During the early 1930s, the Labour Party opposed rearmament – and indeed voted against every defence budget until 1937. Then, under the impact of Germany’s reoccupation of the Rhineland, the Spanish Civil War and the Battle of Cable Street, the mood among working people changed. Labour switched to support for Spain and support for rearmament, while the Tories – changing from Baldwin to Chamberlain – moved further towards appeasement.
In the coming year, it is the duty of the whole Labour movement to lead a similar transformation. Because, while Labour’s record on defence has been excellent – supporting Ukraine, designing a state-directive defence industrial strategy and hiking forces pay – we are constrained by two, linked, factors.
The electorate does not yet realise the peril we are in; and as a result there is insufficient public support for rearmament at a scale commensurate with the threat, and for the hard choices needed to fund it.
As the main party of the progressive left, we face specific challenges: pacifist internationalism is a strong and legitimate tradition within our party; the residue of Leninist “anti-imperialism” lingers within parts of the trade union bureaucracy; parts of the higher education system are off-the-scale hostile to defence, defence industries, defence science and the armed forces; and who wants to spend money with global defence giants adept at fleecing the taxpayer?
But the socialist case for rearmament is strong, and consists of five arguments.
First: the threat is real. It is spelled out in black and white in the National Security Strategy – an expert document drawn up by civil servants, intelligence and military chiefs: there is a non-negligible chance that Russia attacks a NATO ally with conventional forces, and the “hybrid” phase of Russian aggression is already under way.
Denialism about the nature of the threat is the first line of defence of those opposed to defence spending. They clutch at straws like “Russia is too weak to invade Poland”, or make ridiculous assertions about NATO “aggression”.
We need to understand where this comes from: in 1937 the former Labour leader George Lansbury came out of a two hour meeting with Hitler, which had ended with the Führer screaming anti-semitic remarks at him, and told news cameras that “Hitler wants peace”. For committed pacifists, the kind of genocidal aggression exhibited by Vladimir Putin in Ukraine is hard to square with the belief that everything can be sorted out through international law and reason.
In the end it comes down to the absence of a theory of evil.
Second: deterrence works. People who wanted to unilaterally abandon nuclear weapons never won the argument because the evidence is, at the nuclear level at least, the threat of mutual destruction is a strong disincentive to aggression. Few military planners believe any conflict with Russia would turn into a strategic nuclear conflict – but the use of tactical nukes is a regular part of the Russian military philosophy.
To deter Putin from attacking the UK and its allies, we need to match his buildup of conventional military power with enough of our own to ensure that, in any attack, Russia would be prevented from seizing European territory, and punished hard enough to make an attack on NATO a pointless exercise.
By punish – because I am sick of the euphemisms surrounding defence – I mean the major degradation of the Russian economic infrastructure – from power stations to commercial shipping to political and military command centres, and the seizure of trillions of private Russian assets in Western banks.
Third, there is a major economic upside to rearmament. Simply by abandoning the Tory principle of “global competition by default”, and by sending clear demand signals in the 2025 Defence Industrial Strategy, Labour has already achieved the highest defence exports since records began.
The average defence industry job pays £15k more than the manufacturing average; defence jobs can be distributed into regions needing new industrial investment; and according to a study that Labour relied on to design its industrial strategy, every £1bn spent on defence brings £2.2bn of GDP growth.
Labour has designated the trade unions officially as part of the defence industrial base, and brought them into decision making via the Defence Industrial Joint Council – where they will be in a strong position to influence skills, investment and work process design.
Fourth, Trump’s unreliability makes it all the more vital that we rearm in concert with our European allies. If we get this right, we don’t only end up with higher UK defence spending, but UK firms benefit from the massive investments going on in Germany, Poland and the Nordic states.
And because we now have to anticipate losing some of the “strategic enablers” the USA has provided – satellites, intelligence, heavy lift aircraft etc – we will need to do things differently than in the past, encouraging new entrants into the defence space, using AI and robotics, rather than the wasteful practice of every European state having a jealously guarded defence giant.
Fifth, the damage it will do if the left does not turn up for the fight to deter Putin will be enormous. In the 1930s it was the Tory right who were labelled the “Guilty Men” after a decade of slow rearmament and appeasement left the British Army wrecked on the beaches of Dunkirk.
We must find the courage to say to the trade union leaders who led the vote against defence spending at last year’s TUC, and to the students and lecturers resisting defence industrial research on campus: if the worst happens again, you will be the Guilty People – and our party stands strong both in support for Ukraine and for domestic rearmament.
But it is going to need money. I am glad the Labour government brought its 2.5%/GDP spending target forward to 2027. But the current rate of increase – rising to 3.5% in 2035 – will not allow us to build the kind of forces needed to match threat with military capability.
Right now the Labour government sits astride a glaring contradiction: we have an official assessment of the threat which demands major and rapid increases in defence spending; yet we have fiscal rules that say it is impossible and an OBR whose neoliberal economists don’t even believe in our central assertion: that defence can be an engine for growth.
Furthermore, in the 1930s, rearmament was funded through borrowing. So far, the in year hike to 2.5%, made in response to the Trump administration’s signal that it no longer prioritises the conventional defence of Europe, was achieved through reallocation from development aid.
As in the 1930s, I do not see any way of rearming at pace and scale other than to do so through borrowing – preferably via a multilateral bank created with our allies.
