Starmer is putting warfare before welfare

When the revolt by Labour MPs forced the government to drop – for the time being – plans to cut disability benefits, mainstream media instantly issued dire warnings about the fiscal ‘black hole’ this created. ITV said: “Welfare U-turn leaves chancellor with financial blackhole that could lead to further humiliation.” The Guardian jumped in with: “A £5bn black hole: What Labour’s U turn on welfare cuts will mean for the public purse”. And so they went on: one political journalist after another re-cycling the same narrative like sheep.

Yet, only a week earlier, these same media outlets made no mention at all of black holes when Keir Starmer and other NATO leaders agreed to more than double each members’ annual military spending to 5% of Gross Domestic Product by 2035. I’ve tried searching for combinations of the relevant words but haven’t found a single piece using the term in that context. The Times came closest by at least telling us that the prime minister “will not reveal how it will be funded until after the next election.” Note the word ‘after’. In our version of ‘democracy’ voters are typically not told about ‘tough choices’ until after they have voted, by which time they have no choice.

This obfuscation is aided by the media generally not translating the NATO commitment into its monetary value. Five per cent of GDP does not mean much to most people, yet each one per cent of the UK’s 2024 GDP is £28.5 billion – nearly six times as much as the ‘black hole’ left by the U turn on welfare benefits.  The UK’s military spending is currently 2.3% of GDP, which therefore costs us £66 billion annually. Spending 5 per cent will raise the annual bill to £143 billion, adding £77 billion. That is more than 15 times as much as the welfare ‘black hole’ and will require an average increase in military spending of nearly £8 billion every year for ten years.

The pedantic will say that not all of this vast amount will go on what NATO defines as “core defence requirements.” The five percent includes 1.5 percent of GDP annually “to protect our critical infrastructure, defend our networks, ensure our civil preparedness and resilience, unleash innovation, and strengthen our defence industrial base.” But this does not negate the fact that money that could have been spent on health, education, housing and welfare will be used instead to fund these vaguely-defined items, which could be anything from direct subsidies for arms manufacturers to a revival of civil defence scaremongering like the Cold War era ‘Protect and Survive’ campaign, which CND countered with ‘Protest and Survive’.

When the Cold War was launched in 1947 by US President Harry Truman with an eponymous ‘doctrine’ of US global policing, the sacrifices of the Soviet people as war-time allies were still fresh in the minds of Americans.  Knowing this, the influential Republican chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Arthur Vandenberg, told Truman that he would have to “scare the hell out of the American people” if he wanted public support. In the forty-two years from then until the end of the Cold War, the US fought actual wars in Korea and Vietnam, and Britain and France battled liberation movements in their colonies, but the always-imminent Soviet invasion of western Europe never happened.

Now, Vandenberg’s scare tactics are being re-cycled, with Starmer saying we have to be “ready for war with Russia” and Britain’s military top brass telling us that the invasion will happen before the end of the decade. During the Cold War, Soviet interventions in Hungary and Czechoslovakia were used to fuel the scaremongering. Today, it’s the war in Ukraine. One commentator even suggested in The Times this weekend that NATO was being complacent and that Russia could “overwhelm” its “modest forces.” Seriously? According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s annual league table of military budgets (in US dollars), NATO’s European members spent $454 billion in total in 2024. Russia, on the other hand, spent $149 billion – even though it was at war with Ukraine, which itself spent $65 billion over and above aid provided by the US. How can the forces of European NATO members be considered ‘modest’ when they cost three times as those of Russia before counting Ukraine or any back up from the USA, which has numerous permanent military bases on this side of the Atlantic?

As in the Cold War, it’s more likely that we are being dragged into massively increasing military spending for reasons other than a Russian threat. So, what are they? The UK Defence Review published in June provides some clues. In the section on the strategic context (pages 26-27), there is no mention of a Russian invasion of Europe. Instead, we are told that the problem is “growing multipolarity and intensifying strategic competition” from states who are “seeking to reshape the rules-based international order that has governed international relations since the Second World War.” As ever, the rules-based order is being used here to mean the rules and rule of the West not international law as understood by the rest of the world. If that was in doubt, a subsequent sentence confirms the review’s meaning by saying: “Intensifying strategic competition will make it more difficult for the UK and its allies to shape the world and events in their interests”(my emphasis).

The review was therefore imperialist business as usual, which is hardly surprising once you know who Starmer appointed to produce it. Chaired by Lord Robertson, who was NATO secretary general at the time of the invasions of both Iraq and Afghanistan, the other two members were General Sir Richard Barrons, who commanded various operations in Northern Ireland, Iraq and Afghanistan before becoming deputy chief of the defence staff (operations) under the Tories from 2011 to 2016; and Fiona Hill, who was born in Britain but is based in Washington and worked as a national security adviser to Donald Trump during his first term. If you wanted a break with the regime-change mindset that has given us so many disasters, these would be among the last people you would ask.

Their bankrupt thinking was evident in a recent interview Hill gave. Asked what the US wanted from the review, she likened the UK to “an aircraft carrier all of itself” and said they also saw the UK’s overseas territories as “very important” outposts in key regions. Not surprisingly, therefore, the review itself boasts (page 80) that the Ministry of Defence has 8,500 personnel deployed overseas and says (page 76) that the government will “bolster the capabilities of its allies and partners in other theatres of importance to the UK, notably the Middle East and the Indo-Pacific.”

Within weeks of the review being published, two events underlined the reality of what this means. First, acting as a US aircraft carrier, the UK was used by Trump as the launchpad for bombing Iran, putting us – once again – in the firing line for any backlash. Then, in recent days, the lifting of a super-injunction laid bare how the lives of anti-Taliban Afghans were put at risk by a security breach that occurred while special forces officers were sifting through their asylum applications to weed out any that might have witnessed British war crimes.

The latter highlights how the costs of war are far greater even than the ballooning military budgets that fund them. In the case of the 20-year war in Afghanistan, the £32.8 billion that the UK spent on fighting the war has been followed by as yet unquantified billions spent on providing asylum for Afghans who collaborated with us, on pensions for the widows of the 457 military personnel who died and on ongoing benefits and health support to the many thousands who were injured or traumatised.

The savings from cutting welfare benefits for the disabled – or from the recent cut in support for schoolchildren with special needs – are nothing compared to what we would have saved by not participating in US-led forever wars and could save in future by not basing military spending on trying to “shape the world” in the interests of the NATO powers. Spending £77 billion more every year on the military budget will require devastating cuts in other public spending or big tax rises, or both. The commitment creates a gigantic fiscal ‘black hole’, and it’s time the media started talking about it.

Note: Steve’s new book, ‘Cold War Puerto Rico: Anti-Communism in Washington’s Caribbean Colony’ will be published by the University of Massachusetts Press on May 1, 2026. More details here.