Westminster's new “common sense” says defence spending must rise and that the price must be paid in cuts to care, public services, and social security.
But that isn't realism. It is ideology dressed up as prudence because if we hollow out the state to fund missiles and weapon systems, we don't strengthen national security, we undermine it. A society built on insecurity, collapsing services, and rising poverty is not a society people will defend.
In this video, I ask the most important question in the entire debate: what exactly are we defending, and for whom?
And I explain why Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) shows this supposed trade-off between defence and care is a political choice, not an economic necessity.
This is the audio version:
This is the transcript:
What are we defending? That's a question I want to ask because everywhere I hear the story that more defence spending is unavoidable now, and the people who are claiming it are telling us it must be paid for by cutting care, public services and social security. All over the weekend, in the commentary that was on the media, in the newspapers and everywhere, this was the claim that was being made, but I wanted to ask one simple question. What exactly are we defending if we destroy society to pay for it?
The new " common sense" in Westminster is that defence spending must rise, and cuts elsewhere must inevitably follow as a consequence. It's treated as if this is like night following day, and that everyone must just accept it.
Interviewers nod along as if this is realism, but let me assure you, it isn't. This isn't realism at all; it's ideology dressed up as prudence.
And the fact is that if defence spending requires austerity, the first question we have to ask is not economic. It is moral, because if we are being asked to trade care, security, dignity, and public services for missiles and weapon systems, I'll ask again, what exactly are we defending in that case?
A society that is hollowed out is not worth fighting for, is my point. A country where services collapse, and poverty rises, and insecurity becomes normal, is not a society built on shared purpose. It is not a society built on care, and if the wealthy are protected at the same time, as appears to be the implication of everything that I am hearing, then the message is unmistakable. What is being proposed is not a defence of our collective security; it is a defence of the unequal status quo that we already know in our society, and which is already unacceptable to most of us.
People do not, in fact, fight for abstractions. There's a brutal truth here. People don't want to fight for increased GDP, and they definitely don't fight for national competitiveness. They fight, if they want to fight at all, and it's a good question whether many want to, for places where life is worth living, where citizenship means something, and where burdens are shared.
If we hollow out the state, we are not strengthening it. We are, in fact, destroying the foundations of legitimacy, and this creates a real paradox. The claim is that defence spending is our security, but if it requires worse housing, worse healthcare, worse education, more poverty, and more fear, then it undermines the very thing we call security. In fact, it makes the country weaker, and not stronger, and that is most definitely counterproductive to any form of defence policy that anybody can ever have imagined.
There is then a false either-or equation in here. Politicians are claiming, "We can't afford both social security and defence. We have to choose between the two." They say, "Care cannot be afforded if we are to protect the country," but that claim on their part rests on one core assumption, and that is that the government has a fixed pool of money and a fixed pool of capacity to command resources available to it. They are therefore saying that if we want more defence, we must spend less on everything else, but what we know is that this is fundamentally false.
We saw it during the Second World War. We saw it in the logic that Lord Keynes used to organise the defence of this country economically, when we were at our greatest peril. We did change the use of resources. It isn't true that there is a fixed use. And anyway, let's just stand back for a moment and just appraise the facts.
What we all know is that the UK economy is not fully used at present. We do have 5% unemployment in this country; 10% amongst the young. Now, I'm not saying they should all now be enlisted in the armed forces and suddenly be marched around in khaki with rifles over their shoulders, that's the last thing I'm saying. But the point is, we do have underutilised resources. It isn't, therefore, the case that we have to live in a world of either-or.
If we actually have underemployment and insecurity in this country, and we have both as a consequence of that unemployment, the waste of human capacity is enormous. We have skills, unused labour, lying idle, and needs unmet. We don't, therefore, have a resource shortage; what we have is a policy failure, and this is the issue that isn't being talked about by those who are claiming we must cut the capacity to care if we want to defend ourselves.
The constraint that we are looking at is not money; in other words, when it comes to whether we are able to defend the country or not, the real constraint is people, skills, materials, and organisational capacity, and if we haven't got those, that's, firstly, our fault because we haven't trained them into existence. And secondly, if we have got them, but they're deliberately lying idle, and undoubtedly some of the people who could do these tasks are at present unemployed, then the fact is that the state could mobilise them, and that is an option available to them. In other words, there is no economic necessity to force a choice between defence and care.
This, of course, is exactly the point that modern monetary theory explains. A currency-issuing government of the sort that we have in the UK does never run out of money because it always creates it as a consequence of its spending: that's literally how it comes into existence. So it is not like a household because it can always fund whatever is required for public purpose. If we need care and we need defence, it is possible for the state to do this, but the question becomes not where does the money come from, but how will we organise the real resources of this country to meet our priorities? That is the question that we need to ask.
We can also say that if we do need more resources than we do at present have the capacity to pay for then we can still run a deficit to ensure that they're put to use for social benefit. We don't need to wait in other words. That is the message that MMT also supplies, because we may run a deficit .
We won't say we can't fight a war because we have no money. We didn't, in 1939. We didn't, throughout the history of humankind. We said, it's essential to do this thing because it matters to us as a country, and therefore, we'll do it.
So the argument that again, we cannot have defence and care is absurd. We can have defence if we need it, we just run a deficit if necessary to do so, or we do as Lord Keynes said again, and that was tax the wealthy, because that was the choice he made in World War II, and it was the right one.
The point is, this is all about politics. If we're trying to defend the country on the back of the poorest by saying we can't have care, what we are implicitly doing is saying, "We will protect the wealthy, but we won't make them pay for the privilege of us having done so." That is the implicit thing that we are hearing.
We have to, therefore, name that deception. It is not true that we have to make this choice between defence spending and welfare. There are, instead, things we can do. We can stop the pretence that the government is financially constrained, and we can stop the pretence that we cannot tax wealth more, and we can stop the pretence that there are no resources unused in our economy, which we could bring into use to cover the defence needs that we have. All of these things could be done. It is a narrative that we need to put into place, and instead, we're getting one which says austerity is necessary instead. Once more, I make the point: austerity is always a political choice; it isn't a necessity.
So, what should we actually be doing? Defence really means defending people, public services, community resilience, housing security, healthcare and shared purpose. That is what we would be defending if we went to war. Let's be honest, there is no other reason for defence but to preserve the well-being of the people of this country; that is what states exist for. Therefore, if we went to war and broke our own social contract by not doing those things, we couldn't command loyalty. We couldn't therefore defend the country, and in fact, any amount of defence spending would fail because people would not be willing to stand up and fight. So we have to make care the priority alongside defence.
I'll go back to the beginning. Right at the start of this video, I asked, what are we defending? And I asked it for a good reason because an economy that is rigged for the wealthy and that tolerates poverty, where services collapse by design, is one that is not worth defending. If we're defending an ideology by going to war, which is the threat that we face, then that is an ideology that is indefensible, and we should refuse that.
We should be putting in place a logic of care, and if we do, two consequences will follow. One, we probably won't need to go to war because it will be obvious that actually everything will be going okay, and others will want to copy what we are achieving. And secondly, people will actually willingly pay for the defence of the system that they believe is worthwhile because it will be.
We've got all our logics wrong, in other words. This claim that we have a choice, defence or care, is fundamentally wrong. What we need is an appropriate amount of defence, but also a very clear understanding of what it is that we are defending, and what we should be defending is a politics of care and a country that lives by that because it delivers care to everyone.
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After The Falklands War, some senior British Rail staff were invited to a formal dinner and presentation by The Armed Forces.
Why?
Because thanks to dear old BR pulling the stops out the Task Force was able to get away about 10 days sooner.
As a colleague of mine pointed out in the study of War the amateur studies strategy, the professional studies logistics.
So if we want a bigger defence sector we need to look at everything behind it, transport, manufacturing, agriculture – and dont even get me started on shipbuilding and The Merchant Navy
Much to agree with.
Increasingly I believe that the main entity we need to defend ourselves from is a treacherous government that has betrayed its people. And its associated press. And not, to be clear, by violent means. Violence begets violence.
I am no expert on defence but the debate is always couched in monetary terms “How much should we spend?”. I then immediately visualise an old WW2 Battle of Britain movie with the plotters, moving wads of banknotes over the map (rather than planes). My point is that policy objectives need to be spelt out in terms of material and capability, not budget… and this is true for all policy areas – signing a cheque does not, in itself, make anything happen.
“Anything we can actually do, we can afford to do”…… but can we actually do anything?
Much to agree with
Agree Comprehensive Security is what’s needed.
My son and his friends openly say they won’t fight for billionaires, and why should they.
When Far-right-age whines on about people not loving this country anymore, what he wants is the blind obedience of yore.
Who would fight King and Country when the ‘king’ is a disgustingly rich and dysfunctional royal family that harbours an accused child abuser, and the country is a plutocracy? The young know they are the late arrivals to a corrupt giant Ponzi scheme, and are extruded.
Many more Uk nationals hold dual citizenship than previously , eg Irish passports, and I know younger folk want to leave as this country is a hostile country to them.
I like Clive’s image of moving money on a big table in the war office ….
When I hear we need to spend to improve defense it also seems predicated on US kit. A genuine improvement in our capability to defend requires building competence, expertise and capability that can serve long term (not tied to unreliable regimes, like the US). Skills, domestic supply chains and productive capacity.
We never hear about military “multipliers” – but I believe they are low (less than one?). And buying US kit in USD sounds bonkers compared to developing UK capability.
So even if the discussion is based around military spending (not just protection/improvement for all of society, and tax raising, deficits ….), there are other fundamental issues that an MMT perspective would inform.
Will we get that from our STPs or media? Or just buy shiny US rockets in a v shady “weapon market”, with spivs at the centre?
Military multipliers are very low – as low as they get.
In 1962 my school was raising money for a swimming pool. My history teacher told us that when he started there, they raised money to repair the shoes of children whose parents could not afford it because of the unemployment A stunned silence.
In 1965 I was working in a factory and a lady from Jarrow told me as a girl she would stand watch for the police while her father, a glazier, broke windows so he would have some work.
There were a lot of reasons to suggest the country wasn’t worth fighting for.
But I also spent my first years in Jersey and remember the German bunkers from the occupation. My parents lived in the Far East. Mum and my older brother were in a Chinese city when the Japanese bombed it in 1940. My father insisted they leave Hong Kong and go to Australia while he volunteered for the RN Voluntary Reserve. He anticipated the Japanese attack and when they attacked, his 1918 ship with a hastily mounted four inch gun was sunk, and he was captured and spent the rest of the war in a POW camp.
As I got older I read of George Lansbury, leader of the Labour Party, who argued that we should all disarm. Our good intentions and the League of Nations would protect us. In 1935 Baldwin started rearmament. In 1936 Labour leader Atlee, then known as Major Atlee from his service in WW1, agreed to more arms spending. I wonder if Labour had been in power, would we have been sufficiently prepared? 1940 was a close run thing.
Also in the factory were some guys who had gone to war with insufficient and outdated kit and many of their friends had been killed because of it. Today our armed forces have serious deficiencies in numbers, stock piles and new weapons.
Come forward in time. On VE day last year I went to a ceremony and none of us were alive in WW2. I think we over looked that the nations of Europe (Balkans excepted ) had not fought each other in 80 years. That is due to the sort of values perhaps that Lansbury had for international cooperation. But if war comes, the weapons can’t be brought into existence in a few months. A viable defence means adequate spending. So 100% agree we can do both. And need to.
In the city of Derby, the old Rolls Royce site has been redeveloped in Osmaston. During the site remediation, we saw the WW2 concrete ‘bomb proof’ bunker built to protect where the Merlin engines for Lancasters etc., were constructed in the old factory complex. It was a fitting symbol of what we learnt from that war – as ‘Keynes’ said ‘we can afford to do what we need to do’.
That is to say that the world over, the war economy – the ‘have to economy’ was used to build the peace in the post war period.
I’d like to know where this idea that the UK was bankrupted by the war came from, as we built the NHS and social security big time after the war. OK, we were in hock to the U.S. but only because it added to our capacity to fight a world war, the small nation that we actually are. That paid for a lot of inferior kit like the Sherman tank.
Again, we find the money don’t we to kill people in the name of self defence. But now it seems, other life giving things must be sacrificed – the shortage of which might well increase the cost as well.
This is simply senseless. I am tired of the tyranny of the Treasury.
I am tired of the very limited definition of ‘defence’.
Where is the defence from squalor?
Where is the defence from exploitation?
Where is the defence from fear?
Where is the defence from hate?
Where is the defence from environmental breakdown?
What a fucking country……………………..
Much to agree with
I have come full circle on this. From asking myself whether I should volunteer to fight/nurse in Ukraine when Russia first invaded….. to remembering that we have not exhausted our negotiating position. We have something that informed citizens all over the world want. To crack open our secret banking system and cancel unfair debt. If we stop robbing countries earnings via debt payments and helping autocrats to hide their stolen wealth we will make common cause with the world’s citizens and I believe we will reduce war. I want to emphasise, I am not concerned with an analysis of ‘who is to blame for the Russian invasion’ or the back and forth between ‘Ukraine gave up it’s nuclear deterrent’ versus ‘Euro zone banks facilitated oligarchic asset stripping of post Soviet Russia’. The point is rather that we have genuine things to offer in a negotiation. Things any sincere Labour government should in any case be pressing for in the interests of its own citizens and in the interests of global justice.
What are we defending indeed.
Let’s hypothesis and say that we have just lost a war and been inculcated into Russia or China.
Leaving other considerations aside, a basic tenet of security is housing. Russia and China both have home ownership rates of over 90%!
We might do well to determine exactly what the lived experience of our ‘enemy’ is before we allow our politicians and media to turn them into a ‘boogeyman’ that we must fight.
Our politicians duplicitly/ignorantly play the ‘what we can afford’ cards and constrain us to a quality of life that does indeed bear being examined for its worth losing lives over.
Couple that with the fact that wars are so transparently not about moving humanity forward to a better place but more indulging the rapacious whims of boychild egomaniacs like Trump.
When the history of any conflict is carefully examined it should become apparent that mankind just doesn’t learn does it?
We like to think that the grand oratory at the UN, NATO, the ICC, the ICJ etc is achieving some sort of magnificent order but as recent events have shown it’s pretty much all bullshit…..and all the while the innocents are doing the dying.
Most commentators here will reject the lazy ‘consensus’ propaganda we are being fed about having to increase ‘defence’ spending and at the expense of ‘welfare’.
Defence procurement has been hopeless. Willy-waving aircraft carriers with no planes and which cant be used unless escorted by US frigates or destroyers , billions on armoured personnel carriers that poison their drivers and much more.
The cipher that is George Robertson produced the ‘Strategic Defence Review’ which seemed to suggest the whole society and economy should go onto a integrated ‘war fighting’ basis, embracing new technology, cyber warfare, drone warfare integrated purchasing across army navy and air force and the rest.
But although it argued for ‘transformation’, it also seemed to say ‘more of the same ‘ – new nuclear ‘deterrent’ submarines and missiles – as the ‘bedrock’ of UK security – despite also saying that the proliferation of nuclear weapons is making the world less safe. A fleet of other nuclear submarines, more missiles etc. etc..
“We will create a next-generation RAF, with F-35s, upgraded Typhoons, next-generation fast jets through the Global Combat Air Programme, and autonomous fighters to defend Britain’s skies and strike anywhere in the world.” Talk about science fiction.
As others here have said , beside pushing Richard’s point about false choice between defence and ‘welfare’, the public and parliament should really be focussing on the specifics of precisely what we are spending defence money on. The Establishment will never query the renewal of the nuclear deterrent – its the only thing that gives us our ‘great power’ status. It is difficult not to despair.
I don’t know if this is apocryphal and I can find no proof for it, but it’s still a good line.
“During WW2 Churchill was asked to defund cultural events to pay for the war. His response was ‘Then what are we fighting for?'”
Without care, without culture, the population have nothing worth fighting for. The rich, on the other hand, use other people’s bodies to defend their excessive lifestyles.
superb analysis written with beautiful clarity, the message is strong and consistent. Cannot help but feel if this message is delivered to the youths in society and the penny drops that would be the ultimate legacy.
probably only the young would know how and where to deliver this message probably via social media, format also would rely on opinion of youth. perhaps in cartoon form or via “influencers” with large scale exposure
just some random thinking I wanted to put out their. been thinking on the debate yesterday on 30k words or more but perhaps the solution is less, much less and as they say sometimes less is more.
To be honest, there is no script to the videos. I use a teleprompter with bullet points, but the words happen as we record, and I extemporise, quite a lot.
And 30k is now 5k, maybe.
Richard,
MMT can indeed reconcile the apparent conflict between defence and care. The more problematic issue is in determining what the appropriate amount of defence is at a particular time and what factors are influencing this calculus. The two most influential factors today are the demands of the US government on European military expenditure and the real, perceived or manufactured threat of Russia against the whole of Europe. We need to have a clear understanding of what is driving the proposed level of defence spending and the level of threat we are defending against. The role of information war in the media and controlling narratives also need to be considered. This conversation can then take its place alongside MMT, the productive use human resources, and the social values we are defending. The most informative geopolitical economist I am aware of is Dr Warwick Powell, who provides a global perspective on contemporary and historical issues.
I subscribe to his Substack – it is worth reading.
My own sense is that the danger is being dramatically overstated. A huge arms lobby, combined with a right‑wing press that thrives on fear, has managed to set the tempo of the entire conversation. We’re being marched into a new “common sense” that treats permanent escalation as inevitable and any dissent as naïve.
But if we strip away the theatre, the strategic reality looks very different. Russia is struggling to subdue a single neighbour. It is not about to launch itself at a NATO country, because it knows perfectly well that Article 5 would end the matter instantly. The idea that Putin is poised to sweep across Europe is a fantasy that serves the interests of defence contractors far more than it reflects any credible military assessment.
And on Ukraine, the West has been fighting with one hand tied behind its back. If Ukraine were given the capability — and the permission — to strike the assets that are striking them, the balance would shift quickly. The fear of “provoking” Russia has become a self‑fulfilling restraint that prolongs the war rather than shortens it.
None of this means defence is irrelevant. It means the scale and nature of the threat are being manipulated to justify domestic austerity and to protect the wealthy from taxation. That is the real political project hiding behind the alarmism.
The truth is simple: Putin will not attack a NATO country. He knows it would be suicidal. The danger is not invasion. The danger is a political class using inflated threats to dismantle the very society they claim to be defending.
After my moment of guilt ridden panic that I should be rushing to Ukraine to defend European Civilisation had passed….
I noticed that the centrist European leaders, including in the UK, were exploiting the military pageantry and ‘unity in the face of an enemy’ to rally support away from the extreme right, which had been gaining more and more momentum.
For a while it worked.
But centrist parties did not bring to the negotiating table the real things we could offer. That is, a refusal to carry on protecting the wealth that the wealthy class the world over strips from it’s populations. An offer to end secret banking with regulatory intervention and harmonisation.
Our democratic governments still have the power to address this and should be making common cause with all citizens of the world to wrest control back from the financial markets, the oligarchs, the autocrats and the captured democracies the world over.
[…] there remains the question to answer, which I posted here recently, which is just what is Europe defending by acting in this way? With fracturing politics across […]