When it comes to the defence budget, enormous pressure is being put on Sir Keir Starmer to do something he already intends to do. As a Nato member, Britain has signed up to a target of military spending at 2.5% of gross domestic product. The prime minister has made a “cast-iron” guarantee to honour that pledge, and restated it ahead of a Nato summit in Washington this week.
This was also the policy of the last Conservative government. There was no timetable for reaching the target until April this year, when Rishi Sunak declared that it would happen by 2030. Within a month, Mr Sunak had called an election. Those two things are related. The 2030 deadline was a partisan device to make the Tories look more hawkish than Labour.
Sir Keir chose not to mimic the 2030 line before the election and is resisting calls to revive it now, with good reason. The fiscal terms on which the last government claimed it would finance the rearmament schedule were a trap for Labour. Jeremy Hunt, then chancellor, conjured tens of billions of pounds out of thin air by projecting implausible cuts to other departments that no one expected a moribund government to enact.
Demanding that the new administration make an equivalent commitment within days of taking office, as the Tories, their press cheerleaders and a canny defence lobby are doing, is a pointless continuation of the election campaign.
Labour’s stance under Sir Keir is hardly pacifist. The prime minister has recognised the imperative of stalwart support for Ukraine against Russian aggression. He and David Lammy, the foreign secretary, and John Healey, the defence secretary, have made a clear priority of defence and security cooperation as part of a post-Brexit rapprochement with the European Union.
That agenda is made more urgent by the prospect of Donald Trump, a capricious and unreliable partner for Nato’s European members, winning a second term as US president in November. Labour’s high command observes diplomatic protocol by not naming Mr Trump as a threat to European security and a reason to step up spending, but they are attentive to the danger.
When senior military figures conjure apocalyptic scenarios to urge more haste in hiking budgets, they are doing what all providers of essential publicly funded services do – lobbying government with the strongest case they can muster. The prime minister should not ignore their arguments, but nor should he be intimidated by them.
The new government is not naive about the dangerously volatile global security environment and what that means in terms of spending priorities. There is no ideological obstacle to Britain reaching the 2.5% goal for military spending, but it still has to be done within the realms of Labour’s self-imposed fiscal rules. The defence budget will have to rise from £64bn (about 2.3% of GDP) to about £69bn in today’s money.
Economic growth is the engine of all future revenue in Labour’s plans. When ministers say future spending parameters depend on the state of the economy, they are stating a banal fact. When they say the scope of a higher military budget should be developed alongside a strategic defence review, that too looks like rational policymaking. Sir Keir does not need to depart from such a method. The Tories’ habit of putting political posture ahead of facts and rationality is one of the main reasons they are now in opposition.
