DESPITE strong opposition, the TUC Congress has voted to abandon its commitment to defence diversification and support increased military spending.
Though unions supporting the change made valid points about the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs abroad, there is no disguising that this is a backwards step which risks aligning unions with an aggressive and militaristic government at a time of rising international tensions.
It makes work to build Britain’s peace movement more important than ever.
The premise of the shift — that Britain needs to spend more on the military because the world is getting more dangerous — is false.
More British weapons don’t make the world safer, but more dangerous.
Flooding Ukraine with arms has only prolonged and intensified the war in that country, when efforts should instead have been aimed at securing a ceasefire and negotiated peace.
Continued escalation has brought us closer to the prospect of a nuclear war than at any time since the worst moments of the original cold war, as one delegate pointed out in the heated debate over the composite. There will be no winners.
And British weapons do not only go to Ukraine. Britain is among the biggest players in the global arms trade, selling deadly weaponry to some of the most brutal regimes on Earth — including Saudi Arabia, where they are used in a war on Yemen that has killed far greater numbers than that in Ukraine.
It is also a serial aggressor, having helped launch wars of choice against Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq.
Russia’s own appalling aggression against Ukraine indicates the breakdown in respect for international law and the sovereignty of nations resulting from the utter contempt for both shown by the United States, Britain and Nato in their own “forever wars” that have spread death and destruction across huge swathes of the Middle East and central Asia.
Viewing the Aukus military pact as an opportunity to create shipbuilding jobs is reckless when it forms part of the encirclement of China — another policy that risks sparking catastrophic war — and gives the stamp of trade union approval to the deployment of British gunboats thousands of miles east of Suez.
The growing consensus around British militarism does not reflect public opinion. It is a construct of an Establishment determined to stamp out the legacy of Jeremy Corbyn and the possibility his leadership raised of a country committed to peace and conflict resolution rather than imperialist war.
When Corbyn spoke out for such a policy, linking Britain’s foreign policy with terrorist attacks committed in this country following the Manchester Arena bombing in 2017 — by a man deployed by the British state to help in its Libyan war — he stunned a complacent media because a majority agreed with him.
While British people overwhelmingly oppose Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, they are also capable of understanding that the massive build-up of Nato armies in eastern Europe did not deter but helped provoke that war — with Fiona Bruce having to shut down a man raising that point on BBC Question Time in the first days of the war because the audience began to applaud.
As recently as 2020, the Stop the War Coalition was voted the most single most popular campaign group among Labour members — yet now MPs are threatened with exclusion from the party for signing its statements and a history of speaking on its platforms is cited as a reason to deny a former MP the right to stand again for her old seat.
We must not allow voices for peace to be shut out of the political conversation in this way. It was clear from today’s debate that many in the trade union movement understand Britain’s predatory role abroad and the need to oppose it.
We must work to strengthen that trend and win a labour movement committed to both peace and socialism.
