06.02.2025

Nurses taking industrial action in 2022 over pay and conditions

Going beyond strikism

Too much of left politics is trade union politics. But what is urgently needed, argues Mike Macnair, is the working class posing a political alternative to capitalist rule

After a couple of weeks’ break, I return to reviewing contributions to the discussion of the party question from Prometheus online journal and elsewhere. This week I am concerned (briefly) with the Socialist Party of Great Britain’s contribution;¹ somewhat more extensively with three arguments for trying yet again the last 30 years’ attempts at broad-front arrangements from Ansell Eade, Steve Freeman and Chris Nineham;² and finally with the issue these pose, which is why it is impossible to go round the organised far left.

Let us start with the SPGB. It used to be traditional among the far left to give the SPGB as an example of a dead-end sect that counterposed itself to the organised workers’ movement and was, as a result, marginal. Given the marginality of the rest of the far left at the present date, this argument is now obviously useless.

It is worth saying, however, that the SPGB’s organisational methods are plainly no better than the rest of the far left at avoiding unprincipled splits; a series of splits between 1911 and 1991 are listed by Wikipedia, while the Socialist Studies group, originating in the split of 1991, is still active.³

The SPGB text for Prometheus, ‘The end and the means’, is primarily concerned with making the entirely correct point that a socialist/communist revolution will have to be the work of the majority, who will have to be “ready to be proactive participants in the socialised system of production”. The comrades then argue for their distinctive position, of rejecting “promoting reforms of capitalism”, and instead the need to “make use of what passes for ‘democracy’ to promote socialist ideas until such a time that enough socialists are voted into power over the state machine in order to abolish it, as part of the revolutionary process, and establish an administration of things rather than a government over the people”.

On this basis, the comrades argue:

… the political vehicle the socialist majority choose to win control of political power must be fully democratic, reflecting the sort of society they are seeking to establish … So the mass socialist party must not be a vanguard party controlled by a leadership, but a democratic party controlled by its members; in fact there must be no leaders or leadership - just administrative bodies carrying out the democratically arrived at decisions of a membership that wants and understands socialism.

I set on one side the arguments for a more or less prolonged process of transition from capitalism to communism, filled with contradictory forms that begin under capitalist rule and continue after the overthrow of the capitalist state under working class rule.⁴ In fact, the SPGB comrades implicitly assume such a transition: “It’s not for us to describe in detail how people will choose to organise their lives once a socialist form of production has been introduced: the different resources, technology and mindsets which will exist then are difficult (impossible?) for us to empathise with now.” If we could leap to the abolition of the state and the “administration of things”, in a single act, whether that single act is the SPGB’s recruitment of members to reach above 4.1 billion (a majority of the world population), or the Bakuninists’ one big strike movement, no such problem of imagination could exist.

Prefigurative

Consider, however, the case for a prefigurative party - which has some truth in it. A socialist revolution will have to be the work of the majority as proactive participants, as will the construction of the cooperative commonwealth. The problem with the SPGB’s approach to this has two sides.

The first is that the actual achievement of full democracy is impossible under capitalism. This claim is basic Marx from the 1840s.⁵ Its practical implication is a point I have made previously, and earlier in this series against comrade Lawrence Parker: we cannot practically organise without the work of volunteers; and capitalists’ general unwillingness to employ people who have previously worked for the far left (or, for that matter, been trade union militants) means that there are serious practical limits on our ability to rotate officers.⁶ In the absence of elected officers, the result would be merely the “tyranny of structurelessness” dominance of unaccountable individuals, who are for one reason or another able to put more resources into organising.⁷

The SPGB comrades in fact say in their article that “branches … nominate delegates to various committees to carry out party work”: whichever of these committees takes responsibility for the Socialist Standard will in practice be a “leadership”, whether or not comrades wish to give it that name.

Equally, a “vanguard” is merely people who get somewhere first: SPGB comrades claim that they are right (as against the large majority who disagree). If they are, indeed, right, and the rest of us come to agree with them, they will ipso facto be a vanguard - however much they wish to deny it.⁸

The other side of the coin is that if we recognise that full prefigurative democracy under capitalism is impossible, there are nonetheless means available of developing more democracy under capitalism - and not only in a socialist party that denies the utility of fighting for reforms. We can fight to maximise democratic functioning and the work of the majority as proactive participants in existing workers’ parties, in trade unions, in cooperatives, in campaigns. By doing so, we promote the proactive participation of the majority; their readiness for a future socialism; and their ability to imagine a future cooperative commonwealth as an alternative to capitalism.

In doing so we will, of course, be fighting against the efforts of the capitalist state and the capitalist media to force workers’ organisations into a managerialist mould (to date largely successful, including with the far left). We can counter these efforts by campaigning for democracy in the state itself (raising constitutional issues). This, too, promotes a majority of proactive participants. But this, of course, would be to reject the SPGB’s foundational claim about ‘reforms’.

Possibilists

The SPGB originated as a part of the ‘impossibilist’ opposition in the Social-Democratic Federation, which opposed engagement in the Labour Representation Committee and unity initiatives towards the Independent Labour Party and argued for rejection of collaboration with the existing trade unions. There was significant influence at first of the ideas of Daniel De Leon of the US Socialist Labor Party, who argued for party-controlled trade unions. In May 1903, 80 SDF members, mainly in Scotland, voluntarily split to form the British De Leonist SLP; the remaining impossibilist leaders (in London) were expelled in April 1904, and 88 SDFers formed the SPGB on June 12 that year.⁹

Why ‘impossibilist’? The answer is that this was a reaction to the arguments of the ‘Possibilists’ (capital P) in the French workers’ movement led by ex-Bakuninist Paul Brousse. Brousse argued that the “minimum programme” of the Programme of the Parti Ouvrier (1880), drafted by Jules Guesde and Paul Lafargue with the collaboration of Karl Marx, was sectarian and tended to separate the party from the working class, because of its insistence on raising constitutional issues: instead, the party should concentrate on raising reform proposals that were “possible” and could alleviate the immediate situation of the working class, which would enable the party to win mass support. This tendency was therefore ‘Possibilist’ (its formal name) and its opponents were denounced as ‘impossibilist’.¹⁰ The Second International was founded in 1889 through a split between the French Possibilists (and the British TUC), on the one hand, and the ‘Marxist’ trend led by the Social Democratic Party of Germany, on the other.¹¹

De Leon, and the left opposition in the SDF, embraced the name, ‘impossibilist’, as a badge of honour.¹² This seems to me to be a negative dialectic - not in Adorno’s sense, but in the sense that the polemic drives both sides towards worse positions than they had before. A clearer example is the polemic over ‘democracy’ in 1918, in which Kautsky’s use of ‘democracy’ to mean liberal constitutionalism and support for Entente war aims led Kautsky towards constitutional loyalism, and Lenin and Trotsky to denounce ‘democracy as such’ - in doing so striking at the foundations of Marx’s strategy. In the ‘impossibilism’ polemic, the De Leonists and the SPGB were led by rejecting the Possibilists’ reforms-only line to denounce any involvement in campaigning for reforms at all.

Why this history is relevant is that, while the SPGB are ‘impossibilists’, comrades Ansell Eade, Steve Freeman and Chris Nineham - and, it must be added, the large majority of the British far left - are ‘possibilists’ - though they would never admit to it.

Ansell Eade in his Prometheus article, ‘One big party?’, argues that “the political conditions and structures in Britain mean that what partyists have in mind - unity of the Marxists snowballing into a mass party - is more likely to emerge from an electoral alliance of the broader left”. The argument for this proposition in summary is that the ‘first past the post’ (FPTP) electoral system requires electoral parties to be broad coalitions; that the trade union leaders will not break with Labour, “because no alternative exists with which to influence legislation”; and that the far left is splintered, because “these barriers prevent any purely Marxist formation from achieving the snowball effect necessary to win wider layers to its politics”.

And breaking with the left’s anti-factionalism without an immediate road to the masses is excluded: “The divided Marxist left will not unite into a single, yet multi-tendency, party for the sake of putting together the resources of individual organisations and becoming instead open factions, unless there seems to be a guarantee of growth.” What he proposes is - pretty explicitly - a return to the Socialist Alliance(s) of 1998-2003.

Steve Freeman’s ‘The commonwealth party and the communist party’ argues:

There is no basis for a mass communist party in the UK. The existing fragmented communist groups are wedded to Stalinism or Trotskyism. Although republican communism is a revolutionary democratic break with these two main ideologies, it is far too weak to launch an alternative world party. Of course, the case for a different kind of world party needs to be made.

There is, however, the basis for a mass social democratic party in England and the rest of the UK. This possibility was shown in the rise of the Corbyn movement, with hundreds of thousands of supporters in the Labour Party and millions of votes won in 2017 and 2019. Despite the defeat and fragmentation of the Corbyn movement the conditions for a mass party still exist, not least with the war in Gaza, the Palestinian solidarity movement and the defeat of the Tories in 2024.

Hence, he argues, “social democratic workers and communists can and should unite in the struggle for a mass social democratic labour party”. And “If communists have any use to the working class beyond sectarian self-promotion, it is in fighting for a minimum social democratic programme.”

Chris Nineham’s ‘A party mood?’ starts with the idea that “there is a big left in this country, whatever its weaknesses. It formed the activist base for Corbynism, it coalesced again around the short-lived 2022 strike wave, and it has been at the heart of today’s unprecedented Palestine movement.” He argues that there needs to be a revolutionary organisation, by which he means a Cliffite organisation:

… what type of revolutionary organisation do we need? It must be an organisation that puts class at its centre. That means being rooted in the day-to-day struggles of working people. It must be based on action. If action is central to winning people to revolution, then it must be central to what revolutionaries do. Marxism, as developed by Marx, is not about emphasising differences with other people on the left or proposing socialist ideas from the sidelines.

But this ‘revolutionary’ organisation needs to apply the method of the united front, and Trotsky is selectively quoted from a 1932 article in support.¹³ Nineham’s interpretation of the united front is not Trotsky’s - of unity in action within which differences can and must be openly expressed - but Georgi Dimitrov’s Stalinist version from the 1935 Seventh Congress of Comintern, that the revolutionaries must be the “best builders”¹⁴: “The revolutionary organisation then has two main tasks: First to initiate, support and develop actions with other forces to its right. Secondly, to argue for the most militant tactics within the movement and to explain to workers the significance of their actions.”

Only militant tactics - not substantive political differences.

Paradoxically, Nineham’s proposed application of the policy of the united front is a “new anti-neoliberal and anti-war party”. It is paradoxical, because Trotsky’s united front slogan in 1932 was precisely for forms of unity with the right wing of the SPD against the rise of the Nazis. Nineham proposes a ‘united front’ party against the Labourite majority of the organised workers’ movement, and including an anti-war policy that is the fundamental historical dividing line between social democracy (the pro-war or loyalist wing of the workers’ movement after 1914) and communism (the anti-war, disloyalist and internationalist wing).

Such a ‘united front’ could never ever become the road to workers’ councils (as Trotsky in the 1932 article Nineham cites posed the outcome of the united front): “Forgotten is the fact that the soviets were founded as workers’ parliaments and that they drew the masses because they offered the possibility of welding together all sections of the proletariat, independently of party distinctions; forgotten is the fact that therein precisely lay the great educational and revolutionary power of the soviets.”

All of these arguments are plainly enough variants on Paul Brousse and his co-thinkers’ arguments from the late 19th century. According to these comrades, like the late 19th century Possibilists, Marxist politics may be relevant at some point in the future; but, for the present, advocating Marxist politics is an obstacle to what needs to be done, which is to focus on ‘the possible’.

History

The short answer to all this is that all these comrades propose, in slightly different forms, to repeat what the left has been repeating, with diminishing returns, over the last 30 years. George Santayana famously said that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”¹⁵ The broad-frontist left clings to its dogma and not only is unable to remember the past, but refuses to do so.

The first point that is forgotten is that small parties can win seats in FPTP elections, contrary to the claims of comrades Woodrow and Eade. The old pre-1991 CPGB did so, occasionally, before the point in the 1950s at which its Stalinism became a mark of Cain to working class voters, while the 1951 British road to socialism promoted voting Labour as the road to communism. Other small parties have done so in parliamentary elections. The small left parties of pre-1914 were able to win seats in local elections, in ways which leveraged the idea of socialism into public politics.

The same is true of the Greens, in relation to ‘green politics’ more broadly. The claim made by comrades Woodrow and Eade that the Greens are a “broad front” party is nonsense: the “broad front” parties pretend to be ‘real Labour’. The Greens, in spite of including various forms of green politics, do not pretend to be ‘real liberals’. On the right, the successive pro-Brexit parties have pushed politics to the right, even without winning parliamentary seats, but merely by taking votes from the Tories.

Thus, the claim that FPTP requires broad-front coalitions for any electoral representation - as opposed to for government - is merely a false dogma, promoted in the interests either of Labourism or of ‘anti-electoralism’ (what Lenin and Trotsky characterised as “anti-parliamentary cretinism”).

The second point is the calamitous history of broad-frontist formations in Britain since 1995. We can start with Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party. Long in gestation - the private discussions that led to its formation had already started by 1992, but the party was only launched in 1996 - the SLP was committed from the outset to a bureaucratic-centralist and anti-factionalist mode of operation, aided by the broad-frontist Mandelite Trotskyists of the Fourth International Supporters Caucus and later by other auxiliaries. This method led to a series of purges, demoralising to members, and sterilised its possibilities.

Meanwhile, it could not escape from being “one among the far-left groups” because it had an immediate competitor in the Scottish Socialist Alliance from 1996, and in Coventry and some other, less significant, local Socialist Alliances set up by Militant/the Socialist Party in England and Wales from 1998.

Ken Livingstone’s independent London mayoral election campaign in 2000 led this organisation (CPGB) and others to build a London Socialist Alliance, and to promote the creation of a national Socialist Alliance. This, however, was short-lived, because SPEW split it in December 2001 on the “principle” of federalism: that is, bureaucrat-baronial control - in reality to preserve SPEW’s freedom of “initiative” towards what would be claimed to be broader, mass-based campaigns.¹⁶

The Socialist Workers Party, in majority control of the Socialist Alliance, decided to liquidate it in 2003 - again in favour of a broader front initiative, expected to get more mass support - Respect. This, too, turned out to have a short life. The involvement of George Galloway, and of elements of the south Asian origin-communities mobilised by the mosques for the anti-Iraq war movement, was not enough to take it into the ‘big time’. On the other hand, preserving ‘breadth’ meant that the SWP was committed to suppressing political discussion within Respect.

What resulted was a wholly unpolitical split in August 2007 - which could not be explained, because the method adopted to achieve breadth precluded honest discussion of differences.¹⁷ Neither the SWP wing of the split, nor ‘Respect Renewal’ of George Galloway, some of the Muslim forces, and the Mandelites (International Socialist Group/Socialist Outlook, more recently Socialist Resistance and currently Anti-Capitalist Resistance) could be taken seriously; the ISG split Respect Renewal in 2010 on the fatuous ground that George Galloway proposed to stand against the Scottish Socialist Party in the 2010 general election.

The next large broad-front attempt was SPEW’s, in collaboration with the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain and the left leadership of the Rail, Maritime and Transport Union - ‘No2EU, yes to democracy’ launched in 2009 for the EU elections that year and continuing down to the 2014 EU elections. This was certainly no more than an electoral coalition, and really did no more than offer a sort of ‘left’ version of the British nationalism of Ukip. However, from 2010 it morphed into the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (Tusc) - an alliance between SPEW and the RMT leaders. With the RMT leaders now gone, the “breadth” of Tusc is reduced to the presence of a few ‘independent’ lefts.

Next came Left Unity - again a product of a fairly prolonged gestation of private discussions, like the SLP, but actually launched in 2013 on the back of the success of Ken Loach’s 2013 film, Spirit of ’45, and an appeal from Loach. Left Unity was composed primarily of ‘independent’ lefts, though Socialist Resistance was involved at the core and some other smaller groups - the CPGB included - came on board. It did not attempt bureaucratic-centralism, but rather what we in the CPGB have in the past called ‘anarcho-bureaucratism’ or - in my own view better - ‘legalism’. This resulted in Labour Party-style conference organisation, and in a mass of fatuous disputes over local disciplinary proceedings. Always in potential competition with Tusc (and debating its relationship to Tusc), the Left Unity project was marginalised when the Corbyn movement in 2015 showed that Labour could - at least temporarily and at least in rhetoric - turn sharply to its left.¹⁸

Momentum was essentially a version of the same broad-front project within the Labour Party - as was the Labour Representation Committee of John McDonnell and others, created in 2004.¹⁹ But Momentum, on the back of the Corbyn wave, was much bigger, with the result that preserving its possibilist ‘breadth’ required tougher bureaucratic-Bonapartist measures, in the form of the fraudulent plebiscitary overthrow of its original constitution and the exploitation of private intellectual property rights as a means of apparatus control.²⁰

I have intentionally left out all the numerous smaller broad-front projects that have gone nowhere. But the fundamental lessons to be drawn are dead simple.

In the first place, Labourism without Labour will be marginalised, if it gets anywhere, by the ability of Labour - even now - to throw up a left. That was the fate of Tusc and Left Unity. Comrades who claim that the radical defeat of Corbynism prevents that should remember the extent to which the majority of the left was claiming that there could be no new Labour left in 2010-15.

Secondly, it is not possible to go round the larger organised groups of the far left. If one group is relatively successful with a broad-front initiative, another will set up a competing ‘spoiler’ group, or come in and take over (the SWP in the Socialist Alliance) and so on.

Such phenomena are not only British. The French far left has displayed the exact same dynamics over a slightly longer period, as the Mandelites (currently Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste/L’Anticapitaliste), the Lambertistes (currently Parti Ouvrier Indépendant/Informations Ouvrières) and Lutte Ouvrière take spoiler initiatives against their opponents’ initiatives, while the Parti Socialiste and Parti Communiste Français are also enabled to manoeuvre temporarily to the left to disrupt such initiatives of the far left. No doubt the same happens elsewhere; I am merely less familiar with the history beyond France.

Comrade Eade is correct that the left groups will be reluctant to give up independence in favour of public-faction status without guaranteed success. But there can be no guarantees of success. What can be guaranteed is repeated failure if the far left will not break with anti-factionalism and keeps attempting the broad-frontist perspective.

Class struggle

The far left thinks of ‘class struggle’ in terms of trade unionism and strike struggles. Hence the Spartacists’ comment (on my Prometheus article) that “What is the point of a communist party if it isn’t to guide the struggles of workers? Communists will not win workers with theoretical treatises, but only if we can prove in struggle that our strategy is superior to that of Labourite union bureaucrats.” Evidently battles for electoral representation of the working class, (like the Bolsheviks’ elections campaigns in 1912 or 1917) or campaigns like the 1840s ‘Ten-Hour Day’ campaign or the 1860s suffrage campaign do not count as “class struggles”: only strikes do.²¹

This is both a strength of the far left - which is why the larger far-left groups have sufficient weight that it is impossible to go round them to create a mass movement - and a weakness, which is why it can never pose the question of political power.

Trade unionism is probably the most elemental form of working class organisation: going back to the ‘confederacies of masons’ to raise wages (banned under that name by an act of 1425). A trade union is more than a simple strike committee, because it is a membership-based organisation with funds raised by subscription and elected leading bodies, which exercises discipline over its members’ actions.

The application of this model to politics was not present in Chartism in the 1830s-40s. This had the organisational forms of bourgeois parties - loosely connected clubs and societies. The model was applied to politics by the Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiter-Verein (ADAV - General German Workers’ Association) founded in 1863 under the leadership of Ferdinand Lassalle. The ‘Eisenacher’ Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands (Social Democratic Workers Party of Germany) founded in 1869, led by Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel, copied the membership-based form of the ADAV, though rejecting its ultra-centralism. The result was forms of party that had considerable power to organise not only elections, but also other sorts of campaigns. This basis of organisation is the root of the weight of ‘Leninist parties’.

The trouble with trade unionism, however, is its primitive sectionalism - most vivid in the old craft unions (like the United Friendly Boiler Makers’ Society, the Amalgamated Society of Clothlookers and Warehousemen, or the still-surviving Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen). Sectionalism is also present, though, in Unite’s support for UK arms spending, as long as it supports UK jobs.²² It is also, in Gramsci’s coded phrase, ‘corporatist’ (seeking merely to promote worker interests within the frame of capitalism) rather than ‘hegemonic’ (promoting an alternative to capitalism, and the working class offering to lead the society).

Trade union sectionalism is reflected in the insistence of each far-left group on organised independence. Trade union corporatism is reflected in anti-electoralism. In practice, anti-electoralism leads to just supporting Labour as a default position (just as Trotsky commented that the Spanish anarchists in the 1930s revolution and civil war, rejecting electoralism, ended up supporting the People’s Front government).

To pose the question of a socialist alternative, it is necessary to step beyond support for strike struggles, and so on, to posing a policy alternative in the interests of the class as a whole (like limits on working hours) and an electoral alternative.

The far-left groups are as strong as they are because their politics is at the end of the day trade unionism, and thus grows directly out of the earliest form of class struggle - one that persists in spite of many defeats. But this clinging to trade unionist politics has the result that they stand as an obstacle to the working class posing a political alternative to capitalist rule.

prometheusjournal.org/2024/12/13/the-end-and-the-means.↩︎
Eade: prometheusjournal.org/2024/12/11/one-big-party; Freeman: prometheusjournal.org/2025/01/15/the-commonwealth-party-and-the-communist-party; Nineham: prometheusjournal.org/2025/01/24/a-party-mood.↩︎
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Party_of_Great_Britain_breakaway_groups is a convenient reference.↩︎
I have written about this on several occasions - some collected at communistuniversity.uk/mike-macnair-programme-and-party-articles; also weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/823/socialism-is-a-form-of-class-struggle; weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/824/representation-not-referendums; and weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/831/transition-and-abundance (2010). I should stress that much of what I have to say in these articles is wholly unoriginal, orthodox Marxism; I merely cite them for convenience.↩︎
Various writers, but most recently Bruno Leipold’s Citizen Marx Princeton 2024, chapter 3.↩︎
weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1521/anti-partyist-partyism/ and references at note 11.↩︎
www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm.↩︎
There is another possible usage of ‘vanguard’: that is, as short-hand for the broad activist layer of trade union, workers’ party and ‘independent’ militants in single-issue campaigns linked to the workers’ movement. The idea of a “vanguard party” is actually more useful in this usage than in that of the “arriving first” sense.↩︎
M Crick The history of the Social Democratic Federation Keele 1994, pp97‑102, 165-68.↩︎
For Brousse and the possibilists, see D Stafford From anarchism to reformism: a study of the activities of Paul Brousse 1870‑90 Toronto 1970. The 1880 draft programme in English is at www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/05/parti-ouvrier.htm; the French text actually adopted as of 1882 is at materialisme-dialectique.com/pdf/dossier-1/Le-Parti-Ouvrier-Francais.pdf.↩︎
www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bernstein/works/1889/xx/reply-justice.htm gives a contemporary account from the ‘Marxist’ side.↩︎
De Leon: eg, www.slp.org/pdf/de_leon/eds1905/nov15_1905.pdf. For British ‘impossibilists’ see note 10 above.↩︎
www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/germany/1932-ger/next02.htm.↩︎
www.marxists.org/reference/archive/dimitrov/works/1935/08_02.htm#s7; see section on The chief arguments of the opponents of the United Front.↩︎
en.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_Santayana, with useful context.↩︎
Peter Taaffe’s SPEW interpretation is at www.socialistparty.org.uk/articles/108548/09-10-2017/36-the-socialist-alliances, and www.socialistparty.org.uk/articles/108571/09-10-2017/socialist-alliance-splits. More history can be found in the Weekly Worker archives.↩︎
Dave Renton’s SWP interpretation in RS21 form is at revsoc21.uk/2024/03/18/the-socialist-alliance-george-galloway-and-respect-left-electoralism-the-last-time-around. More history is available in the Weekly Worker archives.↩︎
Left Unity still exists; once again, more history can be found in the Weekly Worker archives.↩︎
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labour_Representation_Committee_(2004).↩︎
There have been various reports in this paper.↩︎
iclfi.org/pubs/wh/255/workers.↩︎
www.unitetheunion.org/news-events/news/2024/november/unite-extra-defence-budget-spending-must-prioritise-uk-jobs.↩︎