There are always some who profit from war

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It is said that Keir Hardie died of a broken heart in 1915, having been a lifelong pacifist who failed to stop the first world war. As the maker of a film about the war put it, Hardie “...saw it as a profiteering exercise as well as a loss of men”. The idea of a conflict between spending on weapons of war and spending on food or welfare (‘guns vs butter’, as it is known) is nothing new – and it has historically not been the exclusive preserve of ‘the left’. In a major speech in 1953, then-President Dwight Eisenhower, hardly a socialist icon, declared that, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed”. It was a powerful speech, with a powerful message. In some ways, it was echoed by one Margaret Thatcher who said in 1976, “The Soviets put guns over butter, but we put almost everything over guns”. Their words might almost be an expression of some of those famous western values which we’re supposed to uphold.

And then we come to the man named after Hardie, the UK’s current prime minister, who said yesterday, after announcing that more would be spent on weaponry, that the defence sector offers: “the next generation of good, secure, well-paid jobs”. I somehow don’t believe that the man after whom he was named would have been overly impressed. There is no doubt that war is good for business in the eyes of some companies; it’s no coincidence that the share price of defence companies has soared in recent days. It was ever thus: the soldiers sent to their deaths come predominantly from the working class whilst the capitalists benefit. Profiteering, as Hardie would have put it. It’s also interesting to note that Sir Starmer talks about the increase in defence spending boosting economic growth, after having told us for months that public spending needs to be cut in order to boost growth. Things he wants to spend money on magically have the opposite economic effect to things on which he does not wish to spend. Strange, that.