By Dave Stockton
On 25 February, the government website proclaimed ‘Prime Minister sets out biggest sustained increase in defence spending since the Cold War.’
It promised ‘a reinvigorated approach to defence industry will drive economic growth and create jobs across the UK’, in an ‘era of intensifying geopolitical competition and conflict.’
The next day Whitehall rang to cries of ‘Welfare Not Warfare!’ as disabled rights campaigners, trade unionists, anti-poverty and anti-war activists protested chancellor Rachel Reeves’ £4.8bn cut to health and incapacity benefits.
As well as making the sick and disadvantaged pay once again, rather than taxing the rich and the big city corporations, Labour is hitting people in countries that British colonialism bled dry for centuries by cutting Overseas Development Assistance, already a miserly 0.5% of Britain’s gross national income, to 0.3%.
In the government’s Spring Statement, the UK’s core military spending is planned to rise to £62.2bn for the coming financial year, 2025–26, following the announcement of a further £2.2bn spending, a rise of £8.3bn over the previous two years—considerably above inflation. The government aims for military spending to reach 2.5% of GDP by 2027-28.
Starmer, with an eye on the manufacturing trade unions and the party’s constituencies in long declining industrial districts, has resorted to ‘military Keynesianism’, claiming a big increase in arms spending will ‘support highly skilled jobs and apprenticeships across the whole of the UK’ and boost ‘R&D and innovation across the UK, including developing technologies such as AI, quantum and space.’
For the working class, more spending on warfare means less for welfare, health, education and other vital services. But the question is not simply an economic one. The claim that we are arming to defend ‘our streets’ from Putin is a total fraud. In fact, it is to guard the loans and investments of British capitalism and to maintain the Western imperialist world order, with the Americans or without them if need be. In fact, it is a ‘defence’ of Britain’s capitalist rulers against their rivals but also against exploited and oppressed people around the world. The UK was the fifth largest military spender in the world in 2023 at £53.9bn, after the USA, China, Russia and Germany.
Britain is still a major imperialist power with its boot print in many of the areas it once ruled, before the sun set on its formal empire. British army, navy and air force personnel are stationed in approximately 145 overseas military installations, located in 42 countries. Sixty facilities are run directly by the British Armed Forces, such as in the Chagos Islands, from which the indigenous population was forcibly displaced, beginning in 1969 under a Labour government.
Others include the Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, Cyprus, Singapore, Belize, the Malvinas and Kenya. They exist to maintain a ‘forward presence’ on the adjacent continents and facilitate ‘expeditionary actions’ like the Iraq war. More billions for these outposts, as well replacing the Trident nuclear weapons system with four new submarines are part of a programme that, like the arms race before 1914 and 1939, reflects the sharpening of global inter-imperialist tensions. History teaches us where this escalatory logic leads.
If anyone wants to see what a modern war means, not just to the combatants but to the old, women and young children, they should look at those currently raging across the world from Gaza, to Ukraine to Sudan. New technological terrors such as drones and AI integrated weaponry combine with all the old horrors of the two world wars.
That is why communists say, as they have done for over a century, ‘not a person or a penny for the defence of imperialist fatherlands!’ In imperialist robber states like Britain, the US, Germany, Russia and China, the main enemy of the working class is in our own country. Oppose Labour’s defence budget and cuts to spending on social services and aid to the oppressed around the world. No both to Nato and any alternative European/Canadian ‘coalition of the willing’. We must reach out to the workers of the other imperialist powers for a common struggle to head off our rulers’ drive to war and hasten their overthrow, as the crisis of their system grows. Peace under capitalism is a hopeless utopia. Only a new revolutionary workers’ International can lay the foundations for the peaceful development of humanity.
