Against The Warfare State

Andrea Egan writes:

Speaking to members of my union, this country’s biggest, you can’t not come away in awe: of the dedication to public service, the commitment to caring for our communities and the determination to keep going in incredibly tough circumstances. But there’s a flip side. You also always get a vivid sense of our country’s torn social fabric, the terrible state of the services that people rely on.

‘I’m not living, I’m surviving. Every month I have more outgoings than income when it comes to my salary’, said one of our 400,000 members in the NHS. Another told us they are taking strong doses of anti-depressants and cannot sleep because of work-induced stress and fatigue. Here’s a nurse: ‘I have high levels of anxiety and constantly fear making mistakes due to workload and staffing issues. My immune system is poor. . . . but I fear taking any time off due to financial issues.’ Our surveys and conversations with members show that these are typical experiences, not outliers.

It’s not much different in any part of UNISON’s massive public service membership. School support staff love their work but tell us their pay doesn’t cover the rent and that they’ve taken on second jobs in mid-life just to stay afloat. We know from our research that most are only paid in term time and almost half take home less than £1,400 a month. And then there’s my old profession, social work, where you see the full range of miseries inflicted by austerity and economic decline. Unaffordable housing, fragmented communities, and a surreal, cruel welfare system all combine to make life harder both for social workers and for those we’re trying to help.

That’s what life is like for ordinary working-class folk today. That’s the state of our society, and I think it should count as an emergency: a massive threat to the future of our country, which must be the first priority of any government to fix. It should be dominating the headlines. Yet it rarely does.

Meanwhile, demands for more spending on foreign wars and the weapons to fight them are given exactly this kind of treatment. When was the last time we had a nurse or hospital porter handed a primetime slot on the BBC to tell the government that the country faces ruin if they don’t find tens and tens of billions in new investment? In Britain today, that privilege is reserved for top military officials and the politicians who support them.

We already have the sixth highest military spend in the world, with the Ministry of Defence given the biggest capital budget of any department. But you wouldn’t know it from the media. Top military brass — past and present — have been especially relentless in the weeks running up to Andy Burnham taking office. They are trying to pressure the new prime minister into taking on their agenda wholesale, which means cutting everything else to give more to the MoD.

On their broadcast rounds, the military bosses aren’t exactly subtle. We’ve had the former head of the Royal Navy implying free breakfasts for school kids should be scrapped, remarking that ‘things like welfare. . . . are unimportant when you lose a war’. The current UK chief of defence declared earlier this year that ‘Rearmament is not warmongering’. Maybe not inherently. But constantly inflating the threat of war on British soil, and suggesting we must arm to the teeth in anticipation, is absolutely that. It makes war more likely in the name of preventing it.

The ‘defence’ establishment clearly cannot take yes for an answer. Keir Starmer bowed to their demands — which really just tail the demands of Donald Trump — and took their word as gospel. MoD officials never have to shake the tin, no matter how much cash they waste or how many projects they mothball. In February 2025, Labour committed to increasing defence spending to 2.5 percent of GDP by 2027. By April 2026, Starmer had signed on to the NATO target of 3.5 percent by 2035. But it still wasn’t enough: Defence Secretary John Healey resigned in protest, parroting the demands of the military and the Americans. The outgoing PM used his final weeks in office to lock in almost £7bn worth of cuts to crucial government departments to fund his so-called Defence Investment Plan.

In government, Labour has decided to impose a zero-sum fiscal framework on itself. Anyone who suggests breaking with this is effectively blackmailed by the bondholders. That means all the extra billions the Generals take are billions that will not go to our hospitals, schools, local councils, transport, housing: you name it. Rather than getting patients out of corridors and into beds, reopening community centres, funding a dignified social care system or putting money in the pockets of struggling workers, the military will be handed more blank cheques to buy more weapons made in America.

It would be one thing if this debate were actually about defending the country and making its people more secure. But it isn’t. It’s all about serving the destructive foreign policy objectives of the United States. It’s about maintaining a global British military presence — in far-flung places like the middle of the Indian Ocean — that does less than nothing to offer us protection.

Anyone who doubts this should take a moment to reflect on what the military actually spends its money on, from the disasters in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya to the recent use of UK bases to attack Iran. Not to mention the bombing of Yemen and the assistance given to Israel in its genocide in Gaza. The only outcome has been to subject tens of millions of people around the world to extreme violence and destruction. At the same time, life has gotten harder and harder for our communities here at home.

So I hope the new Prime Minister has the strength to resist the siren calls to defund the British people in order to bankroll more overseas bases and more American wars. We need investment in our people, our services, our socially useful industries. We need to improve lives here, not destroy them abroad. We need to rebuild our country, not collapse other ones. That’s the trade union movement’s agenda, and it’s one we expect Labour to follow.

And Simon Fletcher writes:

We are today in one of the most dangerous periods since the end of the second world war. Extreme warmongering is normalised, and the drive for higher military spending across Europe and the NATO member states is unrelenting.

Behind it all lies pressure from the United States. Indeed, the US Ambassador in London warned Andy Burnham shortly before he became Prime Minister that Britain must move beyond ‘rhetoric’ and make ‘sustained investment’ in defence rather than focusing on ‘other spending priorities.’ The government must not be ‘held up’ by ‘backloading’ additional investment in defence for a later date, he said.

There is no ambiguity here. Some might rationalise support for rearmament on the basis that Donald Trump is an unreliable ally, meaning Europe must now do more to protect itself directly. But the main force driving NATO member states to spend more on arms is the United States itself. The Americans wish, as they have for almost a century, to deepen our dependence by further binding us to their own military-industrial behemoth.

Today, this longstanding American objective is hitched to an aggressive posture, wherein the rearmament of subordinate states like Britain serves not US withdrawal from the world but a strengthened NATO under the thumb of the dominant power. This strategy is centrally geared towards enhancing American military might in the face of China – the principal long-term economic and geopolitical priority in Washington.

A Military Colossus

The Left in Britain cannot hope to avoid this question or simply focus on bread and butter issues alone when the scale of what the NATO countries have signed up to is so enormous. It alters the whole political picture. At the 2025 NATO summit, member states agreed to increase the proportion of their economies spent on defence and national security to 5% of GDP by 2035. This consists of two elements: ensuring at least 3.5% of GDP is devoted to spending on core defence requirements; and spending a further 1.5% of GDP on defence and security-related investments.

The real balance of military power on the planet is already absolutely overwhelmingly on the side of the US and its allies. America alone accounts for one third of all global defence spending. China is way behind at approximately twelve per cent. Russia’s spending is lower than that, at just over six per cent of the global spend. NATO’s expenditure, in other words, is vast compared to the states it talks up most as threats. Just Germany and the UK combined spend more in total than Russia. Depending on which analysis is used, Britain is already either the fifth or six largest military spending state. Rearmament, then, is a monumental effort to reassert Western military power over the rest of the world. 

Wages or Weapons?

With defence spending already so high, and given choosing to spend more on the military means spending elsewhere is sacrificed, we should not be giving an inch to attempts to give rearmament a progressive lick of paint. 

Some in the labour movement have pushed for higher spending on defence, criticising Keir Starmer’s government for not going far enough. But this has a cost. To give an indication of what Britain pushing its military budget up still further entails; the UK’s GDP was £3,037 billion in 2025. One percent of that is just over £30 billion, so 3.5% of GDP is just over £100 billion for the military. According to the government’s own figures, its spending on schools in England in 2026/27 will be £65.9 billion. 

At present, the government’s pay offer for teachers is not fully-funded, meaning that schools will be forced to make cuts – at the same time as the government is debating how fast it can go to meet its military commitments. Choices like this will become the norm of politics. Welfare and wages not warfare, books not bombs, nurses not nukes – these are not just campaign slogans but actual choices in the British economy, as they are elsewhere in Europe. In Germany, climbing military expenditure has now overtaken Britain’s, whilst Chancellor Friedrich Merz is imposing a package of economic retrenchment including tough rules for sick leave and raising the retirement age.

The Labour government wants to show that its commitments on defence spending will bring military-Keynesian benefits, including by stressing a ‘buy British’ element to the contracts. But military spending is one of the least effective forms of investment for jobs and benefits to the wider economy. Economic analysis by Greenpeace focused on Germany, Italy and Spain showed that investing in health, education and environmental technology creates more jobs and growth than defence. Modelling of government spending in the US and Europe laid out in CND’s Alternative Defence Review, meanwhile, demonstrates that public spending on solar, wind, environmental protection and education likewise creates more jobs than military contracts.

‘You Had Better Learn to Speak Russian’

In order to persuade the European working class and its allies to forego jobs, services and improved living standards and to accept a programme of rearmament, a dangerous escalation of rhetoric is underway. In France, Macron has proclaimed a l’économie de guerre (‘we have launched a war economy,’ he declared last week). Here in Britain, Chief of the Defence Staff Admiral Sir Tony Radakin said his message to Andy Burnham was that he must be ‘almost like a wartime prime minister.’ Repeatedly in the media we hear former senior military figures counterpose spending on the military and spending on welfare very sharply. 

‘There’s no point worrying about our welfare if the cities are in ashes,’ General Sir Richard Barrons who led the government’s Strategic Defence Review argued on Sky in May. Former First Sea Lord, Lord Alan West, argued in June that it’s ‘all very well having nice funding for breakfast for children at school, which is important stuff, and other things. But if that means you have to fight a war and lose it, and you have Russians stomping down your streets shooting the children who would have been having breakfast, and that sort of thing, it’s. . . . not a very good swap, is it?’ He told BBC Radio 4 that welfare is ‘unimportant when you lose a war and you have Russian Chechen stormtroopers coming down the street raping women and killing people.’ 

NATO iterates the same hysteria, applying pressure over domestic British political choices with deliberately alarming cold warrior language: Secretary General Mark Rutte warned last summer that ‘if you do not do this, if you would not go to the 5%, including the 3.5% core defence spending, you could still have the National Health Service, or in other countries their health systems, the pension system, etcetera, but you had better learn to speak Russian.’ In a way, Rutte is quite right that there is a choice between arms and socially useful spending, but wrong about the conclusions.

The military lobby’s absurd rhetoric reveals the weakness of its case. Russia has been fighting a war with Ukraine for four years. It is not about to set up military checkpoints outside your local Greggs. Yet the bloodcurdling rhetoric builds the drumbeat of militarism and the spiral logic sets in. Once the military has the weapons; the greater the urge to use them.

Counting the Costs of Rearmament

We are now at a new stage. Efforts to make cuts in some departments’ capital budgets to fund the Defence Investment Plan burst out into open conflict in Keir Starmer’s government. John Healey resigned as the defence secretary over the pace of rearmament — not fast enough, supposedly — hastening the departure of Starmer and Rachel Reeves, whom Healey had fought. In his resignation comment, Healey argued that the Defence Investment Plan meant ‘Britain will still be spending just 2.7% of GDP in 2030, the date when NATO has warned we could face a Russian attack.’ 

Now Healey is the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Andy Burnham has committed his government to increasing defence spending from 2.6% of GDP up to 3.5% by 2035, which The Guardian noted implied a real-terms increase of more than £25bn in less than a decade. The new defence secretary, Wes Streeting, has said that spending more on defence would come at ‘an opportunity cost across government.’ But it is not yet clear how the government intends to meet its targets, or exactly by when.

Andy Burnham’s administration has set out an ambition to reconnect with voters and deliver a ‘circuit breaker for Britain’ after a failed forty-year consensus. Measures such as bus fare cuts or help for pubs and live music venues are rightly welcomed. But at the same time the room to raise productive public investment and better services is massively reduced by the a priori commitment to rearmament. 

Left Ruptures

In the British labour movement, whilst the Unite and GMB unions have lobbied for higher defence spending, the leader of the country’s largest union, UNISON’s Andrea Egan, has strongly opposed it. The TUC shifted position last year through a motion on ‘wages not weapons’ initiated by the University and College Union. A large international conference organised by the Stop The War Coalition earlier this summer was addressed by MPs and trade union leaders.

Rearmament and the question of funding for war has caused ruptures and shifts in the labour movement before. In 1914 it split the entire Second International, effectively killing it. In the 1950s opposition to rearmament gave birth to the Bevanite revolt. In that decade into the 1960s and again in the 1980s huge anti-missiles movement surged through the labour movement, reshaping the politics of the left.

Opposition to the Vietnam War was formative in the creation of a new left. Mass opposition to the Iraq War worked its way through politics and shaped left opinion at the beginning of this century. We do not yet know the longer-term political impact of the genocide against the Palestinians but the sustained movement in opposition to Israel’s war and Britain’s complicity has already profoundly affected the political landscape, including within Labour’s electoral base. We are now only in the foothills of the political impact of rearmament; historic political arguments over it are now inevitable. 

The left, inside and outside parliament, in Labour and not, must recognise that the choices and conflicts caused by rearmament are an unavoidable reality of the current phase of politics; and must organise its actions, priorities and programme accordingly – including its economic programme – so that concerted opposition to rising military spending and warmongering is a central priority.