Does anyone really think that spending 3 per cent of GDP on defence would make Britain ‘battle-ready’, as Keir Starmer claims? (Assuming, that is, that he really did spend all that money rather than merely have an aspiration to do so).
Here is the statistic of the day, to remind us of what a wartime economy really looks like. In 2023, according to the World Bank, Ukraine spent 36.7 per cent of its GDP on defence. And no, the reason that percentage is so high is not because Ukraine’s GDP collapsed: on the contrary, Ukraine’s GDP in 2023 was higher than in any year except the Covid rebound year of 2021, plus 2008 and 2013. Russia, in trying to roll over a smaller neighbour, spent 7 per cent of GDP on defence – or rather, on offence in its case.
How quickly could the public accept a switch from social spending to military spending?
No one is suggesting that it would be a sensible strategy for Britain to emulate Ukraine and spend a third or more of national output on defence at the moment. Unlike Ukraine in 2023, we are not actually at war; we are just trying to prepare for the risk that we might find ourselves in that position. But we do need a plan for how spending could be ratcheted up very quickly in the event of a conflict.
Britain has two problems on this front, neither of which are addressed by the Strategic Defence Review published yesterday. Firstly, a wartime economy requires productive assets rapidly to be redeployed. Factories must be retooled and turned over to weapons production, sources of fuel secured, agricultural production intensified. But what do you do when you don’t have the factories any more to retool? Starmer’s dad might have been a toolmaker, but there is little to suggest that the Prime Minister himself has an answer to this.
And how do you cope when you have just allowed your oil and gas industry to atrophy because you have prioritised net zero over national energy security? We might do a little better on agricultural land; while the government has been chucking money at rewilding schemes, many could be quickly reversed in a national emergency.
The other problem is that no UK government has had to run a wartime economy in the era of high social security spending. A wartime economy would require a massive transfer of resources from social spending to military spending.
Would the public accept what was necessary? Possibly, if people could see the need, but you have to wonder. There would be plenty of people on the Left who would refuse to see a bean cut from social programmes and their own pet projects.
This rising and obvious threat from Putin doesn’t quite seem to have got through, for example, to Karen Bell, who occupies a post as ‘Professor of Social and Environmental Justice’ at the University of Glasgow. She has just written an extraordinary column in the Guardian claiming that far from spending more on defence, we should be spending less:
By reallocating resources towards healthcare, education and climate resilience, the UK can address immediate domestic challenges while contributing to global stability.
A few more therapy sessions and wind farms, in other words, and all will be well: the world will be stabilised and we won’t need weapons ever again. I am sure Putin will take note.
The trouble is, Professor Bell is far from on her own. We have a public sector full of people who can be expected jealously to guard social programmes even through a national security crisis. Like games of tennis, a future war could be decided largely in the mind: how quickly could the public accept a switch from social spending to military spending? To put it bluntly: how easy would it be to get DEI officials redeployed into factories manufacturing bombs? Let’s hope we never have to find out.
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