Arms spending up £l billion
Socialist Press1981 1981-01-28Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 8 →
Read from the scan by machine and not corrected: expect misread words, and now and then a caption or a line from a neighbouring story. For anything you quote, read the scan.
Scan page 8
The Tory government is proceeding to increase military spending by £1 billion next year-while slashing back on housing, social services, education and health.
The proposals announced in Parliament by the new Defence Secretary John Nott were proclaimed as a £200 million cut'. But in reality the Tory war drive is continuing, with an arms budget up from £11.25 billion to £12.25 billion.
The marginal cuts involve the earlier scrapping of defunct ships and equipment: but is compensated by the fact that as the recession grows ever-deeper, new equipment is being produced faster than expected by arms manufacturers with little else to do.
These manufacturers have been cushioned from the main impact of Nott's curtailed spending plans-which leave untouched the colossally expensive Trident submarine project, the Tornado multi-role combat plane, the new Challenge tank and the Navy's two new antisubmarine cruisers.
Suppliers can thus rest easy in their beds, knowing that their profitable contracts are secure.
But for British workers there no such silver lining. Thatcher's arms programme is being sustained at the cost of vicious cuts in hard-won social services, the loss of tens of thousands of jobs each week in manufacturing industry, and at the risk of dragging Britain behind Reagan into a military confrontation of major proportions.
"Growing Nott explicitly pointed out that the "defence" policy of the Tories is designed to counter what he termed "the growing threat from the Warsaw Pact"
There is no "threat from the Warsaw Pact". The Stalinist bureaucrats seek only to preserve their own positions through "peaceful coexistence" with imperialism.
The threat comes from a decaying and bankrupt capitalist system that seeks through military force to preserve its rule and its exploitation of the neo-colonial countries-and to intimidate the working class within the imperialist countries themselves.
The threat is personified in Britain in the aggressive policies of the Thatcher government.
To counter it, the working class must be mobilised in struggle to defeat the Tory government and force through a policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament.