They Can Always Find The Money For Wars

With only the twenty-second largest population in the world, Britain is the sixth highest spender on "defence". Our Armed Forces are so tiny, so badly paid, and so badly equipped, that even when you remember that we count things like military pensions, the Coast Guard, the Met Office, and the BBC World Service, then someone is still getting paid on an enormous scale, before kicking back some of that to politicians.

Such is the British way, from HS2, to PPE, to Test and Trace, to the Bibby Stockholm, to the impending bailout of Thames Water, to Rwanda, which has taken absolutely nobody, having always said that it would take only 100 people per year, and having now sold even most of that housing estate to local buyers. Wes Streeting would do the same thing to England's NHS. And Keir Starmer wants even more of it in the name of "defence". Meanwhile, it would be "unaffordable" to have anything that might be worth defending. Defence of what, exactly?

It is just as well that we are not under threat, unless you counted the targeted Israeli bombing, using a British-made weapon, of three of our military veterans who were working, as is often the way, simultaneously as aid workers and as intelligence operatives. And we are determined to do nothing about that. We have not even suspended British arms sales to Israel, as both Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair did. After all, the starvation of the people of Gaza as a weapon of war, as advocated by Starmer, necessitates the bombing of aid convoys. Israel is our ally in what way? What specific form does that alliance take? What do the Israelis do for us? At all, never mind such that they must be allowed to get away with this?

Unfortunately, NATO and Trident were in both of Jeremy Corbyn's General Election manifestos, so that Starmer's claim to have changed the Labour Party is as bogus as the Conservatives' claim to be the natural party of defence when they have starved any meaningful form of it. Instead of NATO, we need bilateral nonaggression treaties with all other European countries including Russia and indeed Ukraine, with the United States, and with Canada. We need nonaggression treaties with the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and with the Collective Security Treaty Organisation, and preferably with each of their members bilaterally. There should be no foreign military bases on British soil, while military force should be used only ever in self-defence, and only ever with the approval of the House of Commons, the composition of which therefore needs to be changed dramatically.

BAE Systems should be renationalised as the monopoly supplier to our own Armed Forces, with a ban on all sale of arms abroad, and with a comprehensive programme of diversification in the spirit of the Lucas Plan. Armed neutrality never includes the nuclear weapons that are purely offensive. Instead of Trident, an extra £70 billion should be given to each of the Royal Navy, the British Army, and the Royal Air Force. This would not entail depriving anything else of funding. As a sovereign state with its own free-floating, fiat currency, the United Kingdom has as much of that currency as it chooses to issue to itself, with the fiscal and monetary means to control inflation, means that therefore need to be under democratic political control in both cases.

Wishful thinking? Well, when I tell you that there is going to be a hung Parliament, then you can take that to the bank. I spent the 2005 Parliament saying that it was psephologically impossible for the Heir to Blair's Conservative Party to win an overall majority. I predicted a hung Parliament on the day that the 2017 General Election was called, and I stuck to that, entirely alone, all the way up to the publication of the exit poll eight long weeks later. And on the day that Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister, I predicted that a General Election between him and Starmer would result in a hung Parliament.

I have no plan to join the Workers Party of Britain, although nor would I expect to stand against it. If, however, it did not contest North Durham, then I would. To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not. We have made a start.