According to the FT, UK Chancellor of the Exchequer John Healey will claim today that, and I quote, "Britain is about to enter “a new age of industrialisation” as he confirms a £6 billion plan to build three new floating docks at the Royal Navy submarine base on the Clyde in Scotland."
The echoes of the 1930s ring heavily in my ears as a result.
It was rearmament that revived economies then, at the cost of the lives of many millions of people worldwide after six or more years of war.
Now, apparently, rearmament is to be the answer to our problems.
That will not work.
Rearmament will not meet the needs of the people of this country.
Rearmament will not build homes.
Rearmament will not deliver the technology required to tackle the climate crisis.
Rearmament will not make our transport system sustainable.
Nor will it improve our resilience when it comes to food.
Rearmament will not teach people in this country how to live with a very different world.
Rearmament will not deliver a Green New Deal.
Rearmament, especially using submarines, provides weapons for a type of warfare that almost certainly no longer exists.
Rearmament provides no answers to today's questions.
But it is so very typical of today's Labour. It provides the answer that big business wants to a question framed for yesterday's needs that is of no consequence to the current requirements of this country or its people.
And that is exactly where Labour now is.
It is not where we need to be.
And we will all pay the price for that.
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I don’t see how you can have an armed forces made up of people being so badly treated as the people of this country at the moment, with housing shortages, poor infrastructure of every kind, price gouging by markets, static social mobility and lying at scale.
That is my first point.
My second point however is more nuanced.
If I expect people to stand in harms way to protect me, I want them to have the best that we can provide. History tells me that that is not always the case, so whatever Healy does with that basket case that is the MoD, I hope makes the right choices.
It seems to me that the situation at the moment, “housing shortages, poor infrastructure of every kind, price gouging by markets, static social mobility” etc, isn’t very different to the situation in the North, at least, in the mid-1930s. My father completed his apprenticeship as a turner in Ashton-under-Lyne, found no jobs available, and joined the Army which gave him, at the time, basic security about housing and daily food. He survived WWII and was retired by the Army c. 1955. In this sense, expansion of the armed forces in peacetime may have social effects which are nothing to do with defense, and which may be positive.
My grandfather was a professional Navy for this reason in the 30s.
He did not survive.
And the alcoholism the Navy created via the rum ration was not positive.
But it might get Labour some votes in the SW of Scotland, and prolong the Burnham McBounce for a while. What else matters?
Polling in Scotland shows little in the way of a Burnham bounce. The needle has maybe moved one or two percentage points toward Labour at Reform’s expense, but both parties are around fifteen percentage points behind the SNP. Projections for the next general election show Labour losing dozens of Scottish seats, retaining between one and seven MPs depending on the poll.
Some say that the military-industrial complex contributed significantly to the decline of the industrial foundation of the U. S. A.
If this hypothesis is valid, are “we” making the same serious mistake?
P.S.
“General public spending in health, science, and education often delivers higher baseline productivity than defence R and D.”
(Defence) multipliers are higher if the spending is debt financed rather than through immediate tax heights or tax cuts elsewhere.” (Both from AI Overview)
P. P. S. How much of “our” defence spending will be on imports?
Thank you, Steve.
It’s music to Wall Street’s ears. Unlike France, much of British and German defence industry is owned by the same investors as the US one.
If it wasn’t Russia or Eyeran, a threat would be manufactured.
The UK and it’s allies face credible military threats from other counties – Russia, Iran, China etc – and threats of the use of armed force by non-state actors. Even peaceful neutral countries like Switzerland maintain defensive armed forces. We might very well argue about what kind of military capability the UK requires, and how much money is needed to achieve that, but it will almost certainly include soldiers, and sailors, and airmen (and women), and armoured vehicles, artillery, and ammunition, and aircraft, and ships. And nowadays information and electronic warfare specialists and equipment, and drones and anti-drone technology. We are an island nation, dependent on shipping for food and other imports and exports, so ships of various kinds including submarines will be in there somewhere.
I am not saying we do not need armed forces.
I know those we have are wholly inadequate for our defence.
I am quite happy to see them redeployed.
But that does not require rearmament as an industrial policy. That is my point.
Please don’t use whole nations as a threat of war.
Autocratic and dictatorial parties as well as people are.
Also the circumstances that give rise to those / keep them in power.
I’m convinced that if e.g. the Weimar Republic wouldn’t have made such a disastrous politics of austerity in the 1930s, the Nazis under Hitler would have never reached that high at all.
In my opinion a “simple” sane social policy could have prevented WW2 and the Holocaust.
I think that satisfied people simply don’t fight wars even if they, granted, might prepare for them.
But this preparation, as Richard’s constantly saying, first and foremost includes a sane, courageous & caring government.
@ Markus M,
What genuine alternatives do you think the Weimar Republic actually had?
Reparations were set at 4% of GNI (Gross National Income), per quarter, for a decade. They made the first payment, just about, but defaulted on the second. That resulted in France and Belgium marching in, then helping themselves to the resources in the west. They’d also lost control of their agricultural base, in the east.
That regime had no chance whatsoever.
I question the comparison with the 1930s & the threats then (& the subsequent rearmament). Then Germany, aggrieved post-WW1 and wanting to settle scores + the Nazis with their own ideas what constituted being human.
The threats now are multiple. Russia is a threat to the UK only for as long as it supports Ukraine (& I think the UK should support Ukraine).
Iran is only a threat as long as the UK acts as the US poodle and also in the interests of Israel. If there were no US bases in the UK and it had a middle-east policy that was not subservient to Israeli interests there would have been no “event” at Fairford.
The main threat facing the UK is the climate disaster (a threat multiplier) & social decay. Only an imbecile would think “re-armament” would answer these.
This is even before answering the question: what form should re-armament take? Re-arm in the face of what threat? How does re-arming address the climate disaster (and perhaps many more refugees). How does it address social decay? I was at a conf +/- 16 years ago with Healey – he was an amateur then and is now, a glove puppet, going through the motions, begging the question: who is Harry Corbett. One thing for sure, nowt has changed in LINO, it governs in the interests of others – with a bit of window dressing to keep UK serfs “happy”.
Thank you
Thank you and well said, Mike.
Unlike engineer Mike, Healey has been in politics all of his adult life. After Cambridge, he joined a disability campaign group, a cause he does not care about, just a stepping stone into politics. Burnham joined Labour HQ from Cambridge.
How can a country with such high energy costs and so little steel production reindustrialise?
Will this rearmament be a give away to firms like the new housing scheme?
I think we know it will not.
And I genuinely think Healey does not care.
I guess you don’t know a great deal about Russia, or the West’s failure to build a reasoned relationship with Russia after 1989. I’d like to recommend Richard Sakwa, generally considered Britain’s expert on Russia. Reading his works could help you revise your opinion.
Richard, the threat picture has changed, and the evidence is overwhelming.
Russia launched Europe’s largest land war since 1945 in February 2022. The government’s 2025 Strategic Defence Review called Russia an “immediate and pressing” threat and concluded Britain must move to warfighting readiness. NATO allies agreed at The Hague in June 2025 to spend 5% of GDP on defence and security by 2035. That consensus did not come from arms companies. It came from intelligence assessments.
The threat is already in our waters. Russian naval activity near UK waters has risen by around 30% in two years. The spy ship Yantar has been tracked mapping British undersea infrastructure, and those cables carry around 99% of the UK’s international data traffic. In December 2024, the Baltic Estlink 2 power cable was severed, allegedly by a shadow-fleet tanker’s anchor.
At home, MI5’s Ken McCallum reported a 48% rise in state-threat investigations in 2024. He warned that Russia’s GRU is running a sustained campaign of sabotage and arson in Britain and Europe, and he has called China an “epoch-defining” challenge.
Submarines are central to this, not a relic. Faslane hosts the continuous at-sea deterrent, unbroken since 1969, along with the attack submarines that hunt hostile boats and protect those cables. The Review commits to up to 12 new SSN-AUKUS submarines.
Security is the precondition for everything else you want. Homes and green investment mean little if critical infrastructure can be switched off.
I don’t dispute that Russia poses security threats, including cyberattacks, sabotage and threats to undersea infrastructure.
What I dispute is that a country so bogged down in Ukraine represents a credible conventional military threat to the UK for decades to come.
Listing hostile Russian activities does not prove the case for vastly increased conventional military spending, new submarines or an arbitrary percentage of GDP devoted to defence.
Security matters. But spending should address the threats we actually face. Cybersecurity, intelligence, maritime surveillance and protection of critical infrastructure may be entirely justified. That does not mean every demand for increased military spending is.
The existence of a threat is not evidence that every proposed response to it is necessary. Stop believing the military-industrial complex – for whom you might be a spokesperson, for all I know.
Richard, Putin’s logic is simple: his economy now runs on war, victory in Ukraine would embolden him, and testing NATO where it looks weakest could fracture the alliance. Meanwhile Russia’s submarine fleet is largely untouched by Ukraine and operates around our cables. That’s why submarines matter. They are the best way to hunt enemy submarines, protect the undersea infrastructure our economy depends on, and secure the North Atlantic routes that would carry NATO reinforcements. They take over a decade to build. Deterrence ordered after the threat materialises arrives too late.
If you want to write total shite, just go and do it elsewhere.
Putting aside whether rearmament is what is now needed (it obviously isn’t):
1. How long will it take to build 3 new floating docks?
2. How long will it take to build the vessels that may be intended to be built there.
3. What will Britain’s defence needs by that point in time?
Drones.
IT.
AI engineers.
Flood defences.
This is fighting yesterday’s wars.
We can not think of defence just in terms of our own nation state.
I agree with Mike Parr about the main threat is due to climate change and more generally neo-liberalism. He is also right the threat from the Middle East is due to a mistaken support of Israel/ US policy. The threat from Russia is something else. It is following a Russian version of MAGA and the intention is the neutralisation of eastern Europe so it can heavily influence the politics of the region and strengthen those forces like the AfD, National Rally and Reform who seem to share similar values. The US is not longer an ally we can trust. Belarus is virtually re-absorbed. Putin expected Ukraine to fall. The Baltic states could be next in line.
Europe has the population, technology and GDP to create a credible force ( with weapons appropriate to this time and Andrew is also correct to say there is still a place for ships and AFV etc ) which would deter military adventurism. It also needs the will to deploy such forces where they are needed. And Richard is right to say the ‘politics of care’ is also a defence against the values of Russian and internal Fascism. Europe is a better place to live in terms of freedoms and prosperity than Russia -and maybe the US, too.
I think we have the resources to do both if we mobilise them.
As Pilgrim says we have a duty to service personnel to make sure they are properly equipped. As an ATC cadet in the 1960s I met men who had been sent into battle with inferior equipment. It should not be forgotten.
Much to agree with
Those of us who marched against Vietnam, Greenham missiles, Iraq, Gaza etc etc have been proved right – politically and militarily time and time again.<p>
The military industrial complex will always press for more arms regardless – however useless they are to our defence. The recent Strategic Defence Review by Lord Robertson – who is apparently compromised by his involvement with the arms industry since being NATO secretary general, just seemed to propose more of everything – more nukes, more tanks, more ships, despite the disastrous record of arms procurement over recent years – kit that doesn’t work yet cost £billions. Apparently we need more of the old kit and all sorts of new cyber and drone and missile stuff<p>
As you say Richard – precisely what we dont need to dig us out of the parlous state we are in. But Rolls Royce, BAE systems, Babcock and co will love it.<p>
Living in Airstrip One.
Ukraine has adapted by making weapons in small workshops and dispersed locations. It is easier to update and change.
However, they also need patriot missiles to intercept ballistic missiles. They are complex and expensive.
And naval weapons are different again. My hope is that the Russian leadership decide to replace Putin and his circle. ( and I’d love to see Trump’s reaction. He would be next )
Its not always an exact comparison but we have about 42 days of diesel in stock
Other comparable nations have about a years worth and some up to about 3 years worth
Who is better protected?
Really?
I am staggered by 42.
The others seem incredible. What is your data source?
I had been looking at figures put on Twitter but an AI search says
Key Regional Breakdown
⚠️ High-Risk Zones (Under 9 Months Cover): The United Kingdom is noted by analysts as the most at risk in Europe due to a highly tight balance of refined products. Meanwhile, central and western heavy hitters like Germany and Italy sit on 7 months of cover, with France holding roughly 8 months. Localised panic-buying has already begun straining French forecourts, prompting emergency government subsidies. [1, 2]
✅ Insulated Buffers (Over 15 Months Cover): Central and Eastern European nations boast significantly deeper safety nets relative to their daily consumption. Romania maintains 16 months of road diesel coverage, Austria holds 21 months, and the Czech Republic leads the pack with roughly 23 months of standalone strategic cover. [1]
Japan maintains massive overall petroleum and refined product reserves—often estimated at over 1,000 days of indirect supply capacity or more than 250 days of net import/consumption demand—though these figures primarily reflect total crude oil reserves and domestic refining capabilities rather than purely refined diesel stored in tanks. [1, 2, 3]
I am surprised
I am used to your ‘just in time’ approach which is falling apart at the seams
Thank you, John.
This may explain the local / rural suspicion that the Fairford gang were out to steal diesel from farmers.
You may well be right. The Fairford 5 have, apparently, already been released on bail which would not have happened if their vans contained explosives. Perhaps they just had empty barrels to fill with stolen fuel?
🙂
When I read the “story” in the Guardian, my BS detector went off louder than a Burnham emergency BBQ phone alert. The photos of half naked arrestees, and vans, and USAF planes, and details about the long reinforced runways, the details about supposed IEDs, and the location, the supposed Iranian connection, all far more than would be in a police press release, and so soon after the event.
But it does suggest that if your boss sends you out to stockpile diesel or water (as a patriotic citizen following Gov’t advice to panic buy now), don’t take your white vans and jerry cans to a filling station near a military base. And same advice applies, if you are out nicking the stuff (which I am not advocating btw).
A genuinely terrorist linked event as serious as that one would more likely have been sat on for days or reported on as “road blocked due to a police incident”.
Here’s the local follow up:
https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/raf-fairford-arrests-update-counter-11175494
That reads to me like a very protracted wind-down, especially the v long police update.
Compare that with the more usual (and possibly tragic) sort of story here:
https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/a4-portway-closed-both-ways-11175627
which is not uncommon, relating to Clifton suspension bridge.
Re-arming will only make the already very wealthy directors, shareholders, of the mainly American military complex companies even richer. The US/Israeli war with Iran has shown that expensive weaponry does not seem to work in real battles and the time taken to produce replacement weapons is years not weeks.
Think of whay is the US navy in the Indian Ocean? Because of the fear of being hit by Iranian missiles.
Assuming Healey had a plan for his let’s build more weaaponry policy there are massive obstacles. Such as lack of materials, especially the required rare earth metals ( China has embargoed their export), lack of capacity to build the required weaponry, lack of trained personnel to build the kit.
As the UK follows the US doctrine of outsourcing milirary production, mainenance and training to the military industrial complex I very much doubt any of the lessons thrown up by the US/Israeli war with Iran will be considered. Think supply of food etc to militray personnel.
I would expect the UK to follow the doctrine let’s spend billions on new expensive not yet in service kit, planes etc which usually do not work as expected.
In the meantitme Healey will most likely scrap the triple lock. So that the disadvantaged will suffer to help the rich get very much richer.
With Healey as Chancellor, this was kind of inevitable, but I find it incredibly sad that we have money for unnecessary armaments, but the disabled are being demonised, schools are having to make further cuts, healthcare services are being cut, and we have too many children living in poverty. This will not help the ordinary person at all. It may provide jobs for those who currently can’t get one including the many young people coming out of university to very few vacancies, but it would be so much better to fund our education and healthcare services. And it ignores the pressing need to address climate change which will cause migration and wars
Much to agree with
I do not know why but I found all the noise surrounding, and coming from, the man who is supposed to be the Chancellor and his speech to the Labour Party conference so dire that I dug out a copy of the late Jimmy Reid’s Rectorial Address to the University of Glasgow delivered on 28 April 1972 for inspiration. Looking back I see how little progress has been made in the intervening 54 years. Arguably matters are far worse now than back then. However I still find his Address a source of hope and inspiration that is lacking in today’s faceless political cowards. Heaven help us all if they drive us towards war. I would rather travel in a coach driven by a drunk with one eye than this lot.
I admit to not having watched it. I had lost much of the will to live after watching Burnham yesterday and needed to use my time better today. But I hear the fiscal rules were the highlight.
I read recently about submarine drones. I imagine these are smaller and cheaper than manned submarines, and healthier for navy personnel.