Next week, the leaders of the so-called ‘free world’ will convene for the annual NATO summit.
At the top of the agenda of this western imperialist conference is the issue of rearmament.
Following the demands of Trump, NATO chief Mark Rutte is urging each NATO member to increase its ‘defence’ spending to 5 percent of GDP.
Rutte described the aim of this to be to “make our alliance stronger, fairer and more lethal”, in order to prepare for a prophesied Russian invasion of the whole of Europe, said to be imminent.
Not wanting to disappoint, Starmer has announced grand plans to make Britain “a battle-ready, armour-clad nation”.
Defence Secretary John Healy went one step further, declaring that now is the time to send “a message to Moscow” by making Britain’s army “10 times more lethal.”
This ‘defence review’ aims to increase military spending to 2.5 percent of GDP, and then to 3 percent by the next parliament. Within its pages is a shopping list of destruction: from fighter jets to drones, and nuclear submarines to new AI tools.
Little mention is made, however, of addressing the Armed Forces’ recruitment and retention crisis, with Britain possessing its lowest number of troops in three centuries. So we’re footing the bill for their shiny new death machines… and there’ll be no one to operate them!
The delusions of British imperialism are laughable, as this second-rate power seeks to cling on to what is left of its imperial prestige.
To fill gaps in recruitment, one commentator suggested removing age limits on army enlistment, even allowing people in their “eighties or nineties” enlist, as long as they are “fit and willing”. Putin must be quaking in his boots!
Warfare over welfare
In a rare moment of candour, Rutte gave Starmer some advice on how Britain can move further to the target of 5 percent:
“If you would not go to the 5 percent, you could still have the National Health Service… the pension system, et cetera, but you had better learn to speak Russian.”
The message is loud and clear: defend the interests of western imperialism by building up a ‘warfare state’, and make the workers pay for it through deep cuts to the welfare state.
For its year in government, Starmer’s Labour has done just this. It has carried out ruthless attacks against the most vulnerable in society, such as pensioners, poor families, and the disabled.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves is calling her recent spending review the “end of austerity”, but it doesn’t even begin to reverse the decades of brutal attacks against workers and youth.
In reality, Labour is whipping up an imagined threat of a Russian invasion to more effectively wage a class war at home: to gut public services, attack wages and conditions, and bring the labour movement leaders to heel.
Schools are overcrowded and crumbling, NHS waiting lists are longer than ever, British society is coming apart at the seams. Meanwhile, people can barely afford to put food on their plates and pay their rent, let alone make ends meet.
Austerity is not a political choice on behalf of these ministers, it is the harsh outcome of the deep crisis of the capitalist system, which is acutely felt in Britain.
As loyal servants of the bankers and bosses, Starmer and co are more than happy to carry out the diktats of capital. When the billionaires call for cuts, Starmer asks: “how deep?” When they call for rearmament, he whips out his cheque book and asks: “how much?”
To put a stop to this, the whole capitalist system needs to go. We need a revolution.
- No to Starmer’s militarism!
- Down with the Westminster and NATO warmongers!
- Invest in welfare, not warfare! For books, not bombs!
- For an international struggle against imperialism! Workers of the world, unite!
Defence spending review: Billions for war, misery for the working class
Georgina Ryan
The Labour government has unveiled its 2025 defence spending review, and it confirms that the ruling class is ratcheting up the war drums abroad whilst waging class war at home.
Workers and youth are crushed under a deepening cost of living crisis, yet billions of public money is being poured into a dead imperialist dream.
The government has pledged to increase defence spending by £11 billion, boost the budgets of its surveillance and intelligence apparatus by £600 million, and spend a further £280 million on so-called “border security.”
It has committed to new nuclear warheads, long-range missiles, and a new fleet of 12 attack submarines it can barely staff – all while public services rot and workers are told to tighten their belts.
An isolated island
With the US’s attention turned towards the Pacific, the old “special relationship” has been reduced to a meaningless phrase. Europe – and Britain with it – can no longer outsource defence to Washington.
As Trump applies renewed pressure on NATO allies to pay their share, the UK finds itself exposed. Once a global empire, it is now a small imperialist power with dwindling influence, trying to punch far above its economic and military weight. The result is a mix of hubris and denial.
Of course, the British establishment will desperately act to prove itself as the loyal lapdog of US imperialism – footing the bill for NATO’s wars while waging war on domestic services.
But a stark reality awaits because Britain is not a global power. It is a small, declining island of financial parasites with a hollowed out industrial base.
A century of decline
The state boasts of investment in innovation and production: new missiles, new factories, new submarines. But this fantasy ignores decades of deindustrialisation. The UK no longer has the industrial base to sustain a war economy.
Port Talbot Steelworks in Wales closed its blast furnace last year and now imports steel slabs from the Netherlands and India. Steelworks in Scunthorpe were on the brink of closing down, almost leaving the UK as the only G7 country incapable of making virgin steel.
Britain is therefore reliant upon foreign supply chains, outsourced contractors, and private arms firms bleeding the public dry.
Furthermore, Britain’s military capacity is a joke: its army has shrunk to just 73,000 regular soldiers — down from over 110,000 in 2010. Recruitment has failed every single year since 2010. Last year, the armed forces lost 300 more full-time personnel each month than they recruited. Morale is at an all time low.
On top of this, the British army is rife with bullying, racism, and sexual harassment, as the BBC recently reported:
“Last year, the Army apologised to Kerry-Ann Knight, a black female soldier who fronted Army recruitment campaigns, after she described years of racist abuse and bullying that made her life while serving a “living hell”.”
Starmer says we need to be concerned with ‘threats’ (he means Russia and China) but even in its highest hopes, Britain’s efforts will be dwarfed by the scale of military production in Russia and China.
Russia’s defence sector – a remnant of the Soviet planned economy – is churning out weaponry at staggering rates. It produces 4,000 drones a day and 250,000 artillery shells a month.
China has manufactured 400 modern fighter jets and 20 warships in just three years — with the capacity to produce 10,000 cruise missiles a week. Britain can’t compete. It isn’t even in the race.
Class struggle ahead
The scale of the Treasury’s proposed spending plans is nothing short of a recipe for class struggle. Further increased defence expenditure plans to three percent by 2034 would necessitate a chainsaw massacre of cuts to public services.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) found to reach 3 percent, would mean finding £17 billion a year. In the words of IFS Associate Director Ben Zaranko, that is equivalent to “10 times what the government is saving by means-testing winter fuel payments. You are going to have to do 10 winter fuel payment reforms, and that seems challenging”.
And NATO chief Mark Rutte has been pushing Keir Starmer to go even further and commit to 3.5 percent as a minimum!
This is all within the context of Britain’s ailing economy struggling to grow, and shrinking by 0.3 percent in April 2025. Public debt now stands at 100 percent of GDP. Interest payments alone will cost £105 billion this year — nearly 8.2 percent of all government spending.
How can they possibly square the circle of servicing this debt crisis whilst bolstering the military budget? The only way they can do this is by inflicting further misery on the working class.
Whilst Rachel Reeves boasted that the NHS is getting £30 billion more funding a year — but this is not enough. The Health Foundation has estimated £38 billion is required to clear the backlog in NHS England alone.
Meanwhile, the working class suffers. Inflation eats wages. Housing is unaffordable. Schools are overcrowded.
Who poses the real threat?
The entire British establishment has been raising militaristic jingoism because of the supposed threat of Russia.
But there is a great irony. Russia is not fighting British soldiers or attacking British sovereign territory. But Britain is militarily involved in fighting Russian soldiers and attacking Russian sovereign territory through its proxy in Ukraine.
For the working class in Britain, the main enemy is not Russia, it is at home. The Labour Party has made it clear whose interests they serve: those of the British ruling class. It is they who are scrambling to maintain its meagre position on the world stage at the expense of us all.
We don’t need more submarines. We need social housing. We don’t need missiles. We need free school meals.
The resources exist to fund homes, schools, hospitals, and green energy. But not under capitalism.
To have this future means fighting for a revolution against the billionaires – for a socialist society where the wealth we create is used to meet human need, not fuel imperialist slaughter.
Only Israel has a right to vaporise
Benjamin Breyer, Kilburn
The hypocrisy of western politicians, and the gulf between them and the people they claim to represent, is made manifest every time they open their mouths.
Israel’s unprovoked air attacks and murders of Iranian scientists and government officials is a particularly egregious case.
The smoke had not yet cleared off the destruction wrought in Iran by the Zionist state, when Macron, Merz, and co. fell over themselves to proclaim their ironclad support for it.
They joined a chorus of hypocritical calls for Israel’s right to vaporise civilians in any country it wants – sorry, to “defend itself against foreign aggression”.
But what about Iran then? What about Palestine and Lebanon? Do they not have the right to defend themselves against foreign (Israeli) aggression? Naturally, the generous support of the Western ruling classes (not only in words, but also in money, weapon parts, intelligence, etc.) does not extend to the victims of Israeli bombings.
When Macron urges “all parties to exercise maximum restraint and to de-escalate”, it is not hard to see that what he means is that only one party, Iran, should de-escalate. Meaning, it should roll over and surrender to Israeli aggression.
This sickening hypocrisy is yet another proof that we cannot count on ‘our own’ politicians to end the slaughter conducted by Israel. As workers, we can only rely on our own forces and methods to fight the Israeli war machine, as the French dockers in Fos-sur-Mer are doing.
Drones rise, disabled die
Ben Cownley, Manchester
Last month Labour cut £5 billion on disability benefits, signing the death certificate to potentially thousands of disabled people in Britain.
Now, what is that money cut being spent on?
Defence Secretary John Healey, hosting a meeting of the Ukraine Defence Contact Group at NATO Headquarters, alongside his fellow German warmonger, confirmed a dramatic scale-up in drone support and other aid measures as part of Britain’s £4.5 billion military support package for 2025.
With more than 10,000 drones delivered last year, the UK is now targeting 100,000 drones by the end of this financial year. Tens of thousands have already been shipped.
The social murder of disabled people in Britain to fund weapons to disable and kill people abroad. Such is the logic of militarism. Investment into smarter ways to kill each other. No gains except for the warmongers.
This increased manufacture could be used to make disability stairlifts and other useful medical equipment. It should be put towards this but the capitalists only want to defend their markets, and they wonder why no one wants to fight.
Why would anyone go off to fight and defend a market just to come home to a country that looks like it’s lost the war? The only enemy worth fighting is our own murdering capitalists!
Oligarch cash needs legal blessing
Edward Davies, Southampton
Roman Abramovich, Russian oligarch and best known for being the former owner of Chelsea football club, is being sued by the UK government to try and stop the proceeds of the club’s sale going to ‘all victims of the war in Ukraine’, and only to Ukraine itself.
There are two points of interest here. First, the UK government is happy to declare you a war profiteer, aide to the ‘madman dictator’ of Russia. But heaven forbid it take your money without the legal documents being in order!
The second being that Starmer and co. consider it of vital importance that the money only go to victims in Ukraine, because as we all know, the only real victims of war are the ones on the ‘right’ side of the battlefield.
Why isn’t the declaration that Abramovich is a war profiteer enough to simply seize his wealth without further legal wrangling? The reason becomes clear when you consider the role of the city of London, which has long been a finance hub for all sorts of bloodstained cash to flow through.
The account books of the city banks have to be treated like holy scripture, as any knock to the safety of their funds would cause all the millionaires of the world to flee, lest their accounts be impounded when their country runs afoul of western imperialism.
This is why the government is desperate to give an air of legality to the whole process, to assure their banker friends that this is a special case. Yet they give no such considerations when raiding the accounts of working-class people, with powers to forcibly confiscate money from accounts if they even suspect that someone has been receiving benefits fraudulently (or more often, in mistake).
The gulf between the classes is obvious, kid gloves for their national enemies, but the fist for their class enemies.
