Rearmament and defence are left-wing causes

The launch of Labour Friends of NATO could be a game-changer in preparing the British people to face down intimidation and aggression. Almost every week brings news of blatant Russian sabotage and disinformation campaigns against Britain and its democratic allies. Yet though support for defence spending is rising, the public remains largely oblivious of the threat.

When we celebrate NATO, as Labour, we naturally think of Ernest Bevin, who placed its creation central to the achievements of the 1945-51 Labour governments. But as a member of the party’s left – who was fighting neoliberalism while Andy Burnham was still a neoliberal – I want also to celebrate the role of Nye Bevan. Not only in the creation of NATO but in defence of a British nuclear deterrent.

For the left, whose priorities are reindustrialisation, increased social cohesion, high wages, high productivity and greater public ownership, the defence agenda should be seen as an opportunity not a threat.

That’s why we focused the Defence Industrial strategy on creating jobs at home, not abroad. It’s why we created the Defence Industrial Joint Council, replacing a body dominated by giant corporations with one where unions and universities sit with equal status, and SMEs have a powerful voice.

Since become coming to office, Labour’s motto has been “NATO First”. It meant reversing out of the Tory fantasy that the UK can play an independent and major role in the Pacific theatre, and focusing our efforts on where the threat is, not where the business opportunities may lie. 

But bigger tasks now lie ahead. In the 1930s, our party started out behind the curve on rearmament and deterrence. We voted against the Defence Budget on principle, we drifted with the pacifist mood; under George Lansbury Labour offered no effective opposition to the slow rearmament and appeasement of the Baldwin government. 

What changed that were two battles – Cable Street and Jarama, where British and Irish troops became the first to fight Mussolini and Hitler’s troops, not just Franco’s. Attlee in the summer of 1936 supported non-intervention in Spain. By December 1937 he was in a trench in Barcelona with the International Brigades.

And in the process, Labour and the trade unions led the British working class to the stark conclusion that we would have to confront Hitler, and even fight.

That was the British “Zeitenwende” and our task now is to make it happen again – albeit in a much more fractured society, where trust in the state is in short supply.

As we do so we need to take account of the obvious differences. In the 1930s Hitler could not shut down a British car factory with a virus. In the 1930s, Hitler could not flood TikTok with disinformation.

Worst of all, though in the 1930s Hitler had Mosley and – in the background – the coterie of aristocrats around Edward VIII, British communism was anti-fascist, and played a leading role in mobilising the working class for war.

Today, sadly, the CPB is spreading lies about Labour “warmongering”, diminishing the threat from Russia and Iran, celebrating the crimes of people who smashed up vital RAF warplanes at Brize Norton, and in many cases cheering Putin. 

While the CPGB and the ILP and the unions mobilised massively to Aid Spain, their descendants have done nothing to support Ukraine. It’s been left to a few stalwart leftwingers in Ukraine Solidarity Campaign, who are – me among them – regularly vilified by today’s Leninist re-enactment groups.

So Labour Friends of NATO can’t be a passive body, holding one reception a year at party conference. We’ve got to be an activist network in every CLP and union branch.

We’ve got to snap people out of the student politics they learned decades ago: if you want to govern the country, you have to run the armed forces. The military moves to imperatives you can’t determine: the enemy does. That means rearmament. And that, in turn, means hard choices.

When people say “Welfare not Warfare” they are doubly deluding themselves and those who listen. First, the real choice is not Welfare vs Defence. It’s Welfare vs Healthcare – because if we allow it, the Welfare and pensions costs will devour everything else: hospitals, schools, police, councils. You can see it happening in every council budget meeting. 

But on top of that, nobody is choosing War. Our nuclear deterrent and the conventional forces that will be enhanced by the Defence Investment Plan are the best guarantee against War starting. As somebody in our launch meeting said: NATO is the most effective Stop The War campaign ever invented.

So we need to take on and defeat the Putinists and the Hamas/Hezbollah proxies. They’re mostly outside the party, clustered around the Greens, where there are none of the guardrails that Corbynism used to contain them. But they are a destructive force in the unions and our job is to convince the vast majority of decent union members that those who’ve hijacked the movement are wrong.

So here’s the challenge. As we set up Labour Friends of NATO, we should extend a hand also to our colleagues in other parties: the Green MPs  - whose actual party policy is to support NATO – to those in Plaid and the SNP who support national defence, and yes to the Tories, who have fortunately lost most of their MAGA/Natcon nutcases.

Let’s build a cross-party friends of NATO movement. And there’s a model for it. In the mid-1930s there was a movement called “Arms and the Covenant” – it became the title of a book by Churchill, but before Churchill even joined it was a cross-party campaign.

Arms meant rearmament. The Covenant meant the founding document of the League of Nations, which gave countries the right to use collective force to deter fascist aggression. Today’s equivalent of that is NATO and the UN Charter. 

Arms and the Charter should be our motto. Massive and rapid rearmament bringing jobs back to our communities, major naval shipbuilding projects back to the Tyne, the Wear and the Mersey, an alliance of not 30 universities but 100-plus to align science with the needs of security. Economic deterrence to back the military deterrence offered by our armed forces. 

We should reach out and build these links with sister socialist parties across Europe, and with the Democrats in the USA.

And we should unashamedly put Labour values – of solidarity, internationalism, diversity in the armed forces – at the heart of our contribution to the National Conversation on Defence. 

As a party we can be proud of our history in helping create NATO. Now there are new alliances in formation, coalitions of the willing to face down tyranny and aggression. And the 100 year commitment to Ukraine.

We did it before in the 1930s. We can do it again.

Paul Mason is a columnist for The New World, an Association Fellow of the Council on Geostrategy, and founding patron of Labour Friends of NATO.