LAUNCHING his government’s Strategic Defence Review (SDR) in Glasgow yesterday, Keir Starmer set out his mission to “Make Britain safer and stronger. A battle-ready, armour-clad nation with the strongest alliances and the most advanced capabilities equipped for the decades to come.”

It might have sounded more convincing had he delivered it from inside a suit of armour, perhaps in the manner of a Monty Python sketch. The sub-Churchillian rhetoric was, as usual, embarrassing. The self-delusion was boundless. And the underlying intent is as criminal as it is suicidal.

One would think that Britain is some poor defenceless lamb besieged by ravenous wolves, not the world’s fifth-biggest nuclear weapons power, the sixth-biggest military spender and the seventh-biggest arms exporter (notably to Middle East dictatorships and genocidal Israel).

But for armour-clad Sir Keir, this is not enough. More nuclear warheads, each with three times the killing power of Hiroshima. Thousands more missiles to deliver them across vast tracts of the globe. More nuclear and conventional submarines.

And six new munitions factories, boosting our military-industrial complex already swollen with many billions of pounds that would otherwise be wasted on homes, schools, clinics, hospitals, civil defences, green energy plants and low-carbon transport systems.

Starmer praises Britain’s armaments industry as though it is not a corrupt cesspit directed by Britain’s intelligence services, as the Matrix-Churchill super-gun scandal and Scott inquiry confirmed before being swept back under the carpet.

Yet for all his pro-Nato enthusiasm and his pledges to pour more money into warfare rather than welfare, Starmer’s SDR will never be enough.

Britain’s ruling-class military establishment, arms corporation executives, faux-retired intelligence chiefs, foreign affairs think tank specialists, gutter-press columnists, their more refined co-thinkers on the BBC and Sky, and gaggles of Tory, Lib Dem and Reform UK politicians, are queuing up to demand yet more money, more bombs and more submarines, whatever the cost to the economy, the environment and peace.

The cost to the economy will be untold billions invested in weapons of mass destruction that no sane human being would ever contemplate using, instead of diversification into socially useful products requiring much more skilled labour, education, training and R&D.

The cost to the environment will be the as yet unquantified — and unmentioned today — increase in carbon emissions generated by arms production, military exercises and war.

The cost to peace will be the terrible example that Britain and the world’s other nuclear powers continue to set for other countries who fear for their own defence and security — especially when threatened by US, British and Nato military aggression.

Countries and peoples around the world support the UN Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

The SDR heads in the opposite direction, fuelled by decades of the lies repeated by Starmer today.

Set up six years before the Warsaw Pact, Nato did not “keep the peace” in Europe; rather, ravaged by war, the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia and East Germany chose the path of peaceful reconstruction.

“We prepare for war in order to secure the peace,” Starmer told his press-ganged audience in Glasgow: the biggest lie of all. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, preparing for war has led to war. As it will today and tomorow.

Fond of lauding Clement Attlee, Starmer forgets that it was his inflated military spending plans — driven by Britain’s atomic bomb programme and Nato rearmament — that helped bring down that post-war Labour government, just six years after it took office with a record majority.