KEIR STARMER justifies the immense increases in military spending stretching years into the future by reference to “threats” to Britain from purportedly hostile states.

The defence review outlining their plans identified four such states — China, Russia, Iran and North Korea.

It is a list instructive of the mind of the British Establishment and its historical amnesia. Take China first.

Over the last 200 years these are things China has not done — it has not fought two wars to force drug addiction on the British people. It has not militarily intervened to put down a disturbance here.

It has not annexed the Isle of Wight as a colony for more than 100 years. It is not today sailing its aircraft carriers around our shores, nor forming new military pacts with other powers directed at our integrity.

Yet Britain has done, or is doing, all these things to China. 

Likewise, Russia has never landed troops in Scotland with the purpose of overthrowing the British government, as Britain did during the civil wars after the October Revolution. 

Nor are there Russian troops parked on our frontier, although there are plenty of British forces in the Baltic states abutting Russia.

Neither this nor any previous Iranian regime has organised a clandestine coup to overthrow an elected Westminster government. Yet that was what Britain’s MI6, in alliance with the United States, did in Iran in 1953.

That led to a quarter-century of dictatorship by the Shah, underwritten and supported throughout by Britain. The Royal Navy today patrols the Persian Gulf — clue in the name — but scan the horizon of the North Sea as one might, one can not catch a sight of an Iranian warship.

And North Korea was laid waste by British troops, again in concert with the US, to stop its socialist unification in 1950. But no North Korean soldier has as much as set foot on British soil.

Who is the real threat here? Both the historical record and contemporary politics show that it is the armed forces of imperialist Britain which menace independent countries across the world, not the other way around.

That is why the arms spending increases — with 3 per cent of GDP going on the military likely only a first step given Nato’s war frenzy — will not only fail to make Britain safer, it will ramp up conflict in many theatres, from Europe to the Middle East to the Pacific.

Starmer claims that he is making Britian “war-ready.” Yet this century alone, while supposedly basking in a “peace dividend,” Britain has waged aggression against Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen.

Plans to deploy British forces to Ukraine only underline the point. If this is the record before the country is “war-ready” what can we expect once the neo-imperialists of Whitehall are still more tooled up?

Ultimately, it is the politics of war, not the technology of it, which is decisive. A big army of a peaceful power, like China, is far less of a menace than a smaller one in aggressive hands.

Almost the entire record of the British Establishment throughout the ages shows that it cannot be trusted with large armed forces. Today it deploys those forces, usually at the behest of the US, to enforce a world order privileging British capitalist interests.

Millions have paid the price for that order. Even were the arms build-up not coming at the expense of the immediate interests of working people here, no-one in the labour or progressive movements can welcome giving our rulers renewed resources for aggression and domination.

Internationalism demands resistance to British militarism and imperialism.