Even before the prime minister took to his feet to deliver a keynote speech and face a packed press conference on Monday, the Daily Mail front page launched a ‘Don’t Leave Us Defenceless’ campaign with a capitalised splash headline, ‘Labour’s Defence Spending Retreat... As key military review is published, Minister accused of U-turn on crucial funding pledge’.
Commitment or Ambition?
The minister in question being Defence Secretary John Healey, an honourable man, who had dutifully done the broadcast studio rounds up to last Thursday apparently committing the government to spending 3% of GDP on defence by 2034. By Sunday, back on studio round duty he had to demote ‘commitment’ to mere ‘ambition’ hours ahead of his boss’s dockyard launch event.
Inside the Mail ran a Monday spread headlined, ‘Treasury Forced Healey to U-turn’. Even allowing for the Mail’s determination to damage the Labour government at every opportunity, it carried the ring of truth with the image of Healey being collateral damage in a clash between Starmer and Chancellor Rachel Reeves.
The next day, the Mail’s main leader mocked under the headline, ‘Plan to prepare UK for war... by 2034’. It began; ‘The prime minister pulled no punches yesterday in his assessment of the perilous times we live in. Announcing publication of the strategic defence review, he warned there are deadly enemies all around. We are entering a new age of insecurity, he said. Our Armed Forces must be made ‘battle ready and armour-clad’ to meet the challenge and our defence industry needs to accelerate at a ‘war time pace’.
“The review itself was equally chilling, revealing our vulnerabilities to long range drones and cruise missile attacks, cyber warfare and sabotage of the undersea cables which carry 95% of the UK’s data. With such a build-up, we might have expected some radical new plan for rearmament. Instead we got a modest uplift in defence spending from 2.3% to 2.5% of GDP and a vague ‘ambition’ to rise it to 3% sometime before 2034... if circumstances allow.
“Valdimir Putin and the rest of the world’s expansionist dictators must be quaking in their boots!”
The Mail mobilised an impressive array of media-savvy ex top military brass guest columnists to echo its attack themes and question where the money was coming from to fund the twelve new nuclear submarines and six UK weapons factories proposed in the review. While regular polemicist Stephen Glover was mobilised to weigh in under an op-ed column headlined ‘Destiny chose Starmer to lead us in these perilous times — but the chasm between his rhetoric and action is mind-boggling’.
Heir to Attlee?
To put the boot in even harder and arguably unfairly, the pay-off line to the Mail’s main leader ran: “Sir Keir likes to style himself as heir to Clement Attlee, the Labour prime minister who took Britain into NATO. But Attlee was a veteran of Gallipoli and had witnessed the grim realities of war. Sir Keir is a human rights lawyer whose military experience is limited to donning flak jackets for cheesy photo-opportunities. More importantly, when Attlee came to power, the war was already over and we’d won. Starmer’s task is to prevent another one from happening. That will require more than vague promises and hot air.”
Some of us couldn’t resist pointing out on air that the Mail’s own political poster boy Boris Johnson had a penchant for flak jackets and photo ops. But that’s another story.
For its part, Tuesday’s Times followed a front page lead headlined ‘Tax Rises Loom to put Britain on war footing’ with a tough main leader headlined ‘Fantasy Forces’ arguing that, “The Strategic Defence Review is a glorified think tank report that will amount to little if the government continues to deny the services the hard cash they urgently require.”
The Times also carried a thoughtful guest column by the highly respected military historian and former Daily Telegraph editor Max Hastings, headlined, ‘War-fighting readiness’ costs more than this’. Less hostile than Mail counterparts, Hastings contended; “The strategic defence review has fine aspirations but is fatally undermined by a Treasury that refuses to pay for them.” He warned: “The SDR is billed by the government as a programme for action. In reality, is merely a menu of choices, none of which has yet been budgeted. It rests upon wildly optimistic assumptions, above all that the new-generation nuclear deterrent programme would not continue to overrun cost projections, as it has done every year since its inception.”
NATO wades in
By midweek, Starmer and Reeves’ defence strategy was seriously compromised when NATO demanded the UK needed to increase defence spending to 3.5% of GDP by 2035 which military analysts said would be “impossible” to reject, particularly with President Trump calling for a 5% European nations commitment. It sparked a Daily Mail headline over a 2-page spread ‘NATO blows hole in Reeves’ plans’, claiming that ‘tax rises look inevitable to fund £40bn shortfall’ in the UK defence budget. The paper’s City editor Alex Brummer arguing that the threat of Russian aggression “poses the biggest threat to public finances since the 1976 sterling crisis.” Ominously, the headline over the widely respected, less than normally hyperbolic Brummer’s column read: “Labour’s facing a crunch that will make the Truss market meltdown look like a tea party.”
But defence budget pressure continues to mount on the prime minister with Thursday’s Times (June 5th) accurately reporting Starmer is under “dual pressure from the US and its own strategic defence review team to increase spending on defence immediately rather than wait any longer.” It focused on a stark message from President Trump’s ambassador to NATO Matthew Whittaker demanding that the UK and other member states must agree to spend at least 5% of GDP on “defence and security, starting now”.
While General Sir Richard Barrons, British ex-head of joint forces command and himself a member of the UK government’s strategic defence review team, warned Britain “could face conflict with Russia as soon as this year.”
None of this will prove sweet music in the ears of those vulnerable Labour MPs calling for welfare to take precedence over warfare.
Even some normally pro-Labour papers have been reluctant to take decisive sides in the party’s defence / welfare priority trauma.
Starmer’s dilemma
Which is where, as a Labour supporting commentator, ex war correspondent and something of a defence ‘hawk’, I feel more than a soupcon of sympathy for the prime minister. Sir Keir Starmer is a political ‘general’ leading an economic crisis-weary nation who finds himself caught in the crossfire between legitimate criticism and the conflicting demands of many of his backbenchers. Particularly those defending ‘Red Wall’ seats and pressing hard for even bigger, faster U-turns on the 2-child benefit cap, the pensioners winter fuel allowance, retreats on disability allowance curbs and much more besides. So much, perhaps, for refusing to accept the magic money tree doesn’t exist but still hoping it does and somehow sprouting in the Downing Street garden.
Of course, one alternative would be to break one of Labour’s election manifesto pledges such as not raising income tax rates or VAT levels. Some Red Wall MPs facing Reform’s surge would welcome that but it would represent a colossal personal gamble for Starmer and render Reeves position untenable. With Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting potentially waiting in the leadership wings.
All this against the backdrop of a self-styled ‘Iron Chancellor’ in Rachel Reeves who seems to have ‘dug-in’ against bending her fiscal rules ahead of her eagerly awaited spending review next week. Having reluctantly indicated at least a partial retreat on the winter fuel allowance and hinted at one on the child benefit front, Reeves appears to have hoisted the ‘red flag’ against conceding major ground in a hurry on defence spending in favour of a £15bn north of England transport spending pledge, the Guardian front page (June 4th) billed as a bid to “placate fractious Labour MPs”.
Unless, of course, Starmer orders her to do so at risk of igniting a power battle within his own increasingly divided and even mutinous parliamentary army.
Either way, a depleted, desperate Tory party’s morale has been marginally boosted by being able to seize on the defence review as a weapon with which to attack Starmer and his government, with the luxury of not having to credibly explain to the nation how they’d find the money in a hurry. Meanwhile, Nigel Farage and his small parliamentary platoon, conscious of its current spectacular poll advances, have been relatively subdued over the SDR war of words. Perish the thought, as Private Eye might put it, that ‘Field Marshal’ Farage is acutely conscious that rival parties will start tossing in hand grenade reminders of his pro-Putin history, early ambivalence over his Ukraine invasion and his own personal closeness to President Trump, a man who could yet sell Ukraine and NATO down the river. Not to mention how to reconcile Reform’s recent extravagant spin of right-leaning tax cuts promises with left-leaning benefit boosts with footing the bill for defending Britain if he ever marches into No10?
If there is one political and media certainty when the next all-out general election battle is joined, then it’s that WARFARE VERSUS WELFARE will be bang on the frontline. No prisoners taken.
