As we await the election results Greg Davies considers the genuine change possible in one area of economic activity that has got its claws into Cymru even deeper during devolution.
Today’s Senedd elections present an historic opportunity to challenge British militarism in Wales. Under the stewardship of successive UK and devolved governments, Wales has developed a dense web of state military infrastructure, weapons manufacturers and cyber-security firms.
According to the Welsh government, this industry now has a turnover of £3.7 billion and contributes around £1.5 billion GVA to the Welsh economy. It encompasses around 285 companies, including many of the world’s largest arms firms, and at least 16,000 jobs.
Over the last three decades, the Welsh Labour government has played a significant part in this development. Before the Senedd even had the power to legislate autonomously, Rhodri Morgan’s administration was spending millions in the pursuit of multi-billion pound Ministry of Defence contracts. Welsh devolution’s purpose, it seemed, was to nurture the defence industry and reap its spoils.
The intervening years have only finessed this zeal. While defence is not devolved, the Welsh government has used its powers over ‘economic development’ to bolster the industry’s foothold in Wales, as documented by Academi Heddwch. For over ten years, it has regularly attended one of the world’s largest and most notorious arms fairs, Defence and Security Equipment International, in its pursuit of further investment, spending hundreds of thousands of pounds in the process.
It has awarded millions in development grants to major arms companies, such as RTX / Raytheon, Thales and Airbus (albeit not for weapons production). It continues to collaborate enthusiastically on Ministry of Defence initiatives, including current plans to expand drone production in Wales.
As long argued by Cymdeithas y Cymod and others, it has been sanguine about the promotion of militarism and military recruitment within Welsh schools (which as Catrin Ashton has demonstrated also has implications for identity and increased support for Reform). Meanwhile, it has had seemingly little to say about the surveillance of protests against arms manufacturers at Welsh universities.
The Welsh Military-Industrial Complex?
All indications from Welsh Labour are that the defence industry should be expanded. It wants more firms to invest in Wales, and it wants the benefits of increased military spending to accrue to more small and medium-sized enterprises.
Combining labour aristocracy with petit-bourgeois precarity, it is a vision in which the economic security of an ever-larger section of the Welsh population becomes inseparable from British war, folly and destruction abroad.
Welsh Labour ministers comfort themselves with the idea that they do not directly fund the production of munitions. While this may be true, it is a feeble defence given the gravity of charges against the companies which have benefitted from Welsh government support.
Thales, for instance, with whom the Welsh government has a multi-million pound partnership, is accused of profiting directly from the sale of weapons and equipment to Israel during its genocidal onslaught in Gaza. Other recipients of Welsh government grants, such as Airbus and Raytheon / RTX, have been linked directly to Saudi and UAE atrocities in Yemen.
However benign the endeavour on Welsh soil, government partnerships with such companies facilitate the laundering of their reputations. They signal that these are entities are deserving of both the moral and financial support of Wales’ democratically elected government, whatever their misdeeds elsewhere. Devolution’s laundering service for global capital, unfortunately, is by no means confined to arms companies.
The eagerness to develop the defence industry, despite having no formal responsibility for defence, typifies much in the ‘Welsh Way’. Confronted by the structural challenges of Wales’ semi-peripherality, the country’s governing institutions have long pinned their hopes on the vicissitudes of foreign direct investment to improve the country’s post-industrial fortunes. The immense scale of capital and resources at the disposal of global defence firms makes them a particularly attractive target for these efforts.
Blood on our Hands
The devolved embrace of militarism also rests on a dubious set of assumptions. Like its UK Labour counterpart, Welsh Labour holds an uncritical view of the defence industry as a force for good at home and abroad, integral to national security and economic prosperity.
What is more, it believes that it can cherry-pick which aspects of the industry to strengthen in Wales, thereby limiting its own involvement in ‘the slightly bloody end of the business’. Welsh ministers also exhibit something close to blind faith in the integrity of their vetting processes for government grants.
Each of these beliefs is misguided. Defence industry supply chains are increasingly complex and interconnected. Many defence companies are also engaged in a vast array of commercial activities, not all of which concern ‘defence’. This means that the possibility of inadvertently funding companies complicit in heinous acts abroad is difficult to remove entirely.
Since 2023, all of the UK’s devolved governments have been forced to confront the possibility that they may have aided and abetted Gaza’s ruin through their financial support to defence companies linked with Israel. Last year, Amnesty International revealed that the Welsh government had given a £500k grant to Senior, a company which supplies military equipment to the Israeli Defence Forces. Although the funds were not awarded for that activity, they undermined Welsh government assurances regarding who and what it was supporting.
This was not an isolated incident. Welsh ministers were similarly blindsided by revelations in 2018 that Raytheon / RTX, another recipient of devolved funds, was supplying military equipment to Saudi Arabia during its brutal campaign on Yemen. As such episodes reveal, the Welsh government simply does not have full oversight of the activities of all defence companies which it supports with public money.
Evading A Vicious Vortex
Cultivating one part of the defence sector also strengthens the pull towards other military initiatives. Britain’s military intelligentsia points out that cyber-security capacity – a Welsh government favourite – is itself an important source of power projection, and an attractive basis for defence industry expansion in the territories who possess it. Any involvement in the sector, in other words, produces its own drive towards further entanglement.
This very trajectory has already played out in Scotland, where the SNP government last year abandoned a principled and long-standing refusal to fund the production of munitions.
These Senedd elections are a chance to change course. The size and extent of the defence sector in Wales will create a powerful impulse toward continuity, even in the event of a Plaid-led coalition. Still, it is vital that the temptation is resisted. For three decades, Welsh Labour has preached the gospel of jobs and investment. After next week, the first responsibility of any progressive coalition is to ask: at what cost?
Plaid Cymru can be proud of its record in opposition. It has successfully challenged Labour’s ambivalence over Israeli atrocities, spearheaded the Senedd’s vote in support of a ceasefire in Gaza in 2023, and frequently called out the Welsh government’s indulgence in militarism. Should it prevail in the elections, these important acts need to be backed by concrete action.
The next Welsh government should cease all participation in arms fairs. It should end funding for companies known to be profiting from war and genocide, and prioritise community wealth building initiatives instead. It should resist the lure of MoD contracts, and ban any use of Welsh government land for military experimentation. It should throw its full weight behind the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement gaining ground at local authority level, and resist any further attempts by Westminster governments to clamp down on these vital expressions of solidarity with the Palestinian cause.
Longer term, the challenge must be to transition Wales away from any dependence on militarism. Clearly, there are limits to what can be done while it remains part of the UK state, particularly one engaged in a project of military Keynesianism. Nevertheless, as CAAT argues, the ultimate goal should be to repurpose existing munitions facilities for the production and maintenance of technologies which improve human lives and wellbeing.
The received wisdom around ‘security’ should be turned on its head, in recognition of the threats to humanity posed by fossil fuels, climate breakdown, war and global capitalism. As the UK Labour government actively facilitates a war of aggression by the United States and Israel against Iran and Lebanon, a confrontation with the growing culture of militarism at home is both urgent and necessary.
Wales need not wait for an independence referendum to take a different course in global politics; that work should start now.