KEIR STARMER in part justified his warmongering over Ukraine by underlining that the 1945 Labour government was in 1949 one of the founding signatories of Nato.

Not welcomed by many on the left either then or now, it marked a significant moment in the cold war between the US and the USSR.

Although it was framed as a defensive alliance, it first came to life during the Korean war, one of a number of conflicts in the cold war that took place outside Europe.

In 1955 the Warsaw Pact was formed in response to Nato — and just as that was largely controlled by the US Pentagon, so Moscow had a key role in the pact.

After the end of the USSR in 1989 the Warsaw Pact ceased to be, and it might logically be thought that this should have been the end for Nato too.

In fact it wasn’t. Rather, the US saw it as a chance to expand the structure further and there are now far more signatories than the original 12 in 1949.

Nato is a mixture of the politics of the present but is itself part of modern history.

The matter didn’t and hasn’t escaped the attention of socialist historians who themselves were politically active but also researching history.

EP Thompson was best known as a historian of the 19th-century English working class but he was also a leading campaigner in CND from its early years until his death in 1993.

In the late 1950s he was already very critical of the role of Nato and its impact on working-class organisation.

Thompson wrote in Universities and Left Review in 1958 about the “fetishistic reverence attached to Nato and the American alliance” which seems to summarise Starmer’s current views well enough.

Thompson continued: “The Nato power complex, so far from being a friend to any working-class movement, stretches from Algeria to Guatemala, from Portugal to Saudi Arabia; its pervasive, retrogressive influence, as the holy alliance of the status quo, can be seen in the fact that during its period of dominance no Western labour movement has made any significant forward advance whatsoever.”

While this was written over 60 years ago it remains broadly true. While there have been working-class advances and challenges to power — Paris 1968, for example — no government of the socialist left has been in office in western Europe.

We need only think of the efforts to stop the election of a Labour government led by Jeremy Corbyn, but the point goes right the way back to the formative period of Nato.

Eric Hobsbawm noted that had the Communist Party won the 1948 Italian election, the US planned to intervene.

Hobsbawm argues in The Age of Extremes that the US economic rescue of Europe after 1945, known as Marshall aid, was closely tied into the launch of Nato.

It saw economic security as coming with what became the European Economic Community and now the EU. Here a rebuilt and rearmed Germany was central to the US plan.

On one occasion several countries including Britain and France went against US military hegemony when they invaded Suez in 1956. When it became clear that the US would not support the action, it folded.

Significantly the then-Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell opposed Suez using the slogan “law not war” — words that one might think would appeal to Starmer.

However while Labour had opposed military action, it was of course in tune with Nato’s effective controllers in Washington in doing so.

It’s not an episode of recent British history that I expect either Johnson or Starmer will be keen to bring up in the next few weeks as they bang the drums of war.

Keith Flett is a socialist historian.