Reform and Greens undermining UK commitment to Nato, Cooper says | Foreign policy
Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper accused Reform Britain and the Green party of undermining Britain’s commitment to NATO.
Cooper was speaking at the Munich Security Conference; where Keir Starmer gave a speech at the weekend, claiming that Labour’s populist rivals Reform and the Greens were “soft on Russia, weak on NATO”.
“Our national security depends on having partnerships abroad that make us strong, and we have seen both Reformation and the Greens undermine commitment to the NATO alliance,” Cooper said in an interview with Sky News.
In the case of Nigel Farage’s party, Cooper said this had led to Reform “not taking the threat from Russia seriously”.
“Despite the fact that Welsh leaders have been found guilty of links to Russia, they have refused to hold an investigation into Russian interference in their party,” he added, referring to the jailing of former MP and Farage colleague Nathan Gill for accepting bribes from a suspected Russian entity to repeat pro-Kremlin positions.
“They have often ignored Russia’s aggression and threat, even to the point where we see the reuse of lethal poisons, as in Salisbury,” he said, in an apparent reference to Russia’s use of poisons that killed Dawn Sturgess in the English city in 2018 and to kill Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, according to a new statement released by Britain and others.
Labour’s new attempts to attack Reformation’s national security credentials come after Farage doubled down on his past claim that the West had “provoked” Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by expanding the EU and NATO eastwards.
Farage said: Political Thought podcast He told BBC Radio 4 that he was right and that it was “strange to get so much abuse because he was right”.
“Democracy has been destroyed by those who want to drag Ukraine west, not east,” he said, referring to the protests that toppled Ukraine’s pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych in 2014, which Farage described as a “street coup”.
HE he said last year He says Ukraine should join NATO, and his party supports strengthening NATO by significantly increasing Britain’s defense spending.
Labor’s attack on the Greens came as their leader, Zack Polanski, insisted NATO would abide by Article 5, which commits NATO to take defensive military action if another member of the alliance country is invaded, but leaves open the possibility of secession.
He told Sky News: “If we are what we are in NATO then obviously we need to sign up to the articles. And article 5 says that an attack on one is an attack on all.”
Polanski has advocated leaving NATO and spending less on American weapons as part of a broader dismantling of the two countries’ defense alliance, although it is not the Green Party’s official policy.
