“Defending our country means investing in our NHS, rebuilding our public services, giving people decent affordable housing, and ensuring there’s a future our children can have some hope in.”
Jo Grady of the University and College Union spoke at Stop the War’s recent International Anti-War Conference about the Wages Not Weapons campaign. You can read her speech below.
Friends, it’s an honour to be here with you today. I’m Jo Grady, General Secretary of the University and College Union, representing more than 120,000 workers in colleges, universities, and prisons. We’re one of the biggest post-16 education unions in the world, and I’m so pleased to be here on behalf of all our members, alongside colleagues from all across Europe — all of us here together to stand up against the war machine.
We couldn’t be gathering at a more important moment. There isn’t a corner of the world where wars aren’t already raging, or where imperialist rivalry doesn’t threaten to ignite yet more. All the while, workers – ordinary folk – everywhere are bearing the brunt of a broken economic system which impoverishes the vast majority.
And here in Britain over the past few weeks, if you can believe it, the headlines have been dominated by Labour Party politicians telling us that we aren’t spending enough money on the military; that we need to be arming ourselves to the teeth to prepare for war; that Keir Starmer should be spending even less money on education and public services and even more on bombs and fighter jets.
Friends, they’re living in a fantasy land, so pumped up by their own war propaganda, they couldn’t be any more detached from reality. Our Defence Secretary, who resigned last week, John Healey, is a case in point. He made all these arguments, more or less, suggesting that we need to be gearing up for a conflict with Russia. This same man, by the way, was once a trade union officer, but this is what happens when you’re captured by Westminster and by a military-industrial complex that calls the shots. Workers, the state of things here — how much of a country we even have left to defend — all of that becomes an afterthought. Through the warmongering lens, everything is distorted.
Well, it’s not an afterthought for those of us still committed to the workers’ movement, and we see clearly, because those realities facing our members stare us in the face every day. In our sectors, in further and higher education, we are facing unprecedented attacks. Our universities, especially, are crumbling, having once been the envy of the world, with tens of thousands of jobs at risk, whole departments being wiped out, academic disciplines just disappearing — and the Labour government does nothing, effectively just sitting back while one of this country’s last great assets collapses.
Yet last week, there was a miracle. Somehow, the government suddenly found some money, tens of millions of pounds of it, for a handful of universities. But it wasn’t to save all the jobs at risk. It wasn’t to stop departments from closing. It wasn’t to stabilise our great sector. No, it was “to strengthen the UK’s defence industry.” And there we have it, laid bare. There’s never enough money for our students, our staff, our universities as universities — just like there’s never enough to properly invest in our schools, hospitals, community centres, local services, you name it. But find some way to make it about the military, and then the cash will flow.
Last year, in my union, we were frankly sick of it — we’d had enough. And we were ashamed that the official position of the TUC, Britain’s trade union confederation representing over 6 million workers, was to support increases in military spending. So we did something about it. We launched the Wages Not Weapons campaign to overturn that stance and put our movement back on the right side of history. And friends, the campaign succeeded. So the British trade union movement is now clear: we will not be bought off by their war machine. Our priority is wages and welfare, not weapons and war.
I’m pleased to announce here today that we will be taking the Wages Not Weapons campaign up a gear over the coming months, and we’ll be bringing that campaign back to the TUC congress in September, with a resolution that asks the questions Westminster never does: what exactly are we “defending”? A country with no research universities left standing? One with ruined public services? One which can’t even build one-third of a high-speed railway?
To truly defend our country, we must refuse to surrender to decline, to poverty and social misery. Defending our country means investing in our NHS, rebuilding our public services, giving people decent, affordable housing, and ensuring there’s a future our children can have some hope in. At the TUC, in Westminster and in universities and colleges throughout our nations, we’ll be spreading the message: our priority must be rebuilding this country, not arming a hollowed-out shell to the teeth.
Welfare, not warfare. Wages, not weapons. Solidarity, and Free Palestine.
- Jo Grady is the General Secretary of the University and College Union (UCU). You can follow her on Twitter/X here.
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