IT is no surprise that stock markets are soaring on the news of huge arms spending increases across the Nato states.

It is more surprising that in Britain there has been so little opposition within the left and the trade unions for the budget shift.

Yes, many have condemned the cruel cuts to overseas aid with which Keir Starmer is funding phase one of his martial build-up. But no Labour MP other than Diane Abbott has challenged the principle of spending more on the military.

And major trade unions have welcomed the increases on the narrow grounds that some manufacturing jobs will be created or at least maintained.

This approach is myopic for three reasons.

First, even if the immediate increase in military spending is to be met, callously, from the overseas aid budget, that is only the start.

The warmongers are still ravenous, wanting 4, 5 per cent of GDP and beyond. Even the 3 per cent that Starmer has committed to cannot be funded except by cuts to other government spending.

There are those who argue that the money for war should be borrowed instead. The advocates of that approach do not explain how more government debt could accrue without triggering a Truss-style crisis on the bond market, which looks at debt sustainability alone.

It would be part of the mission of a socialist government to stand up to the speculators, but the Starmer-Reeves team is not that administration.

Nor do the debt champions explain why more should be borrowed for tanks and missiles rather than to end the two-child benefit cap or restore winter fuel benefit. Theirs are the priorities of imperialism.

Whatever evasions they dream up today, tomorrow the British people will be paying for war through reduced living standards and weakened public services.

Every job gained in a munitions factory will be balanced by another lost in a hospital or a local authority.

Far better to demand that the Labour government revives its pledge to invest £28 billion a year in a green industrial strategy.

Second, we must look at where the fortunes already spent on the military are actually deployed. In the course of this century, they have been expended on one aggressive war after another which few now choose to defend.

Even today, they are being spent on a major naval deployment in the Gulf to bombard Yemen, standing guard over Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians.

RAF Akrotiri is used to support Israel, too. And vast sums are being blown on the Aukus pact with the US and Australia, which is aimed at confronting China.

Every trade unionist who votes for more military spending is, like it or not, lending support to this policy of global confrontation and war.

Third, failing to protest against the arms spending hike contributes to a mounting war psychosis directed against Russia.

That has little or nothing to do with any sober assessment of Russia’s military intentions or its capabilities. Whatever view is taken of the Ukraine war — and this newspaper condemned Vladimir Putin’s invasion from the first — no-one troubles to explain how or why Russia would menace Britain.

Instead, the public is being conditioned for catastrophic conflict. That is what lies behind Starmer’s rhetoric of the “whole society” gearing up for war.

We are to be whipped up behind an eastward march, deploying troops to territory the British army last saw in the Crimean war and the wars of intervention against Soviet Russia, two ill-starred adventures.

If the left is to offer real alternatives to the British people it must shed its diffidence and say clearly — this policy is not ours.