My son has a penchant for fantasy movies, especially Marvel. It’s an expensive taste. The cinema isn’t cheap once you add in food and parking. So in a way I am grateful to Sir Keir Starmer. Because there’s now no need for my son to visit the cinema again. If he wants a fantasy, all he needs to do is listen to the Prime Minister speak about defence.
To be fair to the PM, he isn’t the only one. Pretty much the entire political class is, to varying degrees, living in a fantasy – that we have even started to get to grips with the requirements for defence spending, let alone decided to do something about it.
If you find me a party which is being serious about defence, I’ll find you a unicorn
Sir Keir has been on the airwaves today trumpeting the rise in defence spending from 2.3 per cent of GDP to 2.5 per cent. And he has managed to keep a straight face. It’s risible. For one thing, even this paltry increase isn’t promised until 2027 – as if we can simply freeze the world for two years and not worry about the challenges posed by Russia or China until then. They are decent chaps and I’m sure they’ll hang on for two years before doing anything we might have to worry about.
But even that misses the real point. 2.5 per cent isn’t close to being sufficient – as both the Defence Secretary and the PM well know. John Healey spent the weekend telling the world that ‘in the next Parliament this country will spend 3 per cent of our GDP on defence’. No ambiguity there at all. Of course there wasn’t, because Healey knows that paying for the recommendations of the defence review necessitates 3 per cent as a bare minimum. Except today the PM wouldn’t even back him, describing 3 per cent as an ‘ambition’.
An ambition! If that’s the level of ambition Sir Keir has for the country’s defence, no wonder the government is in such trouble. An ambition would be 5 per cent – although even that would only mark a return to the 1980s, when we didn’t live in a fantasy world and were realistic about the need to pay for a defence policy that actually defended us.
Back then, we spent 5 per cent of GDP even with the full protection offered by the US via Nato. Now the US is getting more isolationist by the day and yet the government is congratulating itself on an increase in spending of 0.2 per cent in GDP to 2.5 per cent. Fantasy or what?
Sir Keir has been clear and consistent about the need to support and defend Ukraine. Does he not see that his words are meaningless if he can’t even commit to 3 per cent? The idea that we can properly support Ukraine on 2.5 per cent is away with the fairies.
The reality is that politicians haven’t even begun to come to terms with the new world we are in, where the US is no longer our defence sugar daddy and we face all sorts of new threats. Look at the outcry on the Labour benches – and among Tories, too – over the removal of the winter fuel allowance and other cuts announced by Liz Kendall: minuscule reductions to the bloated welfare bill which the government couldn’t even stick to because of the pressure. No wonder Sir Keir and the government prefer to live in the fantasy world where everything ticks along much as before but with a bit of tinkering where they can get away with it.
It’s not a serious party; not a serious debate. But then if you find me a party which is being serious about defence, I’ll find you a unicorn. Neither exist.
Today is supposed to have been an important moment in resetting our defence priorities for the next decade. It’s certainly important – but only for exposing the utter failure of our political class to lead the country in understanding the needs – and the costs – of the future.
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