Standing up for the interests of workers means standing with the overwhelming majority of people — home and abroad. That is why our movement, the workers’ movement, is a political force without parallel. It’s why trade unions at our best are not special interest groups but universal vehicles fighting to transform society for everyone.
It was a deeply shameful moment, therefore, when the TUC voted three years ago to support — albeit by a very fine margin — to embrace militarism and support increased spending on defence.
It might have been justified by talk of just how unsafe the world has become. But unions cannot respond to such uncertainty by throwing in their lot with warmongering politicians and the arms companies they will go on to become lobbyists for. It risks not only rendering us complicit in the perpetration of unfathomable evils like the genocide in Gaza, but also encouraging more war and insecurity.
Just as importantly, hitching the workers’ movement to the war machine fundamentally betrays our class interests. Consider the situation we face as workers in Britain today. We are told by a Labour government that there is no money left for us. No money left for our industries, our services, or our pay packets — all already depressed by Thatcherism and further degraded by austerity. Yet magically, the cash can always be found when the United States instructs that we buy more of their weapons.
Our Labour Prime Minister likes to justify these topsy-turvy priorities by telling us that his first duty is to keep the British people safe. We aren’t buying it. Workers have never felt so insecure. Waging endless wars abroad; arming the mass slaughter and starvation of innocent children. These things don’t keep us safe. Who could buy the national security lie, while our country crumbles around us thanks to the refusal of successive governments to seriously invest to rebuild it?
Austerity for workers at home. Billions to fuel death and destruction abroad. Who does this agenda serve? Trump demands it. Farage, Badenoch, and Murdoch support it. These are enemies of our class pure and simple. Determined opponents of our movement. That a Labour government sides with them should not lead us down the same blind alley.
Next week, at the TUC’s 157th annual Congress in Britain, we are bringing a motion to reverse the movement’s support for ‘immediate increases in defence spending’. In a campaign launched today calling for Wages Not Weapons, we are joined by nine other trade unions, collectively representing well over a million workers.
Were the motion to pass, it would mark a historic reassertion of the workers’ movement’s best traditions. It would give a shot in the arm to a trade unionism confident that in representing the interests of our members, we are advancing the general interest and fighting for a peaceful, freer, and more just world.
These debates have raged in our movement for a long time. In the 1950s, American planners in the administration of Harry Truman fretted about the influence exerted across the trade union movement by one of Tribune’s founders (and the founder of the NHS), Aneurin Bevan. They worried that ‘Bevanism and those who urge social welfare above defense’ posed ‘a very serious problem’.
By voting next week in Brighton to invest in working people rather than war, and to prioritise our wages over American weapons, delegates to TUC Congress could not only force a course-correction for our movement, but also pose that same very serious problem anew for Donald Trump.