HE NEEDS the full facts before he can form an opinion. Apparently the Prime Minister cannot recognise what the whole world can see.

US forces violently intruded into a sovereign state, Venezuela, on Saturday for the purposes of abducting its president and his wife, killing dozens of others as they did so.

President Donald Trump then announced that the United States is going to “run” Venezuela with scarcely the formalities that attended European colonial annexations in the 19th century. He is to do this by threatening the decapitated Venezuelan government with further armed attack unless it complies with all his demands.

It is further patent that a main motivation for the assault is the seizure of Venezuela’s oil reserves for the benefit of US monopolies. We know this because Trump has said so.

In the 48 hours after this outrage, the US president and his officials have threatened similar action against Cuba, Colombia, Mexico and Greenland, as well as Venezuela again. They have threatened to bomb Iran too over its internal business, just for good measure.

Dispensing with the usual liberal pieties, Trump has scorned Europe’s favoured “democratic” alternative to Nicolas Maduro, right-wing puppet Maria Machado, and failed to pay even lip service to elections in Venezuela. It is all the work of a mob boss.

These are all facts in need of no further verification. All can see them in plain sight, and all can draw their conclusions — that the US administration, as well as promoting far-right political takeovers worldwide, has embarked on a policy of lawless neocolonial banditry, distinguished by a brazen lack of any hint of political concealment.

It is bent on subordinating the entire hemisphere to a regime of US dictatorship and plunder, aimed at negating China’s growing economic ties in the region and thus embarking on a classic imperialist policy of redivision of the world, a policy that has never ended in anything other than war.

But the Prime Minister, almost alone amid all of sentient humanity, needs more facts before forming a judgement.

In truth, what he is missing is not the facts. It is rather the usual alibis, the chatter about human rights, about intervening for democracy, even about “weapons of mass destruction” which have provided the habitual political cover, sufficient unto the hour, for imperial brigandage.

The “war on drugs” — under which banner boats have been arbitrarily sunk across the Caribbean in recent months, also illegally — fails the plausibility, as well as the legal, test. Only last month Trump pardoned a right-wing former president of Honduras, who had been convicted on drug smuggling charges in a US court, and other wealthy drug-runners.

Bereft of the customary playbook, Starmer has had to default instead on Neville Chamberlain, determined to see hear and speak no evil as evil rampages unbound in a faraway country of which he knows little.

His vaunted legal mind recoils from the conclusion that most other states have reached — that in Trump we are dealing with a criminal driven by no consideration other than the aggrandisement of US imperialism.

Of course, Starmer’s pretensions to being a scrupulous adherent to international law has already been exposed by his indulgence of Israeli barbarity. But equivocating over this Trump adventure is a further abject collapse.

Where next? Will Britain acquiesce in the seizure of the Panama Canal? In a US attack on Cuba (Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s preferred target) or Colombia? In an invasion of Mexico?

On all past form, the Starmer answer will be “yes.” He has drawn a shaky line at Trump seizing Greenland, because its present proprietor is a fellow Nato state, Denmark. European states aligned with imperialism accrue rights denied to others, it seems.

His concern there is surely not the integrity of international law, but the certainty that an attack on Greenland would precipitate an almighty crisis within, if not the collapse of, Nato. Britain without Nato is beyond his imagining. Technically, Britain and other Nato members would have to rally to Denmark’s support and confront the US military. Don’t hold your breath.

Critical judgement, never mind independent policy or action, seems almost unthinkable for Starmer. He makes Fifa boss Gianni Infantino, last seen handing the US despot a bespoke “peace prize,” appear a model of dignity and probity.

Even Margaret Thatcher was bold enough to criticise president Ronald Reagan’s 1983 aggression against Grenada on the grounds of its illegality.

Yet all Starmer can do is assure us that there was no British military involvement in the weekend attack — itself an interesting disclaimer, since it is predicated on the assumption that the world automatically assumes that wherever the Pentagon goes, there would Britain be too.

He is thus clarifying that Britain was not an accessory to what he does not dare call a crime anyway!

Labour is writing blank cheques for every warlike caprice of the bandit Trump and it cannot possibly end happily.

The reasons for Starmer’s exceptional servility are well understood. He has pinned disproportionate hopes for the revival of Britain’s floundering economy on trade with the US, an activity which is now conducted purely at Trump’s caprice.

Above all, his “coalition of the willing” striving to prolong the Ukraine war depends on US military, intelligence and logistical support for the foreseeable future. The mercurial Trump must be kept onside through flattery and appeasement.

So Starmer is supporting Trump’s wars in order to ensure US backing for the continuation of his own in Ukraine. The weasel words about Venezuela from others in Europe — we love international law, but can’t say that it has been broken — are in service of the same agenda.

Starmer is a servant of the British state, dedicated to protecting its long-range interests, which the ruling class identifies with the alliance with Washington. No US, no stable global capitalist order from which the City of London profits so handsomely, the reasoning goes.

Indeed, it may well be the case that many key functions of the British state cannot be discharged without US involvement, so deeply embedded is Washington in our affairs. It is the indispensable alliance for British imperialism’s place in the world.

The Premier as good as conceded as much on Sunday: “I constantly remind myself that, 24/7, our defence, our security, and our intelligence relationship with the US matters probably more than any other relationship we’ve got in the world, and it would not be in our national interest to weaken that in any way.”

Was an abdication of any pretence at legality, at any adherence to values, ever more clearly expressed by a British premier?

This despite the fact — that word again — that the support for the aggression in Venezuela fatally compromises the belligerent government rhetoric in relation to Vladimir Putin and Ukraine, and blows up entirely any hope that “international law” might retard the slide towards world war.

The trade unions in this country, with exceptions, and the Labour left have responded clearly. They have not just condemned Trump’s neo-Hitlerian criminality but also Starmer’s supine response as well.

Indeed, disquiet in the Parliamentary Labour Party extends well beyond the left — Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper had few Labour supporters when she outlined the government’s craven position in the Commons on Monday night.

Yet British support for US imperialism is not the whole of the picture. In the end, Trump will do what he wants to do, regardless of any opinion Keir Starmer might hold. There are forces that can stop the US president, but they do not include 10 Downing Street.

The danger of Starmer’s neo-Trumpism lies also at home. The pretence that Trump is a responsible and reasonable ally impacts directly on our domestic politics, because it disables the necessary fight against the US president’s British surrogate, Nigel Farage and his far-right Reform party.

How can Starmer’s Labour pretend Farage is a menace if it presents Trump as a reasonable and law-abiding political actor? How can one oppose the threat of fascism here and yet present its expression in the US, violently exported, as harmless?

And does not the far right thrive on the threat of war, the spectre of new conflicts dividing the world — the essence of the Trump approach, and Starmer’s too?

So the Labour left and the unions cannot rest at declarations. If stopping Farage, Trump’s British bosom buddy, is the priority then it must focus on removing the Prime Minister from office, as he abstains the country all the way into neofascism and a new world war. That should be the working-class response to the crisis.