“The situation is so severe that we need to get beyond business as usual and engage in some serious strategic planning, across borders but also across continents.”
CND Vice President Kate Hudson spoke at Arise’s Globalise the Resistance online rally for May Day 2026. You can read an edited version of her speech published below:
We’ve seen a proliferation of wars since Trump became president, and both sustaining that and causing it is a significant increase in global military spending, accompanied by escalating pro-war rhetoric. We hear a lot of that here in Britain, about being war-ready, having a whole society approach to war and so on. Across Europe, too, governments are slashing public spending budgets, destroying welfare states, to spend on weapons and all forms of military kit; many are moving towards conscription, and militarising education as well as industry.
The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute announced the figures this week for 2025 global military spending. They starkly confirm the trend that we are already painfully aware of. World military spending increased by 2.9% in real terms in 2024. Of course, this is disastrous in what it means for our societies and communities, and opposing it is central to the work of all our movements.
The figures show interesting developments.
One is that the increase of 2.9% was much smaller than the 9.7% increase in 2024.
This is largely explained by a 7.5% drop in US military spending. But as we know, Trump is not reining in his wars; on the contrary, this was accounted for by the fact that there was no new financial military assistance from the US to Ukraine in 2025. But the US continued to increase spending on both nuclear and conventional military capabilities, focusing on Trump’s new priority of the western hemisphere, as well as the Indo-Pacific. Of course, this drop isn’t going to last long. Spending approved by Congress for 2026 has risen to over £1 trillion, and it could rise to $1.5 trillion in 2027 if Trump’s latest budget proposal is agreed.
The main contributor to the global increase in 2025 was a 14% rise in Europe. Russia’s spending grew by 5.9%, and Ukraine’s grew by 20%. Germany was Europe’s largest spender, growing by 24%.
The other big growth area was Asia – China was up by 7.4% over the previous year, Japan’s by 9.7%, and Taiwan’s by 14%. But pretty much everywhere saw big increases.
Bizarrely, one unusual figure was that Britain’s military spending actually decreased by 2%. So our campaigning must be having some impact!
What is increasingly clear is that military spending is not just a national problem that we each individually address; this is an international problem that we need to address on a global level. This is the case with so many of the challenges we face, and we must really seriously address our international coordination, as this webinar stresses, to globalise the resistance against war and militarism. There have been some recent positive steps forward, for example, the Stop Rearm Coalition in Europe, which tries to coordinate a common approach between many peace and anti-war groups that are opposing the spending increases. One initiative from Stop Rearm is the Welfare not Warfare demonstration planned for Brussels on 14th June. I hope there will be a good international mobilisation for that. Most importantly, there have been huge mobilisations against the genocide and war on Gaza, as well as active campaigning against the wars on Iran and Lebanon, and an increasing emphasis on opposing foreign military bases. We’ve certainly seen those here in Britain. Last weekend, we had a very good protest at RAF Fairford, a British base used by the US to bomb Iran.
We’ve also seen a positive shift within the British trade union movement, away from military spending and war, and regaining the historic relationship in our movements between Peace and Socialism. But more work needs to be done on that, and I hope we will have further progress at TUC Congress this September.
But it’s clear that we need a greater level of coordination between the different peace and anti-war organisations and trade unions internationally to be really effective.
We always say this, but it is very difficult to achieve, because each country has its own national specifics, and they don’t always easily cross borders. In Britain, we have some specific challenges – the ‘so-called’ special relationship that makes our governments very compliant with US foreign policy demands, a British nuclear weapons system, many US troops and bases outside the control of the British government, and US nuclear weapons that have been reimposed without any British agreement. We cooperate with a range of networks, but resources for international networks are scarce when we are all struggling to fund our own movements.
But surely now the situation is so severe that we need to get beyond business as usual and engage in some serious strategic planning, across borders but also across continents. The London international anti-war conference on 20th June is a strong step in the right direction, but let’s really work to open up a global dialogue. As we often say, the militarists and war mongers organise across and beyond borders, and so must we.
So peace and solidarity and May Day greetings to you all – and let’s commit to greater international coordination.
- Kate Hudson is the Vice-President of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND).
- You can follow Kate on Twitter/X; and follow the CND on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter/X.
- You can watch Arise’s Globalise the Resistance May Day rally in full here.
- If you support Labour Outlook’s work amplifying the voices of left movements and struggles here and internationally, please consider becoming a supporter on Patreon.
