You know how close to boiling point Middle Britain is when Jeremy Corbyn is writing for Metro
:
‘There’s no money’.
That always seems to be the current government’s response when asked to tackle the enormous crises affecting the UK.
But as Keir Starmer announces he will ramp up military spending, and as Rachel Reeves plans to slash welfare budgets, we must never forget what impact government funding choices have on the most vulnerable people in society.
As we speak, 4.3 million children in the UK are living in relative poverty. Over 350,000 people are homeless in England.
Millions are worried about the cost of heating their home, braced for yet another hike in energy bills. Meanwhile, billionaires are richer than ever.
So what is the government doing?
They could lift children out of poverty, if they wanted to, by scrapping the two-child benefit cap.
They could help pensioners with energy bills, if they wanted to, by restoring universal winter fuel allowance.
They could ensure nobody had to sleep rough on the streets, if they wanted to, by launching a massive council-house-building programme.
Instead, they have signed off on a 13.4 billion increase in military spending. With that money, the government could scrap the two-child benefit cap 10 times over.
Now, today, we’re told the government is preparing to cut billions from welfare budgets.
No doubt we’ll be told this is another ‘tough choice.’ Just like it was a tough choice to not lift children out of poverty.
Or the tough choices to cut winter fuel allowance, scrapping the £2 bus fare cap, betraying the WASPI women and cutting foreign aid.
Isn’t it strange how the government only cites ‘difficult choices’ when they are harming the most vulnerable, but increasing defence spending is apparently an easy choice to make.
Put simply: there is never any money for the poor, but always enough money for war. I just wish the government was honest about that.
Keir Starmer says the increase in defence spending will put money in people’s pockets. Whose pockets exactly?
To me, what they really mean is that taxpayers’ money will be paid directly to arms companies. These are the only victors of war.
And there are plenty of losers from armed conflict, whether the UK spends money on its own defence or aids other countries with arms sales.
We should never forget those who have been killed by British-made bombs. David Lammy himself acknowledges that Gaza lies in rubble.
He conveniently omits the reason why: Gaza was destroyed by weapons supplied by countries around the world including our own.
That is why myself and my colleagues in the Independent Alliance have been calling for an end to all arms sales to Israel.
We are part of a much wider movement – of all faiths and none – who want to see an end to all war – in Gaza,
Ukraine, Yemen, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and beyond.
Instead of bringing about a more peaceful world, Keir Starmer is choosing to accelerate the endless cycle of war instead
This week, I expressed concern after Keir Starmer raised the prospect of British troops in Ukraine.
There is no glory to war, only death and destruction – and politicians who neglect to use the language of diplomacy should remember that it is other people’s children who pay the price.
From the very first day, I opposed Russia’s invasion and called for an end to the conflict as soon as possible to save human life. Three years on, and hundreds of thousands of lives later, I renew my calls for peace.
Ultimately, Keir Starmer must tell us what impact this increase in military spending will have on budgets for housing, education, healthcare and beyond.
Early signs are not good.
The Prime Minister is talking about our security, but real security is having a secure roof over your head.
It’s having enough food to eat. It’s having a fully-public NHS to rely on in your time of need.
In that sense, then, the government is failing to provide people with the real security they desperately need, one broken election pledge at a time.
During that election, I said that I would congratulate the government when it made positive changes to people’s lives, but call it out where it fell short.
For example, I welcomed the Renters’ Reform Bill, which ended no-fault evictions. However, I remain disappointed by the government’s continued refusal to implement rent controls.
Likewise, I am alarmed by the government’s expansion of private healthcare, which could mean the creation of a two-tiered system threatening the foundational purpose of the NHS: To provide healthcare for everyone irrespective of their status of wealth.
In both cases, the government is failing to tackle the root cause of so many crises in this country: Privatisation.
While your energy bills went up, private companies pocketed a reported £4 billion in excess profit.
The government could end this farce now by taking these companies into public ownership, but it is choosing to let customers foot the bill for the failure of privatisation instead.
Meanwhile, the government is scapegoating refugees for their own domestic failures, releasing cruel footage of migrants being deported and barring people who arrive in Britain in small boats from ever claiming UK citizenship.
Refugees are not our enemies.
They are our doctors, teachers, friends and neighbours of tomorrow.
Parroting the rhetoric and policies of Nigel Farage will backfire, and vulnerable people will pay the price – just like vulnerable people will pay the price for Labour’s decisions on defence spending and the welfare budget.
There is an alternative path: Build public support for a society based on human need, not corporate greed.
That means taxing the very wealthiest to rebuild our schools and hospitals. That means ending the disaster of privatisation in energy, water, rail and healthcare. That means investing in welfare, not warfare.
Millions of people in this country voted for Keir Starmer because he promised change. They are still waiting.
And it is no less remarkable that The Guardian
allows Owen Jones to write:
Britain is now on a “war footing”, we are told. Earlier this year, Nato’s secretary general, Mark Rutte, demanded that European nations start hiking defence spending at the expense of pensions, health and social security. Fail to do so, he warned, and the only recourse would be to “get out your Russian language courses or go to New Zealand”.
In this increasingly feverish atmosphere, it becomes ever more difficult to ask for a bit of perspective, but it is necessary. European elites are panic-stricken after Donald Trump hit the accelerator away from US hegemony, a trend already long under way. Meanwhile, Labour figures openly brief that this could be Keir Starmer’s “Falklands moment”, using Ukraine’s agony to transform the government’s calamitous polling, speaking to a grubby political opportunism. Britain’s current trajectory could raise a much graver menace than Russian invasion: domestic social turmoil and an ascendant radical right that threatens democracy itself.
That Britain and its European neighbours are hiking military budgets to arbitrary percentages of gross domestic product should raise questions. Announcements of defence splurges rarely involve detailed explanations of what that money will actually be spent on. A better approach, surely, would be to make a case for what is actually needed, and in relation to which concrete threats. At present, Britain wastes a significant amount of its defence budget on Trident nuclear missiles, which are dependent on the US – and going by failed tests, are unreliable anyway.
Billions have been squandered on aircraft carriers described by the former chief of the defence staff David Richards as “unaffordable vulnerable metal cans”; they are plagued by faults, not to mention outmoded in the face of armed drones and anti-ship missiles. Another £5.5bn was thrown at Ajax armoured vehicles, which were delivered eight years late after being beset by multiple problems, such as shaking so violently that soldiers developed nausea, swollen joints and tinnitus.
To avoid such colossal waste, defence spending must be scrutinised, and proportionate to real threats. That the Russian autocracy represents a lasting menace to Ukraine is unquestionable, and arming its war of defence against a criminal invasion was justified. In the longer term, Moldova – with its breakaway Transnistria republic – and the Baltic states may be at risk, although even that is debatable.
The idea that Russia poses a realistic conventional military threat beyond that – to Britain or otherwise – is delusional. After three years of invasion, and 11 years of conflict, the Russian army has managed to capture a fifth of Ukraine’s land mass, inhabited by a 10th of its prewar population. This, in a country which as recently as 2010 elected a pro-Russian president.
The cost to Russia has been enormous. It has lost hundreds of thousands of young men. It already had a demographic crisis, due to high mortality – which surged thanks to western-backed free market “shock therapy” – low birthrates and young men fleeing conscription. That, combined with mobilising troops and defence industries requiring workers, has led to labour shortages. Although Russia’s economy has so far proved surprisingly robust, chalking up 4.1% growth in 2024 and rising living standards, inflation runs at 9.5%, with interest rates at an unsustainable 21%. Moscow is running out of tanks and armoured vehicles, and has been forced to dig into increasingly depleted Soviet-era stocks. And as the Russian revolutions of 1917 showed, the patience of a war-weary population can snap quite suddenly.
Starmer announces 'biggest sustained increase in defence spending since end of cold war' – video
The Soviet Union was a far more formidable military foe, and it attempted just one invasion outside its postwar bloc: Afghanistan in 1979, which proved so calamitous it helped bring the whole edifice down. After the bloody Ukrainian debacle, the idea that Moscow’s rulers are going to march across Europe in an attempt to subsume entirely hostile populations is fantastical. Even the Baltic states – despite their small size and population – seem a stretch. Investing in the defences of these specific nations makes sense; but asking western European nations to throw vast sums at their own defence budgets does not.
That’s not to say Russia or indeed other countries and non-state actors couldn’t pose other threats, such as cyberwarfare. In that case, governments should direct spending there specifically. As Martin Shaw, professor of international relations at Sussex University, tells me, the “defence establishment is so unfit” for judging what is needed; instead, we need “a root-and-branch” examination of defence spending, to assess where savings can be made, to pay for actual priorities.
Here is the real threat. So far, Labour has butchered spending on international aid to pay for defence. That will cost lives, but it is superficially highly popular: although when voters are asked about spending on specific humanitarian commitments, such as aid to Ukrainian civilians, the results are rather different. Nonetheless, given Labour’s refusal to increase taxes on the well-off, future defence spending hikes are likely to come at the expense of public services and social security. Research also suggests that increased military spending is bad for economic growth, particularly in richer countries. The Soviet Union itself crumbled in part because of its excessive defence budget.
Starmer suggests defence spending will benefit Britain’s crisis-ridden living standards. That is disputed by the Common Wealth thinktank, which notes that, in the past financial year, of the £37.6bn spent by the Ministry of Defence, nearly 40% went to just 10 companies. Despite vast public subsidies, the arms industry employs a tiny sliver of the British workforce, declining from more than 400,000 in the early 1980s to about 134,000 people now.
We are already in a position where radical rightwing parties are surging across Europe thanks to austerity and stagnating living standards. The far-right demagogue in the White House owes his victory, in part, to squeezed US workers’ wages. In Germany’s recent election, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) doubled its vote in part because the economic consequences of Russia’s invasion hurt voters. Support for hardcore rightwing parties has risen steadily since the financial crash: they are now the most voted-for political grouping in Europe. Hiking military spending at the cost of social expenditure will undoubtedly fuel them even more. Europe’s pursuit of a phantom menace may prove its actual ruin.
