SHOCK waves from the double cabinet resignations of Defence Minister John Healey and Armed Forces minister Al Carns on Thursday have hit Westminster and plunged PM Keir Starmer’s government into a terminal crisis pushing his premiership to the brink.
Healey dramatically claimed that Starmer was ‘putting the UK in danger’ and was ‘unable’ and the Treasury ‘unwilling’ to spend the money demanded by the UK military chiefs, and that an inadequate spending increase in the government’s Defence Investment Plan (DIP) would ‘make the country less safe’.
This split between Starmer and the chiefs of the armed forces follows months of bitter feuding over whether the government would fund military spending, as agreed with NATO, to 3.5 per cent of the UK GDP by 2030, and even further to five per cent, as demanded by US President Trump, in order to prosecute the war against Russia, among others.
Despite an orchestrated campaign by the media, right-wing Labour MPs and numerous think-tanks and economists, Starmer has utterly failed to make the cuts in public spending needed to fund these military demands and reduce government borrowing.
However, workers throughout Britain are taking strike action in the public sector and the NHS, universities and schools and in private industry, even forcing Starmer to reverse his cuts to social support payments and the welfare state, in the face of a revolt by his own MPs.
Meanwhile, NATO allies rushed to Healey’s defence, with his Belgian former counterpart describing his resignation as ‘a blow to our alliance’, and the Italian defence minister saying he was ‘in agreement with almost everything’ Healey said about Starmer’s DIP plan.
Weighing in for the armed forces, Lord Dannatt, a former head of the army, demanded that either Starmer or Chancellor Rachel Reeves must quit over the crisis, arguing: ‘If the Prime Minister has asked for more money and the Chancellor has refused to give it to him, one of the two of them has got to resign.’
More disastrous economic data fuelling the crisis emerged yesterday from the Office of National Statistics (ONS), that the UK GDP fell by 0.1 per cent in April as the Iran war pushes up energy costs.
Suren Thiru, chief economist at ICAEW, warned that, ‘April’s drop likely signals the start of a damaging descent into stagflation with surging energy costs, supply chain disruption and geopolitical instability set to suffocate growth.’
‘Skyrocketing fuel costs have noticeably altered the UK’s growth trajectory, having flipped from a tailwind to growth in March to a headwind in April, as motorists cut consumption in the face of surging pump prices, after frontloading purchases in March.
Further attacks on social spending came from Starmer’s senior cost-of-living advisor, Lord Walker, who called for the triple-lock on pension payment rises to be scrapped, adding: ‘We must urgently reform the welfare system so that the safety net catches those who need it, not those who choose it as a lifestyle.’
State pensions account for roughly 55 per cent of the government’s welfare spending, equivalent to £178bn in 2025-26 and are an easy target for cuts.
Clearly, Starmer’s government has failed to massively cut UK government spending, or borrowing sufficiently to rescue a bankrupt capitalist system by crushing the living standards of the working class down to the starvation levels of the 1930s. The government is on the verge of a split with various senior Labour MPs feverishly canvassing support for their post-Starmer leadership bids, with a coalition, or a national government likely to emerge from the wreckage.
No doubt, furious debates and schemes are rife among the UK ruling class, the state and its politicians about what form of government, national or otherwise, is needed to prosecute their war of austerity against the working class.
Meanwhile, the TUC remains silent and refuses to mobilise the huge strength of the members to repulse these attacks and overthrow Starmer or whatever regime is put together.
Now is the time to force the TUC to recall the General Council to organise a general strike to bring down whatever anti-working class government emerges, and to go forward to a Workers Government and Socialism, with a nationalised industry and banks, providing a high standard of living for the working class and putting an end to all imperialist wars.
Join the Workers Revolutionary Party and Young Socialists today. Now is the time to organise the Socialist Revolution – there is no time to lose!