I’m afraid nothing the Prime Minister said convinces me that Britain will be safe from Russian aggression over the next decade_Nhy
When people consider Sir Keir Starmer‘s statement on defence in 20 years or so, what will they say?
Will they look back appreciatively and hail his announcement of an increase in defence expenditure as far-sighted – a first step in Britain’s rearmament after years of shameful neglect of our armed forces?
Or will they marvel that, as the United States started its retreat from Europe, Sir Keir was only prepared to raise the defence budget from 2.3 per cent of Gross National Product to 2.5 per cent – too little and too late?
We can’t, of course, be sure what people will say. It depends on unknowable events. I hope that the general reaction will be the first one – that the world will think well of Sir Keir, and regard yesterday’s announcement as the beginning of a realistic appraisal of our defence needs.
But I fear that the welcome but modest increase he promised won’t be adequate in the face of present dangers – particularly Russia – in a world in which Britain and Europe will no longer be tied to Uncle Sam’s apron strings.
I don’t even think that the extra money pledged by the Prime Minister matched the sometimes rousing rhetoric in his Commons statement. ‘Russia is a menace in our waters, in our airspace and on our streets,’ he declared. If it is so ubiquitously dangerous, shouldn’t we be doing more?
All right – I acknowledge that Sir Keir has at last made some sort of decision, albeit one that was made almost inevitable by Donald Trump‘s demand that European countries pay more to protect themselves.
He was unexpectedly brave, too, since in raiding the aid budget to pay for extra spending on our Armed Forces he must have known that he would enrage some of his Labour backbenchers, for whom foreign aid schemes, however ineffectual, rank higher than the defence of the realm.
Sir Keir at pres conference today announcing the Government will raise the defence budget from 2.3 per cent of Gross National Product to 2.5 per cent
Russian President Vladimir Putin during a meeting in the Kremlin in February 2025
Russian Su-35 fighters flying over a snowy landscape
So I half doff my cap – perhaps rather less than half. Let’s remember that yesterday’s announcement largely repeated what the Tories said last April. The only difference is that they promised – in the admittedly unlikely event of their being re-elected – to raise spending on defence to 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2030.
Sir Keir says he will do it by 2027. But it is essentially the same undertaking, though the Prime Minister claims that Labour will actually fork out 2.6 per cent of GDP once extra spending on beefed-up intelligence services has been taken into account.
This is still only about half of what Britain spent in the early 1980s, to counter the threat of the Soviet Union. Incidentally, it’s a fascinating reflection that, according to official figures, the almost universally vilified administration of Neville Chamberlain had increased defence expenditure to 9 per cent of GDP by the outbreak of war in 1939 – a dramatic jump from 2.9 per cent only three years earlier.
Or look at it another way. Russia is on a war footing. It has virtually doubled its spending on defence since 2021. According to a recent report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, the country now spends roughly the same amount of money on arming itself as the whole of Europe in terms of purchasing power parity. Russia may be a relatively poor country but its money goes much further than Europe’s.
Sir Keir is right to say that Putin represents a menace – and that menace will become even greater if Trump forces a humiliating settlement on Ukraine which rewards the Russian leader for his aggression. Is spending just a little more on defence likely to provide us with the extra protection we need after years in which our Armed Forces have been inexorably hollowed out by short-sighted politicians? I don’t think so.
Just how many more billions are being offered is not even clear. The defence budget stands at £56.9 billion a year (which happens to be about half of what this country pays in annual interest charges on its ballooning debt). Increasing spending from 2.3 per cent to 2.5 per cent of GDP is reckoned to cost about £6 billion a year – not a vast amount. That is about the same as the raid on the aid budget.
Yet Sir Keir claimed yesterday that, from 2027, an extra £13.4 billion a year will be spent on defence. As the Institute for Fiscal Studies suggested, someone seems to have got their calculations in a bit of a twist. The numbers obviously don’t add up.
Believe it or not, some £13 billion worth of cuts are being made to the defence budget in this financial year. We are probably spending less on defence than most people – including Trump – think, and I suspect that expenditure will increase after 2027 by less than the £13.4 billion a year mentioned by the PM.
Sir Keir Starmer meets British soldiers at Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire where he saw Ukranian soldiers being trained in August 2022
Soviet soldiers in Red Square in 1977. The defence spending raises announced today is still only about half of what Britain spent in the early 1980s, to counter the threat of the Soviet Union
The extra money simply won’t have much of an effect on our dangerously diminished Armed Forces. We have two aircraft carriers that regularly break down and carry many fewer aeroplanes than they are supposed to. We don’t have enough frigates to offer them adequate support, and therefore have to rely on foreign navies.
With about 74,000 regular soldiers (Russia has a million), our Army is smaller than it has been at any time in the past 200 years, and incapable of providing much more than a small peacekeeping force. The number of RAF fighter jets is about an eighth of those we had at the height of the Cold War.
A few months ago, Defence Secretary John Healey conceded that our Armed Forces would be incapable of deterring an enemy from invading. What a shaming, and terrifying, admission. Our defences have been so run down over the past quarter of a century that it is fanciful to suppose
that a relatively minor lift in expenditure – for that is all Sir Keir is offering, despite the hype – will miraculously fill the numerous gaps in our defences.
It’s possible that the Prime Minister realises this, and is offering us an hors d’oeuvre in the hope that he’ll be able to produce a main course before long. He did, after all, say that defence spending of 3 per cent of GDP should be an ‘ambition’ in the next Parliament, though that might not end until 2034 – which could be too late.
I do realise that money is very tight. Fortunately even Rachel Reeves may realise that another round of tax rises would probably finish off the economy. But hidebound Labour is philosophically opposed to trimming the bloated welfare budget to provide extra resources.
Dangerous times call for radical measures. Sir Keir has recognised that our Armed Forces are gravely depleted. He has taken on his Left-wing MPs by plundering the aid budget, which is to his credit. For all that, he hasn’t displayed the imagination and sense of urgency that define great statesmen.
A few months ago, Defence Secretary John Healey conceded that our Armed Forces would be incapable of deterring an enemy from invading
French President Emanuel Macron with President Trump on Monday
Whether the Prime Minister has done enough to please Donald Trump I don’t know. The US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, has given an encouraging response.
No doubt there will be much clasping of hands and jokey exchanges of goodwill when Sir Keir visits the President in Washington tomorrow. I only hope the PM isn’t as fawning as President Emmanuel Macron was earlier this week.
But whether Trump is happy or not should concern us far less than whether this country will be safe from Russian aggression over the next decade.
Nothing that the Prime Minister said yesterday convinces me that we will be.
