Labour remains a party of war

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The Labour government is ramping up the defence budget to 2.5% of GDP from April 2027, with an ambition to reach 3% in the next parliament. It is set to reach its highest level since the period of the Cold War.

Should we be surprised by the intensification of war preparations by the Labour Party? No, we should not: since the First World War, this party has a long history of supporting and waging imperialist war.

After 1914, an important instrument of Labour’s services to the ruling class was the War Emergency National Workers’ Committee, which started as an anti-war committee, but was quickly turned into a committee to contain workers’ reactions and recruit them for the war effort of their class enemy. In May 1915 the Labour Party even became part of the War Cabinet, participating in the decisions to massacre millions of workers in uniform.

In March 1918 the same government dispatched a small contingent of soldiers to Murmansk to fight against the Germans. But when the Whites in South Russia started an offensive against the Soviet power, Britain fully supported them with a huge amount military material, including British tanks and aircraft. Labour had for the first time, even earlier than the SPD did in Germany, deployed armed violence against the workers’ revolution.

In September 1939 the Labour Party supported the decision of the British bourgeoisie to declare war on the Axis Powers. In May 1940 it joined a coalition government led by Winston Churchill, helping to boost the image of a ‘people’s war’ against fascism.

The post-war Labour government of Clement Attlee dispatched British military forces to Malaysia in 1948 for a “counter-insurgency campaign” against the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA). The UK army made a brutal military intervention, herded hundreds of thousands of people into fortified camps and heavily bombed rural areas, with thousands of deaths and injuries as a result.

The Labour government led by Tony Blair joined the US in the Second Gulf War that began in 2003. In the five years that followed this war resulted in the deaths of around a quarter of a million Iraqi civilians and soldiers, while the devastation of the economic and health infrastructure left tens of thousands more victims.

So, ever since World War One, Labour has defended the imperialist interest of the British bourgeoisie in times of war and ‘peace’.

 

Ukraine war: Britain searches for its lost prestige

It will therefore come as no surprise that this Labour government has decided to increase military spending so drastically today. Labour’s argument that this will lead to the creation of thousands of jobs, rebuilding British industry and boosting the economy, is nothing but a lie. Even if it can lead to an increase of jobs in the short term[1], investment in the war economy is totally unproductive, does not contribute to accumulation, and constitutes a sterilisation of capital.

Either in government or in the opposition, either in war or in peacetime, the warlike language of Labour never abates. Even Corbyn, the representative of the ‘anti-war’ current in Labour, argued that “Britain does need strong, modern military and security forces”[2]. Therefore, he said, “It is vital that [we] keep spending at 2 per cent” [3].

But why does Britain support Ukraine so stubbornly despite the changed policy of the US towards this war and the decision to concentrate its attention more than ever on China? What are British interests in this war and what can it gain from it? The UK has almost no trade with Ukraine. In 2023, Ukraine accounted for less than 0.1% of the total UK outward FDI stock. A comprehensive answer to this question is not possible within the scope of this article. But it is nevertheless important to give some elements of an reply.

First we need to understand that the British bourgeoisie once ruled a world empire, upon which “the sun never set”. As a legacy of this period the British bourgeoisie has maintained a global approach to the imperialist conflicts and wars in the world, not always linked to its immediate interests as a national capital. Britain “is a declining power, one that ruled the world a hundred years ago, one that still has interests worldwide but no longer has the strength to act independently to defend them”[4] .

In the last hundred years, except for the period 1990-2005, the UK considered first the Soviet Union and later Russia as one of its main enemies, if not its main enemy. Already in the 1930s the British conservatives were the fiercest opponents of ‘Bolshevism’. During Chamberlain's premiership, Churchill expressed his hostility towards the USSR in a number of speeches. Characteristic of his ‘anti-Bolshevism’ was the proposal in 1944 to organise an invasion in the Balkans to cut off the advance of the Russians. And then, in March 1946, Churchill made his famous Iron Curtain speech in which he made an appeal to the democratic world to be wary of the threat of the Soviet Union.

When the war in Ukraine started, the Biden administration made it clear that it favoured the escalation in fighting as an opportunity to weaken Russia, a geo-political rival of the US which was also involved in an alliance with the USA’s chief rival, China. The UK was in complete agreement with this policy, and stood with the US at the forefront of the efforts to entrench the conflict. Even today it still wants to see Russia confined to a status of global pariah and has therefore even countered some efforts to start talks with Putin about a truce.

On 24 February 2025, the UK announced its most significant sanctions package since the early days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The unprecedented package is part of a global policy to bring Russia to the point of exhaustion of its military or economic capabilities, or both. Recently Defence Secretary John Healey declared that the Labour government will not be shy of using nuclear weapons. “We have the power to do untold damage to them [Russia] if they attack us”[5].

So, all the talk of the Labour government about defending democracy and peace is nothing more than empty words. Britain, like all other countries, has its own particular motives for being involved in the war against Russia: the sordid defence of it national interests. And for Britain, regaining its lost prestige since World War Two, especially in the eyes of Eastern European countries, is one of its main motives to support this war against Russia.

 

Britain straddles a position between the US and the EU

Since the US is governed by a populist president, expressing the tendency towards every man for himself in international relations, the White House has made clear that it will no longer act as the primary guarantor of European security. It insists that the European nations should be responsible for their own defence and, above all, pay for it. But despite Healy’s boastful language, the UK is not able to deploy its full military potential and cannot use nuclear weapons without the backup of the US. Starmer knows that and therefore rushed to the US on 27 February 2025 to get reassurance of continuing American military support.

He actually wanted to know if the UK, because of its supposed “special relationship” with the US and its decision to raise the defence budget to 2.5 per cent of GDP, would be exempt from the Trump’s growing hostility to America’s former allies and could still count on the US nuclear umbrella. Although the US is turning its back on all international alliances, it seems that it will not yet withdraw from NATO. But Trump gave no positive answer to the question posed by Starmer. Without the deterrent of the nuclear arsenal, the UK is a toothless tiger, only able to roar.

In Washington Trump and Starmer also spoke about the tariffs the US intended to levy on British products. During that meeting Trump gave the impression that something could be "worked out" with Britain. But on 2 April the US nevertheless imposed 10% on British products. A decision that would have strengthened Starmer in his conviction that Trump is a president you cannot really rely on, although he refused to actually call him unreliable. The Labour government reacted with the publication of a 417-page retaliation list, slapping tariffs on 8,000 American products if further talks with the US were to fail.

Returning from Washington Starmer immediately decided to call an emergency conference of European states in an attempt to ensure their imperialist ‘defence’ without the military umbrella of the US. The result was the creation of a “coalition of the willing”. But this coalition has been forged in a rush and remains very volatile, i.e. without a solid foundation and far from unified on the strategy to support Ukraine. The only thing that unites the countries is an agreement on the military threat from Russia. So far, only France and the UK have officially committed to contribute soldiers for the “reassurance force” following a putative ceasefire.

Moreover the deployment of such a reassurance force depends on the existence of a US “backstop”. This refers to American air support, logistics, and intelligence. But so far the US has not said that it is ready to provide this. Various military officials have dismissed the initiative as political theatre. Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy, derided the coalition as “a posture and a pose”. Branding it “simplistic”, he said that European leaders were caught in a “Churchillian fantasy”.

The project has stalled and the initiators have limited themselves to issuing declarations about their commitment to Ukraine. But since his plea for the security of Europe has been turned down by Trump, Starmer needs the platform of the “coalition of the willing”

  • to present the UK (instead of the US) as the new leader in the military confrontation with Russia;
  • as a lever to “reset” the United Kingdom’s relationship with the Continent;
  • to boost its role as advocate for the security of the East European countries.

In 2024, while campaigning in the general election, Labour already made Europe its absolute priority and security in Europe as one of its favoured levers to “reset” the United Kingdom’s relationship with the Continent. “We will begin work with European colleagues on our proposal for a new UK-EU Security Pact, bringing structured dialogue back to the relationship and a common focus on our continent’s security”[6].

Labour's commitment to intensified militarisation will have a considerable impact on the economy. The increase of the military budget will certainly require more sacrifices. In the end it will imply further attacks on the incomes and living conditions of the population and of the working class in particular. The cuts in welfare services today are only a foretaste of what is yet to come: they are being used by the bourgeoisie to get a first impression of how workers will react to more economic attacks after the year-long strike movement of 2022-2023. The working class in Britain as in other central countries retains the capacity to defend itself from these attacks by fighting for its own class demands, and in the longer term to make a clear political connection between the immediate attacks on its living standards and the inability of the capitalist system to offer it any future other than war and destruction.

 

Dennis

 

[1] Direct job supported spending on weapons and ammunition is less than 1% of total jobs in the UK

[3] Jeremy Corbyn, Chatham House Speech, 12 May 2017.

[5] UK won't be 'shy' of nuclear weapon use against Russia, minister says, The National, 25 March 2025

[6] Progressive Realism, Speech by David Lammy, 31 January 2024 

Rubric: 

Consequences of the US/Europe divorce