UNION leader Jo Grady said today she “doesn’t need macho men to defend” her as TUC Congress heard that wealth and windfall taxes “won’t touch the sides” of Labour’s £102 billion annual defence spending plans.

Delegates in Brighton backed the University and College Union’s motion which warned that massively increased military spending will weaken national security by leaving less available for public services.

The motion called on the TUC to raise awareness of “the right to conscientious objection and opposition to compulsory military service.”

Artists’ Union England, rail union RMT and the National Education Union (NEU) spoke in favour while Unite, GMB, Prospect and Community opposed, urging unions not to “pit worker against worker.”

Community delegate and former Royal Marine Andrew Gutteridge said: “We want our world to be more peaceful … we instead are living in a world where strong men want to dominate others, and while those men exist it will be our armed forces who defend us.”

Ms Grady replied: “The weapons that are made are used to rain hell on earth in Palestine now.

“I was 17 when we saw the Iraq war … I don’t need macho men defending me — most of the young men I was friends with enlisted in the army and came back traumatised and wounded and have never been the same: for every story you can tell there’s a different story of trauma and misery.”

NEU delegate Joseph Flynn said that plans for £102 billion annual military spending by 2035 are “staggering sums of money.

“Even with a wealth tax and windfall tax on big tech — they won’t touch the sides.”

He said that Chancellor John Healey’s response to the May elections, that “you can’t give people hope without security,” was a line “worthy of George Orwell.”

Unite’s Tony Reilly said: “It’s not weapons I stand here to defend but jobs, terms and conditions, all of them hard-earned.”

GMB’s Lee Burgess, a BAE Systems worker in Barrow-in-Furness, said: “It’s a campaign to move investment from defence workers and give it to another group of workers.”

Prospect general secretary Mike Clancy said: “Solidarity is a two-way street.”

RMT’s Alex Gordon said that Britain’s military spending “should be spent on civilian jobs, on much-needed engineering and infrastructure improvements in this country and beyond.”