EVENTS over the past days have yet again provided a stark reminder that justice and equality can never be secured in the build-up to conflict or in conditions of war. 

We witness in current warzones to which Iran has just been added, the impact of terror, death and injury, the destruction of homes, public infrastructure and services and the displacement of millions within their own countries and abroad as refugees. 

Women and children are disproportionately affected, including by the war crimes of assault and rape and murder both in the areas of battle and in the so-called “safe places” to which they flee.

The current British government is complicit, as the number one ally of the US, in all of the above. Anyone who had hoped that an incoming Labour government would work for peace and not war now has proof of where its allegiance lies — and it is not with the people either at home or around the world. 

This is a government of warmongers which is directly backing the continuing genocide in Gaza, the perpetuation of war in Ukraine and the widening of conflict in the Middle East, which brings the world to the brink of nuclear war. All the while, exactly as intended, the multinational arms dealers rake in their billions.

Their policies are set to continue as the recent Strategic Defence Review flagged up with more and more money and resources directed towards “defence” spending, putting the British economy on a war footing and militarising public opinion and public life. 

More British aircraft are deployed to warzones, armed to the hilt, and more surveillance information shared, key British bases upgraded and belligerent regimes armed — in Ukraine, Israel and Sudan. Hundreds of billions of pounds have already been allocated to Trident, and now more is to follow as new nuclear submarines find their way onto the order books of the military-industrial complexes.

At the same time, as debate after debate at Unison’s national delegate conference in Liverpool this week has exposed our local government is on the brink of collapse with jobs, services, infrastructure and communities devastated and our National Health Service, social care, education, housing, support services and public transport on the verge of ruin.

Calculations are that an immediate injection of £500 billion is needed, just for the restoration of public and democratically controlled services that meet people’s needs.

We must demand this and never accept the persistently argued lie that the money isn’t there. The channelling of the billions of pounds spent on defence into peaceful development at home, as argued in CND’s Alternative Defence Strategy published at the end of May, would also be the greatest gift to peoples across the globe to save them from the murderous assault to which the public funds of our people are directed.

According to Rachel Reeves, Britain has just sent more RAF jets to the Middle East to help “defend” Israel (from Iran), but, she says, that doesn’t mean we are at war. Without declaring war since 1942, Britain has fought or directly supported conflict in country after country alongside the US, Nato and EU allies — in Cyprus, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Ukraine and Gaza. Our demand must be to add no more countries and peoples to that list. Welfare, not warfare — everywhere, every time.