15.10.2026

Prisoners in soft captivity

Does British promotion of European rearmament against Russia amount to a viable alternative to US domination? Mike Macnair does not think so. Europe is incapable of independent action

In the Cold War TV series The Prisoner, Patrick McGoohan, the show’s primary creator and lead actor, played a British intelligence agent who, after resigning, is abducted by persons unknown and detained in a fictional pseudo-resort in Portmeirion. This is ‘soft captivity’ with the appearance of a resort, but still (high-tech) captivity. In a series of episodes, McGoohan may seem to approach escape, but, when in the last episode he finally does escape, it appears that he has all along been his own captor; the major puzzles of the series are left unsolved.

The Prisoner can in a sense stand for the relationship of the European countries (and Japan and South Korea) to the USA: ‘soft’ imprisonment, since the USA did not make its former imperialist rivals into colonies, but into privileged vassal states; and an imprisonment that is inescapable, and follows an increasingly surreal logic of lies.

This analogy struck me as a result of two news stories published in the mainstream press on October 14. The first, and the one which has been more widely reported and commented on, is Andy Burnham’s claim that there was “Russian interference” in the 2016 Brexit referendum. This goes along with his open promotion of the idea that Brexit was harmful to the UK.¹ The second, which appeared on the front page of the Financial Times, is that Trump threatened Ukraine with cutting off weapons supplies in order to get them to stop attacks on Russian fuel infrastructure.² This was connected to his ‘deal’ to make Russian diesel available to the US in spite of the ‘sanctions’ siege warfare, in order to appear to be doing something about price pressures caused by his war of aggression against Iran (the ‘deal’ has been widely denounced by British and European politicians).³

It is symbolic that in the same week as these stories Germany should be putting on trial the first Ukrainian suspect in the bombing of the Nord Stream 2 Russia-Germany gas pipeline in 2022: an act officially blamed on “elements within the Ukrainian armed forces”, but which cannot have happened without US authorisation and support.⁴

Interference

The pro-Brexit press has been quick to denounce Burnham’s claim of Russian “interference” in the referendum. The head of MI5, Sir Ken McCallum, speaking on October 13, asserted that Russian disinformation was a major threat; on the Brexit issue, he said that there had been Russian attempts to intervene, but that they had not succeeded.⁵ Brexiteer papers treated this as proving that Burnham was wrong; The Guardian saw it as supporting his claim (which The Independent also supports).⁶

Morten Morland provided a cartoon in The Times which is a very appropriate comment on this controversy. The ‘Leave’ campaign’s battle bus, with its slogan, “We send £350 million. Let’s fund our NHS instead”, is seen in a dilapidated state at a motor breakers’ yard. Pasted on the windscreen is a ‘for sale’ notice, saying “several careless owners”, with, pasted over it, “breaking for spares”. Burnham, in overalls, stands in front; he says: “The only thing of use is the reverse gear - and a Russian instruction manual.”

The point is clear enough. It was not fraudulent misrepresentations from Russian troll farms which swung the Brexit vote, but fraudulent misrepresentations by the official ‘Leave’ campaign. The ‘fund the NHS’ slogan is one example. Another is Michael Howard’s claim that EU legislation is made by unelected bureaucrats (in the EU parliament and the council of ministers, no doubt): if Howard honestly believed that claim, he should have lost his professional qualifications as a lawyer on the ground of incompetence. A third was that Brexit would “bring immigration under control”: what actually resulted was the “Boriswave” - a massive increase in legal immigration with the explicit purpose of driving down wages.

Meanwhile, of course, the US was engaged in large-scale ‘electoral interference’ in European, including British, politics, through the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance demanding pledges of loyalty to the once-British, now US, settler-colony of Israel as a form of loyalty pledge to US policy, after the widespread opposition in Europe to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Mike Pompeo, when US secretary of state, said that the US would interfere to “push back” against the possibility of Labour under Jeremy Corbyn winning a general election.⁷

Nor was the US ‘electoral interference’ in European politics at all new. In the 1970s the US redirected funding that had been given to lobby groups of the right wings of the Labour and socialist parties to neoliberal think-tanks. The right social democrats complained about being defunded: after all, they had had US funding since the early Cold War. Their complaints provided direct evidence of long-suspected US funding.

‘Electoral interference’ is, in reality, normal to liberal constitutionalism (which the mass media falsely calls ‘democracy’). This regime is the rule of capital in its money form through institutional corruption: by the advertising funding of mass media to drown out rival voices; by large-scale ‘donations’ to political parties and in support of individual politicians (including payments to retired politicians in consideration of their services while in office); by payments to commercial lobbyists for private access to government officials; by the free market in legal services as a form of sale of justice; etc. This regime inevitably entails the effective interference of the reserve-currency state (now the USA; before 1940 the UK) in the politics of other states.

Russian threat

Burnham was, in essence, attempting to exploit the discourse of the ‘Russian threat to Europe’ to legitimise his aim of a closer relationship with Europe. This Russian threat is one of the dominant themes of our times, and recurred in McCallum’s speech. It is curious that this was published the same day that the former Ukrainian commander-in-chief, General Oleksandr Syrskyi, claimed that Ukraine had fought Russia to a standstill by inflicting disproportionately high casualties and destroying Russia’s offensive military capabilities.

On a superficial view, it seems that what is going on is Europe rallying to the defence of Ukraine on principle, while Trump betrays Ukraine for the sake of immediate electoral advantage (diesel prices). But there are two levels below this superficial appearance.

The first is that US administrations since Bush junior in 2001-09 have been demanding that Europe pay for more of its own ‘defence’. This is not a Trump novelty, although the Trump administration has particularly emphasised its willingness to leave the Europeans to their fate in the event that they do not stump up. In this context, the Ukraine war and talking up the ‘Russian threat’ are useful to European governments seeking to raise arms spending in the face of sceptical populations.

The second level is perhaps particularly relevant to Burnham’s deployment of ‘the Russian threat’. It is that, from the point of view of European states - and European capital, so far as it is at all independent of US capital - the US now looks like a capricious ally, and one which is inflicting direct attacks on European competitors: as in the invasion of Iraq (which wrecked European trading relations with the country), the Aukus scheme (which involved a direct breach of contract with France by the Australian government), the sabotage of Nord Stream 2 (which was a direct US act of war against Germany, though covert) and the US-Israeli attack on Iran (which forces up oil prices at the expense of European countries, as well as China). Maybe, then, the ‘Russian threat’ can spur European rearmament and deeper European military cooperation to obtain more independence from the USA?

From this point of view, Burnham, seeking a general policy of re-industrialisation and the revival of a British manufacturing Mittelstand, would naturally seek a return to closer relations with the EU. Europe could potentially stand up to America …

The third level is displayed by Trump’s reported threat to cut off arms to Ukraine. The point is how this works: the threat is to cut off intelligence sharing (which implies drone targeting capabilities) and “PURL - the Prioritised Ukraine Requirements List for procuring US weapons for Ukraine”. That is, though the US has dumped the cost of the Ukraine war on the Europeans, the US is the ultimate weapons supplier to Ukraine, through the European countries.

This third level shows that the second level as well as the first is delusional. Europe is nowhere near a revival of an independent arms industry to the point of being able to support Ukraine without US backing - let alone rearmament at the level of the creation of an effective European army, plus naval and aerospace operations and sufficient supplies of munitions. The war in Ukraine is a US war, and the Europeans’ belief that it is in some way in their interests reflects the level of US electoral interference in European politics.

US threat

There is yet another deeper level to this: the USA is pursuing a policy of aggressive encirclement of China (like the UK’s policy towards Germany in 1900‑14), and denial of hydrocarbons essential to industry (US policy towards Japan in the late 1930s and down to 1941), with a view to pre‑emptive war before China can become too strong to be conquered, but with the Chinese being forced to strike the first blow - like the Germans in 1914 or the Japanese in 1941.

The war with China would inevitably be on the scale of 1914‑18 and 1939-45 in terms of US production and expenditure. On the basis of history, there was - until 2014 - a danger that the continental Europeans would ‘sit out’ the war with China and sell arms to the US, as the US did to Britain and France in 1914‑17 and to Britain in 1939‑41, thereby becoming the new world hegemon.

In 2014, the US deployed its covert ops and news management capabilities to force the European powers into war with Russia through the ‘Euromaidan’ coup. This was a classic strategic ploy, in which anything less than outright defeat would be strategically advantageous to the US. Full success, leading to regime change in Russia, would allow the Russian state to be disarmed by a new Yeltsin and broken up, allowing US control of central Asia through a series of small states. Partial success would allow the US to deny Russia warm-water shipping access and naval bases (so far, apparently, achieved). Even a static war - which we seem to have in Ukraine - would force the Europeans into long-term semi-war with Russia, thus freeing the US’s hands for a war with China without the threat of the Europeans doing to the US what Britain did to the Netherlands in 1710‑13 and the USA did to Britain in 1914-17 and 1939-41.

2014 itself did not work: the Russians took the Crimea and the eastern Donbas. Trump, in 2017-20, in diplomacy and talks, held out the hand of friendship to Putin, while, behind these deceptions, Ukraine was rearmed with anti-tank and anti-air munitions, which meant that the Russian strike in Kyiv in 2022 (analogous to Russian strikes deep into Georgia in 2008) failed.

The US operation is pre-emptive, because the European states are forced into war with Russia before they can take any steps to overcome the political mechanisms of subordination to the US, or to build up independent arms production and military capabilities independent of the US; so that increased arms spending means merely increased tribute to US capital.

Burnham’s Europeanism is thus delusive. The European states remain politically subordinate to the US. As long as they cling to nation-states, as opposed to a real, radically democratic European union, remain within the Atlantic alliance and remain ‘democracies’ (ie, plutocracies), they will remain subordinate to the US.

Europe could break free of the death-grip of US imperialism in decline. But to do so would require a universalistic political project, one which broke decisively with the plutocratic regime: that is, a project of European communism, able to unite Europe and pose a real alternative which could appeal to the American masses.

1. ‘Burnham says it is “clear” Russia interfered with Brexit vote’: www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c6jdm3zggl0ko; ‘Rejecting closer EU ties would be dereliction of duty, PM to say’: www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c6lyk8e3lxz0o.↩︎

2. ‘US threatens block on Kyiv’s arms in push to halt Russian refinery attacks’ Financial Times October 12.↩︎

3. ‘UK does not support Trump’s Russia diesel deal, says Streeting’: www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c65yn92nj423o; see also www.euronews.com/2026/10/12/blindsided-again-by-trump-europe-puts-on-a-brave-face-and-rallies-behind-ukraine.↩︎

4. ‘Germany puts Ukrainian on trial accused of blowing up Nord Stream pipelines’: www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cw99zpmnxzmjo.↩︎

5. ‘MI5 chief warns of threats to UK from Russia, Iran and AI’: www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c60rl5vwpk02o.↩︎

6. See www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/oct/13/russia-brexit-eu-referendum-interference-mi5; and also www.independent.co.uk/voices/editorials/andy-burnham-prime-minister-brexit-b3065290.html.↩︎

7. www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jun/09/mike-pompeo-leaked-recording-corbyn-labour-jewish-leaders.↩︎