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Trade union leaders welcome Starmer’s rearmament drive

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While Labour ramps up austerity, trade union leaders have endorsed the government’s militarism, naively believing that this will create jobs and economic growth for British workers. We say: No trust in Starmer! Fight the bosses and warmongers head on!

Starmer’s government has devised a cunning plan to achieve economic stability: producing more bombs and bullets.

By pumping billions into weapons, Labour hopes to kickstart UK industry, create new jobs, and pave the way for a new era of economic prosperity – a new British golden age.

This conveniently ignores the fact that – to afford the eye-watering sums required for this, on top of the borrowing costs for the UK’s mountainous debt – the government must implement massive cuts to social spending. And it will be workers who are made to foot the bill.

Despite this, leading figures from the trade union movement have embraced Starmer’s ‘military Keynesianism’.

We say: no to rearmament and austerity! For books, not bombs!

Healthcare, not warfare

The reformists are desperate to find some way out of the crisis. And they naively believe that a boost to arms expenditure can stimulate growth.

Even the ‘lefts’ have completely bought into the Keynesian idea that capitalism can be managed, and that the economy can be rejuvenated through an injection of military expenditure.

But more money for arms will not be a silver bullet for British capitalism.

Firstly, in order to fund such investment, Labour will be forced to make sweeping cuts to already crumbling public services. Do Starmer and co. really expect workers to accept tanks and fighter jets in place of decent schools and hospitals?

Nor will ‘defence’ spending save failing industries and generate a burst of job creation.

Money spent on arms is ultimately money poured down the drain. Instead of modernising productive sectors, and making them competitive, capital and labour will be wasted on equipment destined to be blown up on the battlefield or left to rust in barracks.

This unproductive investment will only serve to squander society’s resources and increase inflation.

Made in Britain

The trade union leaders have offered no pushback to this militarism. In fact, they welcome the extra spending on murder machines, so long as they are made in Britain!

Writing in the Guardian, for example, Unite leader Sharon Graham pleaded with Starmer’s government to channel money for arms towards British companies. According to Graham, purchasing American made fighter jets would be a “mockery” to British industry and skills.

The notoriously right-wing GMB leadership have produced a statement to similar effect, stating that defence spending “can be a powerful force domestically for growth and levelling-up…but only when we make good choices to buy British”.

Ultimately, this concession to jingoistic warmongering is the product of the narrow, reformist outlook of the trade union tops.

These leaders do not believe that it is possible – or even desirable – to fundamentally change society. And so they confine themselves to tinkering around the edges of the system.

The result is that the union leaders are rallying behind the imperialist establishment, all under the parochial guise of ‘defending jobs’.

The same was seen in regards to the genocide in Gaza. Instead of organising members in the arms industry to halt the imperialists’ war machine, Unite and GMB leaders actively discouraged rank-and-file members from showing solidarity with Palestine.

And now the same can be seen in relation to Ukraine, with union leaders completely capitulating to the ruling class and their hysteria about the threat of an imminent Russian invasion.

Workers’ control

There should be no contradiction between defending workers’ jobs and opposing the ruling class’ imperialist adventures; between ensuring our livelihoods at home and protecting the lives of those abroad.

On the basis of socialist planning and workers’ control, decent jobs could be provided in industries producing socially-necessary goods, rather than means of death and destruction.

The workers at Lucas Aerospace, for example, showed what would be possible if workers were in charge of production, with their famous 1970s plan for reequipping the arms factory they operated.

Unfortunately, however, the union leaders have no such perspective. Instead, they are sowing illusions in the very government that is attacking the working class.

We must have no trust in Starmer’s Labour and the imperialist establishment. To win class demands around jobs, pay, and conditions, workers must trust only in their own strength.

Unite represents over 70,000 workers in the UK defence industry. If the union’s leaders were to organise these workers, and link up with the rest of the labour movement, they could forge a powerful fightback against Labour’s reactionary agenda.

Workers in Britain have no interest in imperialist wars. This was made clear by the mass mobilisations against Israel’s massacre in Gaza.

Those working in weapons factories are themselves not happy. “Many hate management for the intensified workflow, and their continued support [for imperialism] and profiteering by supplying to the Israeli war machine,” stated one arms factory worker in a recent letter in The Communist.

Instead of class collaboration, let’s fight the bosses and warmongers head on!

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