Go Figure

To anyone wondering how the fourth highest military spending in the world might still not be enough for some people, those people are the hired megaphones of corporate greed, and in any case a huge proportion of that figure is Trident, which is what we have instead of tanks, fighter jets, and indeed personnel for our own country, never mind also for Ukraine, or Taiwan, or who knows where next.

Yet armed neutrality, which noticeably never includes the nuclear weapons that are purely offensive, is having a good week. Public pressure may be turning Switzerland back to that righteous path, while not even the British or American response to the earthquakes is persuading Turkey to change its mind on Swedish or Finnish membership of NATO. For that matter, notice how the MH17 story has been brought out in reaction to wavering Dutch opinion on Ukraine. Expect something about Novichok if Britain needed a bit of a prod back into line. Although we should be so lucky, to be felt to be deviating.

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. And 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. The issuing of currency is an act of the State, which is literally the creator of all money. A sovereign state with its own free floating, fiat currency has as much of that currency as it chooses to issue to itself. All wars are fought on this understanding, but the principle applies universally.

The State also has the fiscal and monetary means to control inflation, means that therefore need to be under democratic political control in both cases. That is what both fiscal policy and monetary policy are for: to encourage certain politically chosen forms of behaviour, and to discourage others. They are not where the State’s money comes from. Nothing is “unaffordable”, every recession is discretionary on the part of the Government, and there is no such thing as “taxpayers’ money”.

In any case, this is all small beer compared to the fraud and waste arising out of track and trace, PPE, and all the rest of it. The daily revelations about that are now scarcely being reported, because it would then be difficult to report anything else. If we could afford that, then we can afford anything. As with the meaninglessness of a defence spending figure that included Trident, the NHS spending figure is meaningless when it includes that. Take that out, and we are underspending catastrophically. So of course there are strikes, and of course they enjoy massive public support.

They do not, however, enjoy the support of the Official Opposition. But then, the Labour Party cannot see what is wrong with pumping sewage into the water supply, placing it far to the right of GB News and of the Daily Mail. No one who remembers the last Labour Government imagines that the Labour Right in office would have been any less corrupt than the Conservatives were in the face of Covid-19. Labour frankly wants to privatise the NHS. Although it takes no such view of that, or of the public ownership of the utilities, Labour has elevated Trident and NATO to articles of faith “because of Attlee”.

Therefore, the Labour Party is silent even now that everyone else is talking, as some of us always have been, about Ukrainian corruption, about Ukrainian Nazism, about the bans on Opposition parties and on free media in Ukraine, about religious persecution there, about war crimes on both sides, about the role of NATO and EU expansion in fomenting this crisis, about the fact that this war had been going on for nine years, and about how any realistic alternative to Vladimir Putin would be even worse. Labour has nothing to say in response to Seymour Hersh on the Nord Stream pipeline.

But the opinion polls bear no resemblance to real votes cast. We are heading for a hung Parliament. 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.