JUNE 27, 2025
Labour’s military spending priorities ignore the real dangers Britain faces and merely serve the interests of the defence establishment, argues Mike Phipps.
“Britain will commit to spending 5% of its GDP on defence by 2035 after weeks of diplomatic pressure and intense negotiations with allies,” reports the Guardian. It might have added: once again, the Labour Government appears to have caved in to pressure from the Trump Administration.
Consequence of militarism
Rachel Reeves, in her recent Spending Review, talked up the benefits of increased defence spending in terms of more jobs and economic growth. This looks unlikely. A Business Matters analysis of this claim was damningly conclusive: “Military expenditure in Europe has historically been a poor driver of economic expansion. A European Commission study found no clear growth effects from defence spending across 15 countries over five decades. Even in the UK, while real-terms defence spending has crept up since the 1980s, employment in the sector has halved. Today, only around 0.9% of UK jobs are supported by Ministry of Defence contracts.”
This leaves aside the sheer wastefulness of military investment – the lavishing of vast sums on weapons systems that hopefully will never be used, compared to the far more modest outlays on environmental, educational or health infrastructure which can produce tangible improvements in the quality of people’s lives.
There will, however, be some worrying consequences of the new militarism. If anyone doubted the connection between the rise of authoritarian militarism and the erosion of civil liberties – even in a stable democracy like the UK – look no further than the government’s proposal to ban the direct action group Palestine Action. And this is just the most recent in a series of measures to curtail and criminalise protest.
Nearly thirty years ago, a group of peace activists broke into a BAE factory in Lancashire and disarmed a warplane intended and to be delivered to Indonesia and used against the people of illegally occupied East Timor. But, despite spending six months in jail awaiting trial and facing heavy sentences if found guilty, the defendants were allowed to put their case to the jury who eventually acquitted them.
Changes in the law are making such options increasingly unavailable in today’s authoritarian climate. The designation as ‘terrorist’ of direct action groups that commit criminal damage – which begins with Palestine Action, but which could be extended to cover a host of environmental campaigns and would have included the suffragettes historically – is a major step in the repression of political dissent.
National security priorities
As I have argued before, socialists cannot ignore the issue of national security. Voters want governments to keep them safe – from both internal threats, such as poverty, illness, unemployment – and external threats, such as terrorism, cyber-attacks, climate crisis or pandemics.
We are, Keir Starmer tells us, living in “an era of radical uncertainty” and this is used to justify the proposed hike in defence spending. The line about uncertainty may well resonate with many people. But part of that uncertainty arises from the unpredictable and volatile behaviour of the Trump Administration.
People are legitimately concerned about the effects on European security of current US policy. It is hard not to be, when Trump echoes Putin’s justifications for his aggression against Ukraine and when Vice President Vance openly parrots the talking points of the European far right. Trump may seem to be one of a kind but his reduced commitment to European peace and security – isolationism – did not begin with him and may well outlast him. Would a change at the White House see the USAID budget fully reinstated? No – just as electing a Labour government did not see the return of the Department for International Development, axed by Boris Johnson.
Of course, many socialists will not lament cuts to UK or US ‘aid’. Much of the US’s spend, in particular, was aimed at promoting ‘soft power’ and skewed towards helping US corporations develop markets in poorer countries. But in the short term, the impact of terminating much of this expenditure will be devastating – including in Europe. Part of the Dayton peace process that ended the bloody war in former Yugoslavia, for example, earmarked considerable sums of US aid money to help fund a public sector in some of the newly-created statelets, including education, healthcare and social security; when that goes, the conflict could again flare up quickly in some areas.
European security is more endangered by authoritarian states in some regions than others. Russia’s war on Ukraine is more of a concern for former Soviet states than in Western Europe. There is already growing Russian interference in Moldova, Romania and other eastern European countries. In Britain, the risk from authoritarian states like Russia is far less, and any serious look at defence spending has to start from an honest assessment of what the real threats might be.
Don’t increase spending, reassess priorities
What should the left be saying about defence? Firstly, that we don’t need to increase defence spending. Instead we need a thorough reordering of Uk defence priorities.
That starts, as Paul Rogers has argued, with “an honest assessment of Britain’s abject failures in recent wars, especially Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. The UK armed forces have been integral to the coalitions involved in all three of those wars, just as it has been a close partner to the United States in the devastating 2014-18 air war against ISIS and is far more involved in Israel’s current wars than it will acknowledge.”
As I have argued elsewhere: “It’s estimated that 940,000 people died in post-9/11 wars directly as a result of war violence, and four times that number indirectly. Some 38 million people were displaced in wars that cost $8 trillion. And it should be remembered that these wars – particularly in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, where new instabilities and terrorist threats were generated – were failures.”
Secondly, we need to recognise that there are serious global threats ahead. But the biggest, including climate breakdown and the likelihood of more pandemics, cannot be solved by military means – any more than the challenge of increased immigration can be effectively dealt with by increased security and calls to ‘stop the boats’, ‘smash the gangs’, etc.
Unsurprisingly, these issues were absent from the Government’s recent Strategic Defence Review. To look at the political roots of these challenges – the West’s reliance on fossil fuels, its exploitation and subordination of poorer countries, often by force – would challenge its entire economic order.
Instead, the Review produced the usual conventional banalities, as one would expect from a process led by traditional pillars of the defence establishment, including former Minister of Defence and NATO Secretary General George Robertson.
Nukes, as usual
Overarching everything is the continued commitment to unusable nuclear weapons. Upgrading Trident will cost at least £200 billion over the lifetime of the new system. Additionally, as Tom Stevenson points out, the Review recommends that the UK “consider ordering F-35A jets capable of carrying B61 nuclear bombs. As a signatory of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, the UK is supposed to be taking measures ‘in good faith’ towards nuclear disarmament. Instead, the government appears to be entertaining the expansion of its nuclear weapons programme.”
This week, the Government confirmed that it would indeed buy at least twelve F-35 stealth jets that can carry nuclear warheads. The step was described as the most significant strengthening of the UK’s nuclear capability in a generation. Whether it will make UK citizens ‘safer’ is highly doubtful.
The deal means that US bombs will return to British soil for the first time since 2008. It comes at a cost of an eye-watering £900 million.
Nuclear war is not of course the biggest threat facing Britain, but it certainly gets the most money. The same could be said for war in general. The distortions introduced into defence spending priorities by the power of commercial lobbyists, pushing for high-prestige, expensive projects are notorious. They neither make Britain safer nor address the real threats we face, but they do pay generous dividends to the shareholders of arms companies. Defence contractor Babcock International’s share price has more than doubled this year.
Britain’s return to the ‘nuclear frontline’ will not take place without largescale protests, potentially on a scale not seen since the Greenham Common mass protests of the early 1980s. it’s in this context that the Government’s crackdown on public dissent can be fully understood.
The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament has already organised a big campaign around RAF Lakenheath, where a new round of nuclear bombs are expected to be stored. They are encouraging supporters to email their MP about the stationing of US nuclear weapons at the base, without any public consultation or parliamentary debate.
CND have also produced an Alternative Defence Review, which challenges the dominant war narrative, cultivated by political elites in thrall to the military-industrial complex.
It “examines how militarisation has distorted national priorities, fuelled global instability, undermined international law, harmed the environment, and diverted investment from public services and social infrastructure. It shows that increased military expenditure will be economically inefficient, environmentally destructive, and socially regressive, offering limited job creation while stifling a more sustainable and just economy. The review calls for a 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.”
More military spending does not just distract from the real challenges we face – it worsens them. A the Peace Pledge Union argues, “Militarism isn’t the solution to climate change, but a major cause. The carbon footprint of militaries worldwide accounts for around 5.5% of global carbon emissions, which governments, including the UK, routinely fail to disclose.”
To end on a note of caution. There are many issues – pubic ownership, austerity, social spending, wealth taxes – where socialist ideas have widespread popular support. Opposition to the new militarism may not be one of them: nearly two-thirds of people support increasing defence spending at the expense of overseas aid. This includes a majority of Labour voters. Campaigners will need to make the argument patiently and persistently as widely as possible as to why the Government’s new defence policy is a decisive step in the wrong direction.
Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.
Image> c/o CND
