Starmer's Gamble
Days before Trump’s inauguration, the British Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, arrived in Kyiv to pledge 100 years of protection for Ukraine. Britain entered both World Wars to uphold similar promises. Could a failure to meet today’s challenge discredit the UK and highlight the need to rejoin the European Union? Sir Keir may well hope so.
Despite having limited military means to support Ukraine, Britain — along with France — has already guaranteed Ukraine’s territorial integrity. Prime Minister Boris Johnson previously declared:
“No country can acquire territory or change borders by force of arms… and so it follows that we will never recognize Russia’s annexation of Crimea or any other Ukrainian territory.”
This latest doubling down suggests that the Labour government intends to gamble its political future on international solidarity. It may also use Britain’s unique constitutional system to put the very source of Western national legitimacy on trial.
Can Law define a Nation?
Starmer is a man who believes nations and their borders are defined by international legal status and civic apparatus. Despite cloying attempts to express this administrative nationalism (remember the NHS hospital bed dance at the opening of the 2012 London Olympics?), most of Britain seems to disagree.
So does most of the world, likely including many Ukrainians. Nations are always bigger and better than their governments and constitutions.
Yet Starmer, ever principled, remains the embodiment of the technocratic state. He defended the Crown Prosecution Service to the hilt amid international scrutiny over its political bias. He once declared that he would not pay for private healthcare even for his own critically ill mother.
True to form, then, his move in Kyiv appears less a diplomatic gesture and more an ideological experiment, a test of a worldview so pure (and perhaps so repellent) that he is determined to drag it into the spotlight for all to see. The groundwork for this political show trial has been carefully laid.
Britain as a Constitutional Paradox
For centuries, Britain’s political system drew its authority from the Crown and the institutions that grew around it. Over time, Parliament and government have shifted away from that older foundation, relying instead on a more modern, legalistic framework of rules and procedures.
Today, those two traditions — the inherited weight of monarchy and the newer logic of technocracy — exist side by side but rarely connect. In this sense, Britain has become a testing ground for how old national myths and modern legal order can coexist in uneasy parallel.
Recent events suggest that people feel closer to the enduring idea of the nation than to whichever government happens to be in power. That distinction is less familiar on the continent, yet it may become a defining question for the wider West.
Part of the tension lies in the public’s reluctance to see their country defined only by electoral majorities or bureaucratic decisions. Even leaders of avowedly republican states still attend royal ceremonies — a quiet recognition that such older symbols of legitimacy continue to matter.
Who Runs Britain?
The other reason the British government has become hollowed out is that public discourse in Britain is now directed mainly from abroad. Sir Keir may lead His Majesty’s Government, but the most powerful figure in British political life today is arguably Nigel Farage.
It’s not that "Mr Brexit" commands more votes than Starmer, or that his party, Reform, holds more seats than the Tory opposition (though it now has more members). The simple truth is that Farage is the only British figure the Trump camp pays attention to, and those inside the Mar-a-Lago bubble effectively shape the public discourse of the entire Anglosphere.
This matters. If a Trump peace deal forces Ukraine to abandon its claim to the eastern territories, the very constitutional legitimacy upon which the West has rested since the Napoleonic era will be put to the test, perhaps fatally.
At the same time, as the centre of British public life drifts away from its elected government and the international legal order Starmer reveres, there may be a strange kind of reassurance: nations can survive, and even thrive, when freed from the grip of overbearing state control and international bureaucracy.
Either way, for Sir Keir’s already teetering government, this is double or quits.
The Battle Over National Identity
According to Ukrainian MP Maksym Tkachenko, some 150,000 Ukrainian refugees have returned to Russian-occupied territories — choosing to live as minorities under Moscow’s rule rather than as displaced persons in the West of their own country. Suppose Donald Trump offers a peace deal that formalises this territorial transfer. In that case, the West may face an existential choice: to defend the idolatry of its pledges, or to defend Ukraine itself.
This is not just a territorial dispute. It is a civilisational one, over who has the authority to define what a nation is. The way this conflict ends for Britain may shape how it ends for Europe. After all, it is often in Britain, the last great holdout against the French Enlightenment, that national legitimacy is tested most severely.
Neville Chamberlain’s 1938 dismissal of Czechoslovakia as “a country far away, of which we know nothing” is still drilled into British schoolchildren, to rouse their righteous indignation. And yet, decades after Britain gave shelter to Czechoslovakia’s Communist leaders in exile during the war, the country itself peacefully dissolved at the first given opportunity.
Now that Britain’s outrage over Chamberlain’s snub has outlasted Czechoslovakia’s pretence to nationhood, it may be time to confront an uncomfortable truth: the radical notion of treating all legally sovereign territory as equal under international law has become not only absurd but dangerous, especially for governments that continue to base their legitimacy on it.
Alexander Shaw
Journalist
