Yesterday, the Labour government’s Armed Forces minister, Louise Sandher-Jones, revealed plans for the mobilisation of army veterans in preparation for a war against Russia.
The plan involves the ‘strategic reserve’ of 95,000 retired army veterans being called into action ‘on a scale we haven’t seen for a long time’ she said.
This latest plan follows on from previous moves by the Labour government under Keir Starmer to put the UK on a ‘war footing’.
In January it was revealed the Labour government was introducing changes to the new Armed Forces bill that increased the age at which retired soldiers can be called up to serve from 55 to 65.
Currently, reservists can be called up in times of ‘national danger, great emergency or an attack on the UK’.
Under the new changes this criteria will be lowered to ‘war-like preparations’. The term ‘warlike preparations’ refers to the measures and actions taken by the UK military to prepare for war.
This criteria already exists for reservists who have recently left the armed forces, but will now be extended to cover every military veteran up to the age of 65.
Sandher-Jones, a retired army officer, said: ‘The strategic reserve is a real commitment for those that are in it and they will be exercised as part of our exercised programme next year where we will go through measures to call out, use, equip and all the rest of the procedures we’d have to go through to use the strategic reserve properly.’
She added that when she left the army and found herself in the strategic reserve it never crossed her mind she could be called up again to fight but ‘we are definitely no longer in that space.’
Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton, chief of defence staff, weighed in, warning that Britain lacked an ‘effective system of tracking and engaging’ with those who have left the military.
The British army has shrunk from over 100,000 in 2010 to around 71,000 today – far less than during the Napoleonic Wars of over 200 years ago – fully trained troops ready to deploy on the front line.
The Labour government under previous prime minister Starmer ramped up the increasingly strident calls for war with Russia, and the Burnham administration is carrying on with dire warnings about imminent attacks on UK soil, while British arms manufacturers are supplying military aid to the Ukrainian regime.
In February, Labour’s defence secretary, John Healey, now Burnham’s chancellor, declared that Britain would put troops on the ground in Ukraine.
With a much depleted army relying on calling up a ‘dads army’ of former soldiers, most of whom can’t be traced, the only alternative for the Labour government to be able to pursue the imperialist war against Russia is to bring in conscription.
Last year, Starmer was forced to deny that Labour had any intention of imposing military conscription on workers and youth.
However, the increasingly strident calls for rearming the military and attempts to rally workers and youth around the flag of British imperialism clearly mean that the threat of conscription has never been stronger.
The working class is expected to pay for the failed war, provoked by NATO in order to weaken Russia and open it up for capitalist exploitation, by becoming cannon fodder for a capitalist system that is in its death agony.
At the same time, workers will be forced to pay for imperialist wars through savage austerity cuts to provide the money demanded by the military to carry out wars that threaten to turn into a new, nuclear, world war to smash Russia.
The time has come to put an end to capitalism by forcing the TUC at its annual conference next Sunday to mobilise the strength of the working class by call- ing a general strike to bring down the Labour government and bring in a Workers Government and socialism.
Join the lobby of the TUC on Sunday 13 September – join the WRP and Young Socialists to build up the leadership required to put an end to capitalism with the victory of the socialist revolution.
