GEORGE ROBERTSON has said the quiet part out loud. Normally Labour’s pimps for the military-industrial complex, from Paul Mason to John Healey, like to pretend that a burgeoning arms bill need not mean any suffering for British working people.

But Robertson has blown the gaff.  A cabinet member under Tony Blair and later Nato secretary-general – where he distinguished himself in the only salient feature of the job description, unctuous support for US policy – he has exploded in rage at what he regards as Keir Starmer’s dilatory approach to boosting the military.

While the Prime Minister has pledged eye-watering arms spending increases over the next 10 years, he has yet to set out a plan to deliver on this pledge.

The “defence investment plan” on which some unions have unwisely set too much store is held up by a row with the Treasury over how it is to be funded.

Two possibilities have been ruled out – more borrowing, which would require relaxing Rachel Reeves’s “iron-clad fiscal rules,” or tax rises on business and the wealthy. Either would cut against Treasury orthodoxy and neoliberalism.

The third alternative, as the anti-war movement has long warned, is cuts to social spending. And here Robertson has been explicit.

He is due to tell a meeting in Salisbury that “we cannot defend Britain with an ever-expanding welfare budget.”

Dyed-in-the-wool Labour rightwinger that he is, Robertson ignores the reasons for expanding welfare, which include the inability of capitalism to guarantee stable well-paid work to millions and the vast shortage of affordable housing, as well as mental health problems generated by the deepening alienation of millions from capitalist society.

For him, welfare is an expense that distracts from building up Britain’s military, necessary since he claims the country is “under attack.”

In fact, it is British governments like the one in which Robertson served which have done all the attacking this century. 

But it is at least now plain – working people will suffer in their millions for the militarisation of the economy.  They are indeed under attack.

Labour MPs have held back the Starmer-Reeves assault on welfare so far.  Robertson is a warning that they need to go further, as Diane Abbott but too few others have done, and reject the planned arms build-up entirely.

Let the movement be loud and clear - welfare not warfare.