After the fall of France 85 years ago and at the moment of gravest national peril, Winston Churchill said that Britain, with its values of democracy, liberty and support for vulnerable nations under attack, would prevail: “Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth lasts for 1,000 years, men will still say this was our finest hour.”
Churchill’s peroration of his famous June 1940 speech must be our national rallying cry today. Would that more media outlets were taking the strong stance of The Independent in standing up for Churchillian moral values in the face of its widespread abandonment on both sides of the Atlantic.
Most surprising of all has been the reaction of the right in Britain, whose stomach-churning triumphalism and glee at President Trump’s election and first two months in office has led them to claim that “Trump is right and Zelensky wrong,” words that will sit uncomfortably in the light of history. The term “fellow traveller”, used in the Cold War to denote left-wing followers of the Kremlin line, has now been appropriated by the right.
This last week, I’ve been walking across the Czech Republic en route from the North Sea to Ukraine. Everywhere I went, I heard dismay from Czech people, with memories still raw of being abandoned by the gullible British prime minister to the Nazis in 1938, and by the American president to the Russians after 1945.
Keir Starmer has a remarkable opportunity for national leadership unmatched since Tony Blair’s decisive role in the early weeks after the attacks on Manhattan’s World Trade Center on 9/11. The free world stood behind the United States when, for the only time in its history, Article 5 was triggered denoting that an attack on one Nato nation was an attack on all. The opportunity for the free world to come together in a common cause was there for the taking. The Russian invasion of Ukraine and the election of Trump offer another of those sliding-doors moments in a history of untold potentiality. Major changes of direction always come at times of great disturbance – wars, revolutions economic turndowns, bad harvests and plagues.
So what should Starmer be doing and saying when he goes to visit President Trump? This week he should be making history in a way that Churchill grasped and Blair dropped.
Trump understands strength. He despises supplicants and weakness. In its thinking about the United States, Britain has been living in a fool’s paradise. It is a purely transactional relationship, not an emotional one. Starmer should remember that it was only self-interest that propelled a reluctant United States into joining the Allies in the First World War in 1917 and the Second World War in 1941. For many years now, the US has been becoming increasingly isolationist and Pacific-focused. Never again will the United States be prepared to bankroll Europe. Why should it, American voters ask? Starmer should price that reality into everything he does in the 15 minutes or so he will have to make an impression on the president before he loses his attention.
Since the 1950s, Washington has been most impressed with Britain when it has been the bridge to the EU. Respect soared greatly after Britain joined in 1973, and it has diminished since the referendum vote in 2016. Britain, even outside the EU, needs to lead Europe. Yet Europe and the EU are desperately weak. President Macron of France has been a disappointment, and no other leader has emerged to bang its heads together. Friedrich Merz, the likely victor in the German elections today, has already indicated he’d welcome Britain’s lead as a nuclear and military power.
So what does Starmer need to do? First, tell Trump that he’s going to increase UK defence spending to not 2.5 per cent but 3 per cent by 2030 – and that he’s going to galvanise the British economy to provide the money to make it happen. Second, he’s going to remake Europe as its founding father Jean Monnet did after the Second World War. The EU needs to be expanded to include Ukraine. The EU has become a sclerotic, overly bureaucratic mess. Productivity and dynamism have needlessly been lost. The EU has been struggling throughout this century. It’s crying out for drastic reform.
A remodelled Europe would, as Trump would understand, become a significant challenge to the United States, a threat indeed, as it would to Putin. The US and Russia have been feeding off the feebleness of Europe. No one is better placed than Starmer to end the victimhood and to take fate into our own hands – and to make history.
Remodelling the EU and forging Europe into a powerful economic and political democratic bloc will take 10 years. But he can signal that change this week. Talk of being a bridge to the EU won’t impress if it’s a bridge to a soggy nothingness that is sliding into the mud. But if it’s a bridge to something that promises to be solid, proud and principled, well: that’s a different matter.
If the right continues to persist in believing that Britain can either stand alone in the world or do so on the coattails of the United States, then it will be seen that they are deluded.
After his return from Washington to the UK, Starmer should convene at the prime minister’s country residence, Chequers, a one-day seminar of Britain’s brightest and best historians on how the country can lead the remodelling of Europe. It is 35 years since Margaret Thatcher convened such an event on how Britain should best approach Germany after the end of the Cold War with the country reunified. One figure who Starmer should invite was present at that earlier occasion, the eminent historian Timothy Garton Ash. Other figures he could invite include the head of Chatham House, Bronwen Maddox and former Downing Street foreign policy advisor, John Bew. Historians have seldom mattered more.
So stand up, Starmer. This is the week that you can start to make history. People laughed at the presumption of Churchill when he made that speech 85 years ago. But they will say of you, and of Britain, this was our finest hour.
Anthony Seldon’s book ‘The Path of Light: Walking to Auschwitz’ is published in September
