UK lawmakers urge banks to drop ‘unethical’ label for defense investment

Lawmakers from Britain’s ruling center-left party urged banks to reclassify some defense investment as ‘ethical.’

The open letter from more than 100 Labour MPs and peers said corporate environmental, social, and governance requirements “often wrongly exclude all defense investment as ‘unethical’,” raising barriers for the industry and slowing military spending.

Europe is scrambling to boost defense spending as the US changes its stance on Ukraine, with Germany rewriting its debt rules and France discussing expanding its nuclear deterrent.

Ultimately, though, the Financial Times’ international politics commentator wrote, Europe must accept that its social security needs to be trimmed to make way for more military spending: “The mission now is to defend Europe’s lives. How, if not through a smaller welfare state, is a better-armed continent to be funded?”