ECHOING the strident and alarmist calls to prepare for war against Russia from UK military chiefs, Al Carns, Labour’s UK Armed Forces Minister, warned that ‘Britain must now stop relying on the US for defence’.
He said that Britain had been dependent on US security guarantees ‘for the last 60 years’, but warned that Donald Trump’s White House may pivot away from Europe and that NATO countries must spend more on defence to ‘increase our lethality’.
Carns said the UK and Europe needed ‘to up our game on defence spending. For the last 50 to 60 years, we have been reliant on US security guarantees and now, with multipolar threats facing the US, they may not be as forthright as they have in the past.
‘In the past, in wars of choice, we’ve outsourced our lethality to others. We’ve got to make sure that we increase our lethality … across all of our single services. We need to up our game on defence spending.’
Carns endorsed the warmongering rant by Mark Rutte, the Nato secretary-general, who warned on Thursday that Russian president Vladimir Putin had chosen the alliance as his ‘next target’ and the West must be prepared for a war.
‘Conflict is at our door. Russia has brought war back to Europe, and we must be prepared for the scale of war our grandparents or great-grandparents endured.
‘We need to be crystal clear about the threat. We are Russia’s next target, and we are already in harm’s way,’ Rutte claimed, ramping up the war hysteria.
PM Keir Starmer had previously agreed the UK would increase defence spending to 3.5 per cent of GDP and buy 12 US F-35A stealth jet aircrafts capable of carrying nuclear warheads.
He boasted of turning the UK into a major world supplier of military equipment to grow the UK economy.
This reckless war drive comes as the UK’s economy shrank ‘unexpectedly’ by a shock 0.1 per cent in October during the lead up to the Budget, according to the latest official figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) released on Thursday. It also contracted 0.1 per cent over the previous three months.
Thomas Pugh, chief economist at RSM UK blamed ‘nervousness ahead of last month’s Budget’, as Britain’s dominant services sector unexpectedly contracted by 0.3 per cent in October, while construction output shrank by 0.6 per cent.
Julian Jessop, an economist at the Institute for Economic Affairs, said: ‘In the real world, yes we’re in recession.’
It is blatantly clear that it is the working class who will bear the brunt of the cost of militarising the economy with crashing living standards, super-austerity and later with their lives in imperialist wars.
France has already initiated mass conscription with Germany not far behind. In Britain military chiefs also see this as the way to deal with the problem of mass youth unemployment.
The NHS will also be sacrificed to fund the ever-growing government fiscal deficit. With reports of a huge spike of winter flu cases, NHS managers are restricting access to hospital treatment in many areas of England to save money.
Regional health boards have ordered some hospitals to cut back on the number of patients they are seeing until April 2026, meaning hundreds of thousands of patients on the 7.5 million waiting list will have to wait longer for treatment.
It is clear that bankrupt British imperialism has been abandoned by Trump and must fend for itself and wage war against Russia.
Dragooning the working class to fight for the bankrupt and vicious ruling class of a decaying imperialist regime which now cannot sustain its population, will not be tolerated by many millions of workers.
In fact, now is the time to finish off this capitalist system, which is bankrupt and isolated.
Now is the time to recall the Trade Union Congress to organise a general strike to overthrow the Labour government and for the working class to take the political power and set up a socialist economy, nationalised and centrally planned to provide for all the needs of the working class.
Now is the time for world revolution to extend socialist revolutions to the EU, the USA and worldwide. Join the WRP and its youth organisation, the Young Socialists today!
