Dave Stockton
Keir Starmer has apologised for his speech in which he said immigration was making Britain ‘an island of strangers’ and done half-a U-turn on penalising the disabled to drive them back to work. All this is no more than window dressing, a response to his backbenchers’ panic over their seats at the next general election and Labour and his own personal standing going through the floor in the polls. At the same time, he is rolling out a message that can aptly be described as ‘Warfare not Welfare.’
On 2 June, Starmer set out the findings of his 140-page Strategic Defence Review in a speech at the BAE Systems shipyard at Govan, Glasgow. It came after what he called an inspiring trip aboard HMS Vanguard, one of the four UK submarines which carry the country’s Trident nuclear deterrent. He said that Britain must become ‘a battle-ready, armour-clad nation’, one ‘ready to fight and win’.
He told the Govan workforce:
‘The threat we now face is more serious, more immediate and more unpredictable than at any time since the Cold War. We face war in Europe, new nuclear risks, daily cyber-attacks… growing Russian aggression in our waters… menacing our skies… Their reckless actions driving up the cost of living here at home.’
But Britain has always spent fortunes to be a global military power, with two hugely expensive aircraft carriers added to its lethal fleet in the past decade. The new concentration on Europe is not only in response to Putin’s reactionary war in Ukraine, but to up defence spending within Nato and persuade Trump not to leave the transatlantic alliance. Hence Starmer’s promise to spend 2.5% of the country’s GDP on defence by 2027-28, rising to 3% in the next parliament.
This overblown rhetoric would simply be laughable were it not at the same time tragic in that, if carried through, it would gobble up the billions of pounds and productive resources needed to restore the broken NHS, the education system, the water, power, and transport infrastructure, to meet the challenge of climate change and to bring much needed aid to the countries around the world that British imperialism has plundered for centuries.
Along with the arms spending, fossil fuels and nuclear power are back. Clearly all the social and environmental ‘priorities’ can be pushed far down the list. Under Starmer it’s going to be ‘guns not butter’, not a peace dividend but dividends for the arms industry shareholders.
However much he sounds like a Tory, Starmer is of course a Labour prime minister – the so-called party of the unions. So he likes to be seen in aircraft factories and shipyards in high viz jacket and hard hat.
His message to workers is that war spending means jobs in the old industrial areas. Labour will be spending billions more on weapons factories, on high tech super destructive drones, frigates and nuclear submarines — raiding the welfare and the aid budgets to do so.
The programme for 12 new F-35A fighter jets, each costing £35 million, will – it is claimed – support 20,000 jobs in the UK, with 15% of the global supply chain for the jets based in Britain. Jobs and bombs is the traditional way for an imperialist power to soften up the trade unions and prepare for a war.
These are to be equipped with US B61-12 tactical nuclear bombs, each costing literally more than its weight in gold. In addition there are plans for spending: £15bn developing new submarine-launched nuclear warheads; building 12 nuclear powered attack submarines for the AUKUS anti-China Pacific alliance; investing £1bn in air and missile defence; £6bn on new munitions during this parliament; opening at least six new weapons factories to increase military stockpiles; and rebuilding the Home Guard (yes!) to protect airports, communications sites and key infrastructure in the event of a major crisis. Doubtless any objection will be stigmatised as ‘appeasement of Putin’.
Clearly, if we wish to stem the softening up of the population for the prospect of a Third World War, remembering Albert Einstein’s prediction that the Fourth World War would be fought with sticks and stones, we need to oppose every penny spent on warfare and fight for the money and the skilled labour of our workers to be deployed in the welfare of humanity, both at home and abroad.
This will mean a hard struggle in the unions to prevent the leaders of Unite and the GMB buying into Starmer’s arms race. It will require the unions in the civil service, health, education and renewables to go beyond pacifist phrases and develop a programme for addressing social deprivation and climate change, and for sustainable development of the countries in Africa, Latin America and Asia, whose resources and labour have been and are still being exploited to develop the ‘global North’.
And also it will mean intensifying our action against the war-machines of the US, UK and its attack dog Israel, as well as rival imperialist powers Russia and China — any one of whom could provide the spark that leads to Armageddon.
