Britain’s public infrastructure is broken, degraded by years of Tory cuts. Massive public investment to rectify this situation — in our colleges, universities, schools, hospitals, railways, local councils, you name it — could not be more urgent. Yet we must be patient, the new Labour government insists, as the Tories have “maxed-out the credit card.”
It seems odd, then, that while the government take policy decisions that will keep hundreds of thousands of children in poverty and subjects many more pensioners to freezing homes justified by fiscal prudence, the Prime Minister and Chancellor can nevertheless find billions for defence.
Though the Prime Minister has not yet named a specific timeline, he is steadfastly committed to hiking British defence spending — already the third-highest in Nato in absolute terms — to 2.5 per cent of GDP.
This is something on which we in the trade union movement should be united, demanding investment be redirected away from militarism and foreign wars towards the public good.
Sadly, it has rarely been so. TUC Congress voted two years ago — shamefully, albeit narrowly — to campaign for “immediate increases in defence spending,” overturning policy in support of defence diversification from 2017.
Indeed, these are old divisions. In the 1950s, foreign policy officials in the Truman administration observed Britain and spoke of their panic at “Bevanism and those who urge social welfare above defense.”
My union, UCU, is proud to stand on the right side of this debate. We are urging investment in the welfare of our people, not more money for the material of war, genocide, and ecological catastrophe.
It was in that spirit we are arguing today at Congress for the TUC to pressure the Labour government to reduce spending on defence and arms, while providing a just transition into climate jobs for workers in those industries.
Listening to defence unions, you could at times be forgiven for thinking that campaigns against increasing expenditure for defence and militarism — for peace and disarmament — are somehow improper; external to the labour movement even. But these are not just political questions. Internationalism is integral to our movement not because it makes us feel nice and affords us some moral high ground. No: it is part and parcel of defending our class interests.
Consider why there is so much money for “defence” alongside austerity for working people. Increased spending on arms manufacturing fuels war and weakens the hand of working people the world over. That some jobs in this military-industrial supply chain are unionised jobs does not alter the fundamental character of defence spending or obviate its political dangers. On the contrary, it deepens them.
We end up with a situation where parts of the trade union movement are dependent on the arms industry. This encourages a sectionalism that not only sees foreign war prioritised over domestic wages but leads some to sit on their hands while British-made weapons are used to unleash hell on Earth in Gaza.
As if war and militarism aren’t catastrophic enough in their own right, it is clear so-called defence spending is an investment in accelerating the climate emergency. Western militaries are huge carbon emitters themselves, and every pound spent on arms manufacturing is a pound not spent on rapid decarbonisation. That much might be obvious.
But it is evident, on a more fundamental level, that war and militarism are underlying drivers of the ecological catastrophe facing us all. That is true historically: militaries were important progenitors of fossil fuel use, encouraging the adoption of coal and then oil as the fuel of war. And it is true today: beyond enriching their shareholders, the British and US arms industries serve to shore up the unjust global economic order.
From “swords into ploughshares” to the Lucas Plan, there is a rich history in the workers’ movement of organising against war and militarism, trying to turn manufacturing capacity associated with these horrors to more socially useful ends. Today, we should insist not only on investment in repairing our public realm over weapons, but more specifically that factories start churning out wind turbines rather than F-35 fighter jets.
Backing expansion of the defence industry is hard to justify ethically — what job could be worth more than the lives of Palestinian children? But it is also, for trade unions, profoundly self-defeating. We should be arguing for the government to convert profiteering arms companies into publicly owned firms focused on driving rapid decarbonisation, with a job guarantee for every arms industry worker. These would be more secure union jobs, oriented to the social good rather than the bottom-line of BAE Systems shareholders.
Our historic task as a movement is to bury the system that enriches a tiny minority while impoverishing the rest of us and destroying our common home. That means investing in people and planet, and winding down the fossil-fuelled war machine.
Jo Grady is general secretary of the University and College Union.
Source: Morning Star