The Armed Forces Bill 2026 was presented to the House of Commons for its Second Reading on Monday, January 26 [1]. John Healey, the Defence Secretary, introduced the Bill in such a grandiose manner that showed he expected no challenge from any part of the House, and indeed many MPs from all the cartel parties felt obliged to echo the Defence Secretary in saying that it was "a privilege" to speak in the debate, including the Shadow Defence Secretary in his contribution.

John Healey began: "It is a rare privilege to open this debate. This is only the second ever Labour Armed Forces Bill, yet the provenance of this legislation reaches all the way back to the Bill of Rights, and more than three centuries on, granting authority to maintain our armed forces remains one of the most important - if not the most important - formal constitutional responsibilities of Members of this House." He used these words designed to secure responses in Parliament that were broadly supportive of the Bill's aims, but with the scrutiny of MPs mainly focusing on the welfare of those in the armed forces, on their housing and justice reform, whilst skirting around the huge-scale increases in defence spending as the government's particular aim with this legislation.

These measures in the Armed Forces Bill are being put in the service of the government's Strategic Defence Review announced by Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer in June [2]. This, as Starmer said then, aims to turn Britain's already military-dominated economy into a fully militarised economy and to put British society on a war footing. This is why Healey went on to say in his statement to Parliament that the Armed Forces Bill was a "substantial Bill - a reflection of just how much the world has changed over the past five years. It is more dangerous and much less certain, and this new era of threat demands a new era for defence." He avoided completely Britain's role in the creation of this dangerous world, in Britain's role in the escalation of Anglo-US and NATO proxy war in Ukraine against Russia and their direct military support and complicity in Israel's genocide against the Palestinians, as well as the government's complicity in US interference and threats of war to Venezuela, I ran and in every part of the globe.

The history of the Armed Forces Bill is that it is required every five years to maintain the legal basis for the UK's armed forces "in peacetime". This although Britain's interventions and wars abroad have continued since the end of World War II almost unabated. The lineage of the legislation goes back to the 1688 Bill of Rights [3], which requires Parliament to authorise a standing army in peacetime. The 2026 Bill does more than simply renew the Armed Forces Act 2006, an Act which consolidated the previous separate service acts into a single system of service law. Since then, new Armed Forces Acts have been passed in 2011, 2016, and 2021 to renew the 2006 Act. Even according to some media reports, the 2026 Bill "is being used as a major policy vehicle to reshape defence for what ministers describe as a 'more dangerous and much less certain world'." Healey's justification for the Bill was not welfare of armed forces service members "in peacetime" but rather the plans for escalating wars. This was further revealed when the Defence Secretary said, "It is why we are proposing, through this Bill, to increase our war fighting readiness and homeland security, and why we are putting the men and women in our armed forces at the heart of defence plans."

In other words, the main point is overall the focus on the military, given what the government, not to mention the other cartel parties, are calling a more dangerous global situation. They have to give support to the armed forces personnel, but, like the "outrage" over Trump's remarks about the role of British forces in Afghanistan staying "a little back", they gloss over who is the aggressor, who is causing the danger, and the direction they are taking the country away from peace and towards war. As Declassified, pointed out a number of years ago: "Britain has deployed its armed forces for combat over 80 times in 47 countries since the end of the Second World War, in episodes ranging from brutal colonial wars and covert operations to efforts to prop up favoured governments or to deter civil unrest." Other estimates have put the number of military interventions by Britain at over one hundred in this time.

What is noticeable today is that the use of violence and dictate is being used by the likes of the US and Britain on an increasing scale, and the Armed Forces Bill fits into this context. This is the meaning of the government's talks of a "new era for defence", in which, for example, it is the Secretary of State who wields the power to recall of reservists, and oversees the "largest sustained increase in defence spending since the end of the Cold War". For the working class and people, this emphasises that they have to work to consolidate themselves as the power to combat this warmongering, violence, dictate and militarism, with their sights set on constituting themselves as an Anti-War Government, and all that entails about authority and power resting with the people who desire peace. The youth must not be made cannon-fodder in the wars of the ruling elite and the armaments industry, and nor should the more elderly reservists! This is what the working class and people demand, tearing away the cloak of being "privileged" which emerged as a theme from the Armed Forces Bill second reading.

For Your Reference - the key measures in the Armed Forces Bill 2026 are:

• Full legal enshrinement of the Armed Forces Covenant, expanding the duty on public bodies and bringing UK and devolved governments into scope [4].
• Creation of a Defence Housing Service to improve and manage service accommodation, regenerate defence land, and support service communities.
• Drone-related security powers, allowing Defence personnel to use approved equipment to detect and prevent drone offences at Defence sites.

Readiness reforms, including:

• Raising the maximum recall age for reservists from 55 to 65
• Allowing seamless transfer between regulars and reserves
• Giving the Secretary of State powers to authorise recall for warlike operations in preparation or underway

Service Justice System reforms, including improved victim support and clearer complaint mechanisms. The Government frames the Bill as part of a broader shift to a "new era for defence", backed by £5 billion in additional defence spending this year and the "largest sustained increase in defence spending since the end of the Cold War".

The Second Reading debate showed cross-party support for what are being referred to as "welfare-focused measures", in that MPs repeatedly emphasised the importance of improving service life, housing, and family support. Government voices in the debate claimed it was the largest pay rise in two decades and with expanded wraparound childcare. However, there were also areas of scrutiny and concern, particularly around housing delivery, justice reforms, and whether the Bill goes far enough on readiness and personnel welfare, and questioning as to whether there were commitments to safe, decent housing for all forces families. These were characterised as overdue steps to "renew the nation's contract with those who serve".

The Bill now goes to a Select Committee, which is to report to the Commons on or before April 30, 2026. Then follows consideration by a Committee of the whole House and a third reading, before the Bill goes before the House of Lords.

Notes
1. Armed Forces Bill
https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/4065
The Second Reading debate can be found at: https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2026-01-26/debates/4F0A248D-4B14-40D2-9D0E-B6008AC997C0/ArmedForcesBill
2. Strategic Defence Review: Starmer's Attempt to Put Britain on "War-Fighting Readiness" Cannot Be Accepted, Workers' Weekly, June 7 2025
https://www.rcpbml.org.uk/wwie-25/ww25-13/ww25-13-01.htm
3. 1688 Bill of Rights
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/aep/WillandMarSess2/1/2/introduction
4. The "Armed Forces Covenant" was first published in 2011 and is said to ensure that "the Armed Forces Community are not disadvantaged in comparison to other British citizens, such as accessing public or commercial services, while also being treated with fairness and respect."
https://blesma.org/armed-forces-covenant

The British government is refusing to disclose key information about US military activity on British soil at the very moment Washington appears to be preparing for a significant escalation in the Middle East. A Declassified UK investigation dated January 20 reveals a tightening veil of secrecy around American operations at RAF bases across England, raising questions about Britain's role in any future conflict involving Iran.

For the first time in years, ministers have declined to reveal how many US military personnel are stationed at each of the 13 American-operated or American-shared bases in Britain. While the government acknowledges that roughly 11,000 US personnel are present overall, it now refuses to break down the numbers by location, citing "personnel security" concerns. "In the interests of personnel security, I will not currently share specific numbers of US [visiting forces] personnel at each individual site," armed forces minister Al Carns said in response to a parliamentary question.

This marks a reversal from 2024, when the Ministry of Defence (MoD) did provide base-specific figures. The MoD also declined to clarify what authorisation the US would require to launch military operations from British territory. Successive governments have long insisted that Britain must approve any such action, but ministers now avoid confirming whether this principle still holds. Whether or not the government has ever refused is a moot point. For instance, RAF Lakenheath is notorious for having played a key role in US air operations against Libya for decades. Notable missions include the 1986 Operation El Dorado Canyon using F-111s, supporting the 2011 aggression against Gaddafi with F-15Es, and conducting strikes against ISIS in 2015.

Recent aircraft tracking data have indicated a surge of US military flights from RAF Lakenheath to Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, a key hub for operations in the Middle East. Recent movements reportedly include at least 12 F-15 fighter jets, 4 KC-135 refuelling aircraft, and multiple C-17 transport planes. RAF transport planes have made multiple trips in recent days to Tel Aviv, Beersheba, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia. While the MoD has not explained the purpose of these flights, their timing raises questions about whether Britain is supporting or co-ordinating with US regional operations.

These deployments align with broader US preparations for potential action against Iran or even Greenland, following escalating rhetoric from the US President. The Declassified UK report paints a picture of a government increasingly reluctant to reveal the extent of US military activity on British soil, even as evidence mounts of a new US build-up in the Middle East and Trump's threats of military action against Iran. The report underscores how deeply embedded US military infrastructure is in Britain's military structure.

US forces must be removed from Britain and there must be no US military action launched from British soil. This is a crucial demand of the anti-war movement.

Sign the Stop the War Coalition Petition, Remove all US military from Britain!

https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/remove-all-us-military-from-britain

Rally in Trafalgar Square supporting print workers, April 6 1986 - Photo: Morning Star.

2026 marks the 40th anniversary of the Wapping dispute, a pivotal confrontation provoked when Rupert Murdoch's News International relocated production of its major newspapers from the traditional Fleet Street to a new, heavily secured, high-tech facility at Wapping, in January 1986.

News International controlled a significant section of the British press at that time, publishing The Sun, News of the World, The Times, and The Sunday Times. At the same time as the move, the company opened a new parallel plant at Kinning Park, Glasgow.

The relocation had been years in the planning. Both new facilities had been developed in secret, and for Wapping in particular, a cover story of a fake newspaper, "The London Post", was circulated to disorient opposition [1].

The dispute was a deliberate strategic move by Murdoch in alliance with the Thatcher government, part of the restructuring of the state around powerful monopoly interests and the overhaul of social relations that was to do away with the social-democratic arrangements that had held since the end of the War. The Miners' Strike had ended in defeat less than a year earlier, and the important Warrington Messenger newspaper group dispute of 1983-4 had proven that union opposition can be broken using the recently-introduced new anti-union laws.

When production shifted to Wapping, 6,000 members of the main print unions - the National Graphical Association (NGA) and the Society of Graphical and Allied Trades (SOGAT) - declared strike action on January 24, 1986. News International immediately sacked these workers while on strike to avoid redundancy payments amounting to some £40 million [2].

The open rule by police powers so brutally used during the Miners' Strike was again deployed by the state at Wapping. Daily demonstrations and pickets began outside the Wapping plant, met by thousands of officers who had been sent to protect the site and distribution trucks. Over the protracted year-long conflict, hundreds of people, both striking workers and police, were injured, and over 1,200 arrests were made.

While a significant uniformed police presence was evident for the protection of the Wapping plant, an undercover operation by Special Branch operated simultaneously [3]. This covert operation aimed at intense surveillance of strikers and protesters, producing daily intelligence briefs and maintaining detailed files on union leaders and MPs. Special Branch utilised informants and meticulously documented various aspects of the protests, including banners and chants, as well as the individuals involved and their lives [4].

The strike ended on February 5, 1987 after 54 weeks - three weeks longer than the Miners' Strike itself - of no pay and was unable to sustain itself further.

Prior to the dispute, the phrase "Words and Spaces" had highlighted the impact of the transition to computerised typesetting [5]. The adoption of modems, digital production techniques and automation resulted in redundancies, undermining the previously established relationship between workers and management. The organisational shift was to use new technology for maximising productivity while systematically dismantling the very workforce that had built the printing industry. What News International produced previously with 6,800 workers they now produced with just 670. The neoliberal view of workers as things rather than human beings, and the monopolies' relentless push for efficiency and productivity, were fully backed by the state. The Wapping, Miners' and Messenger disputes were the prototypes of the kind of imposition that is the norm in so many present-day disputes. It was the new modus operandi, presenting a serious challenge for the unions as the civil society of which they were part was smashed to pieces, a challenge which remains to the present day as they seek to remain effective as the self-defence organisations of the workers in the current reality.

Not only was technology used to drive efficiency, not only was it used to increase control over labour, but it was also used to create a form and content of journalism appropriate to the new neoliberalism. By decimating the staff, Murdoch overhauled the very makeup of the journalism and printing workforce, changing its very character as an industry. Production could be fast, change dynamically, and the product itself could be cheaply made in full colour. The method of organisation in the workplace had changed, and the management held all the cards. The age of the monopoly-controlled media had truly been born.

The issue could not then have been to push back the clock, on any front. In fact, the strike pointed to the need for the New on all fronts.

It was notable that the dismissed print workers, using their skills, produced their own newspaper The Wapping Post over the course of the strike, which served as a crucial instrument for organising and informing the strikers and their community as well as the public at large. Significantly, it effectively communicated the workers' own independent viewpoint, speaking in their own name, overcoming a media blackout imposed by the company [6].

This experience of the need to build the independent voice of the workers, the workers' independent press, relates to developing an independent outlook on the economy and politics. It is on this basis that technological progress can enhance human well-being, not detract from it. Workers themselves are integral to this transformation, requiring their voices to be central in discussions about how technology is developed and applied.

The silencing on the one hand of the alternative, of the direct voice of working people, and on the other, the disequilibrium of the social relation between employer and employed with the negation of "big labour" that characterise the neoliberalism that aggressively took hold in the 1980s are critical factors in the profound political crisis that exists today.

The Wapping strike exposed the inadequacies of a political system that fails to express the interests and voices of workers. It also threw down the challenge to working people as to how to organise to make their defence organisations effective in the period of the retreat of revolution. The legacy of the strike remains relevant in the present in the need for deep-going democratic renewal that empowers the working people to be in control over the matters that affect their lives, particularly now when the productive forces are growing exponentially and the response of the ruling elites is to smash what they cannot control.

The need then and now is for a system of authority rooted in collective decision-making rather than imposition. Modern movements, such as that embodied by the phrase "Enough Is Enough," aim to empower workers to make their claims on society, which they must, and claim their agency, so that any form of change, technological or otherwise, is not posed as a force outside of their control.

Workers' Weekly has confidence in the working class that they can rise to the occasion in the present phase of historical development, and meet this challenge. In this respect, it puts on the agenda to creatively work itself to continually improve the content and form of its journalism.

Notes
1. Annie Brown, "Wapping dispute 30 years on: How Murdoch and Thatcher united to crush British workers", Daily Record, October 1, 2016
https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/wapping-big-read-8949504
2. "Wapping dispute", Wikipedia, retrieved January 29, 2026
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wapping_dispute
3. Nicola Cutcher, "Wapping strike - story: Special Branch kept close watch of the industrial dispute", Special Branch Files Project, January 12, 2016
https://specialbranchfiles.uk/wapping-strike-story/
4. In this regard, see:
"The Undercover Policing Inquiry and the Fight for Accountability", Workers' Weekly, October 12, 2024
https://www.rcpbml.org.uk/wwie-24/ww24-25/ww24-25-05.htm
5. The phrase related to the move towards computerised typesetting systems, which used digital "words" composed with the "spaces" in between them, enabling journalists (and others) to have direct input into the system, rather than traditional methods that required physical typesetting by compositors. This shift meant that fewer workers were needed, as machines could handle tasks previously performed by several printworkers. The phrase highlighted the broader transformation in the industry towards automation, with computers taking over roles that were once labour-intensive. How to deal with this move was one of the challenges facing the print workers and their unions at that time, at the beginning of, and then throughout, the 1980s.
6. "Wapping Dispute", Marx Memorial Library
https://www.marx-memorial-library.org.uk/special-collections-and-subject-guides/wapping-dispute

Workers' Weekly, January 24, 1987

One year has passed since the brutal sacking of five and a half thousand print workers by Rupert Murdoch's News International and the move of Murdoch's titles to Wapping.

This act was a savage onslaught on the print workers and their rights, representing the decisive move by Murdoch in his single-minded pursuit of maximum profits in the conditions of the capitalist crisis. It was an integral part of the offensive against the workers by the capitalist class as a whole to unload the whole burden of the crisis onto their backs, involving throwing workers out of their jobs on a massive scale, as well as further attacking and restricting their trade union rights.

News International is still arrogantly refusing to consider for a moment the reinstatement of the sacked workers. It is still, as it has done from the beginning, pursuing its attacks on the workers and their unions, utilising the Employment Acts to obtain injunctions, issue writs claiming damages and so forth, in order to force the workers to their knees and liquidate their resistance. The police have been used from the outset to attack and intimidate the pickets, to ensure the continued production of Murdoch's newspapers, and enforce the court injunctions outlawing mass pickets. [...]

The offensive at News International opened the way for further attacks, sackings and introduction of new technology in the newspaper industry as a whole, as the press barons saw that Murdoch through his vicious actions had strengthened their hand, and were able to cite the cut-throat competition with Murdoch as "justification" for their own offensive against the workers.

The whole history of the struggle, from the well-laid and vicious plans of Murdoch to carry out wholesale sackings and transfer printing to the heavily fortified Wapping plant, the continual unprovoked and savage attacks by the police on the print workers' pickets and demonstrations, the use of the Tory government's anti-worker legislation to impose massive fines on the print unions and sequester their assets, Murdoch's employing every tactic so as to utilise this legislation to the full and bring the forces of the state and the courts to bear against the workers - all show that the workers can have no illusions about the nature of the capitalists, their state and their government. It reveals this nature to be most ugly, rapacious, vicious, violent, deceitful and bullying, and that as the crisis intensified, the capitalists will stop at nothing to unload its burden onto the working people, to exploit them to the bone, to club them into submission, to split their unity against exploitation, and to attempt to smash their dignity. It shows they will do everything in their power to make the working class and people pay for the crisis and to maintain in existence their system of wage slavery and extraction of maximum profit.

[...]

It is the workers' own struggles that are decisive in winning their demands. The workers' rights - the right to strike, to a livelihood, and so on - and their interests can only be served through their principled, vigorous, uncompromising and independent class struggle, through self-sacrifice and keeping the initiative in their own hands.

The workers have refused to be cowed by the attacks on them, they have twice rejected attempts to impose on them "final offers" [...] which would have compromised their dignity and their just demands for reinstatement and for their full democratic and trade union rights. They have continued their pickets and demonstrations outside the Wapping plant.

The workers are justly outraged by the sackings and the continual savage attacks on them and their right over the past year. [...]

It has shown that the workers can have no illusions bout the viciousness of their class enemy, about the lengths to which it will go to maximise profits, to trample on the workers' rights, and to maintain its system of wage slavery. [...]

The struggle has shown that the workers are not prepared to lie down in the face of the capitalist offensive, to see their dignity trampled in the mud [...].

The fact is that the viciousness of the attacks on the working people by the capitalist class reflects also the depths of the crisis of their system, to which neither the capitalists [nor] their political parties [...] are able to offer any solution. It is only the working class that can lead the people in solving the grave problems which confront them. [...]