Even as the world wakes up to Britain’s chronic “say-do gap” on defence, Westminster is cutting even more cash from the military to boost welfare spending.
The leader of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK department for preparing for government, Danny Kruger, has taken a hand in the burgeoning debate on the demilitarisation of Britain, from the world’s premier military power a century ago, to a credible world power earlier this century, to a hollowed-out force with capability gaps so pronounced it has proven unable in recent weeks to meet its commitments.
Responding to a significant elite defection whistle-blower — former NATO Secretary General and Labour Party veteran insider Lord Robertson — who broke cover to say his efforts to fix the government from the inside had failed and he now needed to expose that, Kruger warned that while it isn’t yet too late to save the British military from terminal decline, “it could be soon”.
Kruger said Lord Robertson’s intervention, which as reported saw Britain’s state of national defence described as “parlous”, the subject of government “vandalism”, and the country “in peril”, had exposed “the chronic say-do gap in the Government’s defence policy”. The Reform organiser, who was brought in by the party to do deep thinking on the big challenges that would face a future Nigel Farage-led government should they win the next General Election, reflected the government’s persistently bellicose rhetoric is “swaggering bluster” and escalatory, but “the reality is we have no capacity to deliver on it”. He said:
The rhetoric is swaggering bluster but the reality is we have no capacity to deliver on it. For instance, Govt boasts we have ‘exposed’ covert Russian activity in the North Atlantic… But we can’t or won’t interdict unarmed tankers carrying illegal oil through the Channel, let alone deal with an actual military threat in our own waters. The rhetoric is of escalation, the reality is forced pusillanimity; the combination – tough say, weak do – is very dangerous. We are talking loudly and carrying a small stick.
Incredibly, even as the armed forces, the Ministry of Defence, and military thinkers cry out for extra spending to save the Navy, Army, and Air Force from collapse, as the failure of Britain to fulfil its obligations to the Western alliance for a simple want of working warships makes headlines worldwide, the Treasury is imposing even more cuts. Kruger reflected:
…we need a vision of Britain’s national security and foreign policy, and a doctrine for how to deliver it. The Govt has none of this – no vision, no doctrine, and no plan. And not many ships, planes, drones or troops either. It’s not too late to fix this, but it could be soon. This is the great national imperative and we have a Government that can’t even cut £3bn from welfare, while defence chiefs are this week looking at cuts to military budgets of £3.5bn.
Former NATO boss Lord Robertson, who was Tony Blair’s Minister of Defence in the 1990s, was one of three external reviewers of the government’s Strategic Defence Review published last year. He has revealed that he gave the government advance warning that he was planning to go public with his criticism, which had left them “extremely angry with me”. He said in a speech on Tuesday: “They don’t want these headlines but sometimes you have to say it… I believe my country is in danger”.
While Robertson was the first of those three to break cover, with it being reported he had “run out of patience” trying to persuade the government to take defence seriously from the inside, he was not the last. A second co-author, General Sir Richard Barrons, joined his comments hours later to say he “completely” agreed with the criticism, and now today the third and final co-author Dr Fiona Hill has also defacto defected from the government to speak against it.
The Guardian reports hill, a former U.S. National Security Council member who was embroiled in the attempted impeachment of President Donald Trump in 2019, said the government needs to have “more movement now” and a sense of urgency”. This lack of urgency is “bizarre” given the deteriorating global security picture, Hill is reported to have said, while decrying a “lack of resolute leadership”.
Yet beyond the criticism of the lack of action seen from Lord Robertson and General Barrons, Dr Hill also offered some explanation for why the left-wing Labour leadership of Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer is so reluctant to engage in the original and core purpose of government, defence of the realm. “The political situation, you know, for the [Labour] party, is not good”, she said, noting “everybody’s worried about votes and, you know, reactions”.
Indeed, it has been the default in post-Cold War Europe that the security umbrella of the United States is a law of nature, leaving those European states free when making the “guns versus butter” decision to always side with welfare over defence. The Guardian cited veteran Labour Member of Parliament Diane Abbott, a stalwart of the left of the party and one of those disaffected with the Starmer leadership, who laid out quite simply that Labour’s few remaining voters would simply walk away from it if it prioritised defence.
She said: “We have already slashed foreign aid, and to cut welfare to spend on armaments is appalling… People are going to start to wonder why they are voting Labour in the first place. It is not going to help us electorally.” Abbott is reported to have said Labour voters would switch to the Greens, a party which believes Britain unilaterally decommissioning its nuclear deterrent will inspire other countries to do the same.
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