only in alli-
ance with other parties, most prominently the Scottish National
Party (snp). Mr Corbyn has abandoned his opposition to Britain’s
trident missile system under pressure both from his mps and from
Len McCluskey, the head of the Unite trade union, who thinks that
jobs trump geopolitics. And most of the day-to-day work of de-
fence and security is a matter of long-established routine that goes
on beyond the prime minister’s ken.
All that is wishful thinking. Foreign policy gives prime minis-
ters more freedom from parliamentary scrutiny than domestic
policy. Downing Street has been accumulating power over security
policy for decades, even more so since the creation of the National
Security Council in 2010. The snpis sympathetic to Mr Corbyn’s
views on foreign policy, adopting the toe-curling slogan “bairns
[babies] not bombs” and campaigning for the removal of Britain’s
nuclear submarines from their base in Scotland. As chancellor,
John McDonnell would exercise even more control over domestic
policy than Gordon Brown did. That would leave a notably vain
prime minister looking for another way of making his mark. The
Downing Street bully pulpit would give him the opportunity to
opine to the world on things he cares about, such as Israeli foreign
policy and Donald Trump’s failures. The next national-security re-
view, due in 2020, offers a chance to revisit questions of hard pow-
er, such as Britain’s commitment to spend 2% of gdpon defence.One-man army
A Corbyn-led government would quickly lead to the biggest
change in Britain’s defence posture since the second world war.
Even if the country stayed in nato, as is likely, it would be a passive
member, reluctant to push back against Russian expansionism
and hostile to the idea of a nuclear deterrent. Given that natode-
pends on confidence that it means what it says, this would be a se-
vere blow to its credibility. Britain’s Middle East policy would be
revolutionised, with a more hostile stance towards Israel and the
Gulf states, particularly Saudi Arabia, and a friendlier one to Iran.
America would almost certainly stop sharing critical intelligence
with Downing Street, for fear that such secrets would find their
way into Russian or Iranian hands. Given Britain’s membership of
the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, that would harm Europe’s abili-
ty to combat hostile states and non-state actors.
Such a revolution would come at a sensitive time. Mr Trump is
already disrupting established security relations (for all their dif-
ferences, he and Mr Corbyn share a common hostility to the multi-
national institutions that have kept the peace since 1945). Brexit is
straining relations with Britain’s European allies, while gobbling
up the political class’s available bandwidth. The Foreign Office is
demoralised by decades of cuts, and the security establishment is
still tainted by the weapons-of-mass-destruction fiasco. All this is
taking place at a time when Mr Putin is on the march and Islamic
State is shifting its focus from state-building to global terror. A
dangerous world may be about to become more dangerous. 7Bagehot Security questions
A government led by Jeremy Corbyn would present a radical challenge to Britain’s global alliances