Your starter for ten: what is the difference between an ambition, a promise, a certainty and a commitment? If you can work it out, send a postcard to 10 Downing Street, SW1A, and you may have clarified the government’s plans on defence spending.
Today, ten months after it was launched and following a weekend of drip-feeding of various elements by ministers, the Strategic Defence Review will be published today. The prime minister launched it – a demonstration of his strange literalism – at a dockyard, rather than risk anything so exacting as announcing a major policy review to parliament first. Already, however, ministers are coming badly unstuck over how much money they are planning to spend to implement it.
In February this year, Sir Keir Starmer unveiled a plan to increase defence spending from 2.3 per cent of GDP to 2.5 per cent. It was modest but welcome news, and it came at some political cost to him, as the additional funding was found by raiding the overseas aid budget; it also had the benefit of clarity, as the prime minister specified that the increase would take effect as of April 2027.
Beyond that undertaking there was a hostage to fortune, as Starmer declared ‘an ambition to spend 3 per cent of GDP on defence in the next parliament’. This was heavily qualified: it would only happen ‘as economic and fiscal conditions allow’, and ‘in the next parliament’ could mean any time between 2029 and 2034. The government hoped that voters would mainly hear ‘3 per cent’ and any detail would be lost in the background, and it was proved right – perhaps too right.
During endless media performances over the weekend, the Defence Secretary John Healey was overcome with bullishness. There was, he told the Times, ‘no doubt’ that defence spending would reach 3 per cent by 2034, allowing himself the full extent of the latitude the prime minister had originally signalled by saying ‘in the next parliament’. Healey added that there would be a ‘certain decade of rising defence spending’, and Whitehall sources added that the recommendations of the review would be ‘unaffordable’ without that level of investment.
Healey is an experienced politician; he turned 65 this year and was first appointed to ministerial office in 2001. He should know, then, that sometimes life comes at you fast. Initially, Downing Street would not confirm that the defence secretary’s ‘certainty’ was a ‘commitment’, and when Healey was pressed on the issue on Sunday, he fell back on the prime minister’s formulation that spending 3 per cent of GDP by 2034 was an ‘ambition’.
Starmer continued the obfuscatory salvage exercise on Monday. He told Radio 4’s Today programme that, with regard to reaching spending of 3 per cent, he was ‘not going to indulge in the fantasy of plucking dates from the air’, and intoned instead: ‘I take the defence and security of our country very seriously.’
Who are we to believe? John Healey today, or John Healey yesterday?
It is an odd state of affairs when the prime minister and first lord of the Treasury, about to unveil what was billed as a ‘root and branch’ review of the United Kingdom’s defence posture, loftily dismisses a question about how much money the government intends to spend on implementing the review as ‘plucking dates from the air’.
He was asked, perfectly reasonably, if his defence secretary was correct in saying that the array of new commitments contained in the review – £6 billion on munitions, up to 12 new submarines, six new armaments factories, a new £1 billion Cyber and Electromagnetic Command – relied on increasing the Ministry of Defence’s budget beyond the impending 2.5 per cent of GDP. Characteristically, he reacted blinkingly as if he had been presented with an absurd and frivolous inquiry.
Who are we to believe? The minister in charge of implementing the Strategic Defence Review had ‘no doubt’ that spending would reach 3 per cent by 2034 and the accompanying mood music said it would otherwise be ‘unaffordable’. Now it seems that doubt has returned, and Healey can only muster ‘ambition’. If that ambition is not fulfilled, and every one of us knows that ambitions sometimes do go unrealised, then it is hard to see how the armed forces receives all its new capacity on the MoD’s current budget.
All politicians play with words and seek safety in parsing and nuance, and most are less skilled at the task than they think. This government has shown itself peculiarly susceptible to a belief in the magical power of words as signifiers separate from reality, and now it finds itself in a communications mess wholly of its own making. The SDR, disjointed and flimsy as it is, contains several recommendations which could enhance the UK’s military capabilities. When asked how these will be paid for, however, ministers cannot give a clear answer. From that confusion observers will all draw their own conclusions. My advice would be not to expect too much.
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