WHICH MP wouldn’t want a defence factory in their constituency? The median full-time pay for making weapons and ammunition in Britain last year was £49,300 ($64,000), far above the national average of £37,400. Big plants hire lots of apprentices, and keep local suppliers of screws and sandwiches in business. For poor English towns that other industries don’t reach, they are a godsend.
Still, the cold transactionalist logic of pork-barrel politics does not alone explain the enthusiasm that greeted Sir Keir Starmer’s announcement last month that defence spending would tick up to 2.5% of GDP by 2027, and 3% some time after. Never mind that the aid budget, once Labour’s pride and joy, would be heavily cut to pay for it, nor, as many Labour MPs have grasped, that taxes must eventually go up. A group of MPs called for ESG rules, which deter banks from lending to arms-makers, to be cut. Others want defence firms to be helped to recruit on university campuses.
What stirred was deeper: a veneration of manufacturing jobs, dear to the soul of Sir Keir’s Labour Party. It was on show on March 6th, when Sir Keir visited Cammell Laird, a shipyard on the Mersey. He shook the hands of oil-smeared apprentices, declared they were serving their country, and waxed eloquent about learning a trade over going to university. He reminisced (not for the first time) about his father, a toolmaker. Lately the prime minister has worried about teenagers who live parallel lives in isolating jobs. Defence work, by contrast, he sees as purposeful, even heroic.
Getting here owes less to political science than to theology. Jeremy Corbyn, Labour’s leader until 2020, regarded the arms industry as a great evil. Worse in his critics’ eyes, his tenure speeded up Labour’s retreat from former industrial towns to the cities, to become a party of public-sector workers and professionals. For those who wrestled the party back, this was not just an electoral crisis, but a moral one. Its founding constitution, Rachel Reeves, the future chancellor, wrote in 2017, commanded it to serve “the workers by hand or by brain”. That, she said, was “the point of Labour”.
In opposition she spoke of “securonomics”, which fused a scepticism about globalisation with support for blue-collar jobs. Yet it was a philosophy in search of a policy: which industries should be protected, and with what spare cash, was never worked out. Sometimes she seemed unconvinced of her own arguments, knowing that the modern working class is more often found in retailing and hospitality. In unguarded moments she would parody the factory photo-ops that filled her diary: “The traditional politician visit to manufacturing, we all put on our PPE, that is ‘The Economy’.” Once in office, the Treasury orthodoxy of promoting free trade, deregulation and services exports held sway.
Now the intellectual muscles honed in opposition have twitched. Securonomics has found a focus. There are few industries for which the Treasury is willing to pay the premium that goods marked “Made in Britain” demand, but defence is one of them, and only a crisis such as America’s retreat from Europe could jolt out the money. The national-security case for buying European-made solar panels and wind turbines was never compelling. For European-made tanks, it is obvious.
Some of the strongest supporters of rearmament are MPs on Labour’s left. They agree with Mr Corbyn on workers’ rights and better pay; on foreign policy, they do not. The same is true of Unite, a large trade union and leading Labour donor. Sharon Graham, its general secretary, called on the government to buy the partly British-built Eurofighter Typhoon over American F-35s; its range and defensive systems make it better suited to policing Nato’s borders against the Russians, she said. These are debates more often aired in Janes than the Morning Star.
It is a moment in the sun for Labour’s “neo-Bevinites”, a type first identified by Colm Murphy and David Klemperer, a pair of academics, as a crop of MPs marked by faith in state-directed industrial strategy and hawkish foreign-policy views. Ernest Bevin, a union leader, served in Winston Churchill’s wartime coalition; as a Labour foreign secretary, he insisted that Britain must have the nuclear bomb. The war, notes John Bew, a historian, seemed like a vindication of Labour’s ideas of “manpower” and state planning.
Those air-conditioned, bright canteens
The need to rearm is undisputed: a recent Commons committee report laid bare a dearth of shells, tanks, artillery and air defences. The size and nature of the jobs dividend are less certain. A great chunk of the defence budget is earmarked for the nuclear deterrent and cyber-capabilities, and the future will be one of automated weapons in which software matters more than the hardware containing it. All this will provide plentiful work for laptop-wielding graduates but less for teenage apprentices. Much depends on timing, says Ben Barry of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a think-tank. If planners conclude that confrontation with Russia is at least five years away, they will be more inclined to invest in advanced weapons systems; if it is much closer, they will sustain existing ones with much-needed stocks of ammunition and spare parts.
A lot rests on the story Sir Keir has chosen to tell. Those in government can see that Britons’ support for Ukraine is high, but not solid. People tell pollsters they favour defence spending in theory, but their enthusiasm shrivels when tax rises are mentioned. Rearmament is liable to be inflationary; other services will be cheese-pared. Only if Britons feel the country stands to be enriched by defence spending, the logic runs, will they be willing to shoulder the burden of European security. A nostalgic ideal of a generation of young welders and platers enjoying the spoils of rearmament may not stack up as economics. As politics, it has to ring true. ■
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