Against a background of 15 years of austerity and the government’s Strategic Defence Review we will be marching at the People’s Assembly No More Austerity demonstration under the banner ‘Welfare not Warfare’.
Britain spends over £54 billion a year on defence, and as a percentage of GDP spends more than most of our European allies. Starmer wants to raise this to 2.5% of GDP equating to £70 billion per year by 2027/8, and by 3% thereafter.
A 5% NATO spending target is now being proposed by Mark Rutte, NATO’s Secretary General.
This is at a time when companies such as BAE systems have boasted record profits of over £3 billion. And at a time when one in three children in the UK live in poverty. As MP Diane Abbott said we have gone back to the era of cuts and scapegoating. But broken Britain is not the fault of migrants, and more war will not help it mend.
Starmer said his Defence Review was “a blueprint to make Britain safer and stronger, a battle-ready, bomber-clad nation” but is no such thing.
It is more a blueprint for arms manufacturers to print money.
As Stop the War’s vice-chair Chris Nineham said, “Increasing defence spending to up to 3% of GDP, procuring more and more weapons of war, including the commissioning of 12 new attack submarines, investing £1.5 billion for more munitions factories and £15 billion for nuclear weapons production, and all the while slashing welfare, is simply grotesque.”
Yet this is what our government proposes in the Strategic Defence Review. This is why we must march on Saturday.
Stephen Kapos, Holocaust survivor, will be joining the anti-war bloc on 7 June. He will be there because he is “convinced that cutting welfare, including benefits for the disabled, and diverting billions to armaments is unjust, unjustified and disastrous [and that ] we must take collective action urgently to stop this massive waste of our precious national resources.
“There is a false narrative at work of threats from Russia and China without any evidence. A revived Cold War Russophobia is at play with ‘as long as it takes’ commitments of support for NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine and continued supply of arms to Israel’s Genocide in Gaza.
“This is hugely damaging to our own country’s social fabric and we must take collective action urgently to stop this massive waste of our precious national resources!”
Stephen is correct, the whole ‘security’ narrative of Russia as a threat to wider Europe is a product of overheated, hawkish imagination.
Russia is a relatively modest economic power, with an economy a bit bigger than Spain’s and a bit smaller than Italy’s. That the Russian army failed to get to Kiev in the first few months of the war is a sign of its limitations. As Russian expert Anatole Lieven has pointed out, “A Russian army which has had to fight for months to capture relatively small cities in the Donbass hardly looks capable of capturing Warsaw, let alone Berlin”.
The real reason for rearmament is that European leaders are responding exactly as required to Trump’s global military reset. This must be resisted – here and across the continent.
British Palestinian activist, Leanne Mohamad, who almost unseated Wes Streeting at the general election last year, will also be marching. Leanne said, “As a British Palestinian, the connection couldn’t be clearer. The same political class enabling a genocide in Gaza is now imposing austerity here in Britain.
“Thousands of Palestinians are being massacred with the backing of our leaders. At home, the Labour government under Keir Starmer is continuing austerity, cutting vital services and entrenching poverty.
“This is not just about numbers on a spreadsheet; it’s about children going hungry, families without homes, and lives being destroyed.”
Fran Heathcote of the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) is one of a number of union general secretaries who will be on the march. She said earlier this week that PCS members will be there in their thousands saying no to austerity and no to war. “The richest continue to be handed tax breaks, corporations dodge billions in tax and military spending continues to soar,” said Fran Heathcote, “The government says there is not enough money for public services, but there is always money for war and for the wealthy. That’s not just unjust, it’s a political choice.”
This is why it’s so important to join the demonstration on Saturday.
We are asking all our supporters to join our bloc and our groups to bring their banners. Let’s make the anti-war bloc as big and visible as possible.
We are meeting at 12 noon outside the Langham Hotel, just opposite the BBC.
