Europe’s darkest moment could be Starmer’s biggest opportunity

The collapse of the old order is a moment of political possibility. Starmer must seize it.

I noted at the start of my last post that these are dark days. Scanning the titles of my posts on Substack so far, I’m conscious of how bleak it has all felt. I can’t take the blame for that, the world is what the world has become, but in today’s offering I’m determined to offer some remedy- because there is hope for a different world. These have felt like weeks where history has turned, but it is in those revolutions that political settlements rise, to replace orders which have faded; it’s in moments like this that new worlds come into view, previously occluded and unseeable. The shattering of the old postwar security orthodoxies at the hands of Donald Trump is scary, for European voters and their leaders alike. But history is about trial- we remember the Lincolns, the Churchills, the De Gaulles because they faced trial, not ease. Keir Starmer, a political figure who eschews ideology or programmatic vision, has an opportunity to do what Clement Attlee did: to use war, or in his case the threat or war, to remake politics around him and seize that history. The much hallowed government of 1945 would not have been able to achieve what it did were it not for the ideological reordering of the world which took place as a result of the worst conflict the world has ever known. The task of the Starmer premiership is to use the threat and menace of something even worse to reshape his own political fortunes and the security of his continent. As Rahm Emmanuel, former Chief of Staff to Barack Obama once said, “Never let a political crisis go to waste.”

Starmer’s announcement that the UK will increase to 2.5% of GDP by 2027, more rapidly than many assumed, is a great start. Principally, it is a recognition of the changed realities: a recognition that what matters in this new world is the hard power and strategic capabilities a state must have, rather than the soft power that it might ideally like to boast. That is why, regrettably, the decision to cut aid is probably the right one: there will be no aid for developing countries if Europe is plunged into a continental war. But the move will be worth more to Britain than the extra materiel it might buy.

The retreat of American leadership in Europe gives Britain its best political and diplomatic opening since the Brexit shambles. The UK’s defence and military might was one of the few genuine cards Britain had during those negotiations and since. In the slumber years of the back end of the last decade, when a somnolent EU still managed to dream that the Russian threat was contained, the card was less potent. That isn’t the case now. It is no coincidence that UK ministers have started to routinely be invited to EU Council/ministerial meetings. While a grand bargain for improved EU trading arrangements would be vulgar and unbecoming, it is true that a Britain which is more immeshed within the European framework might inevitably find a more generous audience in Brussels for what it wants on non-defence matters. Ultimately, as a Danish official put it this weekend “the defence of Europe is unimaginable without Britain.” The better armed Britain is, the greater its power, and the louder Starmer’s voice will be around the tables which will decide the future of the continent’s security. This is not least because he is that rare thing in Europe right now: a leader with an unassailable internal political position and no-election for years. If Starmer wants to lead, if he wants to be a 21st century Ernest Bevin and create a new European security apparatus, he may find others will follow.

"At moments like these in our past Britain has stood up to be counted, it has come together and demonstrated strength. That is what the security of our country needs now and it is what we will deliver.”- Keir Starmer, House of Commons, 25th February 2025

And on the domestic front too, new political space unfolds before Starmer. His is a project which has lacked definition, or an effective political vocabulary or vernacular to explain to the country what it seeks to do. This lack of ideological or communicative ballast flows from Starmer’s own personality. He dislikes dogmatism, eschews grand ideological visions¹ and has a stodgy communication style. But this is a crisis which might prove to make his vices into virtues. He is nothing if not sober, little else but phlegmatic. In a world which feels few steps away from catastrophe, the dour lawyer inspires confidence, if not passions. The collapse of the old order provides him with a task, something which requires more practical doing than ideational thinking: building the nuts and bolts of a new apparatus, and corralling other leaders with the sort of shuttle boat diplomacy he appears to enjoy. Suddenly, the point of the Starmer premiership, in actual and rhetorical terms is obvious: safety, at home and abroad, a groove in which the former Chief Prosecutor feels comfortable.

From this flows obvious corollaries and new spines for his domestic and economic programme; rearmament which requires reindustrialisation. More fiscal room for manoeuvre may be generated by this crisis, not less if innovative financial tools like European defence bonds or a European defence bank are created. Markets may also be more sanguine about a government with a genuine plan to use rearmament to enhance domestic supply. If Starmer wanted he also now has the space to re-engage with Europe with new customs and regulatory treaties. All of the polling shows that the public have woken up to the new political realities that Trump’s America has brought, even if the hard-right media commentariat has not. When offered the choice between new links with Europe and America, British voters are now minded to choose Europe every time- up to and including a European army. Space, space, space.

And in narrower party political terms there are opportunities too: it is never a bad thing for any leader, especially a Labour leader, to be able to drape themselves in the Union Flag. Domestic politics may come to be constrained by the gravity of events: a wartime mentality where the trivialities of Westminster seem small, and where the government feels like it is leading a national project, giving the opposition little real space to criticise. A similar dynamic worked against Starmer during the pandemic. Better still, his most dangerous opponents, Reform and Farage, have indelibly linked themselves with the source of the chaos- a revanchist America under Trump, with its petty obsessessions, and frenzied delusions. Trump remains deeply unpopular in Britain and is an obvious implicit foil for a progressive leader. Farage claims to be the most patriotic of any party leader, this week, spreading lies about Britain at CPAC, outsourcing his critical judgment to a dotty President, and being seen as soft on Putin, he has seemed anything but. Starmer should be unafraid to call him out, or have his best lieutenants do so without inhibition.

The danger will come if Starmer chooses not to avail himself of the space which has become available to him, if he indulges the weaker side of his politics, which favours tactics over strategy and temerity over courage. Viewed through that lens, then the extra defence spending announced on Tuesday will be a mere attempt to appease Trump, rather than part of a bigger design. We have to hope that that is not the case.

This is a country which in so many ways still lives in the semi-imagined myths of 1940. It’s a matter of some interest that Britain’s support for Ukraine and hostility to Russia has been some of the stickiest of any Western nation. I’ve thought long about why this might be and I think there are two key reasons: 1) Britain has had its own seucrity problems with the Russian state which have played strongly into the public consciousness in the Putin era, principally the Litvinenko and Schripal poisonings but also the steady drumbeat of Russian money laundromat stories in London. Other Western states have no equivalent. But there is also 2) the 1940 legend, our national rebirth story of Britain, Germany, Churchill, Hitler and the Blitz for which there is such obvious and easy transposition to Ukraine, Russia, Zelensky and Putin. This current crisis plays deeply into the sort of country most British people believes and wants Britain to be. It is therefore a moment primed for political and ideological renewal: where history and our contemporary politics meet. Bill Clinton once bemoaned that, governing as he did in times of plenty and order, that he never had the chance to truly prove himself, that the political space therefore always remained closed. Whatever else Keir Starmer may complain about, he can’t say that.

1. As Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund relay in their excellent new book Get In, Starmer once thunderously remonstrated with a Corbynite MP accusing his being motivated by dogma: “There’s no such thing as Starmerism, and there never will be!”