UK

Let’s talk about defence policy

Mike Phipps calls for an honest assessment of the real international threats Britain faces and how to address them.

From the first two months alone, it’s clear that the second presidency of Donald Trump marks a departure. It is authoritarian, ideologically far right and ‘disruptive’ to the point of lawlessness – exemplified by the pardoning of the Capitol Hill rioters and the President’s executive order pausing the enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits US companies from paying bribes. Many other executive orders are already being overturned by the courts because of their evident illegality.

Despite this, sections of the US media, for example, Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post are falling in behind the line of this convicted felon-president. And the corporate sector is also moving with the times. BP announced it is now focusing on profits rather than climate policy. Other companies are dropping their diversity policies.

Some might argue that authoritarian lawlessness has been a feature of US foreign policy for a very long time, as evidenced by its carte blanche for Israel’s genocidal occupation, its invasion of Iraq, its contempt for the International Criminal Court, or even its illegal mining of Nicaragua’s harbours back in the 1980s. What is new is the Administration’s  domestic lawlessness, as well as its open support for far right parties in democratic countries in Europe. Siding with Russia and North Korea in a vote at the United Nations against Ukraine is clearly an unprecedented step.

Centrist neoliberalism paves the way for the authoritarian right

Processing all the implications of the Trump presidency for Europe will take some time. But we need to be wary of giving uncritical support to those European leaders who have rightly criticised Trump’s policy turn on Ukraine. Europe is dominated by Western centrist neoliberal politics, whose austerity policies and cuts to basic services have made it easier to demonize migrants and have helped prepares the way for the very authoritarianism of which the Trump Administration is a manifestation. The recent German general election, in which the far right AfD came second with 20% of the vote, underlines this.

Additionally, the free market approach pursued by European countries has widened inequality and reduced empathy, creating the same culture of contempt for ordinary people that is expressed in the mass sackings and proposals to slash public spending now spearheaded by Trump’s government. Britain too is going down this road, with a new war on benefits recently announced.

As a recent Guardian article by Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah pointed out, “The UK has seen income and wealth inequality soar in recent years, leaving us looking far more like the US than continental Europe. The consequence of this could not be starker. Earlier this year, a report from King’s College London and the Fairness Foundation warned that growing wealth inequality in the UK could be a ‘major driver of societal collapse’ within the next decade. And even those benefiting from rising inequality think it is dangerous, with more than half of rich people polled by Patriotic Millionaires thinking that extreme wealth is a ‘threat to democracy’.”

For all their posturing, it’s equally clear that Macron, Starmer, Scholz, etc do not really care about Ukrainians’ human rights any more than they care about the rights of Palestinians. Nor did they care about the ethnic cleansing of 100,000 Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh in 2023 by Azerbaijan, a regime with which EU leaders had just signed a new deal to increase gas supplies. Keir Starmer’s own cynicism towards global rights is underlined by his 40% cut in the international aid budget.

Clearly, these leaders are worried about Trump for other reasons, in particular his apparent strategic shift away from defending the status quo in Europe and its implications for NATO expenditure. Yet this new US isolationism may be something more permanent, not destined to disappear with Trump.

Our government claims to distance itself from Trump’s approach but emulates him in its proposals to cut the aid budget  – and now welfare. In this context, it is essential that socialists and humanitarians make their voices heard independently and do not end up either tail-ending rival imperialisms such as Russia or China – an error much of the ‘left’ appears to have succumbed to over Ukraine, and even Syria – or falling in behind the outlook of Starmer and other centrist neoliberals.

What are the real threats to our security?

Amid the clamour over European security and the alarmist rhetoric about migration, socialists need to identify and focus on the central issues affecting people: the cost of living crisis, the collapse of our public services, health especially, and the climate emergency.

That said, we cannot ignore the issue of defence. People are legitimately concerned about the effects on European security of current US policy, a stance that may well outlast Trump. But while we cannot ignore threats from authoritarian states, we do have to assess how significant they really are alongside other dangers.

Voters elect governments to keep them safe – from internal threats, such as poverty, illness, unemployment – and external threats, such as terrorism, war, climate crisis, pandemics. They want strong government, not in the sense of authoritarian, but on the basis of fulfilling their promised mandate – in this case, “change”, challenging the rich and powerful, and making society fairer.

From recent experience, we should learn not to minimise issues of security. Jeremy Corbyn got this right when he linked the London Bridge bombing in 2017’s general election campaign to earlier British policy in Iraq and beyond. It was courageous, and correct, to make that connection and people appreciated his honesty in doing so. But I believe we got it wrong when some around him downplayed the threat posed by the Salisbury poison attack in 2018, which in retrospect may have been a turning point in his fortunes, perhaps more important that the manufactured antisemitism crisis.

Defence matters. But defence cannot be looked at in isolation from the country’s overall orientation. Britain today faces a choice: either a US vassal state or a new partnership with the EU.

In fact, we are already a long way on the road to becoming the former. According to the latest count by the Office for National Statistics, 38% of all turnover of non-financial businesses in Britain goes through foreign owned companies. US businesses have benefited hugely from Britain’s mass sell-off of its assets, with the value of (known) holdings domiciled in the US rising from £242bn to £708bn in the decade to 2023. Here is Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah again:

“I don’t think even Thatcher would have imagined that a quarter of British GDP would today be made up of sales of US multinationals like Amazon, Coca-Cola, Goldman Sachs and Uber. What that means is that key decisions are being made elsewhere, intellectual property is often held overseas, profits are extracted and taxes not paid here. As the economist Angus Hanton argues, the UK has become a vassal state, paying economic tribute to the American owners of its assets.”

The alternative to this course is a strengthened relationship with the European Union. But, still fearful of the toxicity of the Brexit referendum, this is the one thing Starmer’s government refuses to talk about.

Nukes are not the answer

What should the left be saying about defence? Firstly, that we don’t necessarily need to increase defence spending. And if we do, we should see it as a national emergency and, rather than cut the aid budget, demand a greater contribution from those who can afford it, via a wealth tax of the kind proposed by Richard Burgon.

Currently defence, like international aid, is subordinated to commercial goals thanks to the power of lobbyists. Speaking at a fringe meeting at the 2019 Labour Conference, one former top civil servant at the Ministry of Defence argued that the skewed priorities of the arms industry were the single biggest threat to Britain’s national defence. This lobby channels defence spending into prestigious military projects, including nuclear weapons renewal, away from the real threats of climate breakdown, terrorism, pandemics and cyber-insecurity – in September 2020, it was revealed that Britain is defending itself against 60 significant cyber-attacks a day. Meanwhile, as money is lavished on lucrative, eye-catching but often unnecessary projects, British soldiers are often left poorly equipped in the field.

As I have argued elsewhere: “Besides the issue of affordability and the powerful moral argument against nuclear weapons, there is also a strong defence case as to why upgraded nuclear weapons offer neither the pathway to a more secure Britain nor the correct response to the security challenges the country faces.”  

Furthermore, most people want peaceful resolutions to conflicts. This requires real political leadership, which is sadly in short supply these days. “War isn’t the biggest threat to the UK’s security – but is getting the money,” says Prof Paul Rogers, who argues that climate and pandemic threats are not getting enough resources.

We should also add that much of the current insecurity in the world has been fuelled by Britain’s previous military activity –  Western intervention in Iraq created Daesh; the occupation of Afghanistan allowed the Taliban to recover and grow; the invasion of Libya made that country a failed state, now used by terrorists as a training ground.

Senior military figures warn that global warming is the greatest security threat of the 21st century. Friends of the Earth estimate that there are 40 million environmental refugees, driven to migrate due to food insecurity, drought and rising sea levels. Yet the UK’s own Environmental Agency had its budget halved 2010-20.

Climate change is rarely mentioned in the government Strategic Defence and Security Reviews. When it is, it is often framed in terms of the impact on national security, and approached with ‘hard’ security responses, such as militarised borders to deal with mass migration.

These crucial issues rarely surface when UK defence is being discussed. This is why the left needs to get more comfortable about talking about what our real defence priorities should be. Ignoring the issue will marginalise us at a time when we must find our voice.

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.

Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/defenceimages/1608886263 Creator: Corporal Andrew Morris (RAF) | Credit: MoD/Crown copyright (year) Copyright: © Crown copyright Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Deed