# Keir Starmer, you claim huge and damaging cuts are vital so we can buy arms and defend ourselves. Prove it

. Earlier this year, Nato’s secretary general, Mark Rutte,  European nations start hiking defence spending at the expense of pensions, health and social security. Fail to do so, he warned, and the only recourse would be to “get out your Russian language courses or go to New Zealand”.

In this increasingly feverish atmosphere, it becomes ever more difficult to ask for a bit of perspective, but it is necessary. European elites are panic-stricken after Donald Trump hit the accelerator away from US hegemony, a trend already long under way. Meanwhile, Labour figures  that this could be Keir Starmer’s “Falklands moment”, using Ukraine’s agony to transform the government’s calamitous polling, speaking to a grubby political opportunism. Britain’s current trajectory could raise a much graver menace than Russian invasion: domestic social turmoil and an ascendant radical right that threatens democracy itself.

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Britain is now on a “”, we are told. Earlier this year, Nato’s secretary general, Mark Rutte,  European nations start hiking defence spending at the expense of pensions, health and social security. Fail to do so, he warned, and the only recourse would be to “get out your Russian language courses or go to New Zealand”.

In this increasingly feverish atmosphere, it becomes ever more difficult to ask for a bit of perspective, but it is necessary. European elites are panic-stricken after Donald Trump hit the accelerator away from US hegemony, a trend already long under way. Meanwhile, Labour figures  that this could be Keir Starmer’s “Falklands moment”, using Ukraine’s agony to transform the government’s calamitous polling, speaking to a grubby political opportunism. Britain’s current trajectory could raise a much graver menace than Russian invasion: domestic social turmoil and an ascendant radical right that threatens democracy itself.

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The Soviet Union was a far more formidable military foe, and it attempted just one invasion outside its postwar bloc: Afghanistan in 1979, which proved so calamitous it helped bring the whole edifice down. After the bloody Ukrainian debacle, the idea that Moscow’s rulers are going to march across  in an attempt to subsume entirely hostile populations is fantastical. Even the Baltic states – despite their small size and population – seem a stretch. Investing in the defences of these specific nations makes sense; but asking western European nations to throw vast sums at their own defence budgets does not.

That’s not to say  or indeed other countries and non-state actors couldn’t pose other threats, such as cyberwarfare. In that case, governments should direct spending there specifically. As Martin Shaw, professor of international relations at Sussex University, tells me, the “defence establishment is so unfit” for judging what is needed; instead, we need “a root-and-branch” examination of defence spending, to assess where savings can be made, to pay for actual priorities.

Here is the real threat. So far, Labour has butchered  to pay for defence. That will cost lives, but it is superficially highly popular: although when voters are asked about spending on specific humanitarian commitments, such as aid to Ukrainian civilians, the results are . Nonetheless, given Labour’s refusal to increase taxes on the well-off, future defence spending hikes are likely to come at the expense of public services and social security. Research also suggests that  is bad for economic growth, particularly in richer countries. The Soviet Union itself crumbled in part because of its excessive defence budget.

Starmer suggests defence spending will benefit Britain’s crisis-ridden living standards. That is disputed by the Common Wealth thinktank, , in the past financial year, of the £37.6bn spent by the Ministry of Defence, nearly 40% went to just 10 companies. Despite vast public subsidies, the arms industry employs a , declining from more than 400,000 in the early 1980s to about 134,000 people now.

We are already in a position where radical rightwing parties are surging across Europe thanks to austerity and stagnating living standards. The far-right demagogue in the White House owes his victory, in part, to squeezed US workers’ wages. In Germany’s recent election, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) doubled its vote in part because the economic consequences of Russia’s invasion hurt voters. Support for hardcore rightwing parties has risen steadily since the financial crash: they are now  in Europe. Hiking military spending at the cost of social expenditure will undoubtedly fuel them even more. Europe’s pursuit of a phantom menace may prove its actual ruin.

* Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
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