The Labour government dominated headlines recently when it announced plans to increase defence spending to 3 percent of Britain’s GDP (that’s the entire national product, not the government budget). The Ministry of Defence (MoD) says that this year’s spending is £66.3bn, equivalent to 2.33 percent of the UK’s £2.8tn GDP.
So Labour’s target is to spend, in today’s money, £85.44bn on defence by the end of their term – an extra £19.14bn.
Yet it seems this won’t be enough to satisfy the demands of the USA, which is reportedly seeking an increase in the defence spending commitment to 5 percent of GDP for all Nato member states at the alliance’s upcoming summit in The Hague on 24-26 June. This would be made of 3.5 percent in direct defence spending with another 1.5 percent in ‘defence-related’ spending. (Trump’s Nato ambassador says allies must agree to 5 percent spend on defence and security ‘starting now’ by Katy Scholes, Sky News, 4 June 2025)
Whichever figure it aims for, the Labour government is aiming to generate a war budget in excess of that which the last Tory government was seeking – a comparatively ‘modest’ 2.5 percent! (Defending Britain, a policy paper by the 2022-24 Sunak Conservative government, 23 April 2024)
While trumpeting its intention and assuring us of the vital importance of putting the country on a war footing, the government has also been saying that it is not confident in its ability to reach this goal, since it has been forced (by popular pressure) to make a U-turn and reinstate the winter fuel allowance for some pensioners, and to extend free school meals to 500,000 children.
Like most of the ‘left’ (ie, the left wing of imperialism), Labour tries to paint a picture of government spending as a ‘choice’ between social welfare and defence.
The reality is that the national budget is spent on managing the collective affairs of the imperialist ruling class – and war is an inevitable and necessary part of maintaining the imperialist system. Without the oppression and superexploitation of poorer nations, without wars for conquest and redivision of the world, British imperialism simply could not survive.
The continual claw-back of social welfare from the working class is driven by the same root cause – the desperate need of the financier ruling class to generate profits in a time of economic crisis.
New threats?
Making his announcement, prime minister Sir Keir Starmer claimed that Britain needs to spend more on defence because the “world has changed”, asserting that “we need to ask how Nato can preserve the peace for decades to come”. (Strategic defence review: Britain is not ready for war – as it happened by Mark Ludlow, Larisa Brown and Seren Hughes, The Times, 2 June 2025, our emphasis)
In fact, Nato was never designed for ‘preserving peace’. Its role is to maintain the global hegemony of western imperialism. The claims that it is Russia that presents a threat to Britain is a perverse inversion of reality. The Soviet Union, and now Russia, has been in the crosshairs of British imperialism for over a century. It’s like claiming a fish is a threat to a shark, because if the shark doesn’t eat the fish it will starve.
The truth is that it is the imperialist nations (Britain, the USA, France, Germany, etc) that are behind the drive to war, and they have openly and clearly been defining their main targets for many years (Russia, Iran, China, the DPRK, etc). It is not Russia that threatens Britain, but the imperialist nations who threaten the whole world, as they struggle to maintain their death grip over the planet and to stop their system of global wealth extraction collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions.
Kemi Badenoch, the latest in a long line of ineffectual and gaffe-prone Tory leaders, let slip on Sky News recently that Ukraine and Israel are fighting wars on behalf of the British ruling class. She made this important admission just after declaring that working-class families shouldn’t have too many children and denying that there is a genocide taking place in Gaza.
As the US imperialists try to turn their attention and resources towards the goal of ‘containing’ (ie, destroying) China, it seems that a new division of labour has been agreed between the USA and its European allies. The British, French and Germans will find a way to continue the fight against Russia, theoretically leaving the Americans free to turn their attention to the Pacific.
But there’s many a slip ’twixt the cup and the lip, as the old saying goes. The USA may keep repeating its desire to ‘pivot to Asia’, but facts on the ground keep dragging it back in to its Eurasian defeats. For a start, none of the European countries are in a position to supply any more weapons to Ukraine. And it’s going to take more than wishful thinking and bold announcements to reverse the industrial decline that underpins this inability.
Trying to keep the war going in Ukraine, whether directly or via proxy forces, whether openly or via a ‘frozen’ peace deal and a stream of terrorist operations, is more likely to accelerate the terminal decline of western European imperialism than to result in a victory over Russia or any of her allies.
The ‘changed world’ that Sir Keir has referred to is one in which the old exploiters are losing their grip on the oppressed nations of the world – as is currently being demonstrated in west Africa, where the Sahel states are successfully rejecting the French and US ‘help’ that has kept them impoverished and in turmoil for decades. (New alliance is a knock-out for Nato in the Sahel by Franklin Nyamsi, RT News, 13 February 2024)
China, Russia, Iran and the DPRK all understand that they are in the crosshairs of western imperialism, and have been preparing to defend themselves for decades. Furthermore, they have the industrial base to develop weapons and technology that far outperform anything the west has to offer, with superior hypersonic missiles, fighter jets and drones, to name a few.
The reality that must be recognised, whether one is a jingoistic warmonger or pacifist peacenik, is that Britain is no longer the imperialist hegemon or industrial powerhouse that it once was, and no budget increase, act of parliament, or tub-thumping speech can change that.
Even if Britain could magically reindustrialise, ramp up arms production and come out on top in a third world war, who would that victory ultimately serve? It would merely consolidate the grip of the present ruling class for a decade or two more, at the price of an ocean of blood. We would simply have to endure more years under the rule of a class that cannot and will not provide housing, healthcare or meaningful work to British workers.
What do the unions say?
So have the trade unions, which are meant to represent the best interests of working people, come out against this drive to war? Surely they’re against British-made weapons and materiel being used to bombard Ukrainians and Russians in the proxy war? Surely they don’t want their members to be complicit in the genocide of Palestinians?
Are they calling on workers to mobilise and get rid of the ruling class that profits from all this bloodshed? Are they refusing to help in the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction, whose only purpose is to blackmail and ultimately kill untold thousands, even millions, of our fellow workers in the interests of profit-taking?
Are they at least taking a pacifist position in the interests of preventing their own members and their families becoming the targets of another country’s hypersonic missiles in an entirely avoidable war for the preservation of British imperialism?
Apparently not. Unite general secretary Sharon Graham has loyally backed up the ruling class’s assertion that ‘the dastardly foreigners are out to get us’. Indeed, her only concern seems to be that the defence budget is spent within the UK, and she has lambasted the government for moving too slowly: “Defence spending on UK manufacturing needs to be increased more quickly. Countries that want to do us harm won’t wait and nor can the UK.” (Defence Review: Linking jobs to defence vital, Unite, 2 June 2025)
Similarly, the TUC congress in 2022 passed a motion that had been presented by the GMB to back an increase in military spending.
With friends like these, who needs enemies?
Only socialism can bring peace
It is clear that the British ruling class is preparing the population for the idea of all-out and long-term warfare against Russia and China in particular. To this end, Sir Keir has been trumpeting a desire to move the UK to “war-fighting readiness” and at “war-time pace”. (New era of threat demands new era of UK defence, minister says after spending plans unveiled, BBC, 2 June 2025)
British workers must recognise that Labour party social democrats and all the other pro-imperialist ‘leftists’ and social chauvinists (those who drum up racist hysteria to justify imperialist wars) are their implacable enemies.
Whether in the Labour party, the Green party, the trade unions, the ‘antiwar movement’ or any other supposedly working-class organisation, these gentry are all paid to promote the interests of our class enemies. They work for exploiters who care not one jot for our wellbeing or even for our lives. And they are ready to plunge the world into chaos and destruction in a futile attempt to keep the ‘ultrawealthy’ in their positions of power and privilege in perpetuity.
There is an alternative to the death spiral that Starmer and co have lined up for us. We are not the helpless victims of history. There is no need for workers to continually accept the false narratives of the ruling class, to keep buying into the idea that their enemies are also ours.
We can and must organise a mass movement of non-cooperation with the war machine, we can and must force the expulsion of all Nato bases form British soil and the repatriation of all British troops and military contractors from abroad. Ultimately, we can and must take hold of the factories and banks that are today being used to wage war and line the pockets of a wealthy few, and repurpose them to make the things that are really needed by the mass of the working class.
If we combine our struggle with the struggle of those who are fighting Anglo-American imperialism elsewhere in the world, we can reverse this relentless drive towards all-out global conflagration, and organise the forces for our own liberation from capitalist exploitation in the process.
As Rosa Luxemburg memorably put it: the choice today is between socialism or barbarism. There is no ‘middle way’.
