https://www.councilestatemedia.uk/p/rishi-sunak-has-money-for-war-but
He has put the UK on a "war footing" without asking anyone
Apr 25, 2024

Without consulting parliament or the public, Rishi Sunak has declared the United Kingdom is on a “war footing” at a time when we don’t have enough soldiers to fight a war without conscription. It seems no coincidence that Sunak chose Poland to make his World War III announcement in which he conjured up £75bn for the “defence” budget out of thin air. I’m old enough to remember when the £55bn investment pledges in Labour’s last manifesto were “totally unaffordable”.

Sunak insisted money for bombs was the best way to secure our prosperity, but said the commitment would be funded, in part, by cutting 72,000 civil service jobs to save £2.9bn. Grant Schapps said this is “very reasonable”.

The equivalent of a packed football stadium is about to be thrown on the scrapheap when a one-off wealth tax could raise £262bn, just so we’re clear on where Sunak’s priorities lie.

Defence is just another excuse for austerity. The people in charge will use every dirty trick they can to make you poorer and themselves richer. Their latest trick is to take us to the brink of World War III so you’re too afraid to question their greed. With any luck, invoking Churchill might help Sunak claw back 2 or 3 points in the opinion polls.

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Sunak has promised President Zelensky £3bn a year, which is the wages of the civil servants he’s sacking and a bit extra. The only reason Ukrainians are still being led to the slaughter is because Boris Johnson flew to Kyiv for a photoshoot and told Zelensky to cancel the peace deal with Putin. Just think how many Ukrainians might still be alive if we never elected the guy who puts crayons up his nose.

Interestingly, Sunak used the justification that if we don’t invest billions in Ukraine, it will cost us more in the long-term. This is a logic Tories are incapable of grasping when it comes to things like nationalising energy, or tackling homelessness, or feeding hungry school kids, but suddenly, they can use that argument when it comes to war?

We could take 250,000 children out of poverty and reduce the poverty of a further 850,000 for just £1.3bn by scrapping the two-child welfare cap. So for just £4.2bn a year, 72.000 civil servants could keep their jobs and 1.1 million kids could eat decent meals, but bombs, we have to spend more money on bombs!

Wouldn’t it be lovely if the prime minister said we’re going to declare war on homelessness because this will save us money in the long-term? Imagine if we called houses for the homeless “bombs for the Middle East”. Imagine how quickly we’d find find that money!

Unfortunately, we don’t get a war on homelessness, but we do get a war on the disabled and we get an actual war. Goodie.

Not only are we letting kids go hungry and putting a football stadium’s worth of civil servants on the dole, we’re stopping disability benefits for people after 12 months at a time when we have a hospital waiting list of 7.6 million, but we can shake £75bn out of the magic money tree for war?

Personally, I wouldn’t have a problem with increased defence spending if I could trust our leaders to not bomb every country the US and Israel asks them to, and if they would invest in things like public services, but they won’t. Instead of peace and prosperity, they offer us war and poverty.

“We must not overstate the danger. We’re not on the brink of war and nor do we seek it,” Sunak said while declaring we’re on a “war footing”.

Not a week goes by when I don’t see a newspaper article from some military type telling us we’re on the brink of World War III and we need to introduce conscription. The media is doing everything it can to psychologically condition us for war. Only problem is the generation they would need to fight that war can see right through them. It would be genuinely funny to see them try to bully gen Z into becoming cannon fodder. I’m sure there are a few pro-war patriots among older generations who would volunteer to fight though, right? No? So we’re in agreement this “war footing” is an incredibly stupid idea?

Given we’re a nuclear power, there is zero chance of any country attacking the UK, even if our Trident missiles are so rubbish they spiral into the sea on test launches. This is why I have zero trust this military spending will be for defensive purposes. I could see a justification for increased military spending if we weren’t a nuclear power, but we are.

When we’re increasing public spending, we’re not doing it to defend our own back yard but to fight in someone else’s. We keep hearing the word “defence”, but who is defending us from poverty, homelessness, exploitative bosses, and a collapsing health service? Because all those things count as threats to our safety: austerity is much more likely to kill you than Putin or Hamas.

The UK has already been dragged into Israel’s “war” without any parliamentary vote. Our planes have been doing reconnaissance for Israel and the MoD will not clarify what additional support we have provided. We do know we’ve been bombing the Houthis to punish them for trying to stop a genocide though. We are active participants in that genocide. Our taxes are not spent on defence, they are spent on the most despicable aggression. When the spending goes up, the despicable aggression goes up.

An Israeli drone massacred 11 kids in a playground and naked people were found with their hands bound is mass graves and yet we ask Israel to investigate its own war crimes and we keep giving it military support, even though it’s illegal to do so.

Sensible centrists sneered at the election of George Galloway, but he’s the one member of parliament who is robustly standing up to this lunacy. He might not appeal to your sensibilities, but he sure as hell appeals to the people in Gaza. Imagine a dozen MPs fighting back like Galloway. Now imagine 100. They’d achieve an awful lot more than Keir fucking Starmer. Hell, we might even stand a chance of averting World War III. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Perhaps if the opposition behaved like an actual opposition and called out our government’s complicity in genocide instead of supporting it, we would be on a peace footing instead of a war footing, but that’s not gonna happen and that’s why our politics is so repugnant.