Britain’s inadequate security has been exposed again. Defence must be Burnham’s top priority
KWhen Andy Burnham heads to see the King on July 20 to be confirmed as Her Majesty’s fourth prime minister in four years, as it now seems inevitable, he will have a huge to-do list waiting for him in Downing Street.
And he won’t need King Charles to remind him that the government’s first duty is to defend the kingdom.
The latest statement by experts at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) that Russia is using drones to spy on NATO bases in Europe underlines what a nightmare situation the new Prime Minister will inherit from Sir Keir Starmer.
NATO allies have already been warned that they must be prepared for an actual war with Russia by 2030; This means Britain must now be ready to fight the Kremlin threat.
But Sir Keir’s long-awaited Defense Improvement Plan (DIP), unveiled this week, was £13bn short of the amount needed to get the UK armed forces into shape, according to experts. Perhaps even worse is that almost £5bn of the limited funding available is still unfunded.
John Healey and Al Carns, who resigned last month as defense minister and armed forces minister respectively over funding, feel fully justified in their decision to quit a Labor government that has failed to take the gravity of the situation seriously enough.
In fact, Mr Burnham may need to find as much as £18bn more to give Britain the chance to prepare for looming threats and deal with major instability in the Middle East and Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine. Never mind what might happen to China in the Pacific.
Moreover, the United States—whether Donald Trump is in office or not—is on track to abandon Europe’s defenses and demand its European allies pay their way.
The idea that the UK will hit 3.5 per cent of GDP through defense within a decade seems like a distant dream in current circumstances, but it is a promise nonetheless.
But as it isIndependent It has emerged that those on the left of the party who sacked Sir Keir and became Mr Burnham’s cheerleaders instead are now warning him that he cannot tap benefits to fund defence.
If he tries, it seems Mr Burnham will face the kind of backlash and rebellion that sapped Sir Keir of his authority last summer when he tried to slash the welfare bill by £5bn.
So not only will Mr Burnham have to find a solution to the defense funding problem at a time when Labor MPs are already complaining about road projects being canceled to meet existing DIP proposals, he will also need to muster all his leadership skills to convince his party there is no other option.
The problem with defense spending is that it is rarely popular. Since it is an insurance policy, it does not produce results that will help win votes, such as new hospitals, new schools, or road improvements.
But when things go wrong and the insurance policy isn’t good enough, it’s a disaster.
Some are already drawing comparisons with the 1930s, when Winston Churchill’s appeals to the governments of Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain to rearm Britain fell on deaf ears until the second half of the decade.
Then, as now, the government was struggling to cope with the consequences of the economic crisis that followed the Wall Street Crash of 1929, while facing pressure to invest heavily in social housing, public health and education services.
This meant that in 1939 Hitler narrowly avoided complete disaster as Britain retreated from France when war with Nazi Germany began.
The problem with history is that it has a bad habit of repeating itself, as well as making mistakes for similar reasons.
