All spending is income to someone

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One of the simplest rules in economics is that all spending by one person or organisation becomes income for another person or organisation. I frequently wonder how well understood it is, but it is an unavoidable fact. And what applies to spending by individuals or companies also applies to governments – all public spending becomes income to someone, somewhere. The corollary is that any reduction in public spending cuts the income of someone, somewhere – the only question is who and where.

Yesterday, Kemi Badenoch told us that a government led by her would cut spending on benefits in order to increase spending on defence. Assuming that the cut and increase match pound for pound, then the overall total of money injected into the economy by the government – becoming income for others – would remain the same. What would change, though, is the who and where receiving that income. Income which previously went to recipients of benefits would instead become income for the likes of arms companies and military personnel from where it would flow into the wider economy as it is spent again. Benefit recipients lose income, armaments companies gain income. None of that is, or can be, arguable – it’s simply a statement of fact.

Unless, of course, you happen to be the leader of the Tory Party, who said that this wasn’t targeting the poorest members of society because the welfare system “doesn’t make any sense”. Now, she might actually have a point, of sorts, about whether the welfare system works as well as it should, or is targeted as well as it could be. But unless we choose to believe that most of the benefits – and therefore the savings she is proposing (although she hasn’t actually spelt them out) – are not in fact going to the poorest in society, then it is inevitably the case that cuts will reduce the income of the poorest. Badenoch’s statement is complete nonsense. But the problem isn’t just Badenoch – all those Labour ministers and politicians calling for welfare cuts are effectively proposing the same thing. The only way of avoiding that is if the reductions in benefits are matched by increases in income for the same groups from other sources.

It is a cart-and-horses issue. If those receiving benefits start receiving at least an equivalent amount of income from other sources (such as employment), then it doesn’t need government action to cut benefits spending: it will fall automatically. But if the jobs aren’t available, or the people can’t do them (for whatever reason), then a cut in benefits takes income way from the poorest. Put another way, the issue isn’t really about benefits at all (leaving aside some tinkering with the rules to better achieve the intended outcomes) – it’s an employment/wages problem. It’s a much harder problem to tackle – not least because our politicians are wedded to the idea that governments can’t actually do much because of arbitrary fiscal rules – but looking at benefits solely as a question of ‘unsustainable government expenditure’ is, however they choose to spin it, an argument for making some of the most disadvantaged in society even poorer. It could not be otherwise. We need to start in the right place, which isn’t about the benefits system at all.

Threats work in Trump's mind, even if they really don't

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Reports suggest that Trump is considering using the UK’s possession of the Falklands/Malvinas as a lever to compel the UK government to spend more on armaments. This post isn’t going to get into questions around the legality or morality of the UK’s continued possession of such a remote outpost; that’s a whole other subject. In any event, questions about legality or morality never enter Trump’s mind; everything is about naked power and the ability to apply it. What impact a change of US policy would have is unclear: successive UK governments haven’t exactly demonstrated a willingness to be swayed by international opinion on the question of ownership.

Trump’s end game on the issue seems to be primarily about raising UK spend on armaments, and has little to do with the status of faraway islands about which he knows nothing. Defence spending is already a hot topic in UK politics, although parties are arguing primarily about the timetable for implementing any increase. The concentration on spending as a proportion of GDP is one which I’ve never really understood. Surely, if, or to the extent that, the UK needs to up its defence capacity (another whole other subject), it’s about the nature and scale of that capacity, not about how much it costs in relation to GDP? As the UK has ably(?) demonstrated over many years, increasing defence expenditure is easy – incompetent procurement and project management can add massively to costs for no perceptible increase in capacity.

I do wonder, though, whether Trump really cares whether the relationship between arms spending and GDP makes any sense or not – or even whether he really cares about defence anyway, especially for countries other than the US. I suspect that his real concern is what it’s always been: money and power (mostly his own). He believes (with considerable justification, in the short term at least) that increasing spend on armaments primarily benefits US companies, and that means his billionaire ‘friends’ (whose ‘friendship’, in turn, is more about what they can get out of it than any liking for Trump) and donors. He doesn’t even believe that the Russians (the bogeyman being used in Europe to support preparations for war) are any sort of threat, given what he sees as his own excellent relationship with Putin.

I suspect that the warmongers currently running the UK are going to increase armaments spending anyway, regardless of what Trump says, even if their own blind adherence to wholly arbitrary fiscal rules causes a degree of dithering along the way. And when they do so, even if the Trump threat over the Falklands/Malvinas has had zero impact on the decision, Trump’s simplistic mind will see a cause and effect where there is none, which will reinforce his tendency to resort to threats and blackmail. Trump’s madness and impulsiveness form a vicious circle from which there seems to be no escape.

Government is hard

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Government is hard. And the transition from opposition to government is not a smooth one. Things which it is easy to oppose from outside become more problematic from the inside. We saw it when Labour replaced the Tories as the UK Government: one obvious example is the way that all those Labour candidates who gave such fulsome support to the WASPI women when they wanted their votes found themselves in a government which has done precisely nothing to remedy the injustice. We’re seeing it in Wales too, with the news this week that the Plaid Cymru Welsh Government is facilitating and participating in the sort of arms fairs which many of its members, when in opposition, would have attended only in order to join protests outside the venue.

It may well be true, as the government’s spokesperson effectively claimed in response, that ‘arms fair’ is an over-simplistic description of an event which also showcases, for example, civilian aerospace industries which provide good well-paid jobs for people in Wales, although that didn’t seem to stop party members from describing them as arms fairs when Labour were in government. It’s also true, of course, that the defence sector provides jobs and boosts the economy in the areas where it operates, but it isn’t the only sector which does so; there are other ways of creating jobs. It’s true, again, that Wales benefits less from UK defence expenditure than many other areas of the UK, and that if the industries aren’t located in Wales, they’ll simply be located elsewhere in the UK. But demanding that UK government expenditure should benefit Wales to the same extent as other parts of the UK economy doesn’t mean that the nature of that expenditure has to be the same. It’s how much is being spent in Wales which matters not what it’s being spent on.

Plaid has never been an outright pacifist party, although pacifism has always been an important element in the thinking of many of its leading figures – and opposition to war and militarism has been an even stronger thread in its history. There must surely be at least some amongst the party’s members who are feeling at least a little uneasy about their government’s stance. Perhaps they’re even beginning to understand how it has been possible for many Labour Party members in organisations such as CND to manage their consciences over the decades as their party has enthusiastically backed upgrading the UK’s nuclear arsenal.

Wales needs to grow its economy, it needs jobs, it needs investment and it needs the government expenditure which promotes all those things. There is, though, a moral dimension to that. Do we want jobs at any price, regardless of their potential impact, or do we want to apply a filter under which not all jobs are seen as being of equal value when non-economic factors are taken into account? We won’t all draw the line in the same place, of course, but I know that I’m not alone in feeling a sense of disappointment here. Government is hard, but taking hard decisions doesn’t have to mean taking decisions which will be unpopular with the base support and seem to be in conflict with past stances even if that’s the way it is often presented. The difficulties of government aren’t much of an excuse for throwing away the compass.

Building for peace, not war

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The idea that ‘Russia’ has learnt nothing from its catastrophic losses invading Ukraine, and will shortly be poised to take on the even greater challenge of a direct attack on a part of the European Union seems to be gaining ground almost daily. The Conservative and Labour parties seem equally in thrall to the threat of the Russian menace and equally determined to divert resources from welfare to armaments to prepare to meet the threat. In the process, they and what increasingly seem to be their puppet-masters in the armed forces and the weapons industries seem to be making such a war more, rather than less, likely.

Yesterday, we had a report of a speech from the head of the UK Army, laying out his views of what is needed. Needless to say, the head of the army wants to build up the army, but it was the detail which struck me. “Only armies seize and hold ground”, according to the pre-release of his speech. It’s impossible to argue with that, but the question which needs to be answered is why, exactly, we would want to ‘seize ground’ in the first place. The questions posed by his statement were compounded by his argument that the UK needs to be able to ‘strike deep’ and ‘defend forward’, which seems to mean developing the ability to strike at the enemy’s resources deep inside their own territory before those resources can be used against us. To me, it sounds a lot like an argument that the best defence is attack – and from the Kremlin’s perspective, it will surely sound even more so. What reaction should we expect from a state which feels itself thus threatened, after having watched the UK (and other governments) portray it as an imminent threat to themselves? Do we expect them to just wait, and watch that capability being built for use against them?

For the military (and, apparently, most UK politicians), the natural instinct is to build ever stronger armed forces to deter an attack by the enemy, but surely the deeper issue is how to avoid an attack. Maybe 'deterrence' has a role in that, but the extent to which that is so in that is arguable: up until the point at which war starts, it is impossible to know whether the lack of war is down to deterrence or simply a lack of rationale for going to war. (For example, whether merging the French and German economies into a single economic jurisdiction prevented the two countries from going to war again (one of the original objectives of the EEC) or whether they would never have gone to war anyway is an academic question, to which there can never be a definitive answer.) What we do know is that one of the most likely reasons for going to war against any potential adversary is the belief that 'they' intend to attack ‘us’ and need to be stopped before they can build the capability to do so successfully. But why are so few able to understand that exactly the same consideration plays out on the ‘other’ side as well?

Where are the political leaders prepared to make the argument that if we want to build for peace we should avoid sending the message that we are building for war? Building for war has, instead, become the default position of the UK establishment. And those who build for war are likely to find themselves, sooner or later, fighting that war.

What are we proposing to defend?

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Labour’s warmongers are at it again. On the basis of absolutely no evidence that they are willing to share, they have declared that “the threat of a Russian attack on the UK grows”, and that the UK therefore needs to spend vastly more on new weapons in order to repulse such an attack. I don’t know whether Putin is really planning to launch an attack on the UK, but – despite his obvious desire to reinstate what he regards as being the right of Russia to control certain territories – he isn’t obviously a stupid man. He is, for instance, perfectly capable of extrapolating from his difficulties in conquering Ukraine to the likely consequences of attacking any of the major NATO states, and concluding that it is probably not a battle Russia would be likely to win. He also understands at least a little about geography: Ukraine is close to Russia and shares a long and eminently invadable land border, whilst the UK is further away and any attack beyond an aerial assault would require the use of air and sea transport for a large number of forces.

The military clearly want more weapons, but then the military always do, regardless of the assessed scale of any threat. The real beneficiaries of the proposed increase in military expenditure are the arms companies (and their shareholders), companies which are already profitable and seem to have a knack of ending up invariably charging much more than the price initially quoted. The losers – in a situation where Labour are hemmed in by their own blind commitment to neoliberal economics and wholly arbitrary fiscal rules – will be the population of the UK, and especially those most dependent on the state finances and services which will be cut to pay for weaponry.

The first question we need to be asking is what exactly is it we are proposing to defend? And that raises the question of what sort of society we want to be. If the only way to ‘defend’ citizens is to impoverish and marginalise ever more of them, and prepare them to give their lives in order to do so, there is a danger that the ‘cure’ is worse than the disease. Defending the interests and wealth of the wealthy isn’t serving the population as a whole. The interests of most of us have more in common with those of the ordinary citizens of the 'enemy' state than with the interests of the elites who run the states on either side.

The second – and even more important – question is about how we prevent war in the first place, rather than merely setting out to ‘win’ it. War only becomes inevitable when government on both sides becomes captured by people who think it to be so, and much of what looks to be defence preparation to one side will look to be threat of an attack to the other. The most likely cause of any further attack by Russia is a belief that ‘we’ are preparing to attack them. Building up military forces, with more weapons and more powerful weapons, especially when more of them are stationed close to their borders, isn’t exactly the best way of dispelling that belief.

What is to be defended - and how?

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It was reported a couple of weeks ago that there is a £28 billion ‘funding shortfall’ for the UK’s military forces. It underlines the way in which a careful choice of words can frame any discussion. The substance of the story is that the military needs a lot more money to do all the things that it wants to do, and is presenting the lack of that money as a ‘shortfall’. It’s not the only word that could be used. The same gap could equally be framed as a deliberately planned overspend: the expenditure plan has been drawn up in a way which requires more money than the budget has allocated. A ‘shortfall’ is the responsibility of government, but an ‘overspend’ is the responsibility of the defence chiefs. It’s all about blame avoidance.

The more substantive underlying question is about what the UK’s military needs are; establishing that is a prerequisite to talking about how the expenditure is funded. It’s not a question on which either the government or the military really wants any sort of debate, because an open discussion on the question must inevitably put the question of the Trident upgrade on the table. This enormously expensive project is a major element of the UK’s planned military spend, yet it is, in essence, a weapons system which could only ever be used as a posthumous act of revenge following a nuclear attack on the UK. Even then, there’s considerable doubt as to whether the UK could really decide to fire any of the missiles without US authorisation. The UK government always claim that it can be so used, but the phrase attributed to Mandy Rice-Davies applies. Scrapping Trident completely would free up enough funding to overcome the alleged shortfall, even if we collectively decided that we still wanted to do everything else on the military shopping list.

Meanwhile the Lib Dems have come up with an alternative funding mechanism – the issue of what they are calling ‘war bonds’, based on what the government did during the two world wars. According to Ed Davey, this could raise an additional £20 billion for military purposes, and it’s clear that he thinks that the target market is individuals across the UK, so it would be giving the public a chance to "support patriotically our defence". I suspect that he’s right in saying that the government could raise that sort of money, although it’s more likely to come from the wealthiest in society rather than the man in the street, and they’re more likely to buy such bonds for the security of the capital and the interest they would attract than out of any great patriotic fervour. Given that the government (and there is no indication that a Lib Dem government would take a different view on this) regards all bond sales as ‘borrowing’, it would blow a massive hole in any fiscal rules. But they are correct in identifying that there is a market for more government bonds, which gives the lie to the idea that bond-holders are demanding that the government redeem existing bonds, aka ‘pay off debt’.

What they are all doing, though, is talking about the issue as though the constraint is a lack of money, when it really isn’t. The constraints on government spending on the military are firstly whether the spare physical resources (labour, materials, etc.) exist, and secondly, if they don’t, to what extent do we wish to prioritise weaponry over wellbeing by redirecting those resources. Treating money as the constraint serves only the few in society, and makes it more or less inevitable that the cost of increasing military expenditure falls, ultimately, on the wellbeing of the many. Destroying that which we wish to defend is no defence at all. It’s easy to see why the purveyors of war all want to avoid that question.

Is NATO nailed to the perch?

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Whether NATO is merely slumbering while it waits for the end of Trumpism in the US, or whether it has been nailed to its perch to give a misleading impression of life is an academic question, since in neither case can it be relied on (in the short term at least) to meet its stated objective of providing a collective system of defence. The Prime Minister of Denmark told us this week that it would be dead if the US launched a military attempt to take over Greenland. That sounds logical, although NATO ‘allies’ behaving aggressively towards each other isn’t exactly new. Think of the Cod Wars between NATO members Iceland and the UK in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, or the recurrent near-wars between Greece and Türkiye, occasionally involving the firing of real bullets. Threats by right-wing UK politicians against France or Spain were perhaps never really a practical proposition, but the mere fact that they were expressed shows that not everyone takes the alliance very seriously.

Invading and seizing part of the internationally-recognised territory of a fellow member state is on a different level, though. And when the invading force belongs to the largest and most powerful member of the alliance – the one which has been seen as the ultimate backstop since the founding of the alliance – that puts a more serious perspective on the question. Perhaps Trump will hold back from the military option. There are other approaches to getting what he wants (which seems – just like in Venezuela – to be more about oil and natural resources than about national security) although his love of macho action suggests he’d sooner deploy the military whether he needs to or not. Whether bullying, intimidation, and threats are any less of a danger to the NATO alliance than an actual military intervention is an interesting question; but one rather suspects that most of the members would prefer to keep their mouths shut and put the alliance on some sort of life support than pronounce it dead in such circumstances.

The wider question, though, is whether the alliance is already dead, de facto if not de jure. Trump has already made it clear that he will not come to the aid of any European country which hasn’t spent as much money as he declares necessary on buying US military hardware defence, and it's not at all clear that he would aid even those that do. In fairness to Trump – not a phrase which trips easily off the keyboard – I’ve long held doubts about the reliability of the US as a backstop under previous administrations, as well as about the role of the alliance itself. The difference between Trump and his predecessors is that he can’t help blurting things out where others preferred to maintain a more ambiguous silence. The bottom line is that an alliance dominated by one member and unable to operate effectively without that member ceases to be of any value if that one member goes rogue. Waiting for Trump to invade a fellow NATO member before declaring the organisation dead is pretending that the decaying corpse in front of us still shows signs of life. The question which European leaders should be debating is about building a new international order, starting in Europe, which does not depend on the dubious commitment of the military might of the US, and which is oriented towards avoiding wars rather than fighting them.

Poverty - a price worth paying?

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The military mind, to the extent to which that phrase is not an oxymoron, is a strange beast. It sees threats on all sides from people who want to invade and conquer, and the solution is always the same – more military hardware and personnel. To dismiss the conclusions of that strange beast is not the same as denying that there is any threat, it’s more that the threats aren’t the ones they want us to believe in. It’s true, of course, that some dictators actually want to expand the territories over which they rule – Russia’s dictator probably has eyes on more of his neighbours, although he’s almost certainly not mad enough to have learnt nothing from his costly behaviour in Ukraine. The USA’s dictator probably is mad enough to learn nothing from anything he does, and he too has designs on neighbouring territories.

There is, though, no serious threat from anywhere to invade the UK, and there is no country in the world which has enough resources to carry out a successful invasion and then to control and rule the territory afterwards. That particular threat is completely illusory – and it’s worth noting that there is little in the UK’s current military posture which is actually geared to prevent or resist a land invasion anyway. The threats are more subtle than that, and more guns and bombs will do little to prevent them. The question we should always be asking is why, exactly, would anyone want to attack the UK, and the only rational answer to that question is that they might be led to believe that the UK might otherwise attack them. Defence, in that context, implies an understanding of what might look to others like a threat and considering how to avoid that perception. As Simon Jenkins put it in the Guardian this morning in relation to China, soft power is more important than military power and “It is therefore absurd that the British government is planning to splurge billions more on defending Britain from a purely notional third world war [while] slashing the budget of its overseas cultural institution”.

There is another question which we should be asking ourselves, which was provoked by, even if it wasn’t quite the intention, the words of a retired general who said this week that we should reduce welfare spending to devote more resources to the military; and that question is very simple – who or what is it we are trying to defend? Reducing the spending power of the poorest in society to spend more on weaponry – clearly the implication of his words – means that he sees keeping some people in poverty as a price worth paying to defend us against his imagined threats. It illustrates clearly a dramatic difference in priorities. The problem we face is that most of our politicians seem to agree with him in principle – it’s guns before butter all over again.

There is one potential growth industry

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In order to maintain the fiction that government must always abide by the arbitrary fiscal rules that it itself writes, any additional expenditure in one area must be balanced either by cutting expenditure in another area, or else by increasing revenue. Or so says Sir Starmer. It’s dangerous nonsense, not least because it legitimises the arguments of all those arguing that ‘we should look after our own first’ by validating the idea that spending on refugees and asylum-seekers always and necessarily reduces the money available for homeless people (to choose one example), and especially homeless armed service veterans, a group considered by right-wingers as being particularly deserving. It would still be nonsense, even if it didn’t completely ignore the fact that the reasons for there being so many homeless people in that category are far more complex than a simple lack of cash or housing.

So when it comes to a demand from the military for more soldiers and more equipment, the first things in the government’s sights are, as ever, the old favourites: overseas aid, immigrants, welfare and the pensions triple lock. It is, apparently, entirely ‘obvious’ that those best-placed to bear the burden of paying for additional weaponry and military manpower are the poorest and weakest in society, both at home and abroad. Starmer’s announcement yesterday to divert money from the aid budget and increase the proportion of GDP devoted to preparing for war is hardly a surprise in that context.

The idea that defence preparedness should be measured by the proportion of GDP spent on armaments is, and always has been, a spectacularly stupid one, because there can never be any guarantee that spending more leads to a more effective fighting force. It could be achieved, for instance, by simply doubling the salary of every member of the armed forces. In itself, that might not be a bad thing to do anyway; the pay of junior ranks is not exactly over-generous, so maintaining the numbers involves targeting recruitment at young people living in the most deprived areas. (Recruitment isn’t currently terribly effective either, and whilst outsourcing recruitment might have generated private profit, it hasn’t done much for the numbers.) But increasing salaries wouldn’t make the forces any more useful for war-fighting. Alternatively, they could simply pay more for the equipment that they buy. That might sound like a silly idea, but given the MoD’s history in procurement, it’s one of the likeliest outcomes of an increase in budget. And while paying more for the same equipment (let alone buying equipment which either doesn’t work or is not needed) might help meet the arbitrary target of a percentage of GDP, it doesn’t improve the capability of the UK’s armed forces.

What Sir Starmer did yesterday is what he has been saying for months that he would not do, which is to pre-empt the conclusion of the Strategic Defence Review. Worse still, the reason he’s done it is more about appeasing the madman in the White House than about defending the UK. The working assumption of the military mind – and, it would appear, the Sir Starmer mind – is that the supposed enemy is just waiting for us to drop our guard before launching an all-out invasion to seize land and oppress the population. How likely is that in practice? Assuming for a moment that the enemy really wants to control the UK, invasion is about the least cost-effective way of doing it. Far better and a great deal cheaper in terms of lives as well as money to take over the country from within and install a puppet government, as committed to rule by oligarch as Putin himself is. It increasingly looks like a strategy which has worked beyond his wildest dreams in the US, and brings a bonus in that the puppet government can help him to repeat the trick elsewhere.

On the receiving end of Sir Starmer’s pusillanimity are some of the poorest and most underdeveloped countries in the world, already hit by the body blow of the Trumpian destruction of USAID.  Still, it is, as they say, ‘an ill wind…’, and for a government obsessed with growth there is one group of ‘entrepreneurs’ likely to see an increase in demand for their services – people smugglers. One of the likeliest consequences of aid cuts will be an increase in the number of people seeking to migrate from where they currently live to the richest countries of the world – including the UK – in search of a better life. Whether Sir Starmer’s attack on living standards of the poorest in the UK acts as a sufficient counter-deterrent remains to be seen.

Time to replace NATO?

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The Trump administration has been roundly criticized for the approach which it is adopting to ending the war in Ukraine. But there are two things which Trump says which are surely uncontroversial in themselves. The first is that the war needs to end, on which most will surely agree. The second is that some boundary adjustments will need to be a part of that, which is much more contentious, but nevertheless a statement of an obvious truth.

Those boundary adjustments, whether permanent or temporary, will inevitably involve Ukraine ceding territory to Russia because, realistically, the only way of returning to 2014 borders is for other countries to commit large numbers of troops and resources to the war alongside Ukraine. A third Europe-wide war doesn’t necessarily have to involve nuclear oblivion, but that’s an obvious risk. And there's surely some doubt about whether the youth of Europe in the twenty-first century are willing to be conscripted and sent to Ukraine to die. Asking, let alone instructing, Ukraine to concede territory is neither fair nor just, and Trump’s rationale – which appears to be that Putin has lost a lot of soldiers to gain the territory so deserves to keep what he’s paid for in blood – is an appalling basis for making a concession to aggression. It’s also very one-sided, ignoring the cost that Ukraine has paid to resist the aggression as though Ukrainian lives don’t matter. It is, though, hardly surprising coming from a man who sees everything in terms of transactions, who believes that the strong should dominate the weak, and who has already made it very clear that he rather likes the idea of emulating Putin’s land grab himself.

Even so, for a man whose self-image is that of a master dealmaker to concede much of what the other party wants in advance of any detailed talks is incongruous, to say the least. He surely realises that any process of negotiation will only involve further concessions, and that far from being a mutual process he has to date extracted precisely nothing from Putin in return. He’s also agreed that Ukraine will not be joining NATO for the foreseeable future. At least that one is within his authority. Since new members can only be accepted by unanimous decision, he can block membership although, again, conceding that publicly in advance of any serious talks doesn’t look like a masterstroke of bargaining. Nor does it suggest that he has thought further ahead than the next news cycle.

Personally, I’ve never been a fan of NATO anyway; the idea that dividing the world into hostile military blocks armed to the teeth is a rational long-term way of preventing war has always struck me as being a curious one. Trump has exposed the essential weakness of the alliance: if the most powerful member goes rogue, the alliance becomes meaningless. By declaring in advance that any peacekeeping forces deployed to Ukraine will not be acting on behalf of NATO, and that no attack on them by Russia will trigger the clause decreeing that an attack on one is an attack on all, he has rendered the alliance in its current form largely pointless and toothless, giving Putin the green light to attack the peacekeepers whenever he wishes. However, in the long term, if we can navigate our way through the period of danger which he has created, he might even be doing us a favour, albeit unintentionally.

The question is about how to respond. Whilst it would have been better to have approached the question in calmer times and with more time to work things through, challenging the whole basis of the alliance is not in itself a bad thing. European nations – including Ukraine – need to think about how best to bring about a secure and peaceful Europe which can co-exist with Russia to the east as well as with the US to the west, rather than simply depending on the military power of the US for the first and subservience to the US for the second. It’s potentially an opportunity to negotiate a mutual downsizing of military forces and to remove actual or perceived threats on both sides by re-establishing a degree of trust and co-operation, alongside a commitment to resolve disputes by negotiation within the framework of international law. It’s unclear whether Russia under Putin (or his successors – he won’t be around for ever, and we’re talking about long term solutions here) is ready to even begin such a process. Maybe it’s naïve to expect it to happen rapidly, but European states are hardly sending positive signals about their own willingness to engage in such a process either. The default position increasingly looks like some sort of attempt to build a replacement for NATO which excludes the US, and continue the armed stand-off, with Starmer's Labour in the vanguard, determined to look tough. That would be a huge missed opportunity to seek to find a long term positive in the short term chaos being unleashed by the madman in the White House.

Knowing your branches from your roots

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One of the new UK Government’s first acts has been to set up a comprehensive defence review, billed as a ‘root and branch’ review. A periodic look at what the UK’s defence needs are and how they might best be met is never a bad idea, but this one doesn’t look as open-minded as the billing suggests. According to the BBC, “The review will be overseen by Defence Secretary John Healey and headed by former Nato Secretary General Lord Robertson along with former US presidential advisor Fiona Hill and former Joint Force Commander Gen Sir Richard Barrons”.

None of these strike me as being particularly open-minded about possible alternative approaches. They all seem to already *know* what the risks are and what needs to be done about them, leaving me wondering what exactly a process taking the best part of twelve months is going to do, other than add a few details. As Starmer said in announcing the review, “We will make sure our hollowed out armed forces are bolstered and respected, that defence spending is responsibly increased” – meaning that the outcome is already largely determined, and it will involve a significant diversion of scarce resources into additional military expenditure. The only question is how that expenditure is divvied up between personnel, tanks, planes and ships.

In essence, it’s about responding to the risks they have identified by threatening those perceived to pose them. But a truly ‘root and branch’ review would also be asking about the causes of those risks and what might be done through negotiation and diplomacy to reduce them. The possibility that a military build-up might actually increase risk rather than reduce it is not one which any of those involved seem particularly disposed to consider. Starmer may be named after one of Labour’s pacifist giants, but he doesn’t share much, if anything, of the man’s philosophy.

Did Farage, albeit accidentally, have a point?

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That Nigel Farage hates the EU and sees it as some sort of evil dictatorship which enslaves its member states is hardly news. He blames the EU for almost everything that is wrong in the world. Most recently that extends to being part, along with NATO, of what provoked the Russians into invading Ukraine by daring to expand what Farage sees as the EU’s empire into parts of Europe which Russia thought in some way belonged in its sphere of influence. The choice of words is important, though: what Farage sees as EU-driven expansion to incorporate more countries will be seen by others as a case of states which have newly regained their independence choosing their own future. Whilst there’s no doubt that the existing members of both the EU and NATO were keen to draw countries in the east of Europe into their ranks, agency ultimately lay with those new members in the first place, not with the EU/ NATO. Those states were, to put it another way, exercising precisely that national sovereignty which is, apparently, so important to Farage, just in a way of which he does not approve. It’s legitimate to question whether they were making the right/ best choices – especially so in regard to the military alliance rather than the primarily economic and political one – but not whether they had the right to make them.

If the alternative was to avoid ‘provoking’ Putin, that would imply either that the states concerned agreed never to seek EU/ NATO membership, or that the EU/ NATO declined to accept them. Or even a bit of both. But there is a corollary to that – it would also mean that those states agreed to accept the effective political, economic and military dominance of Russia over them for the foreseeable future. In other words, Farage seems to see it as ‘better’ that those states cede a degree of sovereignty involuntarily to Russia than that they voluntarily share some of their sovereignty with others. Superficially, his demand for absolute sovereignty for the UK whilst limiting the sovereignty of countries to which Russia believes it has a right looks inconsistent. But it really isn’t: English nationalist exceptionalism has long held that some countries are more equal than others. And it isn’t only English nationalists – Farage is just invoking the same attitudes which led to the Munich agreement or the Yalta Conference, where European ‘great powers’ thought that they had the right to dismember and determine the future of lesser states over the heads of the people who lived there.

Whether EU/ NATO expansion did actually provoke Putin is another question entirely. He has certainly said that it was a factor, and it’s not hard to see why expanding the territory covered by NATO in particular up to the Russian borders could look like a threat, but a man who believes that large swathes of Europe historically belong to Russia – and that Ukrainians are just Russians speaking a strange dialect – could always have found another excuse to justify fulfilling his dream of reviving the Russian empire at some point. Wars are rarely caused by a single factor or event, and interpreting that expansion as a potential future threat still doesn’t justify launching a war against a neighbouring country.

But raising the question of whether NATO really did pose a threat to Russia does mean that Farage has gone to the very heart of the debate about the role of ‘defence’ in the modern world, even if almost certainly unwittingly. The nub of the argument is this: do armed blocs act as a deterrent or a threat; do they make war more, or less, likely? Specifically, if most of the former Warsaw Pact countries had not chosen to join NATO, would Putin have been more likely, or less likely, to seek to annexe all or part of Ukraine? The answer is essentially unknowable, which probably helps to explain the absolute certainty which people bring to the table when the issue is debated. Those who would have us spend ever more on armaments argue that it’s better to be safe than sorry, but it’s entirely possible that what they see as being ‘safe’ is actually the direct opposite if it makes it more likely that those who are supposed to be ‘deterred’ feel so threatened that they decide to take the risk of striking first.

What we do know, with a reasonable degree of certainty, is that using Earth’s finite resources to build ever more weapons makes those resources unavailable for other aims, and also that the long term future of all of us depends on achieving a degree of civilisation which recognises the need to share and co-operate in the way we use the Earth’s resources. Somehow, I don’t think any of that was in Farage’s mind when he opened his mouth.

Fighting the last war?

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Generals, so they say, are always preparing to refight the last war. It’s not entirely true, but there is an element of truth to the idea that military attitudes are always shaped to an extent by the last conflict in which they participated. One thing that does seem to hold true, however, is that they always believe that ‘the enemy’ is planning to attack and invade, a belief which justifies their persistent demands for more money and hardware. The current UK government is content to play along with this, at least partly in the mistaken belief that the Scots and the Welsh will understand that they can only be ‘protected’ by remaining part of a state which diverts huge sums into armaments, sums on a scale which Scotland or Wales could never afford.

The nature of this threat to UK territory is rarely elaborated, but generally attributed to Russia or China. Quite why Russia would want to invade the UK (even if the UK’s government wasn’t in the process of turning the country into a basket case) is never spelled out. Russia’s oligarchs find it easier and considerably cheaper to get what they want from the UK by bunging large sums of money at the Conservative Party, and China has no discernible interest in taking over a country more than 4,000 miles away. And if there’s no obvious reason or them to be interested in invading the UK, there is even less reason why they would somehow want to seize on the opportunity provided by independence to invade Scotland or Wales. It’s a form of madness to suggest that they would – and the madness of those in charge of the UK frightens me more than the fantasy of a Chinese invasion of Fishguard.

That’s not to say that there aren’t people (not necessarily states) in the world who want to harm the UK; it’s more about recognising that traditional warfare, whether by air, land or sea isn’t their chosen method, which means that tanks, guns and aircraft won’t help. The ‘inexhaustible’ energy beams which the PM was promoting last week won’t help either (although if they’ve really found an inexhaustible energy supply to power them, there are much better peaceful uses waiting, not to mention a Nobel prize or two and the complete rewriting of physics). Cyber security is more important for our future security than warships or planes, although why we need the predominately offensive capability proposed rather than a merely defensive one is another unanswered question.

But the real question which an increase in military spending doesn’t even attempt to answer is why there are people who want to destroy our society, and whether there are other things that we could do to make ourselves more secure. Not attacking other countries, and not building up an offensive capability to attack other countries might be a good place to start. A rules-based international order in which states agree rules and stick to them is another. Increasing rather than cutting economic aid to poorer countries is a third. It would be naïve to think that there won’t always be alternative world views which seek to impose their views on others, and we will always need a level of protection against that. We’d need rather less protection, though, if the UK wasn’t apparently doing its best at times to recruit more people to their cause.

What 'prizes' does he have in mind?

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One thing of which we can all often be guilty is a failure to understand a different point of view. It’s easy enough to understand why – but things which are ‘obvious’ to one person are not so to everyone else. But however normal it might be, it’s something which politicians in particular need to be careful about. The current Prime Minister is not only not careful about it, he doesn’t even seem to understand that it can be a problem.

There is no doubt that the boost to ‘defence’ spending announced yesterday will be popular amongst Anglo-British nationalists, and there is also no doubt that there are significant numbers of people in Wales (although perhaps rather less so in Scotland) who fit into that category and will be delighted. But in presenting it as an example of the strength and power of ‘the union’, Johnson seems to have completely missed the point that not everyone thinks that way. Worse, his claim that “If there is one policy that strengthens the UK in every possible sense, it is building more ships for the Royal Navy” is based on an assumption about attitudes to the UK’s grandiose notions which rather overlooks the fact that his target audience isn’t those who are already convinced about the union, but those who are not. And in his usual inept and bumbling fashion, he fails to understand that for those opposed to UK military aggrandisement and adventurism, his announcement will weaken rather than strengthen his case - independence offers a way out of excessive and outdated militarism.

Still, shooting himself in the foot by not understanding that not everyone is going to swell with pride at the announcement of further investment in technology to kill and maim is at one with his cloth-eared approach to most other issues.

There was one phrase in his speech which was worrying to say the least. In talking about modernising the armed forces and giving them new weaponry, skills, and techniques, he said that in the future “…the prizes will go to the swiftest and most agile nations, not necessarily the biggest”. I struggle to assign any meaning to that, and particularly the use of the word ‘prizes’, which does not imply that he sees military power as being a route to extracting something from less powerful or less well-armed states in the world by use, or by threat of use, of force. I suppose we were warned from the outset that the Brexiteers wanted to see Britain as a ‘buccaneering’ (i.e. pirate) state, although many of us assumed that they just meant that they wanted the UK to be a state which declined to follow the rules by which others live.

It’s not mere coincidence that the amount of extra military expenditure bears a similarity to the amount which they have been briefing that they intend to cut from overseas aid. That’s another indication of an intention to switch directly from the use of ‘soft’ power to the use of ‘hard’ power; the commitment to spending 0.7% of GDP on aid put the UK among the leading aid givers in the world, and it was in 2015 (under a Conservative-led government, curiously enough) that the UK became the first G7 country to enshrine that commitment in law. The Brexit project has always been about an attempt to turn back the clock, to return to an imagined golden age in which Britannia both ruled the waves and waived the rules. This latest announcement looks like another step along that path, but the assumption that the rest of the world will allow, or can be coerced into allowing, the UK to do what it wants – which was more or less the case in the days of empire - is yet another example of failure to understand that not everyone else shares their view of the world - and in this case spectacularly so.

Inconsistent and incoherent are inadequate words to describe announcing a hopelessly overhyped and underfunded ‘green revolution’ one day and a commitment to an increase in spending on armaments the next. If the government was run using logic and reason, that much would be obvious, but then a government guided by logic and reason wouldn’t have put the UK where it is today.

What do we mean by 'defence'?

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One traditional example of the sheer enormity of infinity is that given an infinite number of monkeys with typewriters and enough time, one of them will produce the complete works of Shakespeare, in the correct order.  When it comes to economists with computers making accurate predictions, we don’t even need an infinite number before one of them gets at last one thing right (although we do need a lot of them before that happens).  But when it comes to Presidents of the USA, even one of them, with a single phone and a few stubby fingers over three short months, can produce a dazzling, not to say bewildering, series of alternative policy positions on the same issue.  Who needs infinity when we have Trump?

Yesterday he told us that, regardless of what he had been saying for months, NATO is no longer obsolete.  The change is due, apparently, to the threat of terrorism, although an explanation of how the threat from terrorism suddenly changed in recent days might be something for which we will be kept waiting.  It’s a pity, though; NATO being obsolete was one of the few things on which I agreed with him.  The organisation was set up in and for a very different world than that in which we live today.

One thing on which he is – for the moment at least – remaining consistent in this context is that most members of NATO are not paying their agreed share of the costs.  I’m not convinced that he fully understands the way this works – and his apparent attempt to hand Germany a ‘bill’ for $300 billion due, in his view, to the US supports my interpretation.  The long-standing agreement between NATO states is not that anyone pays the US for anything; it is that they each devote 2% of GDP to ‘defence’.  But, forgetting for a moment at least my own opposition to NATO, I seriously wonder whether this is in any way a sensible way of judging the contribution of different states.

The question, surely, should be about how effective the contribution to common defence is, not about how much it costs.  The UK is, after all, one of the few states which generally achieve the 2%, but the UK is a classic example of how it is possible to spend money without contributing very much to anything.  After all, the country is building aircraft carriers without aircraft, has a fleet of submarines of which none is currently available for deployment, and spent £4bn on surveillance aircraft which were scrapped before ever entering service.  And there are other examples of expenditure which contributes little to military readiness, although they all help to reach the artificial 2% target.

Then there is the other question about what we mean by ‘defence’ expenditure.  The US and UK seem to see it solely in terms of military hardware and personnel, but Germany argues that at least some overseas aid expenditure should be counted, on the basis that it can help to avoid war in the first place.  On that, I’m with Germany.  Sadly, the UK Government seems to be with Trump on this one, preferring to spend more on preparing to kill people than on trying to avoid the situations which lead to the killing.  Even worse, the official ‘opposition’ in the UK, for fear of being perceived as weak on defence, is far closer to the Trump position than the German one.

Having a bigger (or at least more expensive) stick than any and every perceived or conceivable enemy isn’t the only way of avoiding future wars, and given the diversion of resources from more constructive purposes, it’s not the best either.  It isn’t being ‘weak’ to point that out, and we shouldn’t allow debate on the question to be shut down by the militarists and those who have most to gain from building weaponry.

Ready for what?

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During the campaign for the Scottish Independence referendum two years ago, one of the arguments used by opponents of independence was that Scotland would be ‘too small’ to defend itself against any aggressor intent on seizing its territory.  The way it was presented, there were enemies out there (usually assumed to be Russia) who were just waiting for such a sign of weakness in order to invade.  One of the problems with that argument is that almost exactly the same could be said for the UK. 

As a retired general told us at the weekend, the UK’s armed forces “are ill-prepared to defend the UK against a serious military attack”.  But if the test of any defence capability is the ability to withstand an all-out attack from Russia, then the chances of the UK ever being able to afford an adequate level of armed forces are close to, if not actually, zero.  The logic of the general’s argument is surely that the countries of the EU would need to combine their armed forces in to a single organisation (as indeed, some in the EU seem to want).  I somehow doubt, however, that that was what the general had in mind.

The underlying question is about how realistic it is to assume that there are enemies out there just waiting for an opportunity to invade and occupy the UK.  It seems to be axiomatic for the military that such is the case, but is it really?  The point is that any government has to decide on the probability of a particular scenario before deciding how much to invest in preparing for it. 

The old saying that “Generals are always preparing to fight the last war” seems relevant here; although in this case, the general’s view seems to overlook the last half dozen or so military adventures which have been of an altogether different type.  Perhaps they just don’t count as ‘real’ wars between proper armies, of the sort that the military mind can more easily comprehend.  But it’s a strange world indeed where stating that “Counter-terrorism is the limit of up-to-date plans and preparations to secure our airspace, waters and territory" is seen as a criticism that the government is unprepared, when for most of us it might look as though there is actually a degree of refocussing on what are the greater current threats.

Insofar as there is a logic to the demand that we should always be prepared for another major European war, it is based on an assumption that some or all other states are inherently aggressive and seeking to expand their territories, and an assumption that the best way to avoid such a war is to be always prepared to fight it.  That’s one reading of history; but there is an alternative reading which is that when enough states prepare for war against each other for long enough, such a war is ultimately more likely to happen.

My bigger concern is not that the UK is not ready to engage in a defensive conventional war against largely imagined enemies; it is that the UK is far too ready to engage in offensive wars, and too unwilling to engage in sensible disarmament processes.  

Not all change is good

Tweet Wales has travelled a long way in recent decades, and things haven’t always changed for the better.  There was a heady time thirty-odd years ago when all Wales’ councils came together to sign the nuclear-free Wales declaration.  How different things are today with the Welsh establishment seemingly falling over itself to welcome the heads of government of NATO, a military organisation which continues to argue that the possession of nuclear weapons is an essential part of ‘defence’.

It is partly a result of the insistence on continued possession of its nuclear armoury that the 28 member states of NATO account for around 70% of global military expenditure; yet one of the themes of the two-day extravaganza in Newport is apparently to be that member states aren’t devoting enough resources to the military, and should increase the total.

For what?  A military alliance which was supposed to be defensive has become more interventionist, and is planning to become even more so.  Acting well outside the borders of its member states, it is increasingly taking on the role of supporting US foreign policy on a global basis – it’s a long way from the founding basis that “an armed attack against one … would be considered an attack against all”.  Instead, it’s become the means by which the hegemony of one world view is maintained, and if necessary imposed.

It can be argued that there is a need for a military organisation with global reach to back up decisions taken by the UN, but it’s hard to see how an organisation so tied to the US, and whose membership is open only to “any other European state in a position to further the principles of this Treaty and to contribute to the security of the North Atlantic area” can ever be generally accepted in that rôle.  Indeed, it’s likelier that the existence of such a powerful military alliance will actually militate against the development of a true international police force.

One of my first ever interventions in Plaid Cymru’s policy formulation was to propose a conference motion in 1972 calling for Plaid to reject NATO membership for Wales.  It hit a little opposition from some good friends in London Branch, but was passed overwhelmingly.  As far as I’m aware, it remains Plaid’s policy.  It’s been a disappointment to me that Plaid’s sister party, the SNP, recently changed its policy to support Scottish membership of NATO – I think that was a huge mistake for the party to make.

When that nuclear free declaration was made back in 1982, many of us thought that Wales was on the road to becoming a land of peace; but in 2014, it seems to be a land which actively welcomes the warmongers.  As I said at the outset, not all change has been for the better.

How many submarines?

Tweet One of the most cringe-worthy moments prior to the 2007 assembly election was when David Williams asked Bethan Jenkins how many aircraft carriers an independent Wales would have.  To be fair, there are few people involved in politics who haven’t given an interview at some stage which they later regretted (and I certainly include myself in that), and the question itself was one of the silliest I’ve ever seen put to a politician; but the episode was, nevertheless, something of an embarrassment.

It led some to the view that since we didn’t have properly worked out answers to such silly questions we should simply avoid raising the question of independence at all.  That seemed to me to be something of a ‘baby and bathwater’ response.  It was precisely the lack of debate around independence and its consequences which led to the situation of candidates not being able to answer the question, rather than the other way around.

Whatever, the episode was brought to mind again recently when I read through the report of the House of Commons defence committee (available here) on the implications of Scottish independence on defence.  This time, however, the question seems to be about how many submarines and fast jets Scotland would need, where it would get them, and how it would pay for them.  On a per head basis, a split of UK military assets would apparently give Scotland 0.7 of an Astute class submarine and 1.6 frigates and destroyers.  As for fast jets, well perhaps around 10 -12 on my reading of the figures.  Not enough, say the MPs and military experts, to provide a “credible” defence for Scotland.

My first reaction was simply to dismiss this as yet another silly question, albeit not being asked by a journalist this time.  However, on reading the report, it became clear that it was not, after all, such a silly question – because the SNP’s defence policy does indeed call for Scotland to possess a fleet (size unspecified) of submarines and a fleet (size unspecified) of fast jets.  They have, in short, invited the question.

Whether Scotland actually needs submarines and fast jets is another question entirely.  It all boils down to what it is that Scotland needs to defend itself from and which countries are used as comparators.

For years, decades even, before some of the party’s leading figures got cold feet about discussing the issue at all, Plaid used to compare Wales with the Republic of Ireland, drawing on that country’s experience.  Ireland spends a low proportion of its GDP on defence, as a purely defensive capability which can also be deployed in support of the civil authorities and the Republic has long had a clear commitment to support UN peacekeeping activities.  Its policy is not predicated on the assumption that the rest of the world is just waiting to invade and conquer it at any sign of weakness.  And it doesn't go round the rest of the world pursuing a foreign policy likely to make it a target.

Contrast that with the UK stance.  Much of the UK’s armed forces constitute an offensive rather than defensive capability (aircraft carriers, for instance); and UK policy is indeed predicated on an almost paranoid assumption about everybody else’s intentions.

Faced with that contrasting scenario it is pretty clear to me which stance makes most sense from a Welsh – or Scottish – viewpoint.  The surprise and disappointment to me is that the SNP’s policy was recently changed to align itself much more clearly with the UK rather than Republic of Ireland view of the world.  This even extends to an expressed wish to join NATO – a nuclear armed alliance.  On that specific, I find it hard, no matter how much I might want to, to disagree with the House of Commons committee’s point that there’s more than a tiny inconsistency between the rejection of stationing nuclear weapons on Scottish soil and the embracing of membership of a nuclear alliance.

I can understand why the SNP wants to make independence look less of a risk, to be less of a major step, to be less different, in order to win the referendum.  But for me, being different and taking a different worldview is part of the point of independence.  Moving away from the imperial mind-set of the past is key to developing a different world order, and breaking up one of the old imperial powers is part of the route to doing that.  Replicating it on a smaller scale undermines what is for me a major plank of the case.

The answer to the question about submarines should surely be the same as the answer which should have been given about Welsh aircraft carriers – ‘why on earth would we want any of those?’.  It’s disappointing that that is not the answer being given - and they can't plead youth and inexperience either.

Butter not guns

Tweet There was a story recently about the problems being faced by General Dynamics UK, which will probably lead to a number of job losses in Wales.  I, no more than anyone else, want to see Welsh people short of jobs; we have enough of a problem in that respect already.

But General Dynamics is, of course, an armaments company; they refer to some of their products lovingly as ‘combat systems’; their business, ultimately is in the field of warfare and killing.

Calls to find ways of helping the company and retaining the jobs seem to me to be the wrong response to this particular situation.  I will never shed any tears over any job losses in the armaments industry.  And I’ve never been one for the idea that we should take any jobs at any price; expending time and resources on the production of weaponry is not something that I could or would support.

The question we should be asking is not how we keep these jobs but how we replace them – and all other jobs in the “defence” industry – with more useful and productive activity.  I don’t understand why so many of those amongst Wales’s politicians who claim to support the peace movement aren’t saying the same thing.

Manufacturing more armaments in Wales?

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I welcome the publication of the report by Plaid’s Economics Commission (Offa’s Gap, available here).  One of the problems with debating the economics of Wales is the lack of dependable figures.  For a variety of reasons, there are no such things as definitive answers, and this report itself has inevitably had to make estimates or inferences at times.  Nothing wrong with that; it’s sometimes the only option available.  The assumptions underlying those estimates and inferences will be, of necessity, open to challenge, but they seem to me to be reasonable.

The authors make it clear that this report is aimed merely at establishing what the baseline is, rather than at suggesting solutions, but there are some hints of possible ways forward.  In this context, it’s interesting to compare the report itself with the article based on it over at ClickOnWales.  That article is obviously very heavily based on the report – to the extent that many of the paragraphs in it are lifted, more or less unchanged, from the report itself.

There’s nothing wrong with that as an approach, but for those of us with reasonable short term memories, reading one followed by the other tends as a result to highlight the differences.  And there is one difference in particular which struck me as being interesting to say the least.

Take this paragraph from the article on ClickOnWales:

“Particular thought should be given to the opportunities offered in the public sector.  These include opportunities in the defence industry where Wales is currently under-represented in procurement terms.  They also include new opportunities arising out of the privatisation policies in health and education being followed by the Westminster Government.”

Then compare what I take to be the original, from the report itself:

“Particular thought should be given to the opportunities offered in the public sector, including potential new opportunities which may arise out of the privatisation policies in health and education being pursued by the Westminster Government.”

Spot the difference?  It leapt out at me, and I then went through the report again.  The word 'defence' doesn't appear in it once.  The ClickOnWales article, however, mentioned the ‘defence industry’ again towards the end, saying “Some of these prescriptions will be controversial for a variety of reasons.  What role is there for the defence industry at a time of falling defence spending?”

Why the proposal to expand the armaments industry in Wales appears in one but not the other is an open question.  An individual – in this case, Adam Price – trying to float an idea is the most obvious potential explanation.  Whether it’s a deliberate attempt by the party to float an idea at arm’s length, whilst retaining what Nixon called 'credible deniability', or whether it’s just an individual expressing a view is another open question however.

The one thing that is certain is that the extent to which the defence industry has a future at a time of falling defence spending is far from being the only thing that would make such a proposal controversial.  A deliberate decision to expand the defence industry in Wales would be a huge change from the position held by most members of Plaid over many decades.