With political commitment to increase military spending, military production is thriving in the UK. But do these heavily subsidised industries meet the British people’s security needs, or the state’s desire to dominate abroad? Khem Rogaly argues for a new approach to industrial strategy that centres the needs of workers, people and planet.
Last week, defence secretary John Healey trailed his department’s forthcoming industrial strategy to investors in the City of London. Healey’s speech was a statement of intent: government is wedded to higher military spending; it will direct more spending towards the domestic military industry, and it wants support from the financial sector in doing so. At the heart of the speech was a common assumption: “we must, as a nation, spend more on Defence … to meet the increasing and diversifying threats that we face”.
The idea that increased military spending is essential for security is today’s Westminster consensus. This has not always been the case. As Keith McLoughlin sets out in The British Left and the Defence Economy, the Labour party has been split in its vision of security since 1945. While the right of the party has long been wedded to high military spending and alignment with Washington, they have been challenged by advocates of an alternative strategy more closely tied to the needs of the public.
One prominent challenge to the dominant security strategy in the postwar era was developed by trade unionists at Lucas Aerospace — a supplier of parts for military aircraft — who demonstrated that sections of Britain’s military industry could be converted to serve a wider range of social needs. As a recent report I wrote based on interviews with 21 workers in the military sector makes clear, this alternative remains possible today and would be a source of economic security and resilience to climate crisis.
Against the Westminster consensus
As it stands, military spending is not intended to fund the protection of the British Isles from external threats. Guided by the 2023 Defence Command Paper Refresh, Britain’s military is designed to be a global power that can be used “in the place and at a time of our choosing”. This strategy — in place for decades — has entrenched the status of the British military as an expeditionary force, designed to intervene overseas rather than to protect the country.
Over the next decade, the Ministry of Defence has budgeted £288.6 billion for procurement, although it expects to spend £305.5 billion. Nearly 40 per cent of this budget is for the Defence Nuclear Enterprise. The budget will also build on consistent outlays on conventional military projects across the decade prior, such as the £6.4 billion Carrier Strike programme — two new aircraft carriers for the global deployment of fighter jets. To support Carrier Strike, Britain opened bases “East of Suez” for the first time in half-a-century, attempting to project military power across Asia. As Britain’s record of military intervention and collaboration in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen and Palestine shows, this expansionist strategy is not about safety at home but a bid for dominance abroad.
The military industry that benefits from the procurement budget is constituted by private contractors that operate to serve their shareholders. As exemplified by BAE Systems, Britain’s largest military company, the sector draws on direct subsidies; in 2022, BAE Systems paid for just 14 per cent of its £2 billion R&D budget while the rest was paid on its behalf by state customers. These subsidies underpin healthy returns on investment and payouts to shareholders.
Although Britain’s military budget has fallen as a share of GDP since 1980, absolute military spending has remained fairly consistent once adjusted for inflation. The retention of Cold War-level spending has three primary objectives: to support the British military’s global presence, to sustain a large private military industry and to keep nuclear missiles continuously at sea. The military budget is largely devoted to the worldwide projection of military power rather than the public’s everyday security.
What is the alternative?
Since at least the First World War, trade unionists within the military industry have organised for an alternative approach to security — grounded in the conversion of military industrial production to meet social needs. Most famously, the Lucas Plan published in 1976 set out a pathway for Lucas Aerospace to be converted from the production of parts for military aircraft to civilian products such as hybrid vehicles, solar panels and wind turbines.
At their core, workers’ conversion plans have aimed to address the economic security of those working in the military industry. Despite the dominant portrayal of the military industry as a secure source of employment, it is subject to cyclical volatility dictated by military contracts and the increased capital intensity of manufacturing. Since 1980, more than half of jobs in the industry have been lost even though military spending has been maintained at a relatively consistent level.
The conversion of military production sites is one route to improved economic security for workers. However, as many of my interviewees noted, this would require public investment to be reallocated from military projects to backstop demand for new products. Successful examples of military firms temporarily diversifying into civilian markets, such as Boeing-Vertol’s production of Chicago subway cars in the 1970s and Lockheed Martin’s development of hybrid buses (at a site now owned by BAE Systems) in the 1990s, have benefited from supplying government customers.
The vision of the Lucas Aerospace trade unionists also pointed towards security in the face of climate crisis. Just as the Lucas Plan featured visionary proposals to convert production towards green technologies in the mid-1970s, my interviewees revealed close adjacencies between the skills and capacity of sections of the military industry such as naval shipbuilding and green manufacturing sectors like offshore wind. In at least four of the UK’s naval shipyards, production for offshore wind supply chains is underway even if a deeper transition is not in place. Conversion programmes are one means of using manufacturing capacity and skills within a government-directed industry to expand the green energy sector.
Taking inspiration from the Lucas Plan for Britain’s industrial strategy can provide economic security and form part of a wider initiative to make the country more resilient to climate crisis. Industrial policy is only one tool to create security in these areas — the expansion of social security and price stabilisation will be essential for household security just as rapid emissions mitigation is essential for the climate. Learning from the Lucas Plan to reassess Britain’s global military commitments while investing in economic and climate resilience is nonetheless a more direct response to security challenges than the reflex of an ever-expanded military budget.
The views and opinions expressed in posts on the Rethinking Security blog are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of the network and its broader membership.
Image Credit: Glyn Drury, via Geograph. BAE Systems factory at Brough, East Yorkshire. From 1916 to 2020 the world’s longest continuing production aviation factory, Brough has now ceased to manufacture aircraft and moved into other areas of military production.
I was a civil servant when the Lucas Aerospace report was released. We were explicitly forbidden to see it. I got my copy from a friendly trade unionist. An equally striking case was the Vickers story described in Business History, Vol.46, No.1 (January 2004), pp.1–22. Vickers was into cement machinery and nuclear submarines and had to give up one or the other. They chose the ‘safe’ government procurement customer rather than world markets. Sad, sad, sad.