JOHN HEALEY’S departure as defence secretary is certainly a further blow to Keir Starmer’s fast-disappearing authority.

Healey has spent the last two years touring the world making belligerent threats and campaigning for increased militarisation. He is neck-deep in the Labour right tradition of putting guns before butter.

While he does not say it in his resignation letter, Healey surely agrees with one of his Labour predecessors at the ministry, George Robertson, and Tony Blair, who have recently called for cutting welfare spending to free up funds for arms.

However, his letter is revealing in ways he does not intend. It reveals that arms spending is actually set to rise by £13 billion annually, a point which will surely be overlooked in the media hullabaloo over his departure, which makes it seem as if the military budget was actually being cut.

It isn’t. And Healey’s letter shows where the increases are being spent – on leading a force in the Straits of Hormuz to try to get President Trump out of the mess he has created with his British-enabled aggression against Iran.

And on preparing an expeditionary force for Ukraine, the latest in a line of British initiatives to obstruct any possible settlement to that bloody and drawn-out conflict.

Britain should not be spending a penny on imperialist adventures like these, nor on the other forms of sabre-rattling Healey was so fond of, including trying to menace China.

So this is not a row about defence spending. It is a split which highlights the impasse of British imperialism and “Global Britain” posturing, which working people cannot afford to pay for and would not be in their interests even if they could.

Healey’s departure is a further indicator of the bankruptcy of Keir Starmer’s pro-Washington strategy and the need for a fundamental reset of priorities by Labour.