LAST WEEK saw two linked developments in global and British politics.

On the one hand, the Israeli government formalised an end to the ceasefire in Gaza, which it had been breaking regularly since it was called two months ago. The shelling yesterday saw the deaths of over 400 more Gazans — adding to the official count of nearly 47,000 lives already extinguished in the genocide.

On the other, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions Liz Kendall announced £5 billion cuts to the welfare bill for disabled people — achieved in part by raising the bar on who can claim. We should be totally clear on the brutality of these cuts.

Those who are unable to wash their hair or their bodies below the waist could be ineligible for support, or those who are unable to cook a simple meal. Experts have warned that they could affect up to 1.2 million people.

While Kendall’s announcement took place thousands of miles away from the Israeli bombardment of Gaza, the two are connected.

Faced with the relative decline of US economic power, Trump’s “pivot to Asia” — and the shift in resources that requires — forces both a strategic reorientation to Russia to break it from China, alongside an insistence that the European ruling class increases its own defence spending.

Central to Trump’s strategy for maintaining US supremacy is that Europe pays its own way in the global division of military capabilities as it shifts its own considerable might to deal with its primary rival across the Pacific.

Hence the pressure from Trump for Starmer to increase defence budgets to 3 per cent — overtures to which the British government has happily conceded, for all the gossip in the press about subtle “rebukes” to the president after his very public row with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the White House.

Indeed, while the US volte-face to the conflict in Ukraine has obviously been met with unease by No 10 it has not been opposed, and on any foreign policy issue of substance, there seems little disagreement. This has extended to Foreign Secretary David Lammy’s bizarre apologia for Trump’s outlandish and dangerous comments on Greenland.

The brutal cuts to the welfare budget are the corollary of this obeisance to the Trump White House. The British ruling class is damned if it will foot the defence bill previously paid by its US cousins, so it will be disabled people who are forced to pay.

In following US foreign policy, and the demands it places on Britain’s economy, the government has allowed Trump to set the constraints on economic policy — and thereby imported the viciousness of the Trump agenda into our own domestic context.

And, of course, it has set British policy on Gaza, with No 10 and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office all but silent on the genocide taking place before the eyes of the world. They even refuse to use the word “genocide,” let alone condemn the president’s own plans for ethnic cleansing in the region.

While war crimes have been met with public silence, this has not prevented the continued supply of British weapons to the Israeli military. In fact, the hikes in defence spending are likely to make such arrangements more commonplace as the government tools up to meet the demands of maintaining US hegemony.

This militarisation of the economy and the redistribution of welfare spending to service the needs of a US drive to war must be opposed. Britain needs an independent foreign policy, unshackled from the exigencies of a Trump confrontation with China. That policy should be for peace and for reshaping global institutions so that they better reflect the new, emerging multilateral realities of the global political system.

Rather than killing people abroad and increasing suffering at home, we need an economic policy that invests productively — developing green infrastructure and supply chains fit for the 21st century with good, unionised jobs — and that raises living standards, and basic dignity in life, for everyone.

In short, we need a policy for peace and socialist solutions to the global crises we collectively face — and a movement to fight for them. We’ll be discussing how we build that movement at Arise Festival’s Socialism or Barbarism day school on March 29. We hope you can join us!

Sam Browse is a volunteer with Arise: A Festival of Left Ideas. He will be speaking at the Socialism or Barbarism in-person day-school in London on Saturday March 29 at the Welfare Not Warfare session. The event features MPs including Richard Burgon and Ian Byrne, campaigner Jess Barnard, Calvin Tucker of the Morning Star, Sinn Fein’s Pat Cullen, socialist economist Michael Roberts and campaigns such as PSC, CND, War On Want, We Own It, the Mexico Solidarity Forum, and Stand up to Racism. The day features 15+ sessions of socialist political education. Register and info at bit.ly/socialismorbarbarism.