Opportunity Costs

Economists and others use the term opportunity costs to denote alternative uses of a certain asset or fund. In other words, the benefit that could have been enjoyed if the alternative had been chosen, or the loss suffered because it was not chosen. Politics is often about rival uses of limited public money, so it is entirely natural that there should be challenges to the high priority given by so many governments to military spending.

A rational assessment of the threats to a particular country and its population would identify challenges, consider their gravity and probability, and propose measures to guard against, or better still, prevent them. However it is no secret that other considerations usually enter into the decision mix: political ideology, driving forces like nationalism and populism, as well as the lobbying power of vested interests and outright corruption.

The perspective of GCOMS is that military budgets represent a massive distortion of the use of our society’s precious resources and talents. Instead, a real-security, or sustainable-security, approach should be taken. See Real Security section of the website. Such a holistic approach requires a very different set of values guiding public spending.

In 2017-18 the International Peace Bureau called these the ‘five directions’ in which military resources could be rechannelled through the following broad fields of action:

Five Directions

Peace, disarmament, conflict prevention and resolution, human security;
Sustainable development and anti-poverty programmes;
Climate change and biodiversity loss – for mitigation and adaptation;
Social programmes, human rights, gender equality and green job-creation;
Humanitarian efforts to assist refugees, migrants and other vulnerable populations.

In the course of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020-21, the importance of healthcare has risen in public awareness, along with calls for support for front-line workers and other key sectors such as education, employment, transport and housing. The economic crisis generated by the pandemic has revealed huge areas of economic, social and cultural life that are suffering losses of income which threaten their continued existence.

However, since the range of possible spending areas is very wide, procedures are needed to ensure that the decisions taken by governments are democratic. Since GCOMS activists generally support all the alternative measures outlined above, our main focus is on reducing the commitment to militarism rather than pushing specific programmes. Given that both major UK parties are now heavily committed to support for the UK’s armed forces (and to its very expensive nuclear weapons) – despite much polling evidence (on the latter point) that the public does not agree – we are faced with choices over where to act in order to ensure popular input to what are far-from- transparent deliberations. Thus we can:

1. influence the positions of political parties in advance of electoral contests, possibly in coalition with others. Write to MPs. Propose resolutions for party conferences. Articles in party publications…

2. lobby governments directly on behalf of one sector or another.

3. push for major public consultations on where the government’s emphasis should lie. While such a consultation can take many forms, it could draw inspiration from the widespread phenomena of People’s Budgets, and Citizens’ Assemblies.