Plymouth: the impact of military spending on communities and jobs

The city of Plymouth is home to Devonport Naval Base, the largest in western Europe, where Babcock International repair and refit Trident nuclear submarines. Plymouth is also the city where CND Vice Chair TONY STAUNTON lives and campaigns. Below, he describes what Keir Starmer’s Defence Investment Plan, which Prime Minister Andy Burham has also signed up to, will mean for the town.

We need a sharp turn away from military expenditure. Arms expenditure is a waste of money. This may sound offensive to many in Plymouth, but the reality is we are as divided a set of communities as anywhere else. Many of us do not support war or nuclear weapons.

The vast majority of the working class in Plymouth have not worked inside or even adjacent to the local military-industrial complex – 90% of our local economy is not weapons-based. There are more employed at our regional hospital at Derriford than inside Devonport Dockyard, and three times as many again employed through the services managed by Plymouth City Council, in education and social care. And many more are needed.

True, the Plymouth Dockyards sustain a healthy level of employment, but the higher-than-average salaries are for the technicians and military personnel. They live outside and away from the city, and their comparatively high incomes are spent elsewhere. Equally, the dockyard companies are private, their profits also invested and spent way away – across Europe and America. Consequently, in the neighbourhoods bordering the dockyard we have one-in-three children living in poverty and across-the-board indicators of social deprivation higher than the national average.

Tax investment in armaments does not seep-out into the general economy. The military-industrial complex is its own financial bubble. Once again, our political leaders propagandise that the £4.4 billion of tax money promised to Plymouth’s military business over the next 10 to 15 years will bring us the prosperity promised to previous generations. It won’t.

We need huge investment in welfare services, our crumbling children’s education, health and social housing. That £4.4bn could serve us well locally paying off the £1bn debt owed by Plymouth City Council and turning round the decades of cuts to essential services. It could refurbish our local housing, much of it acknowledged as poor even by our poor national standards – damp, mouldy and dilapidated.

Instead, Starmer’s Defence Investment Plan (DIP) committing to an £18 billion per-year increase in military spending ahead of the 2026 Nato Summit, includes nuclear warheads, drone swarms and missile interceptors for Britain’s armed forces. In reality, it will increase national debt and divert state expenditure away from social need and towards wholesale human destruction. Preparation for war always atrophies social spending and cuts wages across the economy.

For Plymouth, the DIP will continue our descent into a ‘company town’, visibly dominated by Babcock and associates, reeking of militarism and the drive to rearmament ahead of the apparently inevitable next war. Beware a society dominated by the military security services, embedded everywhere. For example, Plymouth University is a likely sign-up as a ‘Defence University’ – a network of 35 higher education institutions partnered with the UK Ministry of Defense – in a strategic relationship with arms companies that will further deplete the college’s commitments to health and education training.

Military conscription is already being advocated by the political right-wing. Our schools are now being encouraged to invite and embed military personnel into the fabric of classroom life and curriculum, the better to prepare the next generation as 21st century “cannon fodder” for the wars of the 2030s. And at the city’s heart sit the nuclear weapons of mass destruction costing us at least £14 billion a year, spewing unmanageable toxic pollution into the environment. This nuclear weaponry, if and when used, will herald the end of human society as we know it. That is absolutely nothing to boast about!

When endless tax money is dedicated to warfare the truth is exposed. The money can be found. We can have a society where every child is comfortably housed, growing healthily with nutritious food and well-resourced schooling. Now that’s worth fighting for – Welfare Not Warfare!

An earlier version of this article first appeared in Plymouth Herald, 2 June 2026
Photo courtesy Royal Navy.mod.uk/hmnb-devonport