Before he delivered his much-ballyhooed address to the European Parliament in Strasbourg this Thursday, former Bank of England head-turned-Canadian Prime Minister, Mark Carney, met with UK Prime Minister Andrew Burnham in Liverpool. The official UK and Canadian readouts make clear that the central topic on their agenda was how to escalate NATO’s de facto war with Russia, and secure the Schachtian war economy required to finance it.

From the war side, Carney announced that Canada has formally applied to join the UK-led Joint Expeditionary Force (a “coalition of ten like-minded Northern European NATO nations” training to respond rapidly against Russia), while Burnham “welcomed Canada becoming the first observer nation in the Global Combat Air Programme” (GCAP: a joint UK-Italy-Japan fighter aircraft project) in July.

The key point, however, reported by the UK PM’s office, was their discussion of the UK joining Carney’s Defence, Security and Resilience Bank (DSRB) , better known as “the NATO bank.” The big speculative financial banks (JPMorgan Chase, Commerzbank, Deutsche Bank, ING and Canada’s big universal banks, among them) have announced they are all-in for Carney’s bank, but the nations stepping up to join it remain limited to a relative handful of nations, with no large European nation among them.

The Financial Times and BBC published similar stories Sept. 15, announcing that the Burnham government is now “‘actively’ exploring joining the Canada-led global defense bank,” as the Financial Times headlined its story. Neither named their sources, but unnamed government and senior Labour Party officials are quoted, assuring that “it’s an idea which has become very much live again,” because joining could allow the UK to increase military spending to 3% of its GDP, and thus “scale defense industrial capacity” as required.