THE Campaign Against Arms Trade lawsuit against the government for licensing arms sales to Saudi Arabia shows the reality of Britain’s arms industry.

It is not about “defence.” Britain is a major arms trader supplying deadly weaponry for use in brutal wars. Saudi Arabia’s record in Yemen is grisly, including mass bombing of civilian areas, hospitals and schools. Britain is up to its neck — providing logistical support as well as armaments — in a war of aggression that has killed larger numbers than the Ukraine war.

That is why it was a mistake for the TUC to back increased arms spending last year, one tied to a misapprehension that state propaganda about Britain being a force for democracy and human rights in the world has some truth to it, which is not the case.

The ever-hungry arms industry is making billions from the Ukraine war too, and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s protest that just after having been browbeaten into sending tanks he is now being urged to up the ante with fighter jets is a further example. 

The logic of escalation is to keep escalating. The price is being paid in an intractable conflict that constantly threatens to spread, and by workers in European countries being told states committing to huge arms spending increases cannot afford proper pay rises or must, as in France, force workers to retire later to make ends meet. Enough is enough — we should say with the Genoese dockers refusing to load arms shipments: ”Lower your weapons, raise our pay.”