WE LIVE in an era where brazen lies are the ruling ideas in politics. The same is true in economics. So, Trump claims to be the “peace president” who ends wars when he is in fact the president who has attacked more countries than any other in living memory. Likewise, Keir Starmer claims to be a concerned bystander to both the Gaza genocide and the Iran war when he has provided significant support to the US in both.

Similarly, there is a huge campaign across the Nato countries to claim that too much is spent on socially beneficial programmes like welfare, or state retirement pensions, or health, and not enough is being spent on warfare.

There is one major exception to this general rule, which is the US itself, where Trump did not bother with any ideological campaign. He simply went ahead and cut over $500 million in federal spending on Medicaid and has followed that by aiming to increase the war budget by the same amount, to over $1.5 trillion.

Yet, for the other Nato member states, nearly all of which have significant social safety nets, or welfare states, this blatant “guns, not butter” economic policy is not so easy. In these countries, including Britain, there is a huge campaign under way to convince us all that welfare must be cut to finance warfare spending.

The argument from the war party is as follows: we are under current and/or imminent attack from our enemies (usually Russia or China), we spend far too little on the military (usually labelled defence) and we spend far too much on welfare and on state retirement pensions, so they must be cut to fund the shift to a warfare state. Furthermore, the war drive will be economically beneficial and create lots of well-paid jobs.

This argument is completely false at every step.

On the question of an imminent threat, these claims are ridiculous. Not even the most deranged warmonger currently claims that China has designs on invading western Europe or Britain. Separately, Russia is currently bogged down in a protracted war in Ukraine. We are constantly told that Russia is sustaining enormous losses simply in trying to hold the four provinces it has claimed yet is also somehow poised to sweep across Europe with total forces about one-third of Nato’s European non-US forces. The current war fever demands such absurdities.

Claims about welfare spending being out of control are also not supported by the evidence. Total welfare spending, including the state retirement pension, peaked in 2012-13, which was the depths of the recession following the global financial crisis and the imposition of austerity.

Since then, total welfare spending has fallen by 1.2 per cent of GDP, despite an ageing and growing population. In addition, welfare spending is expected to rise by just 0.1 per cent of GDP across the period until 2029-30.

On any objective, needs-based measure, total welfare spending cannot be “too high” as poverty is growing, including in-work poverty. Disability benefits have been cut and Britain has one of the lowest state retirement pensions in western Europe, as well as one of the latest retirement ages.

There is no crisis of “uncontrollable welfare spending,” either currently or prospectively. But there is a demand that welfare spending must be cut in order to finance the war drive.

What explains this high volume and relentless campaign to claim the opposite? In a word, Trump.

Trump began the clamour for higher military spending among the Nato countries on the campaign stump, claiming that they contributed too little to their own defence. Along with a leap in the US’s own military spending, this surge in total Nato spending is designed to provide the global military firepower for the US to reassert its dominance by military means, having ceded economic leadership to China.

But there is a wider motivation for cuts to welfare, which have formed a centrepiece to austerity ever since it was first imposed in 2010, long before the current war drive was ever conceived. This is the indirect effect of welfare cuts in lowering the social wage for all workers.

Lowering social wages in this way has the effect of lowering wages from employment. Effectively, workers are forced to take lower-paid jobs if welfare is cut or take on more work if benefit levels are reduced. The same applies to retirement pensions which are reduced or postponed, forcing retirees to take on work.

The purpose of lowering wages is of course to increase profitability. This has been the central aim of the entire austerity project. However, the strategy has not gone strictly to plan. It is true that there has been enormous suffering.

A UCL report found over one million excess deaths in this country up to 2019, and austerity has not been reversed since. It has been deepened.

Yet the central aim has not been met. Profitability in the British economy is still declining along with other western European countries (although the exception is once again the US, where profits are rising robustly).

The war drive therefore creates an opportunity to double down on the austerity attacks, with the pretext that an existential threat provides sufficient motivation for all sorts of cuts that would have been impossible previously.

The supporters of austerity and war clearly hope that the war propaganda will also curb opposition to manageable levels. The plan is that there are no more back-bench rebellions or successful strikes.

In that light it is essential that the organised working class understands the nature of the attacks and how the austerity and war drives are linked.

It is factually incorrect and politically inept for trade unionists to support the war drive, knowing that it can only be made possible by deepening austerity.

The arguments that military spending is jobs rich are spurious. Even compared to the beleaguered British manufacturing sector as whole, military spending provides only a fraction of the sector’s jobs or output.

Much of the MoD’s procurement is sourced from overseas, especially the US. There are far better ways to support manufacturing jobs than through military spending.

More fundamentally, the working class and the poor simply cannot afford Britain’s role in Trump’s war drive. They will be the ones who are forced to pay for it and have every interest in rejecting that imposition.