Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing Street
Responding to the government’s Defence Investment Plan announced this morning, Chris Nineham, Stop the War Coalition vice chair said:
In a telling and desperate bid to leave ‘a legacy’, Keir Starmer has insisted on announcing the Defence Investment Plan before leaving office and before the NATO summit. Never mind the cost-of-living crisis or the collapsing services he leaves behind, Starmer wants to be remembered as the man who ramped up spending on weapons to record levels.
He claims he doesn’t want war, but that the best way to avoid it is to be prepared for it. This is a transparent lie. His government has done little more than enable the US and Israel’s illegal wars and has enthusiastically backed the war in Ukraine, doing everything possible to prolong the carnage in the effort to, as he put it today, “turn the screws” on the Russian economy.
It is clear that security, defence and the fantasy and implausible threat from Russia, which is constantly talked up by ministers, generals and arms companies, are now the main ways that the ruling classes are justifying attacks on social programmes, on welfare and working class living standards in general in favour of still more weapons of war.
Starmer claims this record defence spending won’t be funded by public sector cuts but by “relocating capital budgets by a penny in every pound” and scrapping some infrastructure projects. The public aren’t stupid about what this means. And that is why any effective campaign against public sector and welfare cuts needs to be making anti-war arguments.
There is strong minority opposition to any increase in defence spending, but polls show this opposition surges to big majorities across Europe when it is presented as a question of choices between wages and weapons, between welfare and warfare. This is why we must urgently build a popular movement that has these arguments at its heart.