Credit: Lord West Arrives @shotbyrichie
“Things like welfare, to be quite honest they are unimportant when you lose a war and you have Russian Chechen stormtroopers coming down the street raping women and killing people.”
These are the hysterical words of Lord West, one of an army of former military brass and intelligence officials who now crowd our airwaves. The former first sea lord blurted this obscene nonsense on the traditionally sober BBC Radio Four, but there is no escaping the wall of militarist propaganda. Over on Sky TV, Nicola Sturgeon will join fellow Scots Jim Murphy and Michael Gove in a broadcast simulation of just such a Russian invasion of the UK.
And back in April, Brits could tune in to US networks to watch their King tell the Congress: “Our defence, intelligence and security ties are hard-wired together through relationships measured not in years, but in decades.” His message was unambiguous – though governments change, the state and its security apparatus are permanent and impervious to democracy.
This cascade of warlike rhetoric has been ramping up for months. The strange interregnum between the Starmer and Burnham premierships is filled with the din. The departing PM pledged an additional £15bn from road and energy infrastructure for arms. Everywhere, socially useful spending is making room for the waste and destruction of the warlords.
This propaganda offensive comes from the state and its international allies, not public sentiment. According to a June Ipsos poll, just 37% support increasing arms spending if it means raising taxes or cutting services. The daily omnibus of demands for militarisation is an attempt to curate a fake, one-way national conversation.
So when the Labour Government, the leaderships of the major Unite union, the SNP and even the Greens clamour for the new arms economy it is to the state, not their supporters or the broader public, that they respond. When leftwing Scottish commentator Gerry Hassan accuses Stop the War of “peddling pro-Russian propaganda” for resisting the stampede, it is in opposition to any intrusion of popular democracy into this closed, establishment consensus.
Those on the left caving to this project, and demanding others bend the knee as well, are setting themselves up for abject failure. Remilitarisation is a threat to public provision and democracy by itself. Moreover, the implicit loyalty oath extracted from trade unionists, political leaders and intellectuals, will be turned against them.
Having conceded that Britain faces imminent and catastrophic danger, from the Russians and whoever else, they surrender all to the state prerogative. As the bumptious former sea lord said, what need welfare when the enemy threatens? What need job security, infrastructure investment, schools, hospitals? What price the rights of publication and assembly, dissent and debate? You’re reading books, criticising the government and demanding healthcare while foreign despots sharpen their knives, you fools.
The warfare not welfare demand is the jugular of every critical, reformist or dissident element of society. Trade unionists are already being branded ‘Putin’s friends’ for striking at a time of war. The Greens will be set-up as a national security risk, with their own rhetoric about foreign threats brought in evidence against them.
For years the SNP has continually lobbied for a beefed-up, securitised, militarised British state to ward-off external threats. Now, the SNP’s Westminster leader Dave Doogan MP is demanding that the UK Government spend billions more than already pledged on guns. In this way, the SNP are stacking up war bonds against Scottish independence, which, opponents crow, would open a breach in our defences. All year, militarists have been surreptitiously linking Scottish independence to Russian and Iranian dangers. Supporters of independence must choose – their cause or British, Nato and European militarism, but not both.
We are witnessing a degradation of political life in the UK. The liquidation of welfare spending into arms is also the triumph of the unelected permanent state over the vote, and the militarist-corporate-media nexus over the public square. Amid this bonfire of democracy and public provision, none of the left cheerleaders for arms can even tell us what these weapons will be used for. The mood music suggests the defence of home territory against an impossible Russian conquest. The record tells us Britain has spent recent years arming a genocide in Gaza.
Those of us, the majority, who oppose this rearmament drive, should dig in our heels. Mass public opposition to these plans can force a retreat. We will not consent to watch our hard-won rights trampled from the sidelines, where we’ve been sent to hear from our supposed social betters.
They are counting on our acquiescence. As soon as the social majority make clear our opposition, the united front for war will suddenly falter and fragment. Trade union leaders will rediscover the importance of jobs, welfare and infrastructure. The Greens will remember the environment and the moral value of peace, and the liberal scribes will recall, distantly, as though from a dream, the freedom of press and criticism. Who knows, even SNP leaders might discover that the British deep establishment is no friend of Scottish independence.
Source: The National