IN A speech yesterday at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), Labour’s shadow defence secretary, John Healey, pledged that any future Labour government would keep arming the fascist-supported Ukrainian government at whatever cost to the working class.
Healey told the audience at the defence and security think-tank that a Labour government ‘will inherit the Ukrainian conflict and Russia’s wider aggression’.
He went on to insist on Labour’s continuing support for the imperialist war to weaken Russia saying: ‘With a general election, there may be a change to Labour but there will be no change to Britain’s resolve’ and ‘standing with Ukraine’.
In a blatant effort to portray any Labour government as more dedicated to a military war with Russia than the Tories, he called on Rishi Sunak’s government to ‘set out a stockpiles strategy to maintain military help to Ukraine and replenish our armed forces, reform defence procurement, and publish a 2023 Action Plan for Ukraine.’
Healey went on to insist that the Tory government must ‘give the highest priority to security in Europe, the Atlantic and the Arctic – our NATO area, ensure our UK commitments to the alliance are fulfilled in full and halt further cuts to the British Army.’
Healey and Starmer are in a competition with the Tories over who is the most warlike, with Healey denouncing signals from the UK Treasury that there is ‘no new money’ for the armed forces whose arsenal of weapons has been depleted by all the arms and money ploughed into Ukraine.
Under current Tory plans the army is due to shrink to 73,000 full-time soldiers – it currently stands at under 76,000. Defence sources are warning that the UK military has been ‘hollowed out and underfunded’ by the Tory continuous campaign of pumping Ukraine full of deadly weapons.
According to press reports last week, all the country’s 30 serviceable AS-90 self-propelled artillery guns have been sent to Ukraine leaving two artillery regiments completely disarmed. On top of this, Sunak has pledged to send 14 Challenger battle tanks in the coming weeks in addition to the 600 Brimstone precision-guided missiles also being promised.
The Tories last year committed to spend at least £2.3 billion on weapons to Ukraine in 2023 – matching the commitments it made in 2022 – making the UK the biggest supplier of weapons and equipment after the United States.
But even this vast amount of money to keep the war on Russia, going is not enough for Healey and the Starmer leadership of the Labour Party as they desperately try to prove their credentials as loyal servants to US imperialism and the NATO war machine.
While Healey was pledging unlimited billions for war on Russia tens of thousands of nurses and NHS workers were on strike demanding pay increases above the derisory 4% that the Tories are insisting is all that a bankrupt British capitalist system can afford.
For these workers, along with the half a million civil servants and teachers who struck last week, the Labour Party is offering nothing. The position of the Labour leadership has been to refuse to support any specific pay demand, instead, calling for the Tories to meet the unions.
Their position was spelt out by Labour’s shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves speaking after nurses voted for strike action in November, when she said that nurses should get a ‘fair but affordable’ pay rise and refused to support the RCN’s demand for a 17.6% increase.
For the millions of workers and young people who face a daily struggle to pay for food and heating as all the sanctions on Russian energy supplies drive the cost of living through the roof, the Labour Party offers nothing except unending war to be paid for by the working class.
The working class are refusing to sacrifice their lives for a never-ending war to weaken Russia that is driving super-inflation.
The working class must demand that the trade unions dump any support for the Labour Party and get on with the job of organising a general strike to bring down the Tories and bring in a workers’ government.
A workers’ government that will expropriate the capitalist class and go forward to socialism is the only way forward.
