This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
A common theme in British politics and strong evidence that it is going mad in a literal sense, is the pervasive gulf between word and deed. It isn’t just that politicians say one thing and do another — that is a complaint as old as time — but that the politicians seem increasingly to be taken by surprise by the fact that saying something and doing it are different things.
This is not a partisan failing; one thinks of Rishi Sunak, absurdly but apparently sincerely fighting the last election as a “tax-cutting Conservative” despite presiding over enormous net tax increases. But in part because the decay in the condition of the public finances is more advanced now, this tendency has gotten even more acute under this government.
On issue after issue, the pattern is the same. First, the politicians point to some major policy problem — social care, for example, or defence — and promise to solve it; for good measure, they will likely also suggest that it was unpardonably irresponsible of their predecessors not to have fixed it already. Second, they order a review (usually by Dame Louise Casey but occasionally someone else). Third, the report arrives and is hailed (if only by the politicians) as a significant step towards solving the problem.
So far, so good. But then comes the snag. To actually solve the problem, government has to actually do what the review proposes, which in turn means paying for those proposals. That means the Treasury has to get its hands on it, and the Treasury’s position is almost invariably to sabotage it.
Sometimes this takes the form of simply shunting the timelines for any policy changes so far into the future that they cease, in the attention-deficit time horizons of Westminster, to be real. This is what happened to social care. On other occasions, where the prime minister has made a pledge that precludes such sleights-of-accounting, the Treasury simply takes the purse strings and garottes the policy with them. This is what has happened to defence.
If it offers nothing else, there is a gratifying symmetry to the implosion of Sir Keir Starmer’s defence posture. Just a year ago, in June 2025, he was praising the defence review he commissioned after the election for providing a blueprint for “a battle-ready, armour-clad” nation; the Prime Minister was said by media outlets to have put Britain on a “war footing”, whatever that is supposed to mean.
Fast forward to June 2026, and both his defence secretary and armed forces minister have resigned. A couple of months before that, Lord Robertson and Fiona Hill, two of the authors of his cherished defence review, accused Starmer of “corrosive complacency” on military matters. Robertson, the former Labour defence secretary and ex-secretary general of Nato, specifically accused “non-military experts in the Treasury” of “vandalism” and warned: “We cannot defend Britain with an ever-expanding welfare budget.”
I don’t need to tell you what happened to Starmer’s defence ambitions because it’s the same thing that happened to all the rest of his ambitions. It is, in fact, simply The Thing That Happens in modern British politics: runaway revenue spending leaving no room for anything else.
Rachel Reeves is spending all the money the fiscal rules permit her to spend, borrowing what the bond markets will allow her to borrow, and taxing more than the voting public is prepared to accept. The only way to finance a new commitment to defence would be cuts elsewhere — which Labour MPs won’t allow.
Consider this response from a Treasury spokesperson to John Healey’s resignation: “let’s be clear on what John is asking for: cuts to schools and hospitals”. Now, perhaps the Defence Secretary really was asking colleagues to make steep cuts to their most cherished departments rather than, say, abolish the pension triple lock or find other savings in current expenditures. (To give just one example: getting the sickness benefit bill back to 2020 levels would free up most of the cash needed to properly fund the defence review.)
But it seems at least equally likely that this stark choice is a product of little more than the Treasury’s determined effort to pretend that such an option to correct the public finances doesn’t exist. We have seen the same tactic before, after all; when Rachel Reeves announced her first tranche of manifesto-busting tax rises, the only alternative was supposedly steep cuts in capital budgets. The obviously more sensible option, cutting revenue spending, went unmentioned.
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Who is to blame for this sorry state of affairs? Both parties have to shoulder their share of responsibility for the abject condition of the Armed Forces, which is the result of decades of deferring hard decisions whilst gradually shrinking budgets. Britain no longer spends enough on defence to have a military which does everything, but nobody wants to be the minister to formally admit that Britain has stopped doing something, and every service chief fights for their own budget with partisan zeal. The result is too much ambition with too little money behind it, excessive projects cannibalising one another’s budgets and diverting cash from boring but essential things like maintenance.
But in this specific case, rather unusually, the Prime Minister really can’t blame the Conservatives, who in 2024 bequeathed Labour a funded plan which would have injected tens of billions of pounds into the defence budget. Reeves scrapped that to help pay for her Day One spending spree on things like no-strings-attached concessions to the public sector unions.
This might have been defensible if it had been accompanied by an explicit decision by the government to curb Britain’s strategic ambitions. You and I might not have agreed with it, but it is at least a coherent argument that the public is simply not willing to make the sacrifices necessary to support this country’s historic defence posture, and it would be more sensible to scale our military cheques to the electorate’s willingness to cash them.
No such thing took place, of course. If anything, the rhetoric got more ambitious than ever: last July the now-departed Healey made some of the most robust remarks of any defence secretary about the prospect of the UK fighting for Taiwan. This would be a very ambitious stance even in much happier conditions but coming from a nation which can’t even get a single warship to its own bases in Cyprus, it was laughable.
And that was not an isolated incident. Last January, the Prime Minister was talking up the prospect of deploying thousands of British troops to Ukraine as part of an Anglo-French peacekeeping force once the fighting had ended — only to have the rug pulled from under him when military sources pointed out that the Army simply does not have the numbers to sustain such a deployment (which, remember, would not be doing any fighting).
These two cases capture the strategic dilemma perfectly. Ukraine and Taiwan are both democratic allies threatened by the imperial ambitions of authoritarian neighbours, and British politicians would like to commit to defending both of them. But each would require a completely different sort of military.
A serious commitment to Eastern Europe, for example, would mean a much larger Army, along with serious investment in the logistical necessities to move men and tanks across Europe in volume. A like commitment to Taiwan would require a world-class blue water navy able to deploy in strength in the Far East, likewise with a network of forward bases to provide a logistical base.
Even if the UK were to meet the politicians’ stated target of spending three per cent of GDP on defence, it could only afford to properly service one of these visions; both would require military investment on a similar scale to the United States, which nobody is considering.
Yet as we lack the courage to resile from either, we do both badly. Britain remains one of only a small number of nations to possess more than one aircraft carrier, but is incapable of deploying an independent carrier group, and cuts to maintenance budgets mean that most of the much-reduced surface fleet is in dock most of the time. Meanwhile the Army is not only losing both headcount and vehicles, it lacks the means to deploy easily even what it has to Eastern Europe.
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The collapse of the Government’s defence policy is being written up as a crisis for Starmer, and doubtless it is. But such commentary perhaps obscures more than it reveals, because it may give readers the impression that this is a crisis particular to Starmer, rooted specifically in his individual weaknesses.
A ‘proper’ defence policy starts with working out what military capabilities we need and what they cost
Such thinking is naturally attractive to those who hope to find the remedy for either Labour’s woes or Britain’s in his replacement. But it isn’t obviously true: any potential successor to the Prime Minister from inside his own party would inherit both the same public accounts, the same backbenchers and the same electorate. Any route to increased defence spending would still lie beyond difficult choices the Labour Party doesn’t want to make, and it seems most likely that it would continue refusing to make them.
Of course, the other way to bolster defence would be to get more value out of the money we already spend. Unfortunately, the most obvious way to do that would be to ease the rules about buying our military equipment from British manufacturers.
MoD procurement is an absolute disaster, and this policy locks in much higher costs across all three services. But MPs won’t wear that either. When the Conservatives tried to tender a contract for fleet solid support ships overseas, they came under enormous pressure to “protect British jobs”. The contract eventually went to a consortium based mostly in the UK, but the job cost a lot more than it would have cost in Korea.
Fairness dictates we note that the Conservatives don’t yet have the answers either. Kemi Badenoch has wasted no time outflanking the government on defence — not, in present circumstances, difficult — by pledging to reintroduce the two-child welfare limit and plough the savings into the MoD budget. This is certainly better than nothing, but it isn’t a proper defence policy; it is a martial garnish added to what is fundamentally a welfare policy.
If that sounds like hair-splitting, allow me to elaborate: a “proper” defence policy is one that starts with working out what military capabilities we need and how much they cost, and then tries to work out how to pay for them. Haphazardly hypothecating the savings of other policies towards defence is not that; it is a way to sound serious on defence rather than be serious on defence. One might even call it “virtue signalling”.
But the Tories are not in power and show no imminent prospect of being so. Barring an early election of the Prime Minister’s own choosing, this government has several years left to run — years in which all the problems presently bedevilling it are going to get worse, and the world is likely going to become an even more dangerous place.
Unfortunately, Britain seems very unlikely to be better prepared to meet those dangers in two — or three — years’ time than it is today. There does not appear to be anyone on the Labour benches with the will and ability to get to grips with the MoD’s shambolic procurement, nor any prospective leader with the courage to scale their idea of the UK’s “place in the world” down to the level they’re prepared to spend on it. With the government proving incapable of hitting even its short-term goal of spending 2.5 per cent of GDP on defence, Starmer’s “ambition” to hit three per cent will never happen.
This is the price of the peace dividend. For decades, the American security umbrella has allowed British politicians to talk a big game on the world stage whilst cutting defence over and over again. It was congenial whilst it lasted. But it has left our leaders and voters alike utterly unprepared for even the ordinary discomforts of an independent power.
