Before he went to Washington to meet President Donald Trump, the Prime Minister announced an accelerated time scale to boost defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2027 to be paid for by a cut in international aid. He was emphatically right to do so.
Anneliese Dodds, the International Development Minister, has resigned in protest at the international aid cut. I respect her integrity, but on this I believe she is wrong. She knows the fiscal inheritance from the Tories has been awful - with a huge black hole in the public finances, unfunded projects like new hospitals, and unrealistic cuts on top of austerity baked into future public spending plans.
And with the need to increase spending on key services like the NHS (which the Government is delivering, and which is already reducing waiting lists), international aid is the least bad area to go to pay for the uplift in defence spending.
I do support international aid. It boosts our security, helps to reduce immigration, and boosts our trading opportunities. But short term it is the right way to boost defence spending. In time, I hope we can restore the cut.
We did spend 2.5 per cent of GDP on defence under the last Labour Government, but defence was hollowed out during 14 years of the Tories, with ten thousand soldiers cut. During their final year in office, only two out of 49 major defence projects were delivered on time and within budget. This was a record of lamentable failure and neglect. And the threats we face internationally from Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea are worsening all the time.
We are at war in Europe, with Ukraine having been illegally and brutally invaded by Russia. It is Russia’s illegal and unjustifiable war of aggression against Ukraine that has shattered peace and gravely destabilised the security environment. And despite claiming to be open to ending the war, Russia has made only unrealistic demands for peace. In all this our security is on the line as well as Ukraine’s.
Cutting aid to boost defence was a controversial move but history will judge Starmer kindly, writes Bill Rammell
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So, President Trump is right to say Europe needs to do more in terms of defence spending and capability to protect itself in its own back yard from Russia. Europe took the peace dividend from the ending of the cold war and relied on the US for protection. This must end.
But Trump is emphatically wrong in his bullying of Zelensky and Ukraine, and his one-sided diplomacy which inexplicably gives Russia a free pass, and parrots at face value so many of Russia’s false assertions about the war.
I desperately hope Keir Starmer’s leadership internationally (which has rightly been supported by the Tories as exemplary) to pursue peace, through a coalition of the willing in Europe and an American security backstop succeeds. And that must include greater defence spending by the UK and Europe.
But as we ramp up defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP and three per cent beyond that as Kier Starmer has committed, it must be spent better and more effectively by the MOD. Under successive governments, defence spending has been woefully inefficient with massive waste and delays. The Generals and Admirals are excellent military leaders, but historically have been atrocious managers. That must change.
But back to the imperative. Faced with an existential threat from Russia, defence spending must rise, and this Government is right to deliver this.
As the great Dennis Heally argued as Labour Defence Secretary in 1969, “Once we cut defence expenditure to the extent where our security is imperilled, we have no houses, we have no hospitals, we have no schools. We have a heap of cinders”. This Labour Government is putting that right, after 14 years of Tory neglect.
