Military spending is warping our economy to serve Trump imperialism – The Red Weekly Column
In our Red Weekly Column, Labour Outlook’s Sam Browse writes on the proposal to lift military spending to 5% of GDP.
Last week, NATO Chief Mark Rutte – with the avid support of President Trump – proposed that the defence budgets of those belonging to the military alliance should rise to 5% of GDP. Turning the screws on the British government, US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth told journalists “we think everyone is going to get there, we really do. It’s important they do. It’s important that the UK gets there”.
The demand to increase budgets comes only months after a previous Whitehouse intervention saw the Starmer government pledge to raise military spending to 2.5% of GDP by 2027-28, with an ambition to push this to £3bn by the 2030s.
Responding to the 5% figure, Britain’s Defence Secretary, John Healey, disturbingly indicated that the government ‘are up for that discussion’.
Calls for the rest of the NATO alliance to increase their military budgets are integral to the Trump administration’s reorientation of American foreign policy and attempts to maintain US global hegemony in the face of an ascendant China. As the US pivots to encircle its main enemy in Asia, withdrawing resources from Eastern Europe and reconfiguring its relationship with Russia in the process, it is insisting that its allies pick up the tab for their own military spend.
This demand – which the British Government has, so far, enthusiastically obliged – is already placing strain on the provision of social security, with £5bn worth of cuts to Personal Independence Payments one of the measures used to offset the 2.5% commitment, alongside a cut to the international aid budget.
The human cost of the cuts is appalling and totemic of a wider series of wrong priorities – on winter fuel, the two-child benefit cap, and (non-)support for WASPI women. But subservience to US imperial interests also risks structurally warping the British economy, rigging it even more against workers.
In the Government’s Strategic Defence Review, published last week, the Prime Minister writes that British defence will become ‘the fundamental organising principle of government’. Starmer continues –
“We must drive a new partnership with industry and a radical reform of procurement, creating jobs, wealth, and opportunity in every corner of our country – this is the ‘defence dividend’ which we are determined to seize. It must drive innovation at a wartime pace, making the UK the leading edge of innovation in NATO and equipping our forces with the full range of conventional and technological capabilities. And it must foster a collective national endeavour through which the state, business, and society unite in pursuit of the security of the nation and the prosperity of its people.”
In short, military spending will become – not only an aspect of – but the central plank in Britain’s economic strategy. In this regard, it’s illuminating to note the capital spend for the next four years, set out in the Autumn budget. Investment is due to grow by 4.3% next year, 2.1% the year after, and falls to -0.9% and -0.1% in 2028-29 and 2029-30. On the basis of the 2.5% increase in military spending alone, the Institute for Fiscal Studies argues that –
“All of the increase in capital spending over the Spending Review period has already been implicitly allocated to defence. Given that, it will not be possible to also prioritise investments in public services, net zero and growth-friendly areas while staying within the envelope”.
While next week’s Spending Review will provide the details, the IFS is clear: even before any hike to 5%, current plans for defence spending already eat up any increase in capital budgets for the coming four years – gone any aspiration for additional spending on projects extraneous to the drive to war, such as those which tackle the climate crisis, or that invest in our crumbling hospitals or schools.
And for those who think investment in military infrastructure has its own “defence dividend” as the prime Minister has termed it, there are far better ways of growing the economy and addressing inequality.
A recent House of Commons Library report shows that investment overwhelmingly falls in the South West and South East – areas where poverty levels are lower than most of the rest of Britain. Rethinking Security argue that 56% of MoD spending is actually in London and the South, with 40% in a roughly 50 mile radius of Salisbury Plain.
The defence sector is high tech – and therefore less intensive in the amount of jobs it creates. As the Strategic Defence Review notes, military spending stood at 2.3% of GDP in 2023-24 and supported 1 in 60 (1.7%) of jobs in the UK. But that’s only a ratio of 1% of GDP to 0.74% of total jobs – hardly a “dividend”. It follows that there must be more efficient forms of investment that not only create more jobs, but do so across the whole of the country, and without handing billions of pounds in dividends to a handful of multinational companies in the process.
In other words, the militarisation of our economy is not only forcing cuts on day-to-day spend on social security; it’s also funnelling cash away from productive, job-creating investment in infrastructure, tackling the climate emergency, or delivering better equipped public services, towards a less productive, less job-intensive defence sector – and thereby limiting future growth, even in years where investment is forecast to grow.
Rather than militarise our economy, immiserate people even further, and make serving US imperial power ‘the fundamental organising principle of government’, we need a socialist industrial and economic strategy that serves people and planet – combined with a foreign policy that seeks peace and de-escalation. No to a Trump-inflated military budget – we must continue to say loudly and clearly: we demand “welfare not warfare”.
- The Red Weekly Column will appear each Monday on Labour Outlook from one of our regular socialist contributors.
- Sam Browse is an organiser for Arise Festival and a regular contributor to Labour Outlook. You can follow him on Twitter/X here.
- If you support Labour Outlook’s work amplifying the voices of left movements and struggles here and internationally, please consider becoming a supporter on Patreon.
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