There is one area of employment which the Tories are unusually anxious to protect - the jobs in the arms industry. Over and over again they have repeated that if we don't sell weapons, others will and that loss of arms contracts means redundancies. We may not like the customers we sell to, they may be vicious, dictatorial regimes, but are opponents of the arms industry prepared to see the disappearance of large numbers of jobs?
On the face of it the idea seems unanswerable. The Tories may be unprincipled liars but surely the economy and thus work depend on such markets. The Minister of State for Defence Procurement, Roger Freeman, boasted in December 1994 that 'UK defence exports have been a success story':
'In 1993, the UK won new business in the defence export market worth about £7 billion. This gave us over 16 percent of the market and made us second only to the United States as a defence exporter. No other sector of UK industry is as successful in the international market place.'
The government also claims that these exports sustain between 90,000 to 100,000 jobs.
Yet this picture of export success and the solid employment prospects it underpins is little short of a lie. As the World Development Movement (WDM) points out, government figures are inflated. They include agreements from countries which are subsequently cancelled, scaled down or left hanging. They cover non-arms equipment as part of the export package.
The figures are also misleading in other ways. They reflect orders which stretch over many years. Worse still, they confuse orders with actual deliveries. The implication of Roger Freeman's boast is that Britain sold £7 billion of arms exports in 1993. The real figure was £1.9 billion. The media often ignore this - and the government is happy to leave them in ignorance.
There is also an implication that Britain earns a major part of its livelihood by arms exports. In fact, weapons have only amounted to 1.7 percent of its total annual average exports since 1985.
Neither is Britain's share of the world export market quite what it is cracked up to be. The figures suggest a spectacular rise from 6.3 percent to 14.5 percent in the decade after 1981.
However, Britain's larger share ignores the fact that between 1987 and 1991 the world market declined by 63 percent. So in real terms, as Neil Cooper of the University of Plymouth has shown, Britain's defence exports shrank by 11.5 percent between 1981 and 1991 and by nearly 35 percent since 1987.
Furthermore, it is only in the Middle East and North America that British market share has increased. Market share has declined in other traditional export areas (East and South Asia, Western Europe and Africa). Of the sales to the Middle East the Al Yamamah contract is the biggest. Between 1987 and 1991 exports to Saudi Arabia, valued at $16,300 million, equalled a thumping 73 percent of all British defence exports.
So Roger Freeman's boast about the success story of British defence exports in reality boils down to dependence on one single giant contract. The fear of seeing the success story turn to ashes overnight may well explain why the Tories have been so desperate to keep in with the rulers of Saudi Arabia.
The shakiness of Britain's position in the arms export business should be a warning to trade unionists. There is not even a guarantee of secure employment beyond stage two of the Al Yamamah deal, which provides work for the defence industry till 1997. Saudi Arabia is not in good shape economically. A fall in the price of oil and the cost of the Gulf War means it has a budget deficit of £55bn, which puts pressure on its ability to meet its commitments. So future orders may disappear and there is no certainty, given falling world demand and greater competition from other arms producing countries (notably France), that Britain will get them.
Saudi Arabia's growing economic problems will also lead to political instability. The oil rich and well armed Shah of Iran fell in 1979. There is no reason to suppose that Saudi Arabia is any less open to revolution. So, contrary to Tory myths, the idea that British workers benefit from long term contracts is untenable.
Do we even benefit in the here and now? All the evidence is that vast sums of public money are wasted propping up arms exports and the defence industry. Many of these costs take the form of subsidies of various kinds. The most important come from the Export Credits Guarantee Department (ECGD), that rather shy and secretive government department which the Scott Report dragged into the limelight. What the ECGD basically does is underwrite contracts, in particular to compensate the exporter in case the buyer defaults on payment. The most spectacular example was Iraq. We were left to pay when Iraq defaulted on the £970 million worth of loans and credit arrangements underwritten by the ECGD.
Iraq is not the only example of such losses. The WDM reckons that in the wake of the Third World debt crisis in the 1980s the ECGD was shelling out £3 billion a year by 1991. Despite some attempts to staunch the bleeding, net cash losses amounted to £500 million in 1993 and in 1994. Its accumulated debt to the Treasury came to £4.8 billion in 1994.
This is not the only form of subsidy. As the Pergau Dam scandal showed, aid is used to secure contracts. An even murkier subsidy is the backhanders and bribes, often to middlemen, which in the nature of things can never be properly costed. All in all, according to the WDM, the government is spending at least £384 million a year on direct and indirect subsidies to promote British arms exports.
In other words, the arms industry wastes vast resources that could be invested more usefully and more productively elsewhere in the economy. Any jobs it creates are more than offset by the ones it destroys.
Not even in capitalist terms does promotion of the arms industry make sense. But rational calculation of where resources should best be allocated to answer people's needs is overridden by the drive to maintain and protect profitability in a world of competing states. That means pouring resources into defence even at the cost of irrational distortion to the economy.
To accept the Tory argument about saving jobs is therefore not only incorrect. It is to accept the logic of the system. When trade unionists go along with the idea that 'we' have to engage in the arms trade, because otherwise 'our' competitors will steal the contracts for 'their' workers, it is like saying that you can protect jobs by agreeing to cut wages or lengthen hours or increase productivity or worsen conditions.
Yet this will not protect jobs. All it does is produce competition between groups of workers as to who can do the job cheapest. We saw this in the conflict between Devonport and Rosyth over Navy maintenance. We have seen it in the way such giants of the defence industry as Rolls Royce have sacked thousands over the past few years.
Of course there are reasons why many good trade unionists accept Tory arguments about arms and jobs. One obvious one is: what alternative is there to making weapons? The answer is that the skills and machinery now used to create death could instead be used to preserve life - production could be switched from making bombs to making kidney machines, for example. There is nothing impracticable about this. It happened after the Second World War when factories were converted back from military to civilian use. It is a measure of how far Labour has retreated from any kind of challenge to militarism that this simple argument is not being put.
The point is that capitalism wanted it at the time, whereas it doesn't want it now. That brings us to another reason why people accept these Tory arguments - they don't have the confidence to fight for themselves so they look to the trade union leaders who talk about trusting in arms deals to provide work for the future.
Our objection to the arms industry cannot be a purely moral one. It has to be a socialist one, that when workers fight for themselves, independently of the bosses and not relying on the trade union leaders, they gain the confidence to go beyond economic questions. They begin to fight for political control over what is produced.
There is nothing new about the claim that investment in barbarism is good for jobs. The sugar merchants of 17th century Bristol sang the praises of the slave trade as 'the best Traffick the Kingdom hath...as it doth occasionally give so vast an Imployment to our People both by Sea and Land.' And in the earlier part of our own century, the new lords of death, such as Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite and founder of the Bofors gun company, or Alfred Krupp, the 'Cannon King' in Germany, or Vickers in Britain, made much the same claim. Their fictional equivalent was Andrew Undershaft, the character invented by the socialist George Bernard Shaw for his 1905 play, Major Barbara. Having built up a vast armaments empire, Undershaft claims not only to be more powerful than governments but to have created a model town and factory for his workers. Like many of today's critics of the Tories, Undershaft's idealist opponents find themselves speechless before the apparent welfare and contentment they encounter.
Yet only nine years separated the play from the outbreak of the First World War. The guarantee of jobs and welfare evaporated in a cloud of murderous gunsmoke. Those who found themselves speechless before the Undershafts of that time were impotent before the slaughter. But there were others who were not impotent and who saw how even workers in the munitions factories could fight for a better deal for themselves as well as a world in which war would be a thing of the past.
In our own time, a new arms race is offered by the Tories as the source of secure employment. The victims are not just the peoples of the Third World, butthe workers who produce the arms as well - which is all the more reason for exposing the deadly Tory lie about weapons and jobs.