“BILLIONS HAS BEEN SPENT BOMBING IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN WHILE OUR WELFARE STATE FALLS TO PIECES, AND NOW BORIS JOHNSON AND KEIR STARMER AGREE TO DIVERT MORE PUBLIC MONEY INTO FUNDING ANOTHER ROUND OF MILITARISM WHILE BASIC NEEDS IN OUR SOCIETY ARE STILL NOT MET.”
There is something rotten in the state of Britain. For many years this small island off the coast of Western Europe has suffered from the highest military spending in the continent. This pre-eminence was briefly challenged during the austerity years when France and Germany overtook Britain in wasting money on war, but now Boris Johnson has sought to rectify with a £16.5 billion boost to the military budget, the biggest increase in military spending since Thatcher.
The warfare state is always at the expense of the welfare state. The first major attack on the basic principles of the NHS came in the early 1950s when prescription charges were re-introduced for spectacles and dental work to foot the bill for the Korean War. Aneurin Bevan resigned from the Labour government in protest.
In 2003, during the run up to the Iraq War, when British Chancellor Gordon Brown was asked how much his government was prepared to spend, he famously replied, “as much as it takes.” When have we ever heard our political class use that kind of language when it comes to waging war on child poverty, fuel poverty or homelessness?
“History doesn’t repeat itself”, Mark Twain once wrote, “but it often rhymes”. This week, only a few days after telling us there was no money to feed hungry school kids during the holidays, another government announced more money for ‘defence’. Presumably our hungry families are boosted knowing theirs are the best protected food banks in the world?
So why are our rulers so addicted to a bloated military budget? The answer is simple: Britain used to have an empire. Now that the empire is gone, our rulers have decided the way to continue to be a player on the world stage is to hitch themselves to American foreign policy – and being America’s most slavish European ally demands excessive military spending. This ‘special relationship’ works very well for our rulers, but it is hard to see what benefits we get? Billions spent bombing Iraq and Afghanistan while our welfare state falls to pieces, and now Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer agree to divert more public money into funding another round of militarism while basic needs in our society are still not met.
The bombs Britain drops on faraway lands explode into our own society. Not only because money into war is money out of our communities, but also in the poisoning of community relations, the ratcheting up of racism to justify the wars, the treatment of British Muslims as a suspect community since 9.11, the scapegoating of the refugees who pour into Europe fleeing the wars, and the use of militarism to wage war on our democratic freedoms and civil liberties won through centuries of working class struggle.
After all, war is the long-term enemy of the poor. The world’s 85 richest people have as much as poorest 3.5 billion. The annual sum needed to end world hunger is $30 billion while the US military’s budget is over $600 billion per year and Britain’s military budget regularly exceeds $40 billion. They can find money to fund the war, but they can’t find money to feed the poor.
Maybe there is another way? Maybe public money could be used to give our citizens the most advanced welfare state in the world? Or instead of being living in a state famous for exporting weapons and war around the world, we could live in a state that exports doctors and aid around the world?
Maybe instead of having a ‘special relationship’ with US imperialism, we could have a special relationship with oppressed people on the planet like the Palestinians, Kurds, Uyghurs and Kashmiris? Instead of creating refugees with wars we could help them with international solidarity.
This requires building a huge peace movement in our communities, workplaces, schools, colleges and universities concentrated on the question of slashing the military budget, and winning this political argument in the trade unions and other organisations of the working class. We need to drive home the argument that military spending is an attack on the working class at home and abroad.
This approach means taking on social democratic politicians and trade union leaders who try to sell an expanding war machine to us as job creation, or the kind of left-liberalism we saw over the last five years when Labour’s first anti-imperialist leader, Jeremy Corbyn, was continually pressured to retreat from a radical foreign policy.
It also means shifting a political culture in Wales where since devolution, the Welsh Government has got away with building links between Wales and arms industries, selling it as economic regeneration. Last year when Labour’s Sadiq Khan called for the world’s largest arms fair to ‘get out of London’ it was revealed that the Welsh Government had booked a stall there.
It means challenging the major environmental protest groups and NGOs in the West to take up opposition to military spending . The American war machine, which Britain’s war machine services, emits more greenhouse gasses than over 100 countries. It wages oil wars across the Middle East. Is it not past time for the environmental movement too to take a stand against the war machine as one of the biggest polluters on the planet? The struggle against climate chaos is a struggle for peace.
We need to beat swords into ploughshares. In the 1970s visionary trade unionists from Lucas Aerospace (now BAE systems) produced detailed plans to build road rail buses, kidney machines and renewable energy systems instead of weapons. Today, Campaign Against Arms Trade research has developed ‘Arms to Renewables’ plans, showing how a rapid transition from arms industries to green industries could happen, increasing employment and with no job losses.
A century ago, a Polish-Jewish socialist and anti-war activist, Rosa Luxemburg, writing a few weeks before her brutal murder said,
“The entire war and munitions industries must be abolished since a socialist society does not need murder weapons. Instead, the valuable materials and human labour used in them must be employed for useful products”
We should remember her words today.
The writer is an activist & founder of the Stop the War Coalition in Wales
