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George Robertson and the Nazi redux
The former Nato chief stirred up dark historical undercurrents with his call to cut welfare for military spending, says SOLOMON HUGHES
George Robertson, Baron Robertson of Port Ellen, attends the Order of the Thistle Service at St Giles' Cathedral in Edinburgh, July 3, 2024
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GEORGE ROBERTSON went to Parliament to promote his argument that we should cut welfare to pay for warfare and ended up referring to a “guns versus butter” argument most often associated with the Nazis.
Robertson was a Labour minister under Tony Blair who went on to become secretary-general of Nato before leaving to make money from private consultancies.
Keir Starmer brought Robertson back to run a “defence review.”
Starmer must be regretting this particular piece of Blairite nostalgia: with the typical poison of his generation of Labour rightwingers, Robertson turned on Starmer, accusing him of “corrosive complacency” over arms spending.
Robertson made a speech in April arguing for cuts in social spending to fund arms. He declared: “We cannot defend Britain with an ever-expanding welfare budget.”
For Labour’s right wing, national security doesn’t mean a well-fed, healthy population that feels secure. It isn’t healthy investment in the economy. They want cuts to money spent making people secure, to spend instead on expensive weapons systems to profit arms firms and let ministers join the US in its regular useless wars.
Things got worse when Robertson went to Parliament’s defence committee to promote his argument. Robertson told MPs: “There will be no butter if we don’t have guns.” He was referencing the “guns before butter” argument most famously made by leading Nazis. In 1936 Joseph Goebbels stated: “We can do without butter, but, despite all our love of peace, not without arms. One cannot shoot with butter, but with guns.”
In a similar speech Hermann Goering said: “Guns will make us powerful; butter will only make us fat.”
In 1935 Goering also said that iron “has always made an empire strong, butter and lard have made a people fat at most.”
That speech prompted famous anti-Nazi artist John Heartfield to make his famous anti-fascist photomontage of a family chewing on iron and steel objects with the slogan “Hurrah, the butter is finished!”
Heartfield recognised the “guns before butter” argument was nasty and absurd in the 1930s, but George Robertson thinks it’s time for a revival.
