TWO polls published earlier this month make interesting reading.

Asked by YouGov “Do you think the UK was right or wrong to take military action in the following wars…?”, just 26 per cent of respondents answered it was right to take military action in the 1991 Gulf War, 29 per cent in Kosovo in 1999, and only 20 per cent in Afghanistan and 16 per cent in Iraq in 2003, while 48 per cent and 54 per cent said it was wrong to take military action in Afghanistan and Iraq, respectively.

Another poll by Focaldata for news and opinion website Unherd found 44 per cent of respondents thought Britain should be less engaged in overseas conflicts, compared to just 7 per cent who said the nation should be more engaged.

These results echo a YouGov survey completed shortly after the May 2017 terrorist attack in Manchester.

In an article titled Jeremy Corbyn Is On The Right Side Of Public Opinion On Foreign Policy: Except For The Falklands, the polling company noted a majority of people (55 per cent) thought Britain was wrong to take part in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. “Similar proportions think we were wrong to take part in military action against Libya in 2011 (44 per cent) and Afghanistan in 2001 (43 per cent), although people are slightly more likely to say that we were right to go into Afghanistan than Libya (25 per cent vs 19 per cent),” YouGov noted.

There is a huge rift between the public and governing elite on British foreign policy because, as Morning Star readers will know, these wars were initiated by either Tory or Labour governments and were supported by whoever was the main opposition party at the time, and backed by large swathes of the press.

“The government’s preference is to see both strategy and defence policy as areas to be settled between it and the armed forces, and so far as possible within the corridors of power,” a 2020 report prepared for the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) notes.

This is because the government (accurately) believes the public “is unpersuaded of the utility of military force,” meaning “the Whitehall mindset towards the public on matters of defence tends to be one of distrust,” explained the report’s co-authors, British military historian Professor Hew Strachan and Ruth Harris, a researcher at RAND Europe and previously an RAF officer.

Mark Curtis, whose essential work on Britain’s role in the world is based on many trips to the National Archives, came to a similar conclusion in his 2004 book Unpeople: Britain’s Secret Human Rights Abuses.

“The public is feared” by the government, he notes. “A perennial truth that emerges from the declassified files is the public’s ability to mount protests and demonstrations that divert the government from its course.”

It therefore becomes a matter of utmost importance and self-interest for our masters to cover up the reality of British foreign policy, treating the general public like mushrooms, keeping them in the dark and feeding them bullshit.
 
As British prime minister David Lloyd George is reported to have said after listening to an account of fighting on the Western Front in 1917: “If people really knew [the truth], the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don’t know and can’t know.”

Ancient history? Far from it. “There is a general policy by the MoD to keep the horror of what’s going on in Afghanistan out of the public domain,” a senior British officer told the Sunday Telegraph in 2008. “If the real truth were known it would have a huge impact on Army recruiting and the government would come under severe pressure to withdraw the troops.”

A year later journalist Stephen Grey penned a revealing article for the Guardian about government attempts to control the news coming out of Afghanistan. Nearly all British journalists in the country were embedded with British forces, with “almost all… ordered to email their copy to the military’s press officers in Helmand before publication,” he explained.

The result of this censorship, Telegraph defence correspondent Thomas Harding told Grey, is “we have constantly been told that everything is fluffy and good – and we, and the public, have been lied to.”

As this testimony suggests, the large-scale and active opposition to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq was a significant concern of the government. For example, in November 2003 the Guardian revealed “a [MoD-organised] media offensive aimed to convert the UK public to supporting the outcome of the Iraq War.”

According to leaked papers “the MoD’s main target is the UK public and media while [the main target] of the Basra headquarters for British troops is the Iraqi people.”

While some naysayers dismiss the British anti-war movement as ineffective, in a 2018 report for Forces Watch Professor Paul Dixon provides a much-needed reality check: “The British public’s opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan… imposed operational constraints on the political and military elite’s willingness to put British lives at risk for fear of further undermining domestic support.”

Ten years after the invasion of Iraq the elite’s concern about public opinion turned to outright panic when the House of Commons voted against military action in Syria in summer 2013 – the first time a prime minister had been defeated over a matter of war and peace since 1782.

“The UK finds itself in quite a mess,” Alistair Burt, who had recently stepped down as minister for the Middle East, wrote in The Guardian. “Just occasionally politicians need space and time to take unpopular action that they believe in the long run is in their nation’s interest.”

In January 2014 The Guardian reported senior military figures were warning multicultural Britain was rejecting foreign conflict. And in 2015 Sir Nick Houghton, then the chief of defence staff, expressed concern about “ever greater constraints on our freedom to use force,” something the head of the British armed forces put down to “areas of societal support, parliamentary consent and ever greater legal challenge.”

Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader in 2015, itself in part an outcome of widespread opposition to Britain’s aggressive military interventions, almost certainly struck even more fear into the heart of the Establishment.

Indeed, Jezza had barely got his feet under the table before a senior serving general threatened a military coup. “The army just wouldn’t stand for it,” the anonymous officer told the Sunday Times. “The general staff would not allow a prime minister to jeopardise the security of this country and I think people would use whatever means possible, fair or foul to prevent that.”

A couple of months later Houghton himself told the BBC's Andrew Marr show that he would be worried if Corbyn’s opposition to nuclear weapons was “translated into power.”

The ongoing Israeli assault on Gaza is the latest evidence of the huge gulf between the elite and the public regarding British foreign policy.

So while both main parties backed Israel’s response to October 7, with Labour Party leader Keir Starmer infamously showing support for Israeli war crimes, the public has been strongly opposed, with an October YouGov poll finding 76 per cent of respondents supported an immediate ceasefire.

However, like with the anti-Iraq War movement, the regular pro-Palestine demonstrations in London and across Britain have played havoc with the political system, with both the government and Labour shifting their positions under intense pressure from the streets.

Labour was dragged kicking and screaming to calling for an immediate ceasefire in February, while in March the government voted for a ceasefire resolution at the United Nations security council; home secretary Suella Braverman was sacked after unsuccessfully trying to get the November 11 2023 march in London banned; fighting on a pro-Palestinian ticket, George Galloway was elected in the Rochdale by-election, beating all three main political parties.

And the protests continue despite repeated attempts by the government and sections of the media to smear marchers as anti-semitic.

Sadly, serious ill health has stopped US dissident Noam Chomsky from commenting on the slaughter in Gaza. But activists and concerned citizens would do well to remember one of his many truisms: “Remember, any state, any state, has a primary enemy: its own population.”

Follow Ian on X @IanJSinclair.