„Wages not Weapons“

german-foreign-policy.com: You co-authored the Alternative Defence Review, which has been published this year. What exactly is it?

Alex Gordon: The Alternative Defence Review is a collaborative project published at the end of May 2025. It was written by a working group that was brought together by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) of which I’m a member and by trade unionists from a number of different unions together with journalists and academics specialised in defence, security, the arms trade and political economy. The project was the result of a proposal from my union, the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT) which is the largest railway workers and transport union here in Britain.

german-foreign-policy.com: What exactly did RMT propose?

Alex Gordon: In 2022, our annual RMT conference took place in June just after the NATO summit in Madrid. We noticed that the United States under President Biden was talking about increasing the proportion of GDP that NATO member states should devote to military spending. At that time, the official target was to reach two per cent of GDP in 2024. Britain with one of the largest military budgets, was already spending that amount. The UK is one of the largest arms spending countries in the Western world. We were very concerned about that but also about what we saw as being a march towards militarisation in the West. This of course was all taking place just four months after Russia had invaded the Donbas and taken control of parts of Lugansk and Donetsk oblasts. The political climate in Britain as in many other European countries was becoming rapidly more bellicose. We saw media and political figures every day, not only criticising, but demonising Russia, demonising China as well. We saw a clear increase in Sinophobia in Britain.

So, we were very concerned about this. RMT took a position in 2022 to call for a labour movement summit on peace and to develop discussions around foreign policy based on peace and diplomacy instead of war. Then, we saw in October 2023 the commencement of the devastating genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza, which is still continuing despite the ceasefire. We’ve seen the ramping up of military hostilities in West Asia – the Middle East as it is often called – with a hot war taking place between Israel and Iran including use of intermediate ballistic missiles. We’ve seen British RAF aircraft used to bomb Yemen. We’ve seen the British RAF air base at Akrotiri in Cyprus, which is a key strategic asset for Western imperialism, used not only to launch spyflights across Gaza to provide intelligence to Israel, but being used, too, as a base for importing heavy weaponry from the United States on its way to Israel. And of course, while all of this was happening we’ve seen the most devastating war in the world in terms of human casualties taking place in Sudan, funded by the UAE, Egypt and the Saudis, and the ongoing war in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

In this context, we felt that to call for a labour movement summit on peace was necessary but not enough: The appeal rings hollow unless you put in place some positive concrete steps and proposals. So, after some further discussions in 2023 we decided to develop a relatively short but detailed and hopefully well referenced document which readers could access to find out more about the ongoing militarisation drive. This document would set out the way in which the West was creating a new world order that was based on militarism, on constant forever wars, and which we felt was tipping dangerously towards the real possibility of a war between the global superpowers, especially Russia and the United States which are nuclear armed – a war which would lead to the extinction of most life on this planet.

german-foreign-policy.com: This document – it is the Alternative Defence Review?

Alex Gordon: Yes, indeed it is.

german-foreign-policy.com: Before we go deeper into it, it isn’t a new phenomenon that British trade unions like RMT fight for peace, is it?

Alex Gordon: Not at all. It is true that the British trade union movement is imbued with imperialism – it emerged from the development of capitalism in a country which had the first Industrial Revolution and, based on it, built the world’s largest empire of the 19^th century. But at the same time, the development of British capitalism also contained the seeds of critical, of socialist thinking. There are a number of examples historically where British trade unions have taken action against war. The most famous ones would be in 1918/1919 when British dockers refused to load arms onto ships that the British government was trying to send to Russia in order to arm the White Russian armies to crush the Russian Revolution. The Russian Revolution, by the way, was greeted ecstatically in Britain during the First World War. There were mass demonstrations in coal mining communities in the valleys of South Wales where thousands of people came out of their homes to celebrate. In 1921, the trade union movement created Councils of Action, which were local councils of trade unions influenced by revolutionary socialists and communists, formed to take strike action in opposition to the British government war of intervention to crush the Russian revolution.

After the Second World War, Transport and General Workers’ Union (T&GWU) General Secretary, Frank Cousins – T&GWU today is one of Britain’s biggest unions, Unite – told his union conference in 1957 that separating trade unionism and politics was a false distinction. The T&GWU adopted a position of opposing British use of the atomic bomb arguing that defence policy based on the threat of use of nuclear weapons was morally wrong, militarily dangerous and economically unsound. Frank Cousins was an early supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament which was established in 1957. The argument against nuclear weapons has run through the labour movement in the 70 years since. In the last two decades, we’ve seen a number of occasions where the trade union movement has come out firmly on the side of peace and against war. In 2003, for example, we’ve seen trade unions with left wing leaders opposing Britain’s illegal war in Iraq in support of the United States in 2003.

But more importantly perhaps – there is a need to develop an alternative industrial plan, which can give workers a hope and a belief that it is possible to generate more wealth, safer jobs, better incomes, a better future for themselves and their families by diversifying away from arms production. One of the things that we discovered by doing the research for the Alternative Defence Review was the damage that military production does in many of the towns that are reliant on the arms industry. There are towns like Barrow-in-Furness in the north-west of England which has a nuclear submarine building base where the local population are given iodine tablets as protection against possible nuclear radiation leaks from the arms industry. Even without these horrible medical aspects, what is quite clear is that the towns which are dependent on the arms industry are some of the poorest communities in Britain. They are communities based on service sector jobs, serve people who come into the town in order to do their job to build weapons and get out of the town as fast as possible to go back to wherever they live. There is a clear case for arguing that these abandoned communities need an alternative.

german-foreign-policy.com: What could an alternative look like?

Alex Gordon: There is a history of alternative economic plans which goes back to the 1970s. In 1976, the Shop Stewards’ Committee at Lucas Aerospace, a very important, private sector company designing and manufacturing military and civil components for the aerospace industry produced the Lucas Plan, a comprehensive plan for how plants could be retooled and redirected to produce medical equipment, transport equipment and much more. It was a fully costed plan. There were also attempts by the T&GWU in the 1990s and 2000s to develop alternative strategies for arms industry diversification by using the skills of engineering workers to produce renewable energy components, turbines – in short: moving their skills from the military to the civilian sector. It is important that plans like these are put together by workers who have direct relevant experience in the techniques and the tools and the technology that they are using.

What is missing today, of course, is a government agency able to direct that process of arms diversification. You can’t pull off this type of diversification process without the state. The state needs to direct it. During the five-year period of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party (2015-20), it developed proposals to establish a Defence Diversification Agency staffed by civil servants whose job would be to channel state investment into socially productive sectors and away from the military sector. As soon as current Prime Minister, Keir Starmer replaced Corbyn as Labour Party leader, he ditched that commitment, so it no longer exists. But it is something that we need to remember because it’s a critical component of a serious defence diversification strategy.

german-foreign-policy.com: Let’s get back to the Alternative Defence Review. What are its main elements?

Alex Gordon: In short, the Alternative Defence Review sets out first of all an explanation of the political origins of this new war narrative which we’re now subjected to. Our research looks at the fact that in the British context, after the financial crisis of 2008, the government published two Strategic Defence Reviews, one in 2010 and one in 2015. They took an approach towards the British military around retrenchment, trying to cut costs. They looked at reducing the size of the British army. British army regiments were cut or amalgamated. At the same time, the military industrial complex and the generals were placated with very expensive arms projects to make sure the big arms companies and their supply chains kept a flow of government investment.

All this changed dramatically around 2020, when a number of things happened. On 31 January 2020, Britain finally left the European Union, after three and a half years of tortuous negotiations with Michel Barnier and the European Commission. In July 2019, we saw the arrival as Prime Minister of Boris Johnson. Johnson represented a particularly militaristic wing of the Conservative Party which wanted to project Britain’s military power as a subaltern, loyal servant of the United States, at the same time acting militarily in theatres all around the world from the South China Sea to the Caribbean. In 2020 this led to a dramatic reversal of UK state policy from retrenchment to rearmament. It’s clear that this change was supported by key figures in the United States government at that time within the Biden administration, around Victoria Nuland and Robert Kagan, founder of the Project of the New American Century. The neoconservative circles around Nuland were specifically responsible at this time for promoting the strategy of tension in Ukraine which ultimately led to the hot war in February 2022.

Their main strategy, though, was to argue that the US needed to trigger a military intervention to forestall the rise of China, the world’s greatest economic superpower which would eclipse the United States. China occupies a unique position in world history as the first country to achieve economic superpower status before it developed as a military superpower. The US neoconservatives set various deadlines – 2027 is cited by some US generals – for a hot war with China, without which they argue the US will fall qualitatively and quantitatively behind China in terms of economic output. In terms of purchasing power parity (PPP), that development has already occurred.

german-foreign-policy.com: What did that mean for the UK?

Alex Gordon: From 2020 onwards, we see the sharp pivot in British military policy I mentioned – from retrenchment to rearmament. It’s associated with key political figures and academic advisors, and we were able to show this in the Alternative Defence Review and explain who these people are, what they were arguing for and the particular steps they wanted to take in order to push the rearmament button. In the British context, probably the key treaty which they were responsible for was the AUKUS treaty signed in September 2021, the Australia/United Kingdom/United States treaty which essentially escalated militarisation of the seas around China. It mobilised a defence package which meant that Australia would be able to source nuclear powered submarines for deployment in the Pacific. Shortly before signing the AUKUS treaty, in June 2021, Britain had signed the New Atlantic Charter with the United States, supposed symbolically to mirror the Atlantic Charter that they signed in 1941 when the United States came into the Second World War.

All of this was choreographed and supported by powerful political figures on both sides of the Atlantic. We were bequeathed a domestic political argument for massive rearmament in Britain. Initially, Boris Johnson chose a series of inflation plus targets by which to increase defence spending every year. But then, Johnson’s chaotic administration came to an end, and he was replaced by other conservative figures even more chaotic until we approached the 4 July 2024 general election. The Conservative Party was swept out of power, receiving the lowest vote in a general election for decades, and the Labour Party came into government with a huge majority which they used to ensure continuity of the previous Conservative government’s arms, defence and security policies. Especially with regard to Ukraine, there was a continuous escalation towards military rearmament, towards the reorientation of the British economy to arms manufacturing at the expense of the welfare state, of public services, of social services.

All this was given further impetus in November 2024 with the election of Donald Trump. Trump as US President. Trump was elected on a deliberately confusing programme in which he styled himself as ‘peace president’. After his inauguration on 20 January 2025, he immediately ramped up US military threats against Greenland, Panama, Nigeria, and Venezuela. The jewel in the crown for the global militarists was the 2025 NATO summit at which NATO member states agreed to pledge themselves to a target of five per cent of GDP for military spending.

german-foreign-policy.com: What else can be found in the Alternative Defence Review?

Alex Gordon: We did some research about how the British government has promoted its war narrative through the media, but also through schools and universities. We argue that there is a development of what I’ve called MIMAC – a Military Industrial Media Academic Complex – which bridges institutions from broadcasting to higher education to the arms companies themselves and indeed to the politicians that they bribe. So, we’ve set out the harmful effects on democracy in Britain. We’ve written about how the UK’s current approach based on military expenditure and magnified perceptions of threat is driving social and environmental harm – not just in this society but globally. That is an area in which trade unions have become much more engaged in the last 15 to 20 years: awareness of not just global net zero targets, but of the real damage that industrial processes and their members’ jobs are doing to the planet. The biggest contributors of all to global warming are, of course, military production and wars. A key example of that would be the disastrous sabotage that blew up the Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic Sea, with the release of huge amounts of methane, which was released over Scandinavia.

We also looked at the waste involved in military spending in the British context. It’s a money pit in which there is no accountability for the loss of massive quantities of public money. Of course, none of these arms companies put in their own investment. They are dependent on state investment and public money; arms companies suck up and displace research and development investment. Britain has the lowest industrial productivity of all the G7 nations. We have an economy run on cheap workers, cheap contracts, low wages. That is the key to the British economic model. It’s cheaper to get somebody to wash a car by hand for five pounds an hour than it is to invest in machinery to do the same job more efficiently and cheaper but which requires capital outlay. One of the reasons for this is because research and development in Britain is dedicated to the arms sector. It is dead money.

german-foreign-policy.com: What about the claim that the military sector is a source of economic growth and a creator of jobs?

Alex Gordon: It’s simply a myth. In the Alternative Defence Review, we’ve taken apart claims by UK government ministers that defence and arms spending is an ‘engine of growth’. We’ve looked at the scale of the expenditure and at the small number of jobs that are created; we’ve also looked at what could be done with that money if it was invested in the things people really need, such as a new transport system, new hospitals, schools, insulating our incredibly bad housing stock, building new houses – we’ve got a terrible housing crisis in Britain. There is a long list of spending commitments that our governments should be making, but don’t because we’re supposed to spend five per cent of our GDP – actually £127 billion a year – on the military industrial complex instead. In the final chapter of the Alternative Defence Review, we’ve put together arguments for defence diversification and for the need for just transition, a term we use in the trade union movement to describe the transfer of jobs with good working conditions to ensure that the workers are not the victims in the process of diversification.

german-foreign-policy.com: How has the Alternative Defence Review been received by the labour movement?

Alex Gordon: It has been welcomed by large numbers of trade unionists and those on the left. It has also had a wider impact on the trade union movement. We saw in September 2025 at the Trades Union Congress (TUC) main conference in Brighton, the motion proposed by the University and College Lecturers’ Union (UCU) for “Wages not Weapons”, which won a strong majority and reversed the policy adopted by the TUC three years earlier at the peak of Boris Johnson’s militarisation drive. In 2022, just as Johnson was promising to spend big dollars on arms, the TUC adopted a proposal from one of the engineering and manufacturing trade unions to support demands for increases in arms spending in order to increase jobs. In 2025, we succeeded in reversing that and pointing out that the money taken from schools, hospitals, local services, public services, the health service, to pay for increasing arms expenditure is costing jobs and cutting services and is damaging the social welfare of the workers we represent. I seconded the motion. It was a great trade union political debate, and we won the vote overwhelmingly against some very entrenched interests. It was an important victory, and I think the Alternative Defence Review has contributed to changing the debate inside the trade union movement in Britain. It has also given the peace movement a much clearer idea about the role of the working class and of trade unions in fighting for peace.