“YOU’RE just a war criminal,” the heckler said, appearing seemingly from nowhere.

“If you’re working inside the arms industry, that makes you a war criminal. You’re complicit with imperialism,” she said, directing her ire at the Unite union rep sitting next to me.

“How am I?” he asked as the rest of the table fell into an awkward silence.

The rep was one of the speakers at a panel discussion at The World Transformed (TWT) Festival 2025 in Manchester last Saturday, focused on opposing militarism.

His name and employer did not appear on TWT’s programme listing for the event, and so we’d better keep his identity anonymous here too.

The other speakers at the panel included representatives from Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Disarm Education, Stop ReArm Europe, and the Latin American human rights group SERPAJ (Service Peace and Justice).

In his speech, the rep highlighted examples of workers calling for arms conversion, like the Lucas Plan, where workers in the mid-1970s detailed how Lucas Aerospace could avoid massive job cuts in its factories by producing socially useful goods instead of military equipment.

He also spoke of the Barrow Alternative Employment Committee, workers who, in the 1980s, devised plans to avoid redundancies at Vickers Yard shipbuilders in Barrow-in-Furness by showing they could work on civil engineering projects, instead of warships.

Both were ultimately unsuccessful for various reasons; one of them, the rep said, was believing that government and employers, who’re making a killing from military equipment, could merely be persuaded to change their minds. They lacked a strategy to fight for it.

But, he added, “If you want to challenge militarism and imperialism inside the arms industry, I would argue that you have to fight around Palestine.”

By doing that, by building solidarity around Palestine, he said, arms industry workers could start to question militarism and imperialism in general.

“And, we’ve had some success there, leading to a change in Unite policy,” he said, in reference to the union taking a stronger stance on solidarity with the Palestinians following several motions passed at its policy conference this July.

Another victory came later that month, when Unite general secretary Sharon Graham announced at the Durham Miners’ Gala that “any Unite member who wants to take action or refuses to handle goods destined for Israel will have our support.”

Once the speakers had made their opening speeches, the chairman asked them to move to one of the six round tables spread across the room, and the audience was invited to join the table with whichever speaker they wanted to hear more from.

About 11 of us crowded around the table with the Unite rep, and the conversation began around the possibility and feasibility of arms conversion.

But the conversation was soon derailed when the heckler popped up beside our table.

“You could have any other job,” she said. “Why’re you working in a factory that’s killing babies? Just get another job.”

Having people like him in the industry, organising around Palestine solidarity and arms conversion, was surely better than only having people in it who are happy with war, he said.

“I don’t care,” the heckler said. “Opposing genocide while packing the bombs is not worthy resistance. It doesn’t matter if you feel bad while doing it.

“Anyone who works in that trade is responsible. Why is someone complicit in war crimes allowed to speak here?” she said, before accusing TWT of platforming a genocidaire.

It was around this point that one of TWT’s event organisers, thankfully, stepped in and tried to encourage the heckler to join the discussion table in a more comradely fashion. But she didn’t seem to want to do that, and eventually left.

It didn’t seem fair to me to blame arms factory workers for the genocide in Gaza — and especially not a union rep who was trying to organise opposition to it from the inside.

It’s not the factory workers who start these wars or prolong them. It’s not them that use the weapons or decide who gets to live or die.

It’s not the workers who sell weapons to and prop up tyrants and authoritarian regimes around the world.

And though you could argue that arms factory workers benefit from war and oppression in terms of a wage (most of which will end up back in the pockets of the capitalist class, of course, through rent, mortgages, bills, food, clothes, etc), that would be but a pin prick in an ocean of blood when compared to the wealth, power and influence their employers reap.

To be fair, the depressing truth, I would argue, is that all workers in the West have benefited (some far more than others, obviously) and been corrupted by (ditto) our governments’ past and present imperial antics. Britain’s power and wealth were built on slavery, colonialism, and the underdevelopment of the global South, after all.

Using the logic that all arms factory workers are bad because the industry is bad, you could argue that the miners deserved to be put out of work and have their communities destroyed in the 1980s because the coal they were digging up was poisoning the environment.

And by that same absurd logic, Margaret Thatcher could be seen as one of Britain’s greatest environmentalists.

Arms factory workers are highly skilled, and any company or government with a moral compass would convert away from weapons and utilise their skills for public good. The problem is, of course, that in our current economic system, profit is all that matters, and so bombs and bullets it is.

“I mean, look, I had every sympathy with her,” the rep said to me when I caught up with him the next day.

“I hoped to get a chance to speak to her, but it was impossible because she just kept going on and on. I said, at one point, ‘Have you seen the film Nae Pasaran?’”

Nae Pasaran is a 2018 documentary film about how Rolls-Royce workers at the firm’s East Kilbride factory from 1974 to ’78 refused to work on planes that were destined for Chile, where the US-backed dictator Augusto Pinochet was carrying out mass human rights atrocities, including on fellow trade unionists. Their boycott is a great example of working-class solidarity and direct action.

“And she said, ‘I’m not an educated woman. Of course, I’ve not seen that,’ or whatever.

“I wanted to bring that example to her to say, look, at crucial points, people who are unhappy with what we make in the industry can turn our organisation and political power to our advantage, and to the disadvantage of the employers, the military machine and the empire.”