The lack of opposition to the new drive for armaments spending needs to change urgently, or we will all be endangered and impoverished, argues Kevin Crane

In the past few weeks, Keir Starmer’s government has adopted policies that literally no-one voted for last year, or at least not in this country. Shocked by the failure of his own government’s budgetary strategy over the winter, even if many of us were not surprised in the slightest, the prime minister has sought an alternative and found it with a politician that he would probably have labelled an untouchable populist bigot barely a few months ago: he has decided to implement the programme of Donald Trump.

This has taken two forms. This first is inspired by Trump’s deployment of billionaire idiot Elon Musk just to start ripping apart government departments to see if permanent cuts can be made to public services. Starmer has now announced billions of pounds in public-sector cuts – including the full abolition of NHS England – and suddenly started saying to interviewers that, ‘I think the state should be smaller and more agile’, a position he has never articulated in the half decade since he became leader of the Labour Party on a supposedly left-wing basis.

The second is to commit absolutely to the massive increases in what is euphemistically called ‘defence spending’: that is to say, diverting even more public money away from keeping ordinary people healthy, sheltered, educated and nourished and giving it to arms companies instead. This is obviously the new consensus across Europe, being backed by governments and political parties on both the right and left.

The right have the freedom, of course, to be straightforward about what’s going on here. Britain’s official newspaper of the banking class – the Financial Times – proudly carried an opinion piece entitled ‘Europe must trim its welfare state to build a warfare state’ which openly celebrates a future in which working-class people are actively made poorer while huge military machines are built up. On the other side of the aisle, things are much less clear.

So far, Starmer has not received any opposition to increased weapons spending from within the Labour Party. There has also been very little from anywhere else, with smaller left-of-centre parties such as the Scottish Nationalists, the Greens and Plaid Cymru all broadly supporting military increases even as they say they oppose the attendant public-sector cuts. More worrying than this, however, has been response of the trade-union movement.

Although the trade unions are, in principle, opposed to attacks on the public sector, they have vocally supporting the increases on arms spending. As case in point has been Unite the Union leader, Sharon Graham, who said:

‘Whilst we welcome the increase in defence spending to 2.5 per cent and the PM’s promise around investment, growth, jobs and skills, this needs to be matched with action.

‘There is an immediate decision to be made on the replacement of aging RAF fighter jets with British-made Typhoons. This decision needs to made in the UK’s favour.’

While phrased as critical support, Graham is conceding Keir Starmer’s logic entirely. Worse, what she is arguing for would not work, even if she could achieve the best outcome that she describes.

More guns equal less butter

Unite does organise workers in the arms-manufacturing sector, so in theory, ordering new weapons and war machines from British manufacturers would be to their benefit. Sharon Graham knows full well that there is no certainty that will happen: Donald Trump is determined to boost US manufacturing, and will strongarm other governments into buying American hardware to assist him in doing so. Given Starmer’s craven cowardice before Trump up to this point, the chances of him telling the president ‘no’ do not seem to be strong. This, however, is not the most fundamental problem with what Graham is arguing. The bigger problem is that the benefit of the warfare state to the working class – not even that minority of it who are Unite the Union members – would never be offset by the harm done to the welfare state.

The number of jobs created by increased weapons output is incredibly low relative to the amount spent on it. I quoted from Andrew Feinstein’s work last year:

‘Armaments, [Feinstein] demonstrates, is an industry that is very inefficient at producing jobs: so even though weapons are a £8.2 billion sector in Great Britain and Northern Ireland, it only provides around 55,000 jobs in manufacturing. In contrast, the rail sector has £20 billion in annual income but creates a whopping 250,000 jobs in its supply chain. The two have roughly the same public-sector workforce sizes, so you can very much see which one is the bigger provider of decent jobs beyond those directly working for the government. This is before we get into the various other concerns with the arms trade, such as its inherent corruption and the moral and legal peril of where the produce ends up going.’

Of the 55,000 jobs above mentioned, a large portion are in Unite’s membership (many others will be members of the GMB and some smaller unions), but Unite has around 1.2 million members. Pumping more money into arms will never make that number of arms-sector workers rise anything like as efficiently as putting it into more socially useful sectors would, but remember that the deal is that while that additional cash flows into arms, it is being taken out of the public sector to the tune of billions. This will definitely mean hundreds of thousands of jobs lost, including large numbers of Unite members in diverse areas like health, education and clerical work. So, Sharon Graham isn’t even favouring the needs of her own members over other working people, she’s favouring one relatively small section of the union’s members over larger sections. When you consider that Unite’s membership as whole will also suffer, either personally or due to impacts on their loved ones, from the drop in living standards produced by slashing public services, this becomes not merely a bad trade-off but a frankly crazy one.

Quite simply, the labour movement cannot afford to support the new arms economy, and it’s an argument the left needs to start taking up urgently. This is why it is so important to start building now for the 7 June People’s Assembly ‘Welfare Not Warfare’ demonstration.