Maybe Decide What Defence Is For Before You Fund It?

Despite promising not to make “new major policy or spending commitments“ on his way out, Keir Starmer has saddled Andy Burnham with a decade of rising defence spending. A pledge to raise spending to 2.6% of GDP by 2027, an “ambition“ to reach 3% in the next Parliament, and a target of 3.5% by the one after that.

A capable leader would balk at having the next decade of policy dictated to him. A serious thinker would treat this eye-watering invoice as an invitation to reassess. An attentive reader might note that the review underpinning the plan was led by Lord Robertson, who spent two decades as an arms-industry lobbyist, and treat it with appropriate suspicion. But Burnham, keen to secure elite support, is simply letting Starmer, and the arms lobby, tell him what to do.

The only question left is how to pay for it. Because Burnham’s “Manchesterism“ has nothing to say about foreign policy, he’s allowing Labour’s right-wingers to answer that for him as well. Al Carns and Wes Streeting would cut welfare to fund warfare. Starmer is already gutting the infrastructure the country needs and demanding savings from every department. Unwilling to be outflanked on the right, Burnham is now pushing the same cuts. Public investment, welfare, infrastructure, foreign aid: everything is on the chopping block but the military itself.

Much of the left is no more serious: their instincts are to hear “defence spending” and reply “no”. The reflex is understandable. Britain’s record abroad hardly inspires trust: last year, while facilitating genocide in Palestine, British military equipment turned up in the hands of a Sudanese militia committing another. But refusing to engage with this topic hands the question of what a country owes its people to the flag shaggers.

We can curtail the bloodcurdling excesses of Britain’s “expeditionary“ armed forces, fully fund honest-to-god defence, and make enormous savings. Here’s how:

First we should make clear what few in Westminster are willing to admit: we already spend badly. £5.5bn on a decade-late armoured vehicle that vibrates forcefully enough to injure anybody inside. £6.5bn on destroyers whose engines can’t power the ship. £2.5bn on a radio system that turned up 25 years late and is now being replaced by another system that is also delayed and over budget. The National Audit Office puts the hole in the Ministry of Defence’s Equipment Plan at £16.9bn. This is a MOD that routinely wastes money.

It also underspends where it counts: the MOD’s own officials have long named cyber as the threat we neglect, even as research puts the cost to the UK economy at £14.7bn a year. Prevention is cheap by comparison: the World Economic Forum reports that such spending is “negligible compared to the financial consequences of a cyberattack”.

Secondly, the left must be clear that the funding shortfall facing the MOD was entirely self-inflicted. The same right-wing politicians now demanding money for war also demanded Brexit (an estimated 4% hit to GDP) and austerity (2%). They shrank the economy, and are now demanding further contraction in order to defend what’s left. It’s a doom loop.

The same self-reinforcing vicious cycle can be seen in Britain’s international aid spending, which is also being slashed to fund defence. This makes the world more unequal, and thus more dangerous. It enables Russia, for example, to lure Kenyans facing a lack of opportunities with the promise of $2,000 a month, then feed them into “meat assaults”.

If you don’t build anything inside your walls, they will fall down. And if you help no one beyond your walls, you will find you can never leave them. Defence runs on a population that believes it has something to lose and takes pride in its place in the world. You cannot ask it of people whose services you are degrading and whose state you are gutting. Support falls further still when you redefine “defence” to include wildly unpopular offensive wars.

The warmongers have a counterargument. Defence spending, they say, is good for growth. This is a myth. In World War II? Sure. Spitfires were built from British steel by British workers, with every pound circulating at home.

But an F-35 is not a Spitfire. British firms build only around 15% of each one, and unions reckon that spending the same money on European jets would mean ten times as many British jobs. Its value chain sits mostly outside Britain. The same can be said for other nominally “British” defence exports like the Raytheon Paveway bombs assembled in Scotland. The vision of defence spending as an engine of growth, especially in the context of planned cuts to fund it, is an appeal to nostalgia, not a serious economic prospectus.

A fiscal multiplier is the return an economy gets on a pound of government spending. Estimates vary, but a pound spent on defence returns far less than one spent on public investment. The International Monetary Fund puts public investment at around 1.4, against a standard estimate for defence that tops out at 0.7. Military spending is more capital-intensive, and more of it leaks into other countries’ economies, so it creates fewer jobs per pound than health, education or infrastructure. Move a pound from the first to the second and the economy shrinks.

More concretely, every £1m of transport spending supports 11.5 UK jobs. Energy (10) is similarly fruitful, while defence delivers just 2.4. Cutting infrastructure to pay for defence, as the government plans, will cost the UK 10,000 jobs.

None of this is an argument against making our own weapons. It is an argument for actually making them. There has just been a war that showed both the value of producing your own munitions and the risk of depending on Washington to supply them. Ukraine now makes around 40% of the weapons it uses at the front, and has become the world’s biggest drone manufacturer. The UK, meanwhile, is basically just gluing together American components that we need Washington’s permission to fire.

Speaking of gluing things together, the US is presently passing legislation to bind its own military-industrial complex to Israel’s. Britain is also deepening ties with Israel and America. This is not politically sustainable in a world where half of Britons believe Israel is committing genocide, and more than half see the US as a “negative force“.

New thinking is needed:

• A MOD that wastes billions as a matter of routine should face harder scrutiny, not political reverence that waves the waste through.

• Stripping welfare, aid and infrastructure to pay for warfare is self-defeating: you can’t have national security without human security.

• Accept that the world is multipolar and Britain no hegemon: fund genuine defence in our own region, not aggression half a world away.

• Build it in Britain and with our European neighbours.

• Stop relying on states that disregard international law.

Get that right, then we can talk about funding.

Will Burnham do all of this? Will he do any of it? Will he even try to do any of it? You know the answer as well as I do.