For the Conservatives and those to their right, collectively responsible both for years of cuts to the defence establishment and the damage Brexit has done to the UK economy, the source of funds needed to shore up the UK’s flagging defences is obvious: cut welfare and abandon net zero.
For Labour, the first option is politically impossible. But to a rational observer there is little to recommend the second: abandoning the 2050 goal would inflict economic harm, inflate the bill for climate-related damage, discourage investment, magnify the cost of adaptation and fatally harm the rapidly growing green jobs sector.
The £15bn budget of Keir Starmer’s Defence Investment Plan (DIP) came in only marginally above the £13.5bn that triggered the resignation of his defence minister, John Healey, a few weeks before, and is well short of the 3.5 per cent of GDP Starmer committed at last year’s Nato summer summit to spend on core defence by 2035. And it was only reached through vague promises of “efficiency” savings and by robbing the budgets of two departments with capital spending plans: transport, and energy security and net zero.
The voters of Newark may be disappointed that their town’s bypass won’t now be upgraded—but this, at least, is not a national security threat. Energy security and the fight against climate change, however, make net zero key to national security. Renewable energy at an affordable and stable price is foundational to future prosperity, but the more immediate appeal is to protect the UK from continuing and damaging fossil fuel shocks.
Since it seems inevitable that funding for both defence and net zero will continue to fall short, how the money is spent will matter even more.
The energy transition and the defence plan promise the collateral benefits of creating jobs and boosting the UK’s flagging industrial sector, but in both cases the early stages are expensive. In renewable energy, the government may be tempted to purchase cheap and readily available Chinese equipment, but this would bring serious dependency and security risks. Other options are more costly, but perhaps this is the price of national security.
In defence, the outcome of investment is intended to be that the country is safe. At present, the UK has neither the national resilience nor the basic strengths in personnel and materiel to defend the nation against the threats it may face. The case for investment was powerfully made in the recent Strategic Defence Review led by the former UK defence minister and Nato secretary general George Robertson, and the argument that defence spending should be used to boost jobs and growth in the UK was made in last autumn’s Defence Industrial Strategy. But an important obstacle to progress lies in the Treasury’s view that the Ministry of Defence (MoD) is a hopeless money drain.
There may be some truth in that, but defence procurement was never easy. It requires guessing what will be needed 20 to 30 years in the future, then commissioning affordable equipment from British suppliers in a long-term project that will be subject to repeated short-term funding panics, frequent personnel changes and continuously evolving technologies and threats. In the last decade, geostrategic shifts, battlefield innovation and rapid technological advances have further complicated an almost impossible task.
The most recent poster child for defence profligacy and incompetence was the £5bn Ajax programme, which sought to replace out-of-date armoured vehicles with state-of-the-art ones. On the surface it is exactly the kind of investment the MoD should be making—but when the first of the 589 ordered vehicles were delivered, they were unusable. The level of noise and vibration inside made their operatives sick, their guns could not be fired, and they could not be used at night. In a blistering report, the National Accounting Office identified a series of systemic failures that must be fixed if the current upgrade of UK’s armed forces is not to descend into another farce.
In the wake of the Ajax criticisms, reforms to the procurement system have been promised that would fix weak governance, confused reporting lines, high staff turnover, lack of resources and an ineffective programme board. If the list sounds familiar, it may be because it could apply to so many UK public spending projects. See HS2, which is now scheduled to run its first high-speed train between a suburb of London and Birmingham by 2039, at a total predicted cost of up to £102.7bn—money that both net zero and the defence sector would have been glad to have.
Fixing these systemic failures would pay long-term dividends for the UK—and allow us to move far beyond the unedifying political points-scoring over which sector deserves the most money.
