The British government persistently warns about the risk of war in Europe and the need to re-arm while dismissing the calls of its own military leaders to make funds available to allow that to take place.
Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer (finance minister) Rachel Reeves has ruled out the possibility of a boost to defence spending this year, stating the Ministry of Defence will have to wait for “future spending reviews”. While NATO’s best performing members — such as Poland — push their spending upwards in line with the leadership of President Trump calling for treaty signatories to dedicate five per cent of GDP to defence, the denial of a cash boost makes certain the British military won’t make it to three per cent in the life of this government.
The Treasury department expressed concern about wasteful spending in the Ministry of Defence, reports The Daily Telegraph, and said it would see no more money. Indeed, defence boondoggles have dominated headlines recently with the botched rollout of the Ajax armoured fighting vehicle, a project that has been underway under various guises since the end of the Cold War, grabbing headlines over Christmas.
Reeves defended the spending decision, claiming the present Labour government had already rolled out the “biggest uplift in defence spending since the end of the Cold War”.
While the decision to not make extra discretionary spending on growing the military may seem rational for a country which is not at war and which operates a considerably and decades-long government budget deficit, it does clash conspicuously with the actual rhetoric of the government. The Prime Minister himself, Sir Keir Starmer, spoke stridently just this past weekend at the Munich Security Conference of the need for military might.
In a speech that made clear the government’s position that Russia is a threat that has to be prepared for, Starmer had said:
…Russia has proved its appetite for aggression, bringing terrible suffering to the Ukrainian people. Its hyper-threats extend across our continent, not just threatening our security, but tearing at our social order… It is true that Russia has made a huge strategic blunder in Ukraine, and the Russian casualties number well over a million. But even as the war goes on, Russia is re-arming, reconstituting their armed forces, an industrial base.
NATO has warned that Russia could be ready to use military force against the Alliance by the end of this decade. In the event of a peace deal in Ukraine, which we are all working hard to achieve, Russia’s re-armament would only accelerate. The wider danger to Europe would not end there. It would increase. So we must answer this threat in full.
The answer, Starmer said, is expanding the armed forces. He said:
…in the face of these threats, there is only one viable option… We must build our hard power, because that is the currency of the age. We must be able to deter aggression. And yes, if necessary, we must be ready to fight.
This follows years of similar remarks by government ministers and military figures during this government and the previous Conservative governments. Indeed, the very highest military men in the land have openly lobbied the government for more defence spending.
The Chief of the Defence Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton was one of those, saying last week that “hard choices” are needed on spending, while the head of the Royal Air Force Air Chief Marshal Sir Harvey Smyth blamed political calculations for the slow pace of rearmament in remarks only days ago.
Knighton also spoke on these themes in January, noting the United Kingdom had taken full advantage of the peace dividend of winding-down militaries at the end of the Cold War but now the world was shifting into a less easy period this put the country at risk. He said there were “difficult trade-offs” necessary which meant deciding whether to fund peacetime niceties like education or health, or whether to ensure there might be peace at all by spending on defence. He said: “we have taken a peace dividend and we are not as ready as we need to be for the kind of full-scale conflict that we might face. And that’s how we ultimately deter our principle adversaries, by being ready to fight and win.”
Last year a group of recently retired generals made an unprecedented public intervention to lobby against the government actively undermining the military, while in 2024 the government’s defence minister John Healey warned the military is not ready to fight as it has so few stockpiles. Indeed, months earlier the former Chief of the Defence Staff Sir Nick Carter said the British armed forces could fight for just two months if called to before exhausting itself for want on resources.
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