The British Left and Foreign Policy

For John, BLUF:  Can foreign policy change party alignment?  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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HOW FOREIGN AFFAIRS WRECKED THE BRITISH LABOUR PARTY

From Ryan Evans' War on the Rocks we have a piece examining the Foreign Policy of the British Labour Party.   The author is Geraint Hughes, a Senior Lecturer with the Defence Studies Department at King’s College London, and an instructor at the Joint Services Command and Staff College, Shrivenham, UK.

Here is the start:

Unsurprisingly, War on the Rocks commentators have devoted considerable attention to the Republican Party’s current leadership in the run-up to the presidential election.  As a Brit, I’d like to say here that the Republican Party is not the only venerable Western political force dealing with an unelectable leadership and damaging internal rifts, mainly arising from external affairs.

Following the United Kingdom’s referendum on E.U. membership – and the shock result in which 52 percent voted to leave the Union – much of the British and international media’s attention has focussed on the feuding within the governing Conservative Party over Britain’s relationship with its European neighbours, not to mention the sudden ending of David Cameron’s premiership. Yet Labour, the main opposition party in the British Parliament, is also in disarray.  Its leader, Jeremy Corbyn, is fighting to keep his position despite losing the support of 80 percent of the party’s Members of Parliament (MPs) in the House of Commons, all of its peers in the House of Lords (the upper house), and the presumably soon-to-be unemployed Labour Members of the European Parliament in Brussels.  Britain’s future role in the world, and in particular the question of when it uses military force, are at the center of the civil war that is taking place in Labour now.

Mr Jeremy Corbyn is the man of the hour.  And, the vote over his future is, not mentioned here, fraught with efforts to manipulate who may and may not vote.

An interesting read and a bit of a history review of the last fifty-some years.

Regards  —  Cliff