What would a sensible security policy look like for the UK?

As far as defence is concerned, it does not much matter who forms the next government.

Labour and the Tories both believe Britain should play a global military role, and as such are competing with one another to increase military spending and to appear more committed to the hugely expensive Trident nuclear programme. Both parties have also offered support to the international arms trade, which extends to aiding the Gulf autocracies killing civilians in Yemen and the Israelis killing Palestinians in Gaza.

In short, as Iain Overton of Action on Armed Violence writes for openDemocracy today, the next five years will be more of the same regardless of which party wins tomorrow. There will be little attempt to curb the burgeoning costs of new weapons programmes and scarcely a word of Britain’s role in the devastating failed wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and now Gaza.

Not all the parties speak the same language, of course, with the Greens and the SNP having a different approach on some issues, especially Trident. But the two largest parties dominate and agree on the defence issue, which largely explains why neither’s efforts to be ‘the party of defence’ has been properly scrutinised.

This lack of debate and scrutiny makes little sense given the overarching global challenges of climate breakdown – the most immediate and extreme threat facing us all – and of a world of runaway, wealth where a tiny minority of the population holds the vast majority of the money and power.

Partly in response to this, Rethinking Security’s latest Alternative Security Review has just been published – a report entitled: ‘How do the British People Understand Their Security?’ It presents the unexpected findings of two public opinion surveys carried out in the UK between January and March 2023 by pollster Savanta on behalf of Coventry University’s Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations.

As the report puts it:

“Responses to the surveys suggest that members of the general public think very differently about their own ‘security’ and that of the UK when allowed to shape their own definitions.

“Unprompted they are much more likely to be concerned about their own well-being and socioeconomic conditions than about external threats. They are also ambivalent, and often deeply sceptical of, the protection nominally provided to them by the British state.”

Rather than external threats, survey respondents overwhelmingly identified domestic issues as the leading threats to the UK’s security. Among 16-30-year-olds in particular, 74% rated corruption (the surveys did not ask what kind of corruption) and 68% rated the actions of their own government as ‘significant’ threats to national security. Climate change, pandemics and the economy were among other leading issues of concern.

This is a far cry from the outlook of military-industrial complexes such as Britain’s, where the media and politicians stir up fears of external threats from other states, and all too often suggest the answer is to gear up for war, rather than responding to the common global challenges, especially the accelerating climate crisis.

If it was possible to sketch a broad outline of the kind of security policy that would be appropriate, what would it look like?

For starters, the economic challenges that lead to grotesque wealth at a time of food banks in every large town in the UK are largely down to the persistence of the neoliberal system, now heading for its fifth decade.

That model can be challenged and many of its elements changed, starting with restoring public ownership of utilities, health and social care and transport. Public funding of local politics should be increased to counter a decade and a half of contraction, labour rights should be enhanced and there is plenty of room for encouraging cooperatives, mutuals and many forms of co-ownership.

Early action is needed in the reform of financial regulations, a fair graduated tax system is essential and far more control over tax avoidance and evasion including tax haven elimination is required. There is certainly room for wealth taxes, with scope for raising huge sums for new developments especially the critically important need for radical decarbonisation.

The UK is well-placed to lead on such decarbonisation, even allowing for the multiple failures of the past 15 years, especially if focused not just on renewables but on energy conservation. A place to start is a rapid nationwide home insulation programme that would also hit fuel poverty.

Action in many other areas, including public transport and the food system, increased taxation on fossil carbon and rapid expansion of renewable energy utilisation, would all be part of a transition to a Britain that could develop something of a leadership role in preventing global climate breakdown. Even a single parliamentary term could make a huge difference and this could extend to a serious rethinking of security.

A good starting place there would obviously be closing down the immensely costly Trident replacement programme, currently reckoned to exceed £200bn over its lifetime. The savage £4bn cuts to the international development budget three years ago should then be reversed, before increasing the budget to 1% of GDP, with the emphasis on three areas of expenditure: the vital transition to renewables across the Global South, and confronting pervasive gender inequalities and deep poverty.

Military spending should be cut back, not increased, with the UK playing a more limited role on the global stage. One of the greatest challenges will be responding to inevitable climate disasters, and there is also a huge need to help improve UN peacekeeping and peacebuilding processes, part of an overall increased commitment to the UN and the much-needed reform of the Security Council.

Little of this will happen whatever the result of the forthcoming general election, yet this does not make such an exercise irrelevant. What is sketched here is just one brief example of a different approach, one that is rooted in the reality of where we are now.

Given the rapid unfolding of a global climate crisis faced by a divided and largely uncooperative world polity, it makes eminent sense to remember the alternative definition of prophecy as ‘suggesting the possible’. As the ‘possible’ becomes the ‘essential’, so this kind of exercise will make more and more sense.