our first question today is on the UK and security and defence.

And Alex says, when the left speaks on defence, it understandably often focuses on opposition

to NATO, weapons of human annihilation, arms exports to authoritarian and genocidal regimes,

and the waste of the military industrial complex.

However, the UK's phantom sovereignty, under crumbling US defence guarantees,

prevents anything resembling an independent democratic foreign policy,

whatever the population's views are on Israeli genocide or the abduction of the Venezuelan

president.

What then, in your view, would represent a coherent position for the left to take on UK defense policy?

So I've only got to draft a new foreign policy for the country, fine.

The problem is that traditionally the opposition to NATO and weapons of mass destruction, all that stuff, has been good,

important, but kind of abstract, in other words, not related to any concrete historical trajectory.

We can now say the case quite briskly, NATO is over. The US Empire is in a process of irreversible

decay.

And so whether you like it or not, a new set of alliance is going to be necessary.

It would be necessary for a left-wing government, representing working class interests.

It's necessary probably for the bourgeoisie, although they don't really want to deal with that yet.

The level of defence spending demanded by ongoing NATO membership now is going to exact great social cost. It's totally

unsustainable. And it's part of the general militarisation of the continent that can actually

only exacerbate the prospects of a hot war. So that's a problem. Trident, it was always a monstrosity.

There was never any intelligent way to defend it.

We're now in a situation where it's an albatross hung around our neck.

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