THE new £15 billion defence investment plan announced by Keir Starmer has been blasted by the Scottish Greens and anti-war campaigners.
The Prime Minister – in a speech at a drone company in Berkshire – acknowledged some other areas of UK Government spending would be slashed in order to fund defence, with road and energy projects scrapped to pay for the military.
Annual defence spending will also increase from £54 billion when Labour came to power to £80 billion by 2029.
It will help to fund measures such as £64bn for the renewal of the UK’s nuclear deterrent, more than £8bn for the global combat air programme (Gcap) with Japan and Italy, around £5bn to fund a “drone transformation” of the armed forces and some £11bn on munitions and weapons to build up stockpiles.
The plan reverses the “corrosive hollowing out” of the armed forces, Starmer said – adding: “When the world is arming and aggression is rising, the best way to avoid war is to prepare for it.
He went on: “The best way to defend is to deter, to have the strength to make your adversaries think again before they act.
“And that is what we are doing.”
But the Scottish Greens have hit out at the plans, saying that it is “throwing even greater sums of money into the pockets of arms company bosses” and that it won’t make the UK more secure.
“The Prime Minister was right about one thing in his speech: we are living in an unprecedented time of threats to people across Scotland and the world,” MSP Maggie Chapman said.
“Peace is not only threatened by aggressive and war-mongering regimes like Russia, Israel and the US, but also by food and water insecurity caused by mega corporations hoarding natural resources and the climate crisis that is destroying communities and habitats through wildfires, floods and droughts.”
She added: “For far too long the UK has stuck to a foreign policy that has exacerbated these threats. Both Labour and the Tories before them have cosied up to Donald Trump and armed Israel’s genocide against Palestinians.
“Throwing even greater sums of money into the pockets of arms company bosses isn’t going to make the UK any more secure, and certainly not if we continue with a foreign policy that has done so much damage.”
Chapman then suggested that the UK Government should instead be relocating fund from the “useless and abhorrent” Trident nuclear program in the Clyde.
“We certainly shouldn’t be attacking vital international development funding as Labour has already done or axing public services,” she went on.
“We’ve seen just how important European support and solidarity with Ukraine has been in stopping the aggression of Vladimir Putin, and that must continue.
“However, if the UK is to be a credible voice for peace, then there must urgently be an end to the arming of war criminal regimes such as Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia.”
Stop the War, meanwhile, described Starmer’s announcement as a “telling and desperate bid to leave a legacy”.
Chris Nineham, the organisation’s vice chair said: “Never mind the cost-of-living crisis or the collapsing services he leaves behind, Starmer wants to be remembered as the man who ramped up spending on weapons to record levels.”
He added: “He claims he doesn’t want war, but that the best way to avoid it is to be prepared for it. This is a transparent lie. His government has done little more than enable the US and Israel’s illegal wars and has enthusiastically backed the war in Ukraine, doing everything possible to prolong the carnage in the effort to, as he put it today, “turn the screws” on the Russian economy.”
Nineham went on: “It is clear that security, defence and the fantasy and implausible threat from Russia, which is constantly talked up by ministers, generals and arms companies, are now the main ways that the ruling classes are justifying attacks on social programmes, on welfare and working class living standards in general in favour of still more missiles
“Starmer claims this record defence spending won’t be funded by public sector cuts but by “relocating capital budgets by a penny in every pound” and scrapping some infrastructure projects. The public aren’t stupid about what this means. And that is why any effective campaign against public sector and welfare cuts needs to be making anti-war arguments.
“There is strong minority opposition to any increase in defence spending, but polls show this opposition surges to big majorities across Europe when it is presented as a question of choices between wages and weapons, between welfare and warfare. This is why we must urgently build a popular movement that has these arguments at its heart.”
A spokesperson for the Scottish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, meanwhile, added: "In a month in which the Public Accounts Committee called for greater transparency into opaque nuclear spending, £6bn was reported as misaccounted by the Atomic Weapons Establishment, the UK overtook Russia in real-terms spending on nuclear weapons and the 5 Astute-class nuclear submarines were all reported as berthed and unavailable for deployment, Starmer's great outgoing announcement is to pour more billions into the nuclear black-hole."
The campaign group added: "Not only does the UK's exorbitant spending on nuclear weapons undermine its treaty commitments, raise international tensions and deepen the UK's military and diplomatic dependency on the United States. It is possibly the greatest opportunity cost in British government spending. The £200bn+ on Trident renewal during its lifespan, many billions for new nuclear warheads, more for for US nuclear jets, plus more for upgrading military ports to accommodate nuclear weapons - all of these enormous resources could be spent in sectors of the economy that have genuine social benefits, unlike the production of unusable omnicide weapons designed to kill millions of people.
We need a serious re-imagination of what national security looks like in Scotland and the UK. Starmer is the last person one should look to to deliver that."
