As Britain ramps up defence spending. Pledging up to 5 per cent of GDP to buy F‑35s, nuclear submarines and fresh warheads—the Labour government is simultaneously clawing billions from welfare. But this isn’t just a budgetary footnote: it’s a choice. With over 100 Labour MPs revolting against benefit cuts that will hit disabled people and low-income families, voters are left asking the obvious question. Why fund bombers while slashing the support that keeps people alive?
There is no strategic genius at work here. Starmer’s reform agenda is not some visionary restructuring of the state. It’s a cost-cutting exercise dressed in technocratic language. The target is £5 billion in annual welfare “savings,” a figure that will now be softened, delayed or dressed up in consultation-speak following the revolt in the Commons. But the direction of travel is clear: welfare is too expensive, and defence—somehow—isn’t.
Labour frames this as fiscal responsibility. But this new “realism” is anything but realistic for the disabled claimant waiting months for a PIP assessment, or for the carer balancing two jobs and still using foodbanks. Starmer and Liz Kendall talk of work as the best route out of poverty, as if decades of stagnating wages and punitive conditionality never happened. Work becomes the moral horizon; welfare, a guilty secret.
“the direction of travel is clear: welfare is too expensive, and defence—somehow—isn’t.”
Yet there is money for missiles. The Ministry of Defence sails through fiscal scrutiny untouched. Trident renewal continues. The UK’s so-called “nuclear deterrent” is being extended with American-made jets designed to carry bombs we’re not supposed to use. We are, as the NATO summit in The Hague confirmed, now on a warfighting footing. “Readiness” is the keyword—readiness for confrontation, escalation, deterrence-by-hardware. The cost of that readiness (financial, social, ecological) is never put to public debate.
The message is clear: national strength is measured in kilotons, not care hours. Social security is a drain; military security a virtue. But the welfare state is national infrastructure too. A benefits system that supports disabled people to live with dignity, that protects those made redundant by structural shifts in the economy, is just as vital to the integrity of the nation as any submarine patrol. Yet Starmer’s Labour seems to have absorbed the Conservative logic wholesale: poor people need to be nudged into work, not helped; welfare encourages idleness; the market knows best.
“A benefits system that supports disabled people to live with dignity, that protects those made redundant by structural shifts in the economy, is just as vital to the integrity of the nation as any submarine patrol.”
What this reveals is not a lack of ideas, but a lack of class allegiance. A party founded to represent working people now talks as if work is a disciplinary tool. It no longer defends the right to rest, to be cared for, to live without fear of bureaucratic punishment. It accepts, even amplifies, the logic of austerity: that there isn’t enough to go around, that sacrifice must be made, just not by those at the top.
We’re told there’s no money left. Yet the cost of one nuclear warhead is equivalent to the annual income of thousands of disabled people on Universal Credit. The government can fund stealth bombers and nuclear readiness, but can’t maintain the Independent Living Fund. It can pay BAE Systems to build submarines, but not local authorities to keep social care functioning.
This isn’t a war economy. It’s a transfer of resources from social reproduction to military accumulation. It’s the logic of capital dressed in the language of national duty. And it’s happening with the full cooperation of a Labour government that claims to be serious, grown-up, responsible.
Starmer didn’t just pick this fight. He welcomed it. It fits the image he wants to project: tough on debt, tough on idleness, tough on those who don’t fit the productivity model. But politics is about choices. And this government has chosen stealth bombers over social security. The slogan writes itself: welfare before warfare. Not just because we can’t afford both—but because any politics worth defending would start from the lives of the people it claims to represent.
