EVERYBODY gets it except Keir Starmer.  Labour MPs, including those traditionally on the right, are clear that the basis for Britain’s alliance with the USA is collapsing.

The new US national security document — itself dismissive of Britain — is a manifesto for the advance of far-right and fascistic forces across Europe.

As Liam Byrne MP told the Commons, the strategy is saturated with far-right tropes from the 1930s. “The language of the US national security strategy was deeply regrettable and, frankly, it was not hard to see the rhymes with some extreme right-wing tropes that date back to the 1930s,” he said.

And Matt Western MP, chair of the joint committee on national security strategy, said the Commons “should be under no illusion, the United States consensus that has led the Western world since the second world war appears shattered.

“The prospect of United States interference in the democratic politics of Europe is chilling. Given certain UK dependencies on the United States, this leaves the United Kingdom especially vulnerable,” he added.

They are right. Alongside pursuing untrammelled hegemony through aggression in the western hemisphere, while seeking to pressure China economically, plunder Africa and centre the Middle East around Israel and the reactionary Gulf dictatorships, the Trump administration wants to impose its own far-right agenda on Europe.

And, as Washington’s strategy makes clear, it is willing to back far-right parties like Britain’s Reform UK in order to bring the continent into line, rhetoric about respect for national sovereignty notwithstanding.

This is a menace to democracy, an interference in our internal political affairs and a brazen plan to leverage the immense power of the US to gain advantage over its nominal “allies.”

Yet Starmer and the rest of the government profess that there is nothing to see here, that it is all business as usual.  Hypocritically, they even praise Trump for “working for peace,” when Starmer is actually working might and main to obstruct the US push to end the war in Ukraine.

It seems that the government simply cannot acknowledge the enormity of what is happening, since the entire strategy of the British state has pivoted for the last 80 years on the purported ”special relationship” with Washington.

Indeed, there are core functions which might seize up without US support, so deeply embedded has Washington become in the British state.

Yet the global drive towards a 21st-century form of far-right authoritarianism, now powered from Washington, demands a clear rupture with Trump and all his works.

Starmer’s mealy-mouthed evasions demean our democracy and only invite further pressure from over the Atlantic. Trump should be called out as the proto-fascist he is, and the US told that it can rely on British support for its adventures no longer.

Enough with the fawning. It is time to stand up for democracy.

US piracy in the Caribbean

Donald Trump’s seizure of a Venezuelan oil tanker needs to be called what it is — an act of international piracy.

The US government lacks any legal basis for the seizure of the tanker, the very act which Washington condemned the Iranian government for doing earlier this year.

The move is simply another escalation in Trump’s aggression against Venezuela, which has already seen dozens killed in equally lawless sinking of boats around Venezuelan waters.

Trump has not ruled out a direct assault on the country, designed to overthrow its progressive government, and get imperialist hands on its oil reserves, the largest in the world.

The Labour government should forthrightly condemn the seizing of the tanker.  And the labour and anti-war movements must stand with the Venezuelan people in the face of Trumpian imperialism.