Britain tested nuclear weapons in the Pacific in the 1950s. (Photo: Yui Mok / Alamy)
The lavish spending would continue under Labour.
Britain spends a larger portion of its military budget on nuclear weapons than any other state, a major report published today reveals.
Rishi Sunak’s government is putting 12 per cent of defence expenditure – equivalent to £12,000 every minute – towards the UK’s arsenal of at least 225 warheads.
Sunak increased spending on nuclear weapons last year by 17 per cent to £6.5 billion – a greater increase than any other nuclear power except the US.
Over the last five years UK expenditure rose by a staggering 43 per cent.
The startling figures appear in new research by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), a widely respected group that was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017.
ICAN calculates that Britain is the world’s fourth highest spender on nuclear weapons after the US, China and Russia.
Nuclear Starmer
The group’s report comes at a time when the Labour leadership is championing nuclear weapons. The party’s manifesto states: “Our commitment to the UK’s nuclear deterrent is absolute.”
This spending commitment is in stark contrast to Keir Starmer’s extreme caution when it comes to investing in public services.
The party describes the “independent nuclear deterrent” as “the bedrock of Labour’s plan to keep Britain safe”.
However, it is far from independent. Regular flights from the US carry material that are essential ingredients of Britain’s Trident nuclear missile system.
A Mutual Defence Agreement (MDA) between Britain and the US enshrines Whitehall’s reliance on the Pentagon for essential technology.
The agreement, which is due to be renewed this year, is incorporated in US law. Yet it has no legal status in Britain and has never been the subject of a substantial debate or vote in parliament.
The Liberal Democrats’ policy is identical to those of the Conservatives and Labour, saying they will “maintain the UK’s nuclear deterrent with four submarines providing continuous at-sea deterrence”.
The Scottish National Party has a long record of being opposed to nuclear weapons, which it says are “wrong strategically, morally and financially.”
It adds that it supports long-term investment in the Trident submarine base in Faslane as a conventional military base.
The Green party says it would “dismantle Britain’s entire Trident nuclear deterrent and remove all foreign nuclear weapons from UK soil.”
A pro-Palestinian protester holds a sign during a national demonstration to mark the 76th anniversary of the Nakba on May 18, 2024 in London. (Photo: Mark Kerrison/In Pictures via Getty Images)
“As long as Israel is killing Palestinian civilians in apparent contravention of international law, the U.K. government has a responsibility to stop selling it arms.”
As government data showed the British government has approved more than 100 arms licenses for Israel since it began bombarding Gaza in October, the humanitarian group Oxfam on Thursday joined a legal case demanding the U.K. High Court intervene in the country’s continued weapons sales in the interest of protecting Palestinian civilians.
Oxfam said the court “has been presented with evidence that Israel is not complying with the legal obligations that apply during armed conflict.” Human rights experts have said for months that Israel is blocking crucial humanitarian aid and failing to take steps to protect civilians, as in its recent attacks on encampments in Rafah and at Nuseirat refugee camp, where at least 274 Palestinians were killed in the Israel Defense Forces’ operation to rescue four Israeli hostages.
Oxfam joined Palestinian human rights group Al-Haq and U.K.-based Global Legal Action Network (GLAN) in calling on the High Court to order the Secretary of State for Business and Trade to suspend all licenses of weapons and military equipment for Israel, and to stop granting new licenses.
At a Royal Courts of Justice hearing on Thursday, Oxfam was granted permission to act as an intervener and provide a witness statement outlining the conditions the group has seen in Gaza since October.
“Gaza is fast becoming completely uninhabitable,” said Halima Begum, chief executive of Oxfam Great Britain. “More than 37,000 people have been killed and a further 84,000 have been wounded, the majority children. At least 500,000 Palestinians in Gaza are facing famine and children are dying of starvation. As long as Israel is killing Palestinian civilians in apparent contravention of international law, the U.K. government has a responsibility to stop selling it arms.”
Begum called on the U.K. to use “all the diplomatic leverage it has to push for an immediate and lasting cease-fire.”
Oxfam joined the legal case days after the United Nations Security Council adopted a resolution endorsing a U.S.-backed cease-fire proposal. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Thursday accused Hamas of holding up the cease-fire deal by proposing more amendments to the agreement, while Hamas said it had only proposed counter-revisions to changes made by Israeli officials.
Meanwhile, Israeli attacks continued in Rafah, Gaza City, and other parts of the enclave.
“Morally, the U.K. should not be fueling this onslaught by selling Israel more weapons,” said Begum. “It is vital that the bombardment of Gaza ends, so that Oxfam and our fellow humanitarian agencies can safely deliver life-saving aid to civilians on the scale that is so urgently required.”
The U.K. has licensed at least £489 million ($624 million) of military exports to Israel since 2015, and the country provides about 15% of the components of the F-35 stealth bomber aircraft being used by Israel in Gaza.
On Tuesday, after the government released new figures regarding U.K. arms sales to Israel, Begum said the British government is engaging in “a remarkable feat of intellectual compromise” as it claims to support peace efforts in Gaza “while facilitating the supply of even greater flows of weapons to one of the belligerents.”
“It is a comprehensive failure in the U.K.’s moral leadership and the values of humanity for which this country is still known on the global stage that the government has granted more than 100 new licenses for arms sales to Israel,” said Begum. “This has occurred in the unequivocal knowledge that tens of thousands of innocent Palestinian children and their parents are being killed by Israel’s prosecution of the war in Gaza.”
Tim Bierley, campaigner for Global Justice Now, noted that “it’s clear to most people that the U.K. must cut off the supply of arms” to Israel as it faces an International Criminal Court investigation into its actions in Gaza. A YouGov poll last month found 55% of Britons supported suspending arms sales to Israel for the duration of the fighting in Gaza, including 40% of Conservative voters and 74% of Labour Party supporters.
“Despite the breathtaking scale and brutality of Israel’s war crimes in Gaza, the U.K. has given the green light to huge shipments of weapons to the country, including components for military aircraft and guns,” said Bierley. “The leaders of many countries, including Canada, the Netherlands, and Spain, have taken steps to [halt arms sales], but the British government has opted instead for complicity in war crimes. We must not accept this as normal.”
The High Court is scheduled to hold a judicial review hearing about a potential intervention in arms sales in October.
A man wades through flood water in Downpatrick, Northern Ireland, in November. Photograph: Liam McBurney/PA
Winter downpours also made 20% wetter and will occur every three years without urgent carbon cuts, experts warn
The seemingly “never-ending” rain last autumn and winter in the UK and Ireland was made 10 times more likely and 20% wetter by human-caused global heating, a study has found.
More than a dozen storms battered the region in quick succession between October and March, which was the second-wettest such period in nearly two centuries of records. The downpour led to severe floods, at least 20 deaths, severe damage to homes and infrastructure, power blackouts, travel cancellations, and heavy losses of crops and livestock.
The level of rain caused by the storms would have occurred just once in 50 years without the climate crisis, but is now expected every five years owing to 1.2C of global heating reached in recent years. If fossil fuel burning is not rapidly cut and the global temperature reaches 2C in the next decade or two, such severe wet weather would occur every three years on average, the analysis showed.
The experts behind the study warned that work to protect the populations of the UK and Ireland was still “sorely lacking” and poor and vulnerable people were hardest hit. For example, dehumidifiers provided to dry out flooded homes were not used by some because of high energy costs, while others could not afford to replace losses of frozen food after storms cut power supplies.
The analysis, conducted by climate scientists working as part of the World Weather Attribution group, compared how likely and how intense the wet winter was in today’s heated world with how likely it would have been in a world without high levels of carbon emissions. Warmer air can hold more water vapour and therefore produce more rain. Hundreds of “attribution studies” have shown how global heating is already supercharging extreme weather such as heatwaves, wildfires, droughts and storms across the world.
“The seemingly never-ending rainfall this autumn and winter across the UK and Ireland had notable impacts,” said Dr Mark McCarthy, a climate scientist at the UK Met Office and part of the WWA team. “In the future we can expect further increases – that’s why it is so important for us to adapt to our changing climate and become more resilient.”
Dr Sarah Kew, a researcher at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute and also part of the WWA team, said: “The UK and Ireland face a wetter, damper and mouldier future due to climate change. Until the world reduces emissions to net zero, the climate will continue to warm, and rainfall in the UK and Ireland will continue to get heavier.”
Summary of my basic maths on the UK election results so far. I’m starting from the interim results reported at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election/2024/england/results at 10.10 am BST, there are still a few results to be announced.
The Conservative Party has done very poorly, losing 48.5% of it’s elected councillors.
The Labour Party has only a 20% gain in elected councillors and so hasn’t done particularly well from Conservative losses.
The Liberal Democrats have a 25% gain, getting an extra 101 elected councillors.
The Green Party and Independents have a gain of between 69 and 70%, the big winners yet again.
Residents Associations have a 30% gain.
Reform UK have done well with 2 councillors, none before.
Workers Party of Britain – George Galloway’s party – have done very well with 4 councillors, none before.
My maths skills are not capable of calculating percentage increase from nothing to 2 or 4, don’t know how it is applied.
A student adjusts a sign at an encampment on the grounds of Newcastle University, protesting against the war in Gaza, May 2, 2024
Wave of campus occupations launched at six unis
THOUSANDS of pro-Palestine students across Britain are mobilising at their universities to demand an end to “complicity in Israel’s genocide” following violent demonstrations across US campuses.
Students in Leeds, Newcastle, Manchester, Sheffield and Bristol have joined peers in Warwick by pitching tents outside university buildings in protest against the war in Gaza.
Bristol students said they were golding the action “in protest of the university’s complicity in Israel’s genocide of Palestinians,” while Apartheid Off Campus Newcastle said its own action was to “highlight the institution’s investment strategy and its complicity in the Israeli military’s war crimes.”
Student activists elsewhere have also held marches and protests.
