“The Department for Education (DfE) and the Ministry of Defence (MOD) have announced plans to use schools, colleges, and universities to bolster ‘national security’.”
An in-depth look at Starmer’s militarisation of education, where higher education funding is becoming worryingly dependent on defence industries – Connor Bollins.
There is an ongoing funding crisis in UK higher education, which Keir Starmer’s Labour should be trying to resolve. Instead, they are seeking to exploit the situation in order to redefine the role of universities within our society. As the centrepiece of Starmer’s legislative agenda is to prepare the UK for ‘war-fighting readiness’, the government is especially keen to use academic institutions to train military personnel and create weapons of mass destruction.
As with many of the serious issues that currently beset our public services, today’s crisis in higher education began with the Tory-imposed austerity of the 2010s. Labour allowed this crisis to fester by refusing to intervene during their first year in office. Jo Grady, the General Secretary of the University and Colleges Union (UCU), recently claimed that we have now entered an “existential moment” for the sector. According to a report by Times Higher Education, there have been almost 4,000 course closures across UK universities since 2024. Research conducted by UCU has shown that this was accompanied by 15,000 university job cuts. Many universities are still confronting huge financial deficits, and potential bankruptcy may eventually cause them to close down entirely.
Disconcertingly, whilst this has been unfolding, both the Department for Education (DfE) and the Ministry of Defence (MOD) have announced plans to use schools, colleges, and universities to bolster ‘national security’. In a white paper on post-16 education published in October 2025, the government committed to spending £182 million on boosting “the talent pipeline for the defence industry”. As a result, they have since created a ‘Defence Universities Alliance’, which will encourage students to pursue careers in the arms trade. The government claims that this will help them to build ‘national capability’ in areas such as nuclear and artificial intelligence, which were both lauded for their military applications in last year’s Strategic Defence Review and Defence Industrial Strategy. As I have written about elsewhere, all of these proposals have been accompanied by increased efforts to directly market jobs in the military to both university students and school pupils.
The ‘Military-Industrial-Academic Complex’
Of course, many universities in the UK and overseas are already deeply involved in weapons manufacturing. Those who analyse the institutional relationships between universities and arms companies sometimes refer to the existence of a ‘military-industrial-academic complex’. This is a variation of a famous phrase first used by Dwight D. Eisenhower, the then US President, in 1961. Eisenhower was attempting to describe a system that enables arms companies and the military to dictate government priorities. Since the 1950s, specialists argue, academia’s role within this complex has been to help legitimise the idea that governments must spend huge sums of money on achieving their own ‘national security’ goals and to then execute the prerequisite weapons research. Nowhere has this been more starkly apparent than in relation nuclear weapons. Collaboration between universities and funding bodies linked to the military, such as the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) in the UK, has not only increased the destructive power of nuclear weapons but also helped to justify their existence.
In this context, recent government proposals to entrench links between higher education and the arms industry are only building on pre-established trends. Since 2019, Demilitarise Education (dED) have helped to expose the billions of pounds that arms companies have put into investments, academic and research partnerships. The scale of these investments, made at a time when other sources of funding are scarce, enables arms companies to influence the research agendas of both individual universities and by extension the sector as a whole. As dED have argued, accepting funding from arms companies not only undermines the autonomy of university departments but also core academic values. Most starkly, research to improve weapons technologies is an affront to the ethical commitments to produce research with socially beneficial outcomes that are supposed to be upheld by academics working in the sciences. Worse still, by enabling concrete improvements to the lethality of military hardware, such research can also be said to have facilitated subsequent human rights violations and breaches of international law.
Since the onset of the genocide in Gaza in 2023, and the growth of the movement calling for a national weapons embargo on Israel, there has been a renewed spotlight on the ways in which arms companies are responsible for the devastation of human lives around the world. Communities in Yemen and Sudan, as well as Palestine, have suffered in recent years as a result of UK-manufactured weapons sold by companies like BAE Systems. Campaigners have not only drawn attention to how arms companies fuel and profiteer from global conflicts, but also the complicity of wealthy individuals, businesses, banks, and civil society institutions with ties to such companies.
In recognition of the role that universities play in supporting the global arms trade, there has also been an associated revival of anti-war activism on university campuses across the UK. At the forefront of this has been a series of dynamic student encampments, calling for universities to divest from arms companies and to implement ethical careers policies. However, the financial crisis currently engulfing higher education means that universities are now vulnerable to systemic change being imposed upon them by the government. As Labour’s white paper on post-16 education indicates, these conditions could result in an acceleration of the militarisation of higher education rather than its reversal.
False financial arguments
Labour has peddled the same arguments as the Tories about the need for individual institutions to better manage their own finances. This has allowed them to justify their inaction on preventing the collapse of our universities. As reiterated in the white paper on post-16 education, rather than attempt to reverse chronic levels of underfunding, they are simply planning to shift the burden to students by raising tuition fees in line with forecast inflation. At the same time, the government’s continuation of the ‘hostile environment’ policy introduced by the Tories is undermining the extent to which universities can recruit students internationally. This is not only detrimental to the global reputation of UK higher education but also creates a further loss of income.
The claim that each university’s finances are a matter for them to deal with alone, rather than the Treasury’s responsibility, also implicitly rejects the notion that higher education should be seen as a public good. It also fails to recognise that the current crisis was caused by political decisions made by successive governments and was therefore avoidable. In addition to repeating tired platitudes about improving ‘efficiencies’ within government and higher education, much is made in the white paper about encouraging universities to focus on their so-called core specialisms. This is simply code for allowing further course closures and job cuts.
The government asserts that too many “[universities] with similar offerings are chasing the same students.” Most workers across the sector agree that student recruitment has become a major challenge for universities, especially those who are not in the Russell Group. What the government is refusing to recognise, however, is that it was the Tories’ decision to uncap student numbers from 2015 that led to the emergence of this problem. The logic for uncapping student numbers, which UCU is calling to be reversed, was linked to a ‘neoliberal’ ideological commitment to the marketisation of higher education. The reintroduction of student caps per university would allow a rebalancing of recruitment across the sector to take place.
Linking higher education to the government’s ‘national missions’
It is bewildering that, at the same time that the government is refusing to properly fund higher education, they are also planning to spend money on using schools, colleges, and universities to achieve their own self-declared ‘national missions’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these so-called ‘national missions’ are primarily focused on bolstering the state’s military. The white paper on post-16 education outlines plans to link investment in colleges and universities to the alleged ‘needs’ of regional employers, including arms companies. This builds on claims made in the government’s Defence Industrial Strategy. Here, for example, the MoD claimed that it would be able to revitalise the port town of Barrow-in-Furness through its collaboration with BAE Systems. The BAE shipyards in Barrow are where the next generation of nuclear capable submarines, called Dreadnaughts, are being created. The town itself suffers from huge levels of social deprivation and poverty.
Clearly, there is a moral argument to be had about whether skills providers and universities should be more “responsive” to the ‘needs’ of companies like BAE Systems rather than the needs of society as whole. Nevertheless, it is also important to emphasise that there is no secure path to achieving economic growth through reliance on the arms trade. In the case of private companies manufacturing weapons components or ammunitions, for example, the products created do not have a wide consumer base. Where there are growth opportunities, these are dependent on escalating global conflict. Bullets and bombs, in other words, only tend to be bought by the military, are not socially useful, and only require regular restocking during wartime. Moreover, the major arms companies tend to reinvest their profits overseas rather than back into local economies and there is a ceiling to the number of jobs they are able to sustain.
A more sensible approach would be to invest in health, social care, and education. Allocating more funds to train and employ people in health and social care would improve domestic productivity. It would do so by giving unpaid carers the option of returning to work, reducing national unemployment figures, and improving the overall wellbeing of our society. The same could be said for investment in secondary education, where there is a huge demand to recruit more teachers and teaching assistants. As indicated in the white paper on post-16 education, there are 8.5 million adults in England who have low proficiency in English, Maths, or both. With greater investment in schools, and in universities as training providers, there could be reduced classrooms sizes, greater levels of targeted interventions, and improved provision for children with special education needs and disabilities (SEND). This would serve the interest of improving child wellbeing and helping to create a more skilled workforce.
The role of universities within our society
The weaknesses of the government’s economic arguments suggest that their plans for higher education are in fact being driven by an ideological commitment to the militarisation of society. In turn, this reflects Starmer’s acquiescence with Donald Trump’s project of reasserting US military dominance around the world. Starmer’s aim to increase the UK government’s military spending to 3% of GDP by as early as 2029, in line with demands made by Trump of all NATO states, has to be seen in this context. So too does Starmer’s refusal to condemn the US’s illegal attack on Venezuela and reluctance to defend the sovereignty of Greenland. Starmer should instead be doing everything he can to distance himself from Trump’s bellicosity on the world stage, which is only a recipe for intensified global conflict and the threat of global catastrophe through nuclear war.
The opposition to Starmer’s militarisation of society need to continue mounting the case for ‘welfare not warfare’ and ‘books not bombs’. Clearly, a lack of investment in public assets, including schools, colleges, and universities, will only further degrade living standards to the detriment of future generations. Those with an interest in the demilitarisation of higher education also need to defend the ideal of the academy. Access to degree-level study should not be dependent on the amount that someone is able to pay, or their willingness to embark upon a career in the arms trade. We need to rebuild consensus for the idea that the purpose of universities should be to enrich our culture, strengthen our civic institutions, expand our horizons of understanding, and to produce knowledge or scientific breakthroughs that benefit humanity. Their purpose should not be to create weapons of mass destruction that facilitate war crimes and ultimately endanger us all.
- Conor Bollins is a history academic and anti-war activist. You can follow him on Bluesky and Twitter/X.
- This article was originally published by Demilitarise Education.
- 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.
