The Brexiteer’s case for a European Army

I’ve never understood why jingoism has such a bad rap; clearly all GH MacDermott wanted was an effective military deterrent. 

As the music hall classic goes: “We don’t want to fight, but by Jingo if we do/We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too.” Far from seeking war, the British just wanted to prevent bolshy Russians from mauling the hapless Turk, who for all his “faults” provided a convenient barrier between the bear and the Suez Canal.

Either way, modern critics of jingoism can rest easy — today the British Armed Forces have neither the ships, nor the men. As for the money, military funding has stagnated since the end of the Cold War, with the British state spending having to rummage down the back of the sofa every time it wants to buy a new tank.

To our credit, that has not stopped us sending what military materiel we have to Kyiv, the Constantinople of the 21st century. In January the British government signed off £4.5bn in war-related aid for Ukraine in 2025, covering artillery barrels, air defence systems and other non-lethal aid. Prime minister Keir Starmer has even floated the idea of deploying British troops as peacekeeping forces, should the US succeed in striking a deal.

I appreciate this is heresy

But this rare instance of British state capacity should not distract ourselves from the increasingly visible limits of British hard power. The political tides drawing the American military out have rather revealed the continent’s enthusiasm for skinny dipping. And while our relationship with our European neighbours has been mixed of late, it may be time to think the unthinkable.

Perhaps we should take the presidents’ cent and join a European Army.

I appreciate this is heresy. I voted for Brexit out of the same enthusiasm for democracy as most of my 17.4 million countrymen, hoping that we could take back control of our laws, taxes, and regulations on position limits for commodity derivatives. Sovereignty became a curse word, at least in the mouths of citizens of anywhere, but the right to self-determination is as legitimate as any political conceit.

Controlling each lever of state is not a mere affectation either. As Peter Hitchens once said, currency is not a symbol of national independence, but a fact of it. The same is surely true of the military. A country that is unable to defend itself is vulnerable to threats and coercion — as any Ukrainian could tell you.

Unlike Ukraine, Britain has thus far kept hold of its nuclear weapons, in a salutary lesson for despots from Pyongyang to Tehran. While the Russians might risk a few incursions in British waters and airspace, the direct threat to Britain looks vanishingly unlikely, not least because of the large buffer state in between us known as the EU.

Nonetheless, British diplomats have for centuries been fixated on keeping the balance of power on the continent for a reason. The conflict that MacDermott was singing about, the Russo-Turkish War, was of a piece with this strategy, with Britain backing the Ottoman Empire in an attempt to limit Russian access to the Mediterranean. While concern for Ukraine is no doubt sincere and humanitarian, our self-interest lies in replicating the 19th century approach.

And as in that period, this is not something we could do on our own. By all accounts the British Armed Forces are in a sorry state, suffering from decades of underinvestment, recruitment botched by outsourcing, and procurement that is expensive, convoluted and protracted.

Let’s begin with the spending, the chief bugbear of American isolationists. While the Ministry of Defence budget is roughly in line with the end of the Cold War in real terms – rising to £56.9bn in the current financial year — as a proportion of GDP it has slipped since the 1950s from a high of 7 per cent to a little above 2 per cent. 

The size of the British Armed Forces has also fallen over the past decade, and now stands at 148,000 full-time personnel, about 10,000 less than a decade ago. This has led to regular panicked warnings from officers that the military is too small, and a steady drumbeat of threats to bring back conscription. The botched outsourcing of recruitment has hardly helped either, with applicants complaining of an opaque and labyrinthine process.

A case can no doubt be made that with better equipment, a smaller headcount is no problem. But the British armed forces are a byword in procurement worst practices, with the Public Accounts Committee previously describing a “cycle of costly delay and failure”, in a sentiment echoed by the many, many official reviews in the subject. 

So what should we do about it? What we’ve always done: convince some foreigners to fight for us

Recent years have seen our Watchkeeper drones, worth £5m each, struggle to fly in bad weather. The infamous Ajax armed vehicle programme, costing £5.5bn, continues to be delayed, the first vehicles arriving in 2025, some six years behind schedule. The Morpheus communication system, due to enter service this year, is now not expected until 2030, at a cost of £3.2bn.

Against a credible foe we would be outspent, outnumbered and outgunned. 

So what should we do about it? What we’ve always done: convince some foreigners to fight for us. Britain’s historically small land forces have always compelled us to pull together coalitions for territorial contests, whether it be chasing Russia out of Crimea or bringing Napoleon to heel in a corner of the low countries.

And our neighbours have a lot to offer. France’s nuclear deterrent includes an air-based tactical component, alongside a submarine-based nukes similar to the UK’s Trident programme. The country also has a range of expeditionary forces, including an aircraft carrier capable of acting as part of a strike group.

Germany meanwhile brings one of the strongest defence industries on the continent, including such heavyweights as Rheinmetall, KNDS Deutschland and Diehl Defence. Such companies have enabled Germany to produce the celebrated Leopard 2 main battle tank, a key asset in the country’s land forces, which continue to modernise after post-Ukraine budget increases.

While we won’t want to go Dutch and turn over our combat brigades to the German army, we should be looking to combine our efforts with friendly neighbours, whether or not it’s badged as a European armed forces. At minimum it should mean standardising equipment and command structures, entering joint procurement efforts, and encouraging different countries to specialise in a complementary fashion.

It will mean some sacrifices. Our strategic independence will be reduced, no doubt limiting our scope for destabilising far away countries of which we know nothing. 

But in return Europe gets a large, threatening armed forces, hopefully with a defence industry to match. Britain has to worry less about which hapless grifters to outsource our recruitment to. And presumably there’s somebody on the continent, probably in Germany, who can teach us how to run a procurement programme. 

And perhaps best of all we can rewrite MacDermott’s ditty for a modern age. “We’ve fought the Bear before, and while we’re Europeans true/The Russians shall not have Kyiv.”