Welfare not Warfare: the case against higher military spending

“This is not the Britain we should be. And we have to fight for an alternative.”

At the recent ‘Socialism or Barbarism’ Arise Festival Dayschool, CND Vice-President Kate Hudson challenged the governments plans to cut disability support and international aid to fund greater militarisation; and the need for a welfare not warfare campaign against them. You can read an edited version of her speech published below.

There are two points I’d like to make on this topic.

One is in relation to opportunity cost: in other words, what you could spend the money on instead. How that money can be spent elsewhere to regenerate the economy and create many more jobs. Those are important arguments to make and myths to debunk, especially when the government (and some trade unions) are pushing military spending as a policy for economic growth. Alex (Gordon) and Mick (Burke) are going into depth on those angles. So I want to concentrate on a different point. Which is that I wouldn’t want the extra weapons, the militarisation, if they were absolutely free of charge. In fact, I wouldn’t want nuclear weapons if I was paid. And I don’t think our movement should want them either, and our people certainly shouldn’t be paying for them.

So my second point is against anything other than a basic minimum of military spending: not just higher military spending. We already spend far too much, and it’s our security is not enhanced by military spending and everything that goes with it. That’s the pro-war narrative, the increasingly nationalistic and jingoistic culture which feeds the far right, and the imperialism of which it is part. On the contrary, we are all put at greater risk.

So let’s unpack this a bit:

The government narrative is that we are in an increasingly dangerous and hostile world and we need to spend a lot more on weapons. This is widely bought into, and scarcely challenged in the media or by mainstream institutions. It’s a perspective also pushed by other European leaders, the EU and NATO. The US is at the root of this narrative with its long standing policy of containing China and slapping it down as an economic engine for growth. The US policy since the end of the cold war, of maintaining its sole super-power status, through military means if necessary, is taking the world to the brink. The rash US policy over the last three decades of expanding NATO up to the Russian borders, has resulted in the Ukraine war. Now Trump wants to break the Russia/China alliance, so the US can fight against China on a single front. So he’s trying to establish peace with Russia and pull out of Europe. Hence the European frenzy to increase military spending.

So we have to ask ourselves, looking at the government narrative about war and threats to our security: is China a threat to our security? The answer is clearly no. And do we want to support and encourage the US drive to war against China, which it is pursuing in order to maintain its own global dominance? The answer again is no.  Do we want to pour vast resources into military projects, (like aircraft carriers, the AUKUS pact, nuclear weapons, space fighting capabilities), which are all about global power projection, and interfering in other countries and their right to development? No. These all serve to increase global risks, threatening other countries. This is not the Britain we should be. And we have to fight for an alternative.

Our movement needs to cut through the garbage about military spending, about war, to get to what security really is. It’s easy enough for politicians to talk about war, defending the homeland etc. I remember very clearly in 2002, when Tony Blair said we had to be prepared to pay the blood price for our special relationship with the US by sending British troops to Iraq. He didn’t pay it, or his children, it was the sons and daughters of military families who were killed in an illegal war. And we should never forget the point so eloquently put during the TUC debate on military spending a couple of years ago: there’s a worker on both ends of a bayonet. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians are dead because the US, UK and other NATO members, with shocking hubris, pushed NATO expansion without care for the consequences and Russia launched an illegal invasion in response. Now pro-war propaganda claims parallels with the Second World War, and our leaders want a massive rearmament of Europe, risking ever greater war, putting our countries on a war footing. 

What we need is a different understanding of security, and new security structures in Europe and beyond. Jeremy Corbyn often talks about what real security is: health, housing, jobs, social care; securing the environment, building for a sustainable future. Not the spiral of violence that our government and its allies are unleashing. Now is the time for what’s called Common Security, that no country can be secure at the expense of another; the principles are interdependence, shared responsibility, and “security with” rather than “security against” the other. And underpinning this, justice and equality between states, and an end to the notion that some states have the right to rule, to dominate. 

This is the time of a multipolar world, not a unipolar world dominated by a declining power, doing whatever it takes politically, militarily and economically, to remain top dog. As a movement we cannot want to hitch our wagon to that disaster. The Labour government may be falling over itself to do so. But we must have more sense and more courage.

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• Kate Hudson is Vice President of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND): you can follow her on Twitter/X, and CND on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, YouTube and TikTok.
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