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Forty years before COVID-19, socialists in Britain campaigned for workers to have the right to make ‘socially useful’ products, from hospital equipment to sustain the NHS to affordable heating systems for the impoverished elderly. This movement held one thing responsible above all else for the nation’s problems: the burden of defence spending. In the middle of the Cold War, the left put a direct challenge to the defence industry, the Labour government and trade unions. The response it received revealed much about a military-industrial state that prioritised the making and exporting of arms for political favour and profit.
Looking at peace activism from the early 1970s to Labour’s landslide defeat in the 1983 general election, this book examines the conflict over the cost of Britain’s commitment to the Cold War and asserts that the wider left presented a comprehensive and implementable alternative to the stark choice between making weapons and joining the dole queue.
'The British Left and the Defence Economy is a fascinating study that further demonstrates the centrality and power of the warfare state in post-war British politics.'
Tom Kelsey, Twentieth Century British History
'This important book encourages us to rethink not only some of the key debates among the post-1945 British left. It also provides us with a novel interpretation of the ways in which the Cold War left an impact on British politics and society and, in doing so, how the Cold War framed debates within the Labour Party materially, beyond ideological questions of social democracy and socialism.'
Socialist History
Introduction
1 The left and the defence economy in the early Cold War
2 Guns before butter: Labour’s defence review
3 Taking on the defence economy
4 Workers and the defence economy: the case of Lucas Aerospace
5 Post-material protest? Peace activism and the defence economy
6 The defence economy, the left and the ‘second Cold War’
Epilogue
Bibliography