Posted by: John Phoenix
The only ‘unity’ on display from Britain’s second-largest union is with the arms dealers and the imperialist warmongers.
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On 25 February 2026, Unite the Union mobilised a demonstration in London (attended by general secretary Sharon Graham) that brought hundreds of workers employed in the defence industry to Parliament Square. The rally culminated in the handing of a petition to Downing Street that called for the prompt implementation of prime minister Sir Keir Starmer’s promised increase in defence spending under the Labour government’s new Defence Industrial Plan (originally scheduled for publication in autumn 2025, but now expected in April 2026).
In a sickening betrayal of the British working class (not for the first time), the general secretary of Britain’s second-largest trade union sided firmly with the industrial giants of the defence industry – including BAE Systems, Rolls-Royce, Leonardo and Airbus – in calling for increased militarism via the all-too-familiar mantra of ‘protecting British jobs’.
It was under the same pretext of ‘protecting jobs’ that bosses at Leonardo demanded that the Ministry of Defence place a fresh £1bn order for new helicopters to save its facility in Yeovil from closure in early February. The ‘request’ was duly complied with by the MoD and the order was confirmed within the month – no doubt to the great jubilation of Leonardo shareholders and Unite senior officers alike.
As the inflation (‘cost-of-living’) crisis spirals out of control, greatly fuelled by the imperialist war drive, the last thing that British workers need is the diversion of even more public funds into military spending. What we really need is a trade union movement that is not aligned with finance capital; not tied to the interests of imperialism and the warmongering financiers’ servants in Downing Street.
Destructive v constructive production
What workers need is an economy that delivers the things that they need, which means moving away from propping up the military-industrial complex and rebuilding Britain’s capacity to undertake meaningful and useful production in its place. But we cannot possibly effect such a change without a working-class movement and leadership that is prepared to stand against the imperialists’ relentless drive to war – against their whole economic system of exploitation and global domination, in fact.
Ms Graham would do well to remember that, once produced, military hardware doesn’t simply sit on a shelf. Its primary purpose is to be deployed. And in the case of Britain, that means building weapons that are going to be used against anti-imperialist struggles and working people across the world with the aim of enforcing and maintaining imperialist hegemony – with all the horrors and hardship that this means for millions of people.
We have only to look at Gaza, Ukraine, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Iran and many more countries across the world to see the fruits of such labours.
Trade union opportunism – in this case begging for a few defence industry contracts to keep arms factories open – has never brought positive outcomes for the mass of British workers. It is an approach that throws the interests of millions of working people in Britain and billions worldwide under the bus in favour of the short-term goal of preserving well-paid jobs for a privileged few – jobs that keep the war machine running and thus strengthen the wealth and power of our own exploiters, not only abroad but her in Britain too.
Reportedly, Ms Graham ‘sent a message’ to prime minister Keir Starmer and chancellor Rachel Reeves in Downing Street: “If you can’t back Britain and back British jobs then you are in the wrong job.”
But her own union’s total failure to mount any serious defence of the last vestiges of the petrochemical, automotive, engineering, shipbuilding and steel industries puts the Unite leader’s posturing in perspective and puts an empty ring to her words. Time to take a look in the mirror, Ms Graham?
When the positions of trade union bureaucrats are fully aligned with those of the corporate CEOs and financiers, it is incumbent on communists to expose them for what they are: complicit in war crimes and brutal aggression against struggling workers around the world. Such people, who act as agents of the exploiting class and the capitalist-imperialist system, can never be part of the solution to working-class problems.
As a recent article on the Class Consciousness Project’s website pointed out: “Graham’s logic is transparent: military spending creates unionised, relatively well-paid manufacturing jobs in an economy that has systematically destroyed such employment elsewhere.
“The defence sector – encompassing aerospace, shipbuilding (now predominantly military), and advanced engineering – represents one of the last bastions of manufacturing that maintains significant union presence. From this perspective, demanding increased military expenditure appears as a rational defence of members’ interests.
“Yet this logic is profoundly self-defeating, and its self-defeating nature operates at multiple levels. First, and most fundamentally, it misunderstands the nature of the British state and its military apparatus. The purpose of increased defence spending, as pledged by Starmer and previously by Sunak, is not to create jobs for workers but to enhance the British ruling class’s capacity for imperial intervention.
“The retooling of the British armed forces serves a specific geopolitical function: the projection of power into Ukraine, into west Asia (particularly against Iran), and ultimately as part of the broader strategy of aggression against China.
“This is not speculation. The strategic defence review commitments to reach 3 percent of GDP [on military spending] in the early 2030s and 3.5 percent by 2035 are explicitly oriented toward great power competition. The ‘sovereign industrial capability’ that Graham seeks to preserve is, in reality, the industrial base for imperialist aggression.
“When British workers build Typhoon fighter jets or naval vessels, they are not producing use-values for social need but instruments of death and domination to be deployed against oppressed nations.” (The self-defeating politics of military Keynesianism: Sharon Graham, Unite, and the crisis of British trade unionism by WRA Mckay, 20 March 2026, our emphasis)
The continuing decline of British manufacturing is leading the owners of what remains of our industrial base – and the leaders of what remains of our trade union movement – to jump on the militarist bandwagon and join the scramble for military cash. It is naturally in the employers’ interests to present this desire to profit from the war drive as the highest form of altruism – the pure desire to ‘provide jobs’ for good old British workers.
But any working-class leadership worth its salt, whether in the trade unions, the antiwar and anti-austerity movements or any other front that is supposed to represent our interests, should be making it clear that the working people of Britain have far more pressing needs that should be being served and no interest in helping the imperialists to wage war.
We can all think of industries that need to be rebuilt in order to provide not only jobs but also the things we all need to be provided with in order to live. We need energy security. We need food security. We need access to decent nutrition instead of hyper-processed poisons. We need good quality and affordable clothes and houses. All these basic requirements of daily life could and should be made in Britain by skilled workers employed in dignified conditions.
We need massive investment in social housing, in our education and other public services and in the nation’s transport, utilities and infrastructure. We need to renationalise the NHS and nationalise the pharmaceutical industry so as to bring an end to treatment waiting lists and obscene profiteering by big health and big pharma.
In short: there is plenty of useful and important work to be done, and no need whatsoever to grovel to the warmongers for the scraps they are prepared to throw us while thanking them for the opportunity to prime their guns as they drive us into World War 3.
As WRA Mckay pointed out in the article cited above: “Military production is inherently parasitic – it produces no social use-value, only destruction. Moreover, these jobs are dependent upon the continuation of imperialist aggression – without wars and the threat of wars, the demand for these products evaporates.
“The union movement thus finds itself structurally aligned with the most aggressive, fascistic and militaristic sections of the British ruling class …
“Having failed to resist deindustrialisation through industrial struggle, having failed to build the political organisation necessary to challenge capitalist property relations, the union leadership now begs the ruling class to spare a few manufacturing jobs – even if those jobs serve to strengthen imperialism and perpetuate the system responsible for deindustrialisation in the first place.” (Our emphasis)
A movement of non-cooperation to oppose the war machine and build working-class power
It is notable that Leonardo workers at the Grottaglie and Turin factories in Italy are at this moment opposing moves by their employers to switch their factories from civilian to military production. They have also been revealing and opposing their company’s involvement in supplying arms to Israel.
This movement to oppose and obstruct the war machine is growing, but you would not know that from attending any national congress or reading the press releases of any British trade union. Yet a movement that really represented our interests would be fighting alongside all those workers who face the same class enemy that we do.
It would be joining the European dockers and going further to build a mass movement of non-cooperation with the imperialist war machine. It would be demanding the return of all British forces to British soil. It would be demanding that Britain withdraw from the neo-nazi Nato alliance, and pushing for the removal of all US forces and bases from British soil.
This is all the more urgent since, at this very moment, British bases are being used to wage aggressive war against Iran, and have thus become legitimate targets for Iranian retaliation.
Pressure must be built up from the grassroots membership across the trade union movement. The present leadership must be put on notice: the days of unaccountable officials will soon be coming to an end. There is simply too much at stake for us to continue to allow this clique of class traitors to carry on lining their pockets while selling out the interests and subverting the organisations of the very members they claim to represent.
Chief among our aims must be to sweep away the whole rotten Labour-aligned bureaucracy. The link between the unions and the Labour party must be broken once and for all – a link that the bureaucrats fight tooth and nail to protect.
This connection between organisations that are supposed to serve the working class and a political party that loyally serves imperialism is a permanent block on working-class progress. It acts to promote parliamentarism, to guide workers into dead ends of pointless activity acceptable to the ruling class, to suffocate worker militancy at the shop floor, and to crush working-class solidarity, both nationally and internationally.
The union leaders of today are complicit in the effort to try to save the fortunes of the declining system of capitalist-imperialist exploitation. Rather than helping workers shove the imperialist ruling class into the dustbin of history, they are scrabbling to help it maintain its dominance over workers.
Sharon Graham’s demonstration should be seen and rejected for what it is: a support for British imperialist domination; a walk of shame!