as explained by the UK National Security Strategy 2025

“One look at the world today shows the security challenges we face demand nothing less than national unity. Therefore, it is no longer enough merely to manage risks or react to new circumstances. We must also now mobilise every element of society towards a collective national effort.” — The Rt Hon Sir Keir Starmer MP, PM Foreword to the National Security Strategy 2025: Security for the British people in a dangerous world (NSS), p.5

With these words the Prime Minister expresses His Majesty’s Government’s ambition for a total mobilisation¹ of society² towards war readiness. When a politician demands national unity of those he governs, this is the announcement that the various private interests these people have – as “working people” (NSS, p.5), as employers, as landlords, as benefit recipients, as tax payers, etc. – will have to take a backseat to the project of the nation as defined by the Government. In a word, Sir Keir Starmer is announcing hardship to and for the public: coming sacrifices for the war effort.³ The National Security Strategy 2025 (NSS), in which he writes these lines as a foreword, explains why.

The document opens with:

“National security is the first responsibility of government and the foundation for our prosperity and way of life, along with secure borders and a stable economy. It means protecting the British people, promoting British interests and making the country stronger, more sovereign and more competitive in the long-term.” — Introduction, NSS, p.8

The NSS starts with a mission statement:⁴ the first duty of the State is itself; for national security is the “security and defence of a sovereign state, including its citizens, economy, and institutions”, as the dictionary reminds us.

The State’s commitment to itself is not quite as self-referential as that – the same sentence gives a reason for it – but it is worth appreciating what is identified as the highest duty of the State and what is not. It is neither the prevention of crime nor the protection of property. It is neither democracy, the rule of law nor British values. It is not the prosperity, freedom or security of the inhabitants or even citizens of the country.

These goals are central to the British state and it is committed to pursuing them. However, in the NSS, it makes clear what the order of priorities is: the British economy – “prosperity” – and indeed the basic functioning of society with its processes and customs, the way people live – normalcy or “way of life” – relies on the sovereignty of the State; they cannot exist without it.⁵

The logic of the NSS is that because the might of the British State is the absolute condition for British society, every purpose in this society is subordinated to the protection of this might.⁶ This reversal – the means (the State) subsumes the end (society) – is not some inconsequential logical point, but is at the core of the Strategy and the logic of states at war. This document’s central purpose is to coordinate a whole-of-society preparation for mass slaughter,⁷ involving the full arsenal available to the British State, including but not limited to weapons of mass destruction. The NSS embraces “calculated risk” (NSS, p.10), it insists that Russia’s “nuclear rhetoric” (i.e. threats of using nuclear weapons against the UK and its allies) shall not “constrain our decision making” (NSS, p.16) and it proudly declares “the biggest sustained investment in our defence since the Cold War” (NSS, p.5). It is confronting Russia and other adversaries while calculating with the risk of nuclear war – if it were to occur, certainly the end of the British “way of life”.

In this Strategy and its war plans, the British State makes clear that everything and everyone – “every element of society” – is worth sacrificing for the British State. The logic of war expressed clearly in these war plans is: first the State and then your “way of life” and “prosperity”.

To most commentators this is common sense, rather than a cue to question what kind of society so desperately requires an authority to rule over it that the idea that a large number of its members must suffer and die to protect that authority is taken for granted.

An objection to these points could be that the second sentence continues with “protecting the British people”. The British people, however, does not mean ’the people living in Britain’ or ’British citizens’. The people is an abstraction from the various actual people with their varied and conflicting preferences, convictions and interests living in the UK.⁸ Used this way, the ‘British people’ is a thing in itself, separate from and asserted against actual people in Britain. As the NSS prepares the protection of the British people, it does so by risking the actual people who happen to be British. This is the logic of states at war: for the fatherland, its land and people, entire regions and generations are sacrificed.⁹

The second sentence then formulates an ambitious project. National security is not merely the protection of the homeland, but an expansive programme of “promoting British interests” in the world. While the NSS is also preparing for “the possibility of the UK homeland coming under direct threat, potentially in a wartime scenario” (NSS, p.16) its ambitions are much grander, namely the UK being a global power that deserves respect: “a seat at the table of global decision making” (NSS, p.10). The vital interest that Britain is protecting in the world is its power to dictate terms to the world.¹⁰

The NSS spells out what this means, namely being “stronger, more sovereign and more competitive”. With “more sovereign” the NSS addresses the various dependencies the British State finds itself in, due to its integration into the world market and the (military) alliances it is part of. To be able to dictate terms to the world, to bend other powers to your will, these dependencies need to be turned around from liabilities into tools to extract concessions: “This means reducing our dependence on others, including the ability of adversaries to coerce or manipulate us. But it also allows us to increase our value to allies and to strengthen our hand when we transact business with those who have sovereign assets that we seek access to.” (NSS, p.42)

The NSS speaks of a programme of “fiercer competition for resources, military modernisation, technological competition, economic coercion, increased hybrid threats” (NSS, p.14) when it talks about its adversaries and speaks of the ambition to “increase our competitiveness and sovereign strengths – in crucial areas like science and frontier technology” (NSS, p.10) and “an emphasis on greater lethality, warfighting readiness, deeper stockpiles of munitions and innovation in, and adoption of, new technologies” (NSS, p.12) when it talks about itself. In other words, the British State sees itself confronted by creatures that look just like itself – states hellbent on imposing their will on other states and willing to calculate with the risk of mass death for it – and intends to win by escalation, just like every other power in the world.

The bulk of the NSS then spells out a whole-of-society war programme:

• Pillar (i): to first secure the homeland in order to have the freedom to manoeuvre when inevitably provoking adversaries abroad,¹¹
• Pillar (ii): to use this freedom to project strength across the globe – Africa, the Pacific, the Middle East, the Poles and¹²
• Pillar (iii): to build a national base that allows the UK to economically and militarily outcompete its rivals.¹³

The Prime Minister¹⁴ and the National Security Strategy 2025 are adamant that all this preparation for death and destruction is to the service of “working people” who will be asked to “serve”:

“[National Interests] will be defined as the long-term security and social and economic wellbeing of the British people.” — Introduction, NSS, p.9

The British State measures the social and economic wellbeing of its people in the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The GDP – with some statistical finesse – adds up all newly produced wealth in a society.¹⁵ What is cute about this measure is that it adds up all wealth in society when in this society wealth is not commonly owned but private.¹⁶ There is no such thing as “our wealth”, some people have a lot of it, others make ends meet by working for those who own enough to employ them to augment their own wealth. That is why the Government addresses its citizens as “working people”: what matters is that the vast majority relentlessly work to produce the “economic growth” the Government then adds up in its statistics as our “prosperity”. The poverty that this economic growth produces is so stark, that the British State spends more than half of its budget on the ‘welfare state’, i.e. so that the working and unemployed poor can still get by somewhat.¹⁷

The only thing the National Security Strategy 2025 has to offer for those poor souls is “economic security” (NSS, p.6), the persistence of their status as servants to other people’s wealth. In peace time, they are asked to work for it, in wartime they are asked to die for the State protecting it.