Our New Leadership, Making Their Ambitions Clear At Farnborough

On July 9, Andy Burnham publicly stated that Labour “didn’t get it right” on Gaza. His video message also included a pledge to bar arms sales to Israel wherever weapons could be deployed in Gaza or the West Bank. The second time we saw our PM’s face on a video message discussing arms was a mere 11 days later. Beamed onto the big screen at Farnborough Air Show, he gleefully emboldened the arms industry, placing them as a core pillar of his ambition to ‘re-industrialise’ the nation by ‘working together with brilliant businesses, like those at Farnborough’ – Farnborough being an international arms fair hosting over 1,000 exhibitors, including the likes of BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin, Elbit Systems, Rafael, Israel Aerospace Industries and Boeing.

Shortly after, his Defence Secretary, Wes Streeting, took to the stage and announced a £708 million government contract with BAE . He remarked at ‘what an opportunity we have with this Prime Minister’ and ‘the enormous contribution that Defence can make to the Prime Minister’s vision for this country”

The £298 Billion Commitment 

Streeting confirmed the full scope of the Defence Investment Plan:

• Total: £298 billion over four years.
• Top-Up: £15 billion in additional funding beyond last year’s Spending Review settlement.
• Immediate Capital Expenditure: £11.8 billion in contracts signed within ten days of the plan’s publication.

Streeting was pressed on how the government intended to finance this, his response: increasing military spending would inevitably come at “an opportunity cost across government.”

The Times reported that funding this plan would require £7 billion in cuts to schools, hospitals, roads, and energy projects.

Every pound funneled into BAE Systems’ £708 million contract extension, or the £300 million StormFighter autonomous drone initiative, is a pound systematically redirected away from crucial public services and an already decaying public infrastructure.

Is this the new reality the UK will have to accept?

To understand the vision Streeting (and Burnham) have for the nation, we thought it’d be helpful to analyse the Secretary’s keynote speech to his audience of defence executives and weapons manufacturers.

Streeting opened his talk highlighting Burnham’s ambitions, but was also keen to make space for Trump’s demands, “President Trump has called on Europe to carry a greater share of the burden for our own defence, and he is right to do so”

Streeting further instructed the MoD to adopt a ‘new approach to risk… that’s the price of moving at the pace of modern warfare, where delay and inaction pose the greater threat.’

Under UK law, “risk” is a precise legal threshold. The government is legally required to suspend or refuse export licences where there is a “clear risk that the items might be used to commit or facilitate a serious violation of International Humanitarian Law.” Streeting’s instruction redefines regulatory oversight as “delay and inaction”, signalling to licensing bodies that compliance with human rights law is second to political alignment and arms trade profits.

To illustrate this new operational pace, Streeting points us to a newly fielded Typhoon drone-killing system:

‘From start to finish, the process (concept to deployment) took just 42 days. This is a mark of where we need to be.’

Compressing arms procurement to six weeks deliberately bypasses the reviews and checks required to ensure compliance with international law. Human rights impact, end-user verification, ensuring British weapons (therefore British tax-payer money) are not used to perpetrate genocide and war crimes, all of this is being reframed as unnecessary red tape and bureaucracy, and actively subverted under our new government.

In a similar vein, multi-national joint ventures are specifically structured to evade national licensing suspensions. Streeting applauds the work of international projects like GCAP & FCAS:

‘Today we have over 4,500 people working across the UK building a fully integrated combat air system… Yesterday, alongside our partners from Italy and Japan, I was pleased to welcome Canada’

By embedding UK component manufacturing into global supply chains (as seen with the F-35 program and GCAP), the government can argue that suspending individual licences is “logistically unviable” or would “breach treaty obligations.” This means even if the state receiving British components is demonstrably violating international humanitarian law, committing war crimes, or actively conducting a live-streamed genocide, the UK would still ensure the flow of arms into that arsenal.

By framing statutory human rights assessments as “delay” and calling for a “new approach to risk,” the Burnham administration is sanding down the safeguards designed to prevent British-made weapons from fueling international law violations.

Streeting then closed his speech with some pensive moral grounding: ‘It is not yet clear whether the 21st century will be defined by tyranny or freedom. But we need not let others define the answer to that question.... We know which side we are on.’

Electing ourselves as the ‘others’, we thought we could at least provide some context to the question, given we need not answer it. This century has seen a scale of death and destruction unlike any other period in history. This is the true evidence and impact of the innovation and advancement in arms manufacturing. Burnham and Streeting, collectively, have served under three Labour governments before their recent union. Between Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Keir Starmer (all within the 21st Century), their governments have overseen the slaughter of over a million people from Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine. If extrapolations were to be made, and we were to see another three governments of a similar temperament, truly the 21st century would be marked by history with a unique cruelty.

Though we started with a cautious optimism on Day 1 of the Burnham government, the government’s emphasised presence at Farnborough, coupled with a more recent visit to BAE (announcing an £8.4bn investment), it’s clear to see which direction this leadership is heading in.

We had an immense uphill battle before, and it seems as though the conditions have now worsened. For all campaigners and activists, it’s important to understand that the system we are fighting against has just been emboldened, galvanised, armed and armoured with cash and rhetoric. The campaign to end the arms trade is now facing a government which has placed the arms industry as both its crown jewel and its core engine. Wrapping weapons manufacturing in the rhetoric of ‘reindustrialisation’ and ‘jobs in every postcode’ is an attempt to insulate the industry from challenges on a legal or ethical basis. The arms trade learned long ago that jobs and prosperity is an easier sell than defence and security. And with a declining economy, the public might buy it.

That’s why we need to work harder to get our message out there, pushing this campaign across parliament, the press, the public, lest this narrative is adopted as the accepted reality.

Write to your MPs, join our demonstrations (you might even see Wes), donate to the campaign, set up direct debits, share the socials. We need to have a stronger, more emphatic response to the new and improved, state-favorite gold-plated arms trade, and that is only made possible by our supporters. 100% of our campaigning work is funded by you, and the need to campaign and educate is ever increasing in each passing day of this new leadership.

Warm regards,
Hassan