The recent comments by Unite general secretary Sharon Graham begging prime minister Keir Starmer to expand military production show yet again the limitations of trade unionism and the true role of the union leaders in Britain today.
The likes of Ms Graham sell themselves on the idea that they are either above politics or wish to focus purely on industrial issues. As was pointed out in a recent article by the Class Consciousness Project about the false promises of Sharon Graham, this is designed to look like a militant stance, but in fact is much more about agreeing and collaborating with the ruling class.
Graham asks Keir Starmer for more investment in weapons manufacturing in the belief that this will benefit Unite members, who are historically strong in these industries. Graham would doubtlessly defend this on the basis that the concerns about where these weapons will be used (in Ukraine or occupied Palestine for instance) are not those of the union movement and that organised workers should only be concerned with protecting jobs.
But here’s the problem with that calculation. Unite’s leaders like to pretend to their members that they will cling onto and fight for any manufacturing job that currently exists in Britain. Is that really the case? Is it not rather the fact that Unite (and its predecessor organisations like the T&G and Amicus) allowed mass deindustrialisation to take place over the last 40 years with barely a whimper of opposition?
Where was the mass campaign to defend British industry when the coal, steel, ship and car building industries all went to the wall? The answer is that union leaders then as now assumed their usual role of grovelling to the politicians and capitalists, begging for scraps, while the ruling class carried on with deindustrialisation anyway.
The armaments industry still exists because it is not only very profitable but it is an industry which needs to be based in Britain in order to maintain close and secure supply links to the British armed forces. The industry itself is comparatively small and has shown itself to be utterly incapable of getting anywhere near the production levels needed to keep Nato’s proxy army in Ukraine supplied with storm shadow missiles.
But let us return to the question of whether defending the arms industry is good for the British working class. The arms industry is a key part of British imperialism and this system is based on the export of capital, not commodities. This requires the constant and relentless opening up of new markets as capitalism searches for new places to profitably invest its capital. But in a world already conquered by the market, the export of capital always entails the military plundering of other nations.
This is why the British ruling class keeps its arms industry going and why it has an army designed for small-scale encounters with states that barely have a regular military. Its job is to quickly overpower relatively disorganised forces in order that the British ruling class can gain access to natural resources, avenues of investment, markets and manpower in these countries, thus enabling the further export of capital.
It is therefore the case that Unite’s leadership, by begging Starmer to fulfill his commitments on increasing arms production, is not only aiding militarism but also, ultimately, hurting the British working class as a whole.
The more British imperialism is enabled to export capital, the more Britain is deindustrialised, and the more our class slides into poverty and insecurity. What is the best result the Unite leadership could get with all their grovelling? A tiny number of workers might benefit while the great masses of the British working class end up being plunged further into poverty – and this is before we even consider the effect of British imperialism on our fellow workers in all the countries under siege by imperialism.
A union leadership worthy of the name would be leading a mass campaign for the reindustrialisation of Britain, which is what our class desperately needs. But instead we get General Secretary Graham pleading for crumbs off the imperialist table, whose only result is to keep the working class tied firmly to the coat tails of their class enemies.
