“Funding can be found to stockpile nuclear weapons; but never to put money back in the pockets of the poorest households.”
Bell Ribeiro-Addy MP was amongst the speakers at Britain’s nuclear expansionism – ‘Who pays the price?’, a fringe hosted by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) at this year’s Labour Party conference in Liverpool – you can read a published version of her remarks below.
There is a lot of talk from our political class about putting the country on a “war footing” right now.
Generals tell us we will all be “speaking Russian” if we don’t buck up our ideas and start ramping up defence spending.
We need to question this narrative, not least because of who it is coming from.
Washington has long pressured the UK to increase military spending.
And Donald Trump’s current insistence that European states need to increase defence spending to 5% is not about improving Europe’s security or even cutting US spending.
It is a clumsy and obvious attempt to get European states to spend more money with US weapons firms.
Trump, and his more astute allies on the far-right, will certainly not be unhappy about the destabilising impact of increased defence spending on European economies.
They know that diverting funds away from creaking public services and crumbling social infrastructure creates much more fertile terrain for the blood and soil ethnonationalism they favour.
Of course, increased defence spending is a trend that predates Trump. But Trump’s Presidency represents a major acceleration.
When Donald Trump tells you to do something, you need to think again; not ask how high you should jump.
Sadly, our own government is lapping up his snake-oil vision of security: pushing ahead with Trident renewal, building new nuclear jets and nuclear subs.
I remember the press conference where the government committed to spend 3% of GDP on Defence.
Every single journalist was asking: how are you going to hit this target? Not one asked the question: can we afford this?
Over the past five years, UK expenditure on its nuclear weapons programme has increased by 43 per cent.
The cost of replacing our nuclear arsenal is set to rise by more than £99 billion over the coming decade.
This funding is ringfenced and the government has put itself in fiscal handcuffs.
So when these projects go over budget (and we know they do), we know other departments are likely to suffer.
To fund increased defence expenditure, the government has cut international development and welfare, undermining security abroad and social security at home.
When it comes to the two-child benefit cap, renationalising water and building council homes, the government is always telling us that increased spending has to be driven by growth.
Like doctors telling us a patient has to start getting better before we can start treatment.
But when it comes to Defence, suddenly they’re all Keynesians.
They might have more of a point but Defence is not exactly a cottage industry; it’s a concentrated sector and most of the big companies are US corporations.
44% of defence contracts are awarded non-competitively, and SMEs are securing just 5% of orders.
Huge sums of money are going to be extracted for US shareholders to fuel the production of lethal weapons.
We are talking about government money that should and could be reinvested in the UK for the benefit of communities that are on their knees.
Funding can be found to stockpile nuclear weapons; but never to put money back in the pockets of the poorest households.
And as we are seeing, the biggest beneficiaries of this are the far right: Reform, who are now outflanking Labour, proposing to scrap the two-child benefit cap.
It was great to see the ‘Wages, Not Weapons’ motion passed at TUC Conference this year.
Seeing trade unionists voting to chart a new course away from militarism is really inspiring.
I think worker-led change is the key to demilitarisation.
I want to touch on something that’s not often talked about. Because when we talk about nuclear weapons, we’re not just talking about tools of war. We are talking about tools of domination, built and maintained within a global order shaped by racism.
Let’s be clear: the very existence of nuclear weapons rests on the idea that some lives matter more than others. A handful of wealthy, nations keep vast stockpiles, while telling the rest of the world they are not responsible or civilised enough to possess them. This is not about peace. It is about control.
The devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not just about ending a war. It was a demonstration of power over people of colour. A warning to the rest of the world about who gets to decide life and death on a mass scale. Decades later, we still see the same double standards: nuclear powers dictating terms to countries in the Global South, criminalising their ambitions, while quietly upgrading their own arsenals.
Racism runs through this system.
From testing nuclear weapons on colonised lands, poisoning Indigenous communities in the Pacific and Africa, to denying Global South nations the resources for peaceful nuclear energy, the message is consistent: your lives, your lands, your futures are expendable.
As long as nuclear weapons exist, they will not only threaten our survival but also uphold a deeply racist hierarchy of power. That is why our fight against them is inseparable from our fight against racism, against colonialism, and for genuine global justice.
Overall, I would like the Left to think more about turning swords into ploughshares.
Too often, we are defined by what we are against rather than what we are for.
Yes, we want a world without nuclear weapons.
We need to articulate a left-wing vision of national security which is based on stable public services, energy independence and industrial strategy.
I think the CND’s Alternative Defence Strategy is a useful tool in this regard.
A Labour government that can stockpile nuclear weapons but can’t scrap the two-child benefit cap is in office, but it’s not in power.
- Bell Ribeiro-Addy is the Member of Parliament for Clapham & Brixton Hill – you can follow her on Facebook, Twitter/X and Instagram.
- You can follow Labour CND on Facebook and Twitter/X, and CND on Facebook, Twitter/X, Instagram and TikTok.
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