Three senior UK defence figures have accused Keir Starmer of not giving UK troops the funding they need to carry out their duties.
With “scathing remarks” in Parliament, former defence secretary John Healey, former Armed Forces minister Al Carns and the country’s senior military officer, Rich Knighton, all accused Starmer of “underfunding the military”, said The Guardian.
Knighton, chief of the defence staff, told a committee of MPs that the UK’s Armed Forces will have to “dial back” military deployments, training and exercises if Starmer doesn’t increase funding to the Ministry of Defence. Moscow is “definitely raising the stakes and risks crossing a line”, so “we need to spend more on defence and do it faster”, Knighton told BBC Radio 4’s “Today”.
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The risks and threats to Britain are greater than at any time since the Cold War, and the government needs to spend on defence to match that, he argued. “The challenge for ministers is to make those difficult trade-off decisions,” Knighton said, and “we do need to step up and enhance our capability as the threats from potential adversaries grow”.
Successive governments have “struggled to get a grip” on defence spending, said James Landale, the BBC’s diplomatic correspondent. “They spent less after the Cold War ended and failed to spend more as the world became more dangerous”, so the Army, Navy and Air Force all “contracted”.
Yes, the “fight between the Ministry of Defence and the Treasury” over defence spending has “raged longer than the hundred years war”, said Libby Brooks in The Guardian, but the “case for increased defence spending is harder to make with a population who experience no direct threat while bombs continue to drop elsewhere”. But the “general acceptance in military circles” is that Britain is “already under threat on home soil” from electoral interference, the targeting of synagogues, and arson attacks.
Following the 2024 general election, Starmer commissioned a strategic defence review to “set out a vision for UK defence over the next 10 years”. But “what it didn’t do” was “provide insight into how it was to be funded”, said Thomas Caygill, a politics lecturer at Nottingham Trent University, on The Conversation.
According to reports, the Treasury was refusing to offer more than £13.5 billion in investment (a 0.08% budget increase) when the MoD had asked for £18 billion.
But “to give the Treasury some credit”, the MoD is “known for poor spending decisions” and has “long been criticised for wasting taxpayers’ money”. So the hesitancy “may be justified” when “public finances are very tight” and the cost of government borrowing has risen.
What next?
Starmer has signalled that there’s unlikely to be more money for defence. He said he’d already “taken the decision” to cut capital spending by 1% from other departments to pay for further increases, and that it was up to Dan Jarvis, the new defence secretary, “where he wants that money to be spent”.
Jarvis will have to make “very significant cuts” inside the MoD if he cannot secure any more money for the department in the next two weeks, said Larisa Brown in The Times.
