Good evening! This week's edition of the In Common newsletter comes from Craig Dalzell, head of policy and research at Common Weal.
IT has been observed that politicians will claim there is never enough money to spend on social welfare – but those same politicians are always quick to find that same money when they need to spend it on war. That trend appears to have been broken in the UK, but in the worst possible way.
Now, we’re being told that there isn’t enough money for the war either, and so social welfare has to go to pay for it.
The UK is aiming to spend £10 on war for every £1 it will spend on foreign aid, and Keir Starmer’s likely last major policy decision has been to announce an increase in the military budget by an extra £15 billion a year, funded by cuts to long-term investments in transport and energy infrastructure as well as broader cuts across the board.
This will have multiple impacts on public spending.
The first is the impact of the direct cuts. The second will be the knock-on effects on devolved government spending.
Investment in roads and to a lesser extent energy generates “Barnett Consequentials” which feed through to the Scottish Budget, but spending on defence does not. Every £1bn taken out of the UK transport budget and put into the military means an effective cut of £80 million to the Scottish budget.
The third is that as a “job creation tool” the military is a terrible means of economic stimulus. Yes, the military spending will create jobs, but taking that money from just about anywhere else will cost more jobs than are created.
And then there’s the final point: money spent on a bomb that isn’t used is a waste of money (even more so when we consider the wastefulness of military procurement). Money spent on a bomb that IS used, destroys the bomb and whatever (or whomever) it is dropped on.
War as a negative sum game. Even the “winners” lose.
The problem with the discussions about what the UK defence sector is actually defending us from is woefully inadequate. Rare is the military chief who actually lays out the threats to the country and allows their spending to be democratically scrutinised. This is despite Lord George Robertson – a former secretary general of Nato – rather ironically saying of military spending in a Parliamentary evidence session this week that “if people become aware of the dangers and the risks to this country then they will make the demands that will allow us to do it”.
But if the military folk won’t tell us what they think those dangers and risks are, then we’ll need to work it out for ourselves. Instead of building nukes to “defend” ourselves from shadows and the enemies they’d like us to be afraid of, we need a reality-based security strategy.
The single most serious threat to the UK and our way of life is climate change. This is a self-inflicted problem that is now too late to prevent – but not too late to limit or to adapt to. Doing so, however, will require investments in the kind of things that Starmer’s defence strategy will pull money away from at a critical time.
It’s not just the climate itself. Trump’s illegal war with Iran, and Putin’s with Ukraine, has shown the folly of relying on fossil fuels when we have renewable alternatives that cannot be disrupted by those conflicts.
Opting out of being forced to fight oil wars is a much more sensible strategy than merely hoping we can win one.
Non-climate environmental threats like air pollution are severe too. Recent data has shown that the London Ultra-Low Emission Zone (which was opposed by the political right, including Starmer) has started to save around 3000 lives per year. If a terrorist or hostile state killed 3000 British civilians in a year, we know what the response would be. And yet, there are politicians and political parties who want to roll back on urban LEZ legislation. A reality-based security strategy would treat that appropriately.
Substantial domestic threats exist in the form of smuggling, criminal gangs, radicalised terrorists or fascists like the one spotted outside Holyrood last month. These are all policing matters rather than military, though. Cutting police budgets, social welfare and other community-based initiatives to funnel into war will make these problems worse, not better.
State-on-state threats to the UK do not come from territorial invasion. The war in Ukraine has shown the limits of Russia’s ability to invade even its neighbours. But this should not discount the threat posed by our supposed allies. Just this week, Trump renewed calls to annex Greenland.
More of a threat is “hybrid war” like hacking or drones. Again, these threats do not just come from our “enemies”. A reality-based security system would recognise also the possibility of Trump ordering digital sanctions (as he has applied to the International Criminal Court), spying on our Government (as he’s done to Denmark), or even ordering Microsoft to shut down our Parliament (just as they did accidentality last year due to a cloud server outage).
Scotland needs a digital sovereignty plan – and Common Weal is currently working on creating one.
Warmongers will always want war – it’s good for their business. But if we prepare for war, we will get war. If we want peace, we must prepare for peace instead.
If we want a strategy that results in actual security, we must deal with the reality we have, not the one the warmongers want us to be afraid of.
