No trust in Starmer’s Labour or any capitalist politicians
Editorial of the Socialist issue 1325
Twelve new attack submarines, £15 billion of nuclear warheads, thousands of new long-range weapons. A “ten-times more lethal” army and a “next generation” RAF with new F-35 and Typhoon jets.
These promises from Keir Starmer’s strategic defence review will leave hairs standing on end for many people who voted for a Labour government in the hopes of an end to the Tories’ savagery at home and abroad. In an increasingly unstable world, the response of Starmer is to increase arms expenditure while making working-class people pay.
Starmer promises to boost military spending to 2.5% of GDP by 2027 – paid for by raiding international aid and other budgets – and to 3% by 2034, without saying where that extra £17 billion would come from.
One group of people who will be rubbing their hands together is the arms industry bosses.
One example: Keir Starmer talks about “the brilliant workers and apprentices” in Govan shipyard in Glasgow. He doesn’t mention the real gainers of any potential public investment in Govan – its owners, BAE Systems, which is a collection of American and other investment funds, such as Capital Group and BlackRock – the world’s largest asset manager, mired in scandals.
U-turns
Starmer’s government is under pressure, plummeting in the polls and looking at electoral gains for Reform. He feels compelled to U-turn on winter fuel allowances, and to trail ‘boosts’ to spending in schools, the NHS, and infrastructure. Although in reality, the pledged hike in the NHS budget, for example, is still less than the real average annual increase in NHS spending.
Nonetheless, there is a lesson here for the trade union leaders: imagine how much more could be won if that pressure were organised into a mass movement involving nationwide industrial action and a political voice.
But it is also clear that the government intends any such concessions will be paid for by working-class people in some other way – cuts are “not ruled out”. We already know of plans to cut government departments by 15%, including potentially a tenth of jobs – a literal decimation of civil service jobs.
And it is abundantly clear that these concessions will go nowhere towards repairing the damage of 14 years of Tory austerity: the utter crisis in local government, schools and post-16 education, and the NHS; the 20%+ loss in real wages of public sector workers; the £14 billion taken out of working-age benefits between 2011-2021.
Money for wars
Yet while money is tight when it comes to working-class people’s lives, there is money for arms. When it comes to the winter fuel allowance or disability benefits, every time you turn on the TV or radio an interviewer is asking, “But where will the money come from?” That question seems to disappear when it comes to defence spending.
Starmer claims that defence spending is “central to our economic growth”. But on 6 June the Financial Times quoted a professor at the London Business School, Paolo Surico, who said that growth and productivity benefits would only happen through investing in research and development. Yet the plans in the defence strategy appear to include only £400 million annually for that.
Make no mistake, no matter the headlines, this is a capitalist government intent on defending the interests of the bosses, and that applies to international policy as much as it does at home. The minor concessions Starmer makes are in the hopes of maintaining his government’s ability to do so.
The world is an increasingly volatile place riven with wars and tensions between powers, with extra instability injected by Trump. Given that, it is a sign of the depth of anger and mistrust in capitalist politicians that so many people are opposed to this planned increase in military spending.
In a YouGov poll published on 2 June, only 49% supported increased spending – dropping to just 24% of young people up to age 24. Only 29% of those surveyed supported cuts to public spending or tax increases to pay for it. The ‘welfare not warfare’ slogan is clearly widely supported.
Nonetheless, many workers – and likely especially those who work in the arms industry – will think we need the investment and the jobs. In a time of economic volatility, when there are enormous public sector cuts and when multiple industries are threatening cuts and closures, workers in the arms industries will be relieved that their jobs may not be on the line.
Union response
That view is part of what is behind statements made by unions that represent workers in those industries that welcome the increased spending.
It is correct for a union to defend jobs and pay, and to fight to retain skills. But it is a mistake to conclude that that means following behind the demands of warmongering capitalist governments. Organisations of the working class need their own independent position.
It is not necessary to extend or even maintain levels of military spending in order to retain or expand jobs and skills that currently exist in the arms industry.
The vulture capitalists that own these industries can no more be relied on to protect jobs than the bosses of industry in Port Talbot, Scunthorpe or Grangemouth, or the bosses of the debacle that is Thames Water.
Unions should be demanding democratic nationalisation. That would not only protect existing jobs and skills, but would also be the basis for a real debate about what is actually needed in society.
Lucas Plan
Next year it will be 50 years since the ‘Lucas Plan’ – the Workers’ Alternative Plan drawn up by the Lucas Aerospace Combine Shop Stewards Committee. Lucas Aerospace was a significant part of the arms industry, but in 1976 bosses were threatening jobs.
In response, the elected shop stewards of twelve different unions representing different parts of the workforce combined into a committee that represented the whole. Organising in this way prevented the management from playing off different groups of workers, such as manual and office, against each other.
As well as fighting to improve working terms and conditions, it was able to pool the expertise of workers across the whole workforce. They developed an alternative to jobs cuts, described today by then-members of the committee as “an orderly transition of production to socially useful goods and the use of democratically controlled technology for the benefit of society as a whole”.
The plan stands as a brilliant glimpse of what workers’ democratic control and management could mean – how different the world could be. The products designed by skilled workers were for the benefit of ordinary people and the environment, not to make profits for a handful of super-rich individuals. Products designed in detail, many with working prototypes, included a heat exchange to provide cheap heating for elderly people, portable kidney machines, a hybrid car, wind turbines and solar cells.
The plan could not be implemented because the workers didn’t control the company: in the end, you can’t control what you don’t own. This is why unions have to fight for nationalisation – but also for democratic workers’ control and management, with compensation paid to the old bosses only on the basis of proven need.
Can’t trust bosses’ politicians
However, some workers might also argue that the arms spending is necessary because we need to be kept safe.
But we cannot trust any of the capitalist politicians to do that. If we cannot trust Starmer to do something as simple as defend the pay of bin workers in Birmingham – in fact, it is a Labour council with a Labour government behind it, fighting with brutal measures to defeat these workers and enforce £8,000 pay cuts – then how can we trust his government to save lives?
Starmer stands alongside Trump and Netanyahu. Despite hopes to the contrary, arms exports to Israel have continued. It is workers’ action that can stop them – Socialist Party members argue for the trade unions representing workers in arms and logistics industries to come together to decide actions that can be taken to help stop exports to the Israeli state machine. Starmer stands in the tradition of Tony Blair, who went to war in Iraq alongside US president Bush, inflicting an utter nightmare on Iraqis and vastly increasing the risks of terror attacks in the UK.
Capitalism means war, as competing powers fight each other for influence, power, resources and profit. The way to keep us safe is to challenge the interests of the capitalists and their political representatives, not to welcome their spending.
We have to fight to kick out the capitalist politicians, of all parties. The working class has to have its own party.
The programme of nationalisation with democratic workers’ control and management will not be found in Starmer’s Labour. We need a new workers’ party that will fight for that – and that will break free from following the diktats of capitalism’s wars.
Fight for socialism
Such a party would need a socialist programme – to take into public ownership the main parts of the economy, for it to be run democratically in the interests of the majority, based on planning and cooperation. That could appeal to working-class people across all national and ethnic lines, in Britain and internationally, against war, poverty, exploitation and capitalism.
For the unions to take steps to a new workers’ party with socialist policies now would be a far greater check on Starmer’s actions than simply hoping against hope that Starmer will get better with time; and it would be a serious step in the direction of building the mass movement necessary to win decent jobs and livelihoods for everyone and end the poverty, wars and climate destruction of capitalism.
