Will Labour learn to love defence? The unions are resisting rearmament

Towering above John Healey as he chats with Merseyside journalists is a 1,000-tonne chunk of warship, chalk marks indicating the welds that scar its steel surface. When it’s finished, this will be the prow of a Type 26 submarine-hunting frigate, and thanks to a £10 billion deal with Norway to build five more  than originally planned, the Birkenhead-based Cammell Laird shipyard can look forward to a decade’s worth of work.

The questions for the British Defence Secretary, on a visit during Labour Party conference which began yesterday just across the Mersey, ranged from “What will this mean for local jobs?” to “Is Russia about to attack?” This just about sums up the dilemma facing UK defence policy: are we in a period of incrementally raised threat, demanding incrementally higher defence spending; or should the severity of the global situation demand the urgent expansion of investment into Britain’s historic military hardware production sites, to the necessary detriment of spending on everything else?

Amid its polling slump, Labour is desperate to demonstrate delivery on its domestic agenda, and is conscious that no matter how statesman-like Keir Starmer and Healey look on global stage, there are — as yet — few votes in national security and defence. But the prospect of conflict with Russia, given the recent doubling of Russian incursions into Nato airspace, rightly haunts the British government. If the worst happened, according to one senior military officer I spoke to, here’s what it would look like. In Phase One, all the expensive kit is destroyed, the stockpiles of complex weapons are expended; the long-practised manoeuvres end in stalemate; and trench warfare begins.

In Phase Two, both sides are lobbing drones and missiles at each other’s industrial base. Their armed forces consist mainly of raw recruits, and their cities look like London during the Blitz. In Phase Three, one side’s scientific and technological base begins to innovate faster, using AI, robotics, space and lasers to make itself unbeatable, and their opponent loses the will and the means to fight.

Any of these phases can be circumvented either by a strategic nuclear attack or a devastating act of economic warfare. And the preparatory phase looks much like the present: unexplained cyberattacks on major infrastructure, “protest” movements driven by disinformation and — as is currently happening in Moldova — outright interference against elected governments.

Nobody in their right mind would want to begin such a conflict. But the fragmented state of the Western alliance, and the irrationalism of the man in the Kremlin, mean that our surest way of avoiding it is deterrence — nuclear, conventional and economic — and by strengthening our alliances. If you want to understand how pivotal those alliances are, look at this map, produced by my colleagues at the Council on Geostrategy. It shows that, though Nato’s frontline with Russia is on land, stretching from the Black Sea to the Arctic, the alliance itself is essentially maritime. Its flanks are seas; its supply lines are oceans; its communication networks rest on seabeds.

Though few British citizens are prepared to accept it, and few politicians are prepared to lay it on the line in these terms, that is the stark background to Britain’s rearmament programme. Since February this year, when US Defense Secretary Peter Hegseth told his counterparts that the USA was handing the conventional defence of Europe to European states themselves, the British government has scheduled a hike in defence spending to 2.5% of GDP by 2027, promised 3% in the next Parliament and signed up to the new Nato target of 5% in 10 years’ time.

In UK defence circles, the concept of “fight tonight” has evolved from an edgy thought experiment to a concrete criterion for readiness. Britain has committed, in short order and without any debate in Parliament, to fielding a “sub-strategic” — tactical — nuclear weapon, to be carried on F-35A combat aircraft and deployed under Nato command.

In the new National Security Strategy, the UK has also pledged to embrace higher risks when it takes action and accepted that, in pursuit of enhanced security, its “interests” may have to override its “values”. And, in the upcoming Defence Investment Plan, the Ministry of Defence will decide how to match its weapons systems, forces and deployments to the threat, given the size of its budget.

The outstanding problems are: how to pay for rearmament; how to secure consent for it, from a civil society that is atomised and fractured by disputes over identity; and how to ready political and military leaderships for the possibility of having to manage Russian escalation.

The money problem is acute. In the Thirties, once it accepted the possibility of war within a decade, the Treasury understood it would have to be financed by borrowing. Though it rationed the spending increase, and forced hard choices on the military — prioritising the RAF over both other services — between 1932 and 1939 the Treasury raised defence spending from 2.3% to 9% of GDP.

That would be hard to repeat today. First, because the UK’s public debt is 96% of GDP. Though that is lower than it was at the start of rearmament, today the government borrows from investors free to move their money across borders, not from a middle class whose savings are constrained by capital controls as in the Thirties. Second, because of the welfare state. On the eve of rearmament, when defence spending stood at 2.5% of GDP, the rest of the public sector accounted for just 17%. During wartime, when defence spending ballooned to 50% of GDP, state spending on civilian services shrank below 7%. Today the non-military public spending accounts for around 42% of GDP, much of which is unshrinkable.

“Total war”, of the kind we fought twice in the 20th century, is unthinkable for states with public health, welfare and pension commitments. As a result, the fiscal debates and the rearmament debate in British politics are misaligned: the 5% Nato commitment remains aspirational, while the Treasury and the OBR have yet to agree a methodology that could measure the upsides of this investment in terms of growth.

The British government is engaged in discussions over a proposal to put cash into a multilateral fund, with allies who have better credit ratings, and to borrow against it on the capital markets. That could delay the cost of some defence spending, effectively moving it off balance sheet for the medium term. But the UK has distanced itself from a City-led project to finance such borrowing, known as the Defence Security and Resilience Bank, and is making slow progress in its own negotiations.

In the meantime, selling rearmament to the electorate has barely begun. Keir Starmer was warmly received when he told the London Defence Conference that security and defence were no longer “one priority amongst many others” but “the central organising principle of government; the first thought in the morning — the last at night.” But that is not yet a priority shared by the electorate, nor even most MPs. When the first thought in the morning for millions of people is how are they going to meet their food and energy bills, rearmament is a hard sell.

Labour got a taste of just how hard last month when, by a narrow margin, the TUC Congress voted to stop supporting increased defence spending. Despite pleas from the two big Labour-affiliated manufacturing unions — GMB and Unite — white-collar workers from the teachers, lecturers and health unions voted for “welfare not warfare”.

So those of us who want to make the case for defence spending need to do so in a much more convincing way. “Welfare not warfare” is a compelling slogan only if you believe warfare can be avoided through disarmament and multilateralism. Ukraine found out the hard way that, when dealing with an insane ethnonationalism, these don’t work.

One of our strongest arguments is the economic multiplier effect of defence investment. The economy of Barrow-in-Furness, whose submarine order books are guaranteed for decades, is now booming to the point of overheating. With the government committed to building similar clusters, in Plymouth, Clydeside and Belfast for example, new defence manufacturing jobs should become available, each paying 40% above the average factory wage.

But at some point, the national conversation has to move from the opportunity to the threat. My father’s generation of Labour-voting miners didn’t switch from pacifism to rearmament simply because they thought it would raise wages; they did so because they didn’t want to live in the Third Reich.

Today, many young people are rightly appalled by the wars going on — in Gaza and in Ukraine — but their attention seems fixed on the injustices only of the former. It does not seem to occur to the British public that, when Russian-paid saboteurs torch warehouses in London, or take down airports and hospitals in cyber attacks, that might be in preparation for something worse.

Yet those who study the Russian state media know that the UK is constantly portrayed as the main enemy, and the fantasy peddled is that Putin will one day drown Liverpool, Glasgow and Belfast with a giant nuclear-detonated tidal wave, followed by our abject surrender.

The key to change lies beyond the confines of electoral politics. There is, in Britain, a military-industrial-academic “complex” that has become used to conducting its business in conditions of quiet and opacity. The armed forces don’t look or sound like the country they are defending. Our defence giants tiptoe around the issue of their presence on campuses.

Banks hike lending costs to defence SMEs over “reputational risks”. Our two major Christian churches refuse to let their trustees invest in defence. Students pursuing careers in defence related science and technology face peer pressure to opt for something softer — and, for the most talented, that is often a more lucrative job in finance.

Yet China has seven of its elite universities signed up to top-secret military research, and leads the USA in 57 out of 64 defence-related categories of science, while the whole of Russian society is geared for war. So before the population moves, it is this ill-defined but critical community of bankers, vice-chancellors, civil servants, religious leaders and opinion formers who will have to move first.

Their assumptions accumulated since 1991 — towards reliance on international law and institutions, towards improvisation in a crisis, and towards incremental change — will need to be abandoned. So will the tradition of conducting all discussions about threat, strategy and deterrence out of earshot of the public. So will pension funds’ reluctance to invest in defence, and universities’ reluctance to shout about the defence-related research they do.

In the Thrties, the air of unreality lasted from Hitler’s march to power right through to the Battle of Jarama in February 1937, when — mobilised by the Communist Party — the first British and Irish troops went into action against a fascist army in Spain. After that, something snapped in the British psyche. Labour, which had voted against every defence budget since 1919, became the most ardent supporter of rearmament.

Today, though politicians like Starmer and Healey are already there, the wider electorate — both Left and Right — has yet to make the leap. When they look at the half-finished ships in places like Birkenhead, and its sister yards in Govan and Rosyth, the public sees, if anything, jobs and apprenticeships. When military planners look at these same chunks of metal, they see vital deterrent weapons systems whose deployment cannot come soon enough.

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