UK
‘Alternative Defence Review’ – call to invest in ‘Welfare, not Warfare’
From the CND Press & Communications Office
The ‘Alternative Defence Review’ published today by a working group chaired by Kate Hudson (CND Vice-President) with Alex Gordon (former RMT President) and Sam Mason (CND Trade Union Advisory Group), calls for a radical break with successive UK governments’ failed security and defence policies, which distort Britain’s national priorities, fuel global instability, undermine international law, harm the environment and divert investment from public services and social infrastructure towards subsidies for the global arms industry.
As the UK government publishes a Strategic Defence Review (2 June 2025) based on increasing military spending to 2.5% of GDP from 2027, our Alternative Defence Review sets out the case for a radical shift toward a significantly demilitarised defence strategy rooted in human security and common security—prioritising diplomacy, global cooperation, conflict prevention, and investment in health, education, climate resilience, social care, and the creation of well-paid, secure, unionised and socially useful jobs.
Professor Karen Bell, who edited the Alternative Defence Review, said: “This report offers a credible, democratic alternative to militarism: a sustainable economy grounded in social justice, global solidarity, and the urgent need to build peace—not war—for the 21st century.”
The Alternative Defence Review was proposed by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in response to the RMT union’s decision to ‘… campaign with other trade unions and peace organisations to convene a labour and peace movement summit to work out the basis of a new foreign policy with the promotion of peace and social justice at its heart’.
Contributors to the Alternative Defence Review are Karen Bell, University of Glasgow; Michael Burke, economist; David Cullen, BASIC; John Foster, University of Paisley/UWS; Alex Gordon, RMT; Ann Henderson, former STUC; Kate Hudson, CND; Hugh Kirkbride, Unite the union (personal capacity); Sam Mason, CND Trade Union Advisory Group; Marjorie Mayo, Goldsmiths, University of London; Kevan Nelson, UNISON (personal capacity); Richard Norton-Taylor, Declassified UK; Paul Rogers, University of Bradford; Dave Webb, Leeds Beckett University.
- Read it here.
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Invest in People, Peace & Planet – Not Weapons & War
Sam Mason writes on how we need to unite for action on climate change and real human security, by resisting the agenda of militarisation and war.
The 2020s should have been a decade of hope following the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015. Despite its limitations, it established a framework to limit global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. It was a redline if we were to significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change, and reach a peak in greenhouse gas emissions before 2025 at the latest, and a 43% decline by 2030.
Also in 2015, the 2030 agenda for sustainable development was agreed, aimed at achieving seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Among these were SDG 13 on climate change and SDG 16 on peace and justice.
Additionally, the 2022 Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework was seen as another landmark agreement designed to halt and reverse nature loss by 2030.
But as we reach the midway point of this critical decade for humanity, global and national action on climate change, biodiversity, inequality, poverty and peace has been relegated to the sidelines – and replaced by a new ‘emergency’ of militarisation and a drive to war.
Yet again, 2024 was a ‘warmest on record’ year with annual average temperatures higher than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels for the first time. It also saw the fastest rise in CO2 emissions, the opposite direction to where we need to be to stay on track with the Paris agreement.
Every year, records aren’t being broken but shattered. More extreme heatwaves, wildfires, flooding and storms, drought and rising sea levels. Wildfires in the UK are already at a record high this year, made six times more likely with human caused climate change.
Biodiversity loss is accelerating at a lightening pace. Indeed, the Labour government’s Planning and Infrastructure bill offers little hope among environmental activists they will buck this trend in the UK.
The latest report on the SDGs shows that only 17 per cent are on track to being achieved and progress on over one third has stalled or regressed. The critical areas it highlights as undermining progress are climate change, peace and security, and inequalities among and between countries.
Financing from rich countries is the critical factor in the failures of all these agreements to make progress. Climate financing is far of the needs of those countries on the frontlines of climate change, namely in the global south. The SDGs have a funding gap of USD4 trillion a year, and there is an increasing debt crisis among lower income countries.
Tragically, over the past year, the continuing and now very real threat of climate change is barely anywhere to be heard. And this isn’t just a Trumpian style erasure of the climate crisis.
In the UK, the political weaponisation of climate and so-called net zero policy has seen a race to the bottom to denounce it as an unaffordable luxury for the working class. Despite Ed Miliband’s call at the energy summit in April to ‘bring on the fight’, the reality is that instead of investing in the urgent action needed to reach the important 2030 carbon reduction targets, governments (including in the UK) are preparing for war and growing the ‘magic money tree’ for military spending, while cutting investment on climate policy, real human and workers security.
In 2024, world military expenditure saw an increase of 9.4% in real terms from 2024 reaching a staggering $2718 billion. The UK announcements to increase defence spending to 2.5% of GDP equates to around £70billion a year by 2026/27 and puts the UK as the sixth biggest spender worldwide.
This is money taken from other areas of the economy such as international aid, disabled people’s pockets and wider welfare support, health and social care, education, housing, energy transition, clean and publicly owned water, transport and so on. Action through investment on all these things that would address the climate and biodiversity crises as well as the cost-of-living crisis.
It is a cruel, but politically constructed irony, that rather than the hope of a better world for all by 2030, the ReArm Europe Plan/Readiness 2030 is preparing for war. The UK Government’s Strategic Defence Review due to published shortly is part of joining this call of ‘readiness for war’ as it seeks to rebrand the economy, energy transition and growth objectives within a defence and security framing.
As the economist Michael Burke has pointed out, increased military spending is not socially or ecologically useful investment. It will not raise living standards, provide a mass of jobs, improve public services or help in meeting climate and biodiversity targets. On the contrary, it will bolster the profits of arms companies while increasing climate risk and environmental devastation, poverty and inequality.
If we want to understand the real war being waged, then we should heed the words of Colombian President Gustavo Petro who said in 2023 that the devastation in Gaza should be understood as a “harbinger of what is to come” with respect to climate change, as rich nations and the rich seek to protect their wealth at the expense of the rest of humanity. The may be frightening for us all to contemplate, but it’s an important message we need to understand.
Therefore, as we reach the mid-way point of this important decade we have to put our hope in the courage of our predecessors in struggle and of course, the Palestinian people who in the most extreme of circumstances continue to fight for their freedom.
By urgently joining up our movements – climate, anti-war, anti-nuclear, anti-racism, disability, social justice and labour movements – in coordinated, international action for peace and global solidarity, we can start to pivot away from the agenda of war and increased militarisation for the world. Now more than ever, we need to address the real threats to our security of climate change and poverty.
- Sam Mason is a trade unionist, climate and peace campaigner, and regular contributor to Labour Outlook.
- 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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