Within the British political class there has been a near-universal consensus for supporting Ukraine in its war with Russia.  The UK elite has committed itself to sanctioning Moscow and to supplying weapons and other forms of aid to Kiev.  Remarkably, this policy has brought no tangible benefits to Britain.  In fact, it has imposed substantial costs on the country, especially on ordinary, working class people.  How has the political elite been able to pursue a policy so damaging to its citizens?  And why is it committed to waging a proxy war on Russia? 

The British elite’s pursuit of this policy has been enabled by the historic defeat of the working class and the UK state’s growing reliance on financial markets.  This change in the balance of class power has weakened the voices of ordinary people and has prompted the political elite to actively curtail the public’s influence on policy.  Consequently, the British elite faces little compulsion to govern in the interests of the masses.  These domestic conditions also encourage British elites to seek a larger international role.  Their participation in the proxy war stems from their loyalty to an American-led international order, but it ultimately reflects the sense of purpose – a delusion of grandeur – they gain from being close to the US hegemon. 

British Interests Aren’t Being Served

The international relations scholar David Chandler has observed that since the end of the Cold War, western states have tended to involve themselves in parts of the world “where [they] have little economic or geostrategic interest”.  The UK’s involvement in the Ukraine war fits this pattern.  

Britain’s direct economic interests in Ukraine are negligible.  As of 2021, Ukraine was the UK’s 53^rd biggest import partner and its 48^th biggest export partner.  In that year, trade between the two countries amounted to 0.2% of Britain’s global trade.  Ukraine has economic value to Britain as a transit country for Russian gas and as a major exporter of grain, insofar as the smooth flow of these commodities eases global energy and food prices.  Yet this interest isn’t being served as Britain’s actions towards Ukraine have contributed to a reduced supply of these goods. 

Sacrificing economic benefits might make sense if Britain had major geostrategic interests in Ukraine, but it hasn’t.  UK elites claim that Ukraine is holding back “Putin’s deranged imperialist revanchism” and so is vital to British (and European) security.  But Russia’s war aims appear to be defensive and limited.  NATO has been expanding eastwards since the 1990s and in 2008 the organization announced that Ukraine would become a member.  These developments pose a major threat to Russia, not least raising the prospect of NATO installing nuclear missiles right on its border.  According to David Arakhamia, Ukraine’s chief diplomat in peace talks held in March 2022, Russia was “prepared to end the war if [Ukraine] committed to not join NATO”.  Jans Stoltenberg, former general secretary of NATO, admits that prior to the war the Kremlin sent him a “draft treaty … to sign” that would “promise no more NATO enlargement” and that this was the “precondition [for Russia] not [to] invade Ukraine”.  Russia seems to be seeking security on its western border, not the conquest of Europe.  

But even if the Kremlin is driven by grand imperial designs, there remains the question of capacity.  Russia has responded effectively to western sanctions and in some estimates its army is 15% larger now than it was at the start of the war.  It clearly has significant capabilities.  Yet, despite the British elite’s proclivity for Hitlerite analogies, Russia’s forces aren’t in a position to blitzkrieg their way across Europe. As Arta Moeini puts it, “Russia is unable to conquer and hold even half of Ukraine, let alone expand beyond it”.  The British elite’s geostrategic rationale is therefore flimsy.  

Damaging UK State and Society

There are, then, no meaningful national interests behind the UK’s Ukraine policy.  But it gets worse.  Not only does this policy serve no national interests, it actually damages British state and society. 

Britain, like other western countries, has gifted (and continues to gift) billions in military hardware to Kiev.  So extensive has this been, that Britain’s own armed forces are facing severe shortages.  Reports have warned that if the UK was to find itself in a high-intensity war of the sort taking place in Ukraine, its stockpiles of ammunition would be exhausted in days.  Furthermore, owing to decades of deindustrialization, Britain lacks the capacity to rapidly replenish these resources.  The political class itself admits that under present conditions, it would take at least a decade to make up for this shortfall.

This situation isn’t static and policymakers could in theory expand industrial and defence capabilities.  There are, however, two problems with this.  Firstly, deindustrialization was in large measure driven by changes in the balance of class power and for reasons discussed in more depth below, capital’s ascendancy has eviscerated state capacities. It’s unlikely therefore that the British state has what Cédric Durand calls “the technical-administrative capability to enforce industrial policy”.

Secondly, Britain’s response to the Ukraine war has had serious fiscal costs.  Sanctions on Russia produced inflation, especially in the form of higher energy prices.  To deal with this problem, the government in October 2022 introduced the energy price guarantee, which lowered household electricity and gas bills by subsidising energy firms.  These subsidies are financed by public debt and are forecast to cost £150 billion.  At the same time, the Bank of England raised interest rates to loosen the labor market and bring down inflation, making borrowing more expensive.  Interest payments alone on public debt for 2022-2023 totalled £111 billion, approximating the annual budget for education.  Through their Ukraine policy, British elites have weakened the country’s defence capabilities and have brought about a more constrained fiscal environment.  

These fiscal costs also further heighten the state’s dependency on financial markets, feeding into a longer-term trend of UK governments relying on borrowing to cover expenditure.  Policymakers can’t assume an unlimited demand for UK public debt and so they have to actively maintain investor confidence.  Currently, however, this confidence is waning.  

A clear sign of declining investor confidence is the yield on gilts (British government bonds).  The yield is the amount the government has to pay to borrow, and the current rate of over 4% is comparatively high, indicating that investors require a “bigger risk premium” to purchase public debt.  This declining confidence stems in part from the antics of the short-lived Liz Truss government, which sought to stimulate economic growth through unfunded tax cuts.  Investors concluded that Truss’ September 2022 ‘mini-budget’ would add further inflationary pressure to the economy, necessitating steeper interest rate rises.  As interest rates go up, the price of bonds goes down, prompting a rapid sell-off of gilts and a depreciation of the pound to a record low relative to the dollar.  The market’s reaction disciplined the state: the ‘mini-budget’ was reversed and the then governing Conservative party replaced Truss and her chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng with Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt.

Yet, for all Truss’ and Kwarteng’s disconnect from economic reality, the market’s reaction wouldn’t have been so severe if it wasn’t for the underlying issues of growing public indebtedness, higher inflation, and tighter monetary policy – all factors exacerbated or driven by the British elite’s participation in the proxy war on Russia.  Moreover, neither the removal of Truss nor the election of a new Labour government headed by Keir Starmer has substantially lowered the yield on gilts, suggesting that global capital views these underlying conditions as being deeply set.  This has significant political implications. 

The sociologist Wolfgang Streeck states that the “politics of public debt may be conceived in terms of a distributional conflict between creditors and citizens”.  We can extend this conflict here to include the Kiev regime.  Who is going to lose this struggle at this particular juncture?  Given the British state’s dependence on financial markets, it’s not going to be creditors.  Not long before they were voted out, the Conservatives pledged a further £3 billion in military aid to Kiev and stated that the UK would “stand with Ukraine for as long as it takes”.  Labour has said that under its government, “the UK’s military, financial, diplomatic, and political support for Ukraine will remain steadfast”.  So, it doesn’t seem that Kiev is going to lose – which leaves British citizens.  

But how exactly are British citizens going to lose?  The new Labour government is looking to reassure creditors that their debts will be serviced through a combination of tax rises and public spending cuts.  Chancellor Rachel Reeves has vowed to abide by self-imposed “fiscal rules” that make “sure that we … get debt on a downward trajectory”.  And since taking office, she has announced a slew of cuts to public services and infrastructure projects and has paused plans to build forty new hospitals.         

The fiscal costs stemming from the political elite’s Ukraine policy are thus going to be imposed on British citizens in the form of austerity.  Yet, while British people lose, they don’t all lose to the same degree.  The working classes make more use of public services than the middle classes, so it’s ordinary people who are going to suffer the most from austerity; it’s their life chances that are going to be curtailed. 

It’s worthwhile recalling here that this wasn’t what was promised.  Following the 2016 Brexit referendum, elites said that they would shift “the balance of Britain decisively in favour of ordinary working class people”.  After their emphatic victory in the 2019 general election, the Conservatives declared that they would “level up” the country by improving “pay, jobs, and living standards” in those predominantly working class areas that had been ‘left behind’.  That elites have prioritized proxy war against Russia and are embarking on another period of austerity shows the emptiness of their promises to the working class, their disregard for ordinary people.      

The Political Class Wasn’t Always Like This

Britain’s political elite hasn’t always served the interests of ordinary people so badly.  In the three decades after World War Two, policymakers went to considerable lengths to improve the life chances of the average citizen.  The political priority at this time was full employment and as David Edgerton shows in The Rise and Fall of the British Nation, this period was a success for the working class, with a higher share of national income going to labor.  What changed? 

For commentators such as Paul Embery, the key change has been in the moral character of the elite.  In the full employment era, the political class was driven by moral conviction; it took democracy “seriously” and so exercised “political authority over the economy” to benefit ordinary people.  Today, by contrast, the elite simply isn’t “good enough” and is “abdicating [its] responsibilities” to British citizens. When we consider the miserable behavior of Boris Johnson, the imprudence of Liz Truss, and the stodginess of Keir Starmer, we may be tempted to think that Embery has a point.  But that would be a mistake.  

Embery gives too much weight to individual virtue and is too optimistic.  There may have been morally upstanding figures within the UK’s postwar elite.  But it is politically naïve to think that policymakers responded to working class interests because they thought this was the right thing to do.  Politics doesn’t bend the knee to morality but to power.  Moreover, Embery’s argument implies that all it would take for the interests of ordinary people to be represented, would be for the current elite to be replaced by a more virtuous one.  But given the British state’s growing dependence on financial markets, this too amounts to wishful thinking.  

Elites improved the life chances of average citizens after World War Two because they were forced to.  In part, this pressure was normative.  In the first half of the twentieth century, British attitudes towards the state underwent a profound change.  While previously the liberal norm of laissez faire governed state-society relations, by the mid-1940s the view that the state had “direct responsibility for social security and economic stability” was relatively widespread.  The reasons for this change included the expansion of the state during the two world wars, as well as a determination to prevent a repeat of the Great Depression.  

Yet, for all this normative change, in the decades following World War Two, British capital remained essentially liberal in its outlook; it hadn’t been converted to the idea of state intervention to secure full employment.  And this is understandable, as tighter labor supply increases both the wages and confidence of workers.  What ensured that these new ideas about the role of the state were implemented was the power of labor.  British workers at this time were organized en masse and incorporated into the state through tripartite institutions, such as industrial policy boards made up of employers, trade unionists, and state officials.  Workers could therefore “wield the state” over capital, “balancing the employer interest”, and securing a more even distribution of society’s surplus. 

What’s changed between then and now is that these conditions no longer prevail.  The last few decades have witnessed what Streeck terms a “steady decline in both democratic mobilization and the distributional position of mass publics”; the organized and institutionalized voices of the masses have been pushed out of the state.  Simultaneously, the state’s growing reliance on global capital has prompted elites to further reduce the public’s influence on policy.  Institutional innovations such as fiscal rules, Bank of England independence, and the Office for Budget Responsibility have functioned to place important economic decisions beyond the reach of citizens.  And these measures have been justified through neoliberalism, an ideology that asserts the inefficiency of the state while exalting the market and individual responsibility.  The upshot has been the “increasing insulation of the state from popular pressure”.  Political elites at present face little compulsion to consider the interests of ordinary people, let alone represent them.

How Did We Get Here? 

How did this change come about?  Like other western countries, Britain in the 1970s experienced lower economic growth and high inflation.  Whereas average annual growth was 3.45% during the 1960s, it was 2.66% during the following decade.  In the 1970s, the average annual rate of inflation was 13.5%, with a high of 25% in 1975.  The causes of this decline in growth and sharp rise in prices are beyond the scope of this article.  The pertinent point here is that in this chastened economic environment, workers were often better able to defend their living standards than owners of capital.  While “organized labour could ensure it got pay rises matching or perhaps outstripping price increases”, savers and creditors saw their assets debased.  

This favorable distributional position for labor shifted the power balance.  By the end of the decade, economic inequality was at an all-time low, the welfare state had been expanded and made more generous, and legislation such as the Health and Safety at Work Act had been passed.  Just prior to the 1979 election, the incumbent Labour government was considering proposals for workers to have equal representation with managers on company boards – what was referred to as “industrial democracy”.  

Confronted with diminishing returns and influence, the ruling class struck back.  Its counteroffensive was led by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative party, which won the 1979 election and governed for the next decade.  The Thatcherite assault on working class power entailed a mix of market liberalization and the active use of the state.  The abolition of exchange controls in 1979 helped globalize British capital, allowing it to escape the clutches of organized labor.  From 1980 to 1988 a raft of anti-union legislation was passed that undermined collective bargaining; workers who resisted were subject to police intimidation and violence.  High interest rates brought inflation under control but devastated industry by strengthening the pound and making manufacturing exports less competitive.  High interest rates also transferred income and wealth upwards to owners of financial assets, just as millions were joining the dole queue.  

As a result of Thatcher’s policies, the “power of organized workers was broken … [and] [f]rom the late 1980s the working class disappeared from the public sphere”.  The ruling class achieved a decisive victory, with its triumph shattering the main conduits through which popular demands were formulated and exerted on the state.  The voices of ordinary people were marginalized and disassembled.  

The ruling class’ victory stemmed from a number of factors.  Thatcherite ideology framed the class war as a struggle for individual freedom against state tyranny, which made little sense but proved compelling to many people.  Thatcher was a conviction politician – “the lady’s not for turning” – and her strength of will drove policy forward.  Workers often didn’t help themselves; when a union official representing public health was asked on national television if strikes risked patient lives, the response was “if people died, so be it”.  Certain contingencies also benefited the Thatcherite project, such as the Falklands War and splits within Labour.  

But perhaps the main reason for this victory – ironically – was the welfare state.  The millions who lost their job during the Thatcher years were caught by the robust safety net that had been built in the 1970s.  Under Thatcher, spending on social security increased significantly, rising from 9.9% of GDP in 1979 to 12.4% by the mid-1980s.  As the historian Fritz Bartel writes, public welfare provided “subsistence to the millions of workers deindustrialization had made superfluous”.  Without it, the “human costs of economic restructuring” would have been too high, rendering the political project of Thatcherism untenable.  Of course, this wasn’t the original purpose of the welfare state – this had been to promote greater freedom from the vagaries of the market.  But at this point it was repurposed, used as an instrument to mollify the masses.  

This increased spending on public welfare had the additional consequence of binding the state more closely to global finance.  Lower economic growth and mass unemployment reduced tax revenues.  Therefore, the state had to increasingly rely on borrowing from financial markets to meet its spending commitments.  To paraphrase Streeck, it was at this moment that the UK transitioned from a tax state to a fully-fledged debt state.  Or, to put this differently, just as the voices of ordinary people were being forced out of politics, the voice of global capital was being amplified.  

Over the last few decades, this configuration of power has become more entrenched.  While there have been blips, the broader trends of lower growth, higher unemployment, and elevated welfare spending have persisted.  The state has remained dependent on financial markets to the extent that global capital has become, in Bartel’s words, “an arbiter of politics”.  This situation led to a further transformation, the emergence of what Streeck calls the consolidation state – a state in which political elites not only have to satisfy creditors – usually by making commitments to austerity – but also have to reduce the public’s influence on policy.  That is, the sort of state we have in the UK today.  

Why Proxy War?

The absence of sustained popular pressure, stemming from the historic defeat of the working class, explains how political elites have been able to pursue a policy at odds with the national interest, especially the interests of ordinary people.  Yet it doesn’t tell us why they’ve taken Britain into a proxy war with Russia.  This decision was permitted by their relative autonomy from the masses, but they still had to choose this option.  Why did they? 

If we take elites at their word, their choice was driven by their commitment to a liberal, cosmopolitan order.  Their Ukraine policy fights “tyranny”, promotes “human rights and fundamental freedoms”, and maintains an “international rules-based system” that has brought “remarkable benefits” to the world.  If Russia was allowed to prevail, it would set the precedent of “might is right”, resulting in further violence and instability.  

We need only glance at Britain’s recent foreign policy record to see how seriously elites take liberal, cosmopolitan values.  Military interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and elsewhere have not only contributed to millions of deaths, but also to the fracturing of states, the empowering of retrograde forces, and the emergence of barbaric practices, including torture, slavery, and genocide.  The UK’s support for NATO’s eastwards expansion and for continuing the current war – despite the possibility of a peace deal in March 2022 – has helped bring similarly tragic results to Ukraine: hundreds of thousands killed, millions displaced, an economy ruined, and political institutions degraded.  

The broader international context in which the Ukraine war is occurring is the decline of US hegemony and the rise of China.  US officials openly state that China is their country’s “[n]o. 1 long-term geostrategic security challenge”, and they link this rivalry to events in eastern Europe: Ukraine sits “on $10 to $12 trillion of critical minerals …. I don’t want to give that money and those assets to Putin to share with China”, declared Republican senator Lindsay Graham in a recent interview. According to the commentator Tom McTague, it is this growing rivalry between the US and China that explains the British government’s “almost hyperactive policy towards Ukraine”: UK elites have chosen this policy due to their fealty to an American-led international order.   

McTague’s argument make a lot of sense.  In his last speech to parliament as prime minister, Boris Johnson intimated that supporting Ukraine was a way for Britain to “stay close to the Americans”.  Starmer has promised to increase military spending (despite austerity) and form a UK-EU security pact that “complements NATO” – an arrangement that would not only maintain US hegemony over Europe while having Europeans bear more of the cost, but would also allow America to focus more directly on confronting China.  The British political class’s determination to act as an appendage to US power is hardly new, moreover, though it has become more pronounced since the late 1990s.  A defence review during Tony Blair’s first government (1997-2001) defined the role of the British armed forces as being to “assist US operations”.  

Where McTague’s argument is weaker, however, is in its insistence that Britain “must” play this role of loyal “vassal”.  British security and economy are heavily reliant on the US, which certainly inclines UK elites to follow Washington’s lead.  But UK governments have at times acted against American wishes.  In 2015, David Cameron’s government defied the US to join the China-led Asia Infrastructure and Investment Bank.  In the 1960s, when US hegemony was arguably at its peak, the British government resisted American pressure on it to send troops to Vietnam; then Labour prime minister Harold Wilson refused largely on the grounds that British involvement in Vietnam was neither in the national interest nor consistent with public opinion.  We should also note that most countries of the so-called Global South – many of which are ostensibly less powerful than Britian – haven’t complied with US demands to sanction Russia.  

The defect in McTague’s argument, then, is that it regards the British elite’s loyalty to America as unavoidable rather than an active choice.  But recognizing this defect pushes us to explain why the British elite has been willing to subordinate UK foreign policy to American interests.  This is a complicated issue but we can link it in part to the emergence of the consolidation state. 

Damaging Delusions

As we have seen, the rise of the consolidation state in Britain has effectively limited domestic policymaking to upholding investor confidence while mollifying the masses.  This is a sorry state of affairs for British citizens, but it is also a problem for political elites: austerity and curtailing the public’s influence on policy doesn’t provide them with much of a raison d’être.  

Confronted with these domestic limitations, British elites seem to have turned to the outside.  When the consolidation state was coming more firmly into being in the late 1990s, policymakers announced that “the political debates of the twentieth century – the massive ideological battleground between left and right – are over” and that the “new political agenda” is defined first and foremost by “financial prudence”.  Concomitantly, and not coincidentally, they started saying that “the British are, by instinct, an internationalist people” and that “we are all internationalists now”.  This isn’t true; like most countries, the British people are more concerned with domestic issues than with international ones.  The more recent Brexit vote can in fact be largely understood as a plea for greater protection from external forces.  Yet, Brexit too has been framed by the political class in stark internationalist terms, as the demand for a “Global Britain”.  

This pivot to the outside raises a further problem, however.  Global leadership requires being able to project power beyond the national or regional level.  British elites simply don’t have this power at their disposal.  Britain’s hard power capabilities – GDP, military expenditure, industrial capacity, etc. – are mostly flagging and pale in comparison to the likes of the US and China.  And while UK elites like to talk of Britain as a “soft power superpower”, this grossly overestimates its cultural and moral influence on the world.  Britain is at the very best a strong middle power and has been for decades.       

Stumped domestically and unable to act independently globally, the British elite appear to have opted for living out their globalist fantasies vicariously.  This position is still best expressed in a startling passage from Tony Blair’s 1998 ‘Chicago Speech’:

One final word on the USA itself.  You are the most powerful country in the world, and the richest.  You are a great nation.  You have so much to give and to teach the world …. We need you engaged.  We need the dialogue with you …. Stay a country outward-looking, with the vision and imagination that is in your nature.  And realise that in Britain you have a friend and an ally that will stand with you, work with you, fashion with you the design of a future [emphasis added] ….  

The rhetoric might be less fawning these days, but the stance remains.  By hitching themselves to the US hegemon, the UK elite gets to feel like they are doing something purposeful.  This is a “damaging delusion” as Edgerton rightly points out and as the consequences of Britain’s participation in the proxy war on Russia make clear.  But for the political class it’s easier to live under this delusion than to confront its growing domestic and international irrelevance.

An overhaul of Britain’s political class is thus desperately needed.  It’s not clear, however, where this change would come from. Political expressions of popular discontent certainly haven’t been lacking in recent years, as demonstrated most notably by the 2016 Brexit vote and the 2019 general election.  But demands for change have remained inchoate and ephemeral.  There is currently no organized collective will capable of disciplining the state and forcing it act in the interests of ordinary people.  Until such a will is formed, the British elite’s politics of domestic drift and foreign policy disasters are likely to persist. 

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