Letter from Steve McKenzie, Unite Community member
Never let death, destruction and genocide stand in the way of profits. The disgusting headline in the Financial Times today, Tuesday August 27, was, Top defence contractors poised for a $52 bn cash bonanza as orders soar.
According to the FT, the leading 15 defence contractors are forecast to log a cash flow of $52 bn by the end of 2026, almost double their cash flow at the end of 2021. This evidently creates a problem for the merchants of death, according to Vertical Research, who carried out the analysis for the bosses’ newspaper.
One Robert Stallard is quoted as saying, “It’s the billion dollar question, what do you do with all that money?”. These companies are:
- Arming apartheid Israel, and enabling it to continue its genocidal ethnic cleansing of Gaza.
- Financing and arming Ukraine, not out of sympathy with Ukrainian workers, but piling up debts that those same workers will have to pay.
- Preparing for wider conflicts in the Middle East and let’s not forget Asia. War is a profitable bussiness.
In fact war makes them so much money that they don’t know what to do with it.
While tens of thousands of Palestinians are slaughtered and Ukrainians and Russians are dying in their thousands the elite are drowning in the profits they are making from the misery. For ordinary workers, war is a curse, for these people, it’s a blessing
Meanwhile, at home hundreds die unnecessarily as our NHS collapses, yet we can apparently afford to increase defence spending. As long as capitalism continues, these obscenities will continue. Only the Socialist transformation of society can put an end to this madness
[Picture top from Wikimedia Commons, here]
Couldn’t agree more with this article. Starmer yesterday warning that things would get worse, not sure I recall him saying, before they get better. But he did seem to think that a £22 billion black hole was something to be concerned about….In a two trillion pound economy ? That amounts to a very small percentage indeed, which is why Mr Starmer was quite comfortable promising Ukraine £3 billion every year until their war with Russia is done. Completely oblivious at that moment to all of the needs of OUR public services, the NHS, Local Government, Social Care, Education when no doubt these issues become the primary focus he will reference the 22 billion black hole again. This is shallow nonsense politics..
The editors would agree with everything in your comment, Dave, except the throw-away line about the Ukraine war. As far as Ukrainian workers are concerned – and it is from a worker’s standpoint that we have to view the conflict – it is not, and never has been, “their” war.
Ukraine was long courted by the EU, and the fact is that most Ukrainians were attracted to the idea of joining the EU, seeing living standards higher in the west than they had at home. That is the origin of the conflict in 2014. Putin, however, had other ideas and believes (as some on the left seem to believe) that Ukraine ‘belongs’ in the Russian sphere of influence.
Our basic position should remain that we stand by the right of Ukraine to national self-determination, ie its independence from Russia. Remember, the only time there has been a referendum on independence (1991), there was an overwhelming vote in favour of separation from Russia. That was true even in the Donbas. Should we ignore that?
Looking at the war from the perspective of Ukrainian workers, they believe that they are fighting a defensive war for their communities, their homes and their country and to them, it doesn’t matter where their arms come from. NATO is enjoying the degradation of Russian arms and is supplying Ukrainian forces, but that doesn’t ‘define’ the war for workers.
What would we say to a Ukrainian worker? We’d say no trust in NATO; no trust in the EU states, and no trust in Zelensky. But what we cannot do is urge Ukrainain workers, just because NATO has jumped in, to surrender to Putin.