It takes some political incompetence to announce a defence spending plan that reduces our security, undermines our soft power, does not deliver for the UK economy, and puts the cost on the wrong people, but Starmer's managed it.
This is the audio version:
This is the transcript:
What is Keir Starmer doing about defence? The position that he has taken is utterly absurd.
In reality, Keir Starmer has announced a tiny increase in the UK's defence expenditure, just £6 billion a year in terms of total government spending of well over £1 trillion or £1,000 billion a year. That can be fairly described as the square root of diddly squat - neither here nor there - purely incidental - little more than the petty cash spend during the course of a year, and yet to achieve this, he has made the most fundamental and stupid error of judgment in policy and economic delivery. Let's just run through what I'm actually describing.
We all recognize that there are increased defence threats to the UK at present because, frankly, we have a new enemy in the world. It's called the USA, and they are in alliance with Putin's Russia, and that creates the most enormous potential threat to our well-being.
Nothing about the rest of the world has changed. As a consequence, it is just those two states that are now in an alliance that changes the international architecture.
It also means that we only have one stable world power now, which is China.
But in response, first of all, Keir Starmer has made a puny gesture so inconsequential that it is ridiculous.
And secondly, he has cut 40% of UK aid to supposedly fund this, and that makes no sense at all. There are a number of reasons why that's the case. Let me explain.
The first is that the UK overseas aid agenda is not only fundamentally important for people in some countries because they're utterly dependent upon our aid for their protection, well-being, and support. This is particularly true of women and girls in many countries where we run programs that do, for example, provide education for girls who would otherwise never get it.
It is also true with regard to healthcare, where we run immunisation and other programs that protect people from harm that is easily avoided at very low cost but which may now not be available.
Those direct benefits will be lost almost certainly as a consequence of this.
But there's something much more profound about this cut to the aid budget, which had already been hit hard by the fact that the cost of keeping asylum seekers in the UK had to already be born out of this budget. And this is that we will lose our soft power in the world.
Soft power is the reason why the aid budget has been so important since we withdrew from Empire. To put it bluntly, the world of soft power is all about spreading influence.
The best representation of this was, in fact, the BBC World Service, which was enormously valued, quite literally, the world over when there was no other media on which people could rely because it was thought to be the one information source which people in countries where there was only a propaganda agenda for them to consume could use to get real information about what was going on in the world.
It gave the UK enormous soft power. It's very largely been removed. Now, much of the funding for that station has been cancelled, and many of its services in many of the languages it used have gone, but there's much more to soft power than that.
Our presence in many countries, for example, supporting work programmes, has meant that people have not been radicalised, and that is of enormous benefit to our defence because if people aren't radicalised, they aren't going to move towards the organisations that actually threaten our wellbeing right here in the UK through terrorist activity.
And then there is the defence of our culture. Now some people will say our culture maybe shouldn't be defended. I don't agree with that. I think there are a lot of good things about the balance that the UK can supply to the world, although I question whether all our current politicians understand that. But there are, of course, opposing worldviews.
China has a very different view of the world and has an almost unlimited budget to spend when it comes to soft power spending on aid in Africa in particular. And this decision by Starmer is really all about conceding that ground to China. So, just as he's boosting our armaments to supposedly defend us against Putin, and I would suggest against the USA because those two are now allies, he is literally saying that the soft power war against the influence of China - which is probably as significant because let's be clear, we do not share ideology with China, which has a history of serious human rights abuses - is being lost, and willingly lost, because we are no longer going to engage in it.
But even that is not enough to explain how stupid his decision is if defence is so important. We didn't need to lose the soft power war with China or to undermine our defences by removing aid support in a way that will encourage extremism in the UK, which is what Starmer is doing. We could simply have borrowed another £6 billion a year from the financial markets, and nobody would have noticed.
In fact, we could have simply cancelled a small part of the Bank of England's quantitative tightening programme, which goes on each year in the sum of £100 billion of funds withdrawn from financial markets without any useful gain to society at all, could have been diverted into this process of funding the defence that we need now, but apparently the Bank of England's financial engineering is much more important than defence, and so that can't be disrupted.
Nor can the taxation of the wealthy be changed just because we as a country might perceive ourselves to be in peril. The vulnerable must pay instead. Labour has chosen the vulnerable overseas. The Tories would have chosen the vulnerable here. Either way - I'm going to use the next word carefully, and after due consideration - they're charlatans, and I really think that term is justified.
If we look at the reasons why we are defending the UK from attack, it is because any attacker will want to control UK natural resources - and we still have some - or UK technology - and we still have some - or UK productive capacity - we still are in possession of it - and the UK's ability to raise tax to support a foreign power, which is one of the biggest reasons why wars are ever undertaken, and all of those assets do in effect belong to the wealthiest people in the UK. They should, therefore, be paying the cost of their defence.
Nobody else should be, and there's a very good economic reason for saying that. It's not just about money. If we are working at or near full employment, which is very clearly Rachel Reeve's assumption because she says we can't borrow more because that would overstimulate the economy and create inflation, then if we are to actually spend more on defence, cutting the overseas aid budget makes no difference because that does not reallocate the consumption of resources inside the UK. Anything that is going to fund defence has to do that.
Presuming that Rachel Reeves is right about full employment, and I'm not sure she is, but I'm accepting her position as being right in making this argument. - and in that case, to fund defence, you have to cut consumption of other goods or services. There is no other possibility, and the only people who have excess consumption of those goods and services at present are the wealthy.
Therefore, to impose a tax on them is essential to create the capacity for defence expenditure to take place inside the UK economy. It is as simple and straightforward as that.
We are not talking about finance here. We're talking about real physical situations, and that's what the economy is actually all about, but which the Treasury, our Labour ministers, and others don't understand.
So, at absolutely no level at all, whether it be strategic, or defence or with regard to soft power, or with regard to economics or financing, does what Keir Starmer has done make any sense at all? It's utterly politically and economically illiterate, and we've got these people in power at a time of crisis.
I am very worried as a result.
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Thanks for this piece Richard. I was always under the impression that foreign aid was essentially a way of supporting British industry by the insistence that the aid was spent on UK goods and services. At least in large part. Your analysis has educated me. It is worrying that : MMR , polio , AIDS(treatment), and hepatitis vaccinations may stall with the resultant loss of lives and future productive capacity. Given the amount of antivax people who live near me and the fact that we live in an age of migration I will predict higher costs , and deaths, in the UK of controlling these easily controlled diseases as a direct result of cutting foreign aid. They (the government) are ‘wrong in their heads.’
Can anyone provide a link to a rational explanation of what physical threats the UK needs to defend itself against, and also why predicating defence expenditure as a percentage of GDP is in any way logical?
I’ve tried Googling and got nowhere!
War is a continuation of politics by other means. It is about geo-political dominance for the same reasons as Trump’s ‘polices’.
It seem Putin wants the same sort of relationship with Eastern Europe as it had with Finland in the Cold War. The right to intervene in aspects of foreign and domestic policy. ( see their Dec 2012 treaty proposals). Russia called for the return of all nuclear weapons to home soil. So there would be no ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons in Europe except in Russia. There would be the sea borne French and British submarine launched ‘strategic’ nuclear weapons. If they are used it is a major war. All NATO troops would move out of Eastern Europe meaning the Baltic states and possibly Poland would be open to intervention. He would be free to take the Baltic states and ask us what we are going to do about it. Removal of US troops is also an aim and Trump might go along with that.
That would shore up Putin’s party (with major powers domestic factors can be major) for the foreseeable future.
The real threat to Russia is not NATO land forces ( and Russia also lacks the capacity to ‘invade’ western Europe). The EU offers an alternative model to Russian nationalism. ( Our Pilgrim Slight Return often quotes Tim Snyder, the Yale historian. He is right to do so, His Road to Unfreedom will serve your enquiry better than google )
For all the faults we know all too well, Europe has a fairly free electoral system, media, courts and is more prosperous and more liberal. They are the long term threats (possibly now to Trump’s America as well) to the type of regime they have in Russia.
From the military perspective Europe needs the ability to deploy their forces to the east in support of the Baltic states, Poland and Finland and a demonstrated willingness to do so. There is the population and wealth to do so but at the moment the means are not sufficiently there
As for % of GDP , the real test is not money but the capability measure against the threat.
So we’re not increasing spending to counter physical threats to the UK, but to “deploy forces to the east” to defend the Baltic states, Poland and Finland? Is this idea something that UK voters/taxpayers will be happy with?
And again, the question might be, what actual threats do they face? Might diplomacy rather than armed confrontation be a better option?
Of course, the raid on the international aid budget – already fiddled into not-a-lot by misascribing it to things which have zero to do with real developmental aid – is stupid, politically counter-productive and economically as well as morally illiterate.
Richard, rightly has also asked who or what this increased defence spending is intended to defend and that debate is politically enlightening and economically and socially significant.
However, it is Ian Stevenson alone, so far as I can see – here or elsewhere that I have read – who makes makes the crucial point. Effective defence spending (which is the only kind that matters) has to be aimed at the correct threats, at the correct time and with the correct material and human resources. The ‘U’ K has, so far, given scant signs that its political leadership – of either face of the STP (Tory or LINO) – understands this. The monuments to this are all around us. In an RN with more Admirals than ships, a giant aircraft carrier with major engineering problems and close to zero planes – and those US supplied; reliance on ageing submarine nuclear deterrents which are useless short of total nuclear destruction and whose grotesquely expensive refurbishment/redevelopment is in any case illegal. All recent conflicts – from the Middle East to the nearest in Ukraine – underline the need for effective mass anti-missile defences against non-nuclear weapons. Where are they in these islands? The vaunted RN cannot even deal effectively with a Russian naval incursion in the Moray Firth a few years back – let alone prevent cable threatening Russian intelligence manoeuvres. Brexitania’s defence philosophy has been based on interoperability with an assumed solid US and NATO alliance, the US part of which is now clearly hardly reliable – and yet it is mainly US hardware that has set much of NATO’s standards. In the world of Brexitania, which has cut itself out of the main European body politic, how are we to contribute any political heft to any project for truly combined European Defence forces?
Britain has never had a continental scale conventional military – nor can it ever even attempt to do so without fundamentally changing its society. Its only continental successes, both in the last century – have been based on a world dominating RN in WW1 – a position no loger imaginable – and, in terms of pure defence, a scientifically superior Fighter Command and radar defence in 1940, when the forward thinking of the much maligned National Governments of MacDonald, Baldwin and finally and crucially Chamberlain, were proved to have got the answers to those critical questions just close enough to ‘all correct’ that Britain just survived and a German invasion was called off.
Compared with that steadily evolved sagacity, Brexitania’s leadership is risibly adrift.
None of the % of expenditure debate is worth anything until these questions are addressed and correctly and presciently answered – and that needs to start happening, yesterday if possible.
Agreed.
This is crazy, for the reasons you have outlined.
But it is also crazy electorally. Another MacSweeney miscalculation?
Starmer thinks it will impress the Reform-sympathetic voters and attract them to Labour.
As I have said before, people who want Reform policies will vote Reform, not Starmer’s toxic pale Labour imitation
They will only vote Labour in 2029 if Labour has delivered on the economy, the NHS, social care, and the cost of living (rent, mortgage/house prices, energy bills, and yes, “immigration”.
By 2029 Labour will have had 14 years in opposition and 5 years in government, and so far they have failed and indeed are going backwards. Starmer has proved he can’t be trusted, he is a serial U-turner (to put it politely).
Whereas Fa***e can use his Goebbelsian skills to attract the support of the discontented, with no record of failure in office to trouble him. (Watch out for any Reform-led councils by 2029 though.)
As a political strategy, this latest idiocy will be as effective as Reeves’s economic policy.
And as yet, we have no viable credible organised alternatives to Labour, Tory, LibDem, Reform. Under FPTP, there are few places where a Green vote will achieve anything (except maybe Bristol & Brighton). And they so far lack credible national scale economic policies.
Starmer’s stupidity is handing the UK to Fa****’s fascists.
Much to agree with
An excellent piece Richard, thanks.
Thanks
Thank you, Richard.
A few days ago, some Labour MPs and Grauniad stenographers conferred. A consensus is emerging at both quarters that “this is Starmer’s Falklands moment”, hence the commentary by Raphael Behr and Nicholas Watt. Aurelien and dad, who were involved in such matters, fell off their chairs.
🙂
I agree with your dad.
Thank you, Richard.
You’re going to love the next bit: Cadets, not just reserves, could be used for roles in the background and allow regulars to be deployed elsewhere. This is one idea put forward.
What?
Those who benefit most from the war should pay for it.
I saw a tweet yesterday about the profits of energy companies in Britain. I’ve just looked and figures (to December 2024) range from £457 to £483 billion “since the start of the fuel crisis” which I presume to be February 2022, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but it could be a bit later. Because of the link between electricity and gas prices you covered a couple of days ago. Others on this site will have much better information.
I looked for profit before the invasion, and could only find that five energy companies made £7 billion from 2016 to 2020. All these figures must be unreliable, and the profits could be shown in different ways for different reasons. (Is the £483 billion world wide, or just Britain?) But the overall point is clear. What is a fair profit? And can we please have the rest back, there’s lots that we could spend it on.
That data sounds wrong, but they have undoubtedly done very well
The £483bn claim seems to come from here: https://www.endfuelpoverty.org.uk/energy-firm-profits-top-483-billion-since-start-of-crisis/
The related footnote says: “Researchers examined the declared profits of the 20 energy firms the End Fuel Poverty Coalition is most asked to comment on. This sample of the industry ranges from energy producers (such as Equinor and Shell) through to the firms that control our energy grid (such as National Grid, UK Power Networks and Cadent) as well as suppliers (such as British Gas). It does not include supply chains nor market trading firms…”
Unfortunately, it’s not easy to find citations, sources, or methodology on the site.
While I fully support the campaign, and the breadth of related issues on the site seems comprehensive (from the consumer PoV), I have to take that figure as A. N. Other random stat without that methodology (I could probably eventually find the other two – citations/data & sources – for myself, if I had the time & inclination).
They seem to be pretty egalitarian regarding the sources in their “About” section, so it gives me hope that there may, indeed, be good data, sources & possibly methodology behind the analysis – I just can’t accept the figure without them being explicit, though.
We need adequate defence spending in my view because since the end if WWII the West seems to think that there has been peace. It has ignored wars elsewhere that its jaundiced eyes do not see. The West’s view is very narrow and short sighted on purpose.
Why on purpose? Well, Britain has done some naughty empirical things since the end of WWII which has left behind consequences and a bad vibe, as have other European countries, those ex-colonies etc.
But the truly naughtiest country in the West has been the United States of America, who has interfered in sovereign countries for far too long and created what can only be described as mayhem the world over. This mayhem has contributed to instability in other countries. Read ‘Killing Hope’ by William Blum (2003).
This interference has created blow back – enemies, people with long memories, reasons to hate – good reasons sometimes. Any ally of the U.S. and we all know who these allies are – will be associated with the U.S. and an idea that has grown over the years that it is the U.S. that is the leading rogue state in the world. When the 9/11 event occurred, that is why a book gets written called ‘Why Do People Hate America?’ (2003) and why if I remember correctly the U.S. ambassador to the UK being reduced to tears on the TV shortly after as a British audience told him how much his country was resented because of these interferences.
American aggression abroad (be it political, military or covert) is why even Britain needs defence spending; as I said previously in another post, the Yanks don’t really understand the concept of pissing in the wind. They act God-like – since they themselves have appointed themselves as the ‘shining city on the hill’ – and feign surprise when they get rumbled in an increasingly information rich world.
And then we have to deal like I said with the blow back- Putin, Afghanistan, China and any number of U.S. Western stooges in other countries whom we’ve helped our corporations to own and steal from.
It’s all sickening and grubby. But in the end, all we are having to do is protect ourselves from the consequences of our own short sightedness and greed. Defence spending is the real bill therefore for stupidity and greed, for allowing our governments to be taken over by corporations’ for lying, for political failure. Efforts like Keynes ‘The Economic Consequence if the Peace’ (1919) do not help.
If Starmer does end up taxing us more and reducing spending on public services then what has actually changed? It is consistent with how we have always been as far as I can see. The poor will always pay.
Jeffrey Sachs lays out USA interference in Ukraine / Russia and its non cooperative “gaming” to the EU Parliament:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewvrbvEckxQ
I have three points to make. Firstly on the BBC, whose once great World Service I used to listen to when traveling overseas. The BBC has become so biased towards the right that the neoliberal message is thumped home with depressing regularity and Farage has been turned into a cult megastar! The Zionist fanatics have managed to shut-down the excelent presentation by children in Gaza exposing the reality of a brutal genocide. This morning on Al Jazeera I watched their ‘World News’ broadcast after ‘The Bottom Line’, featuring an in depth analysis of the Ukraine war arrangements. ‘Inside Story’ is another of their informative current affairs programs, with input from a diverse group of really knowledgeable contributors. The BBC ‘guest’ lineup is decidedly biased in comparison. Meanwhile, I was told that the BBC spent a full 17 minutes obsessing over the death of Gene Hackman and his wife in the US! Yes Hackman was a terrific actor, but was there no other pressing news to report this morning?
I too am deeply concerned about Starmer cutting the Foreign Aid budget. It’s not as if we haven’t done quite enough damage through our morally bankrupt policy of scavenging medical personnel from developing world countries that could ill afford to train them. I saw first hand the damage done by that ongoing deplorable policy and it inspired me to work on the ‘Collaborative Circular Migration’ documents I sent you. The point raised about vaccines was very relevant as this will now be cut by the UK as well as the US. In any location or community where people are denied access to essential components of healthcare we risk creating the perfect conditions for breeding lethal infections capable of decimating entire populations globally, including the privileged wealthy.
Where the UK follows the US lead in abandoning their overseas commitments we can be certain that the Chinese and in some cases, like in the Suhail, Russia will swiftly fill the void. When the British were finally compelled to release their vice-grip on colonies in Africa, they still fostered dependence. To eliminate landlocked Zambia’s economic reliance on white Rhodesia and South Africa, they needed a rail link to take copper from mines near Kapin Mposhi in central Zambia to the port at Dar es Salam in Tanzania. During my ten country tour of Sub Saharan Africa I had an opportunity to ride the Tazara train. It was way back in the 1970s when that railway was built with Chinese investment. They will continue to seek new opportunities to advance their influence as we eviscerate our quasi democratic soft power.
Thanks
Thank you, Kim.
With regard to training healthcare professionals, the UK, France and Belgium have limits on the numbers of professionals they train. It’s not just budget, but a hard number of personnel.
Mauritius trains its own doctors and nurses. As the island is multi-lingual, trainees from anglophone and francophone Africa and even India come. Many, not necessarily most, are poached by the above trio not long after. That’s money* and personnel the island can ill afford to waste / lose. It’s the same for hotel and catering and IT. *Money that the government is happy to spend.
Readers may not be aware that there are ties of blood between Africa, including Mauritius, Syria and India and Russia and even Ukraine. From the 1960s onwards, the former Soviet Union and Russia and even Ukraine have trained a variety of African, Syrian and Indian professionals. Many brought back spouses. It’s the same with China. There are over 1m Chinese living in Africa. There have been Chinese in Mauritius for three centuries, as long as my family have been there.
Chinese TikTok, Douyin, has an a African woman married to a Chinese man in rural China posting as Douyin Rose.
BTW, France is / was arguably worse with regard to post colonial control.
The Chinese in Africa, broadly speaking, segregate themselves from the surrounding communities and there are lots of tensions like those documented in “Empire of dust”.
When I lived in China I was friends with African students who really tired of the racism they encountered on a daily basis (Africans tend to be very good at languages so they pick up what’s being said very quickly).
There really is a lot of hype around China and what it’s doing in the world. Obviously they’ve made great strides in many areas but when I lived there I was often stunned by the half arsed attitude to basic things. It is however ultra nationalist and since 2012 the Party has really inculcated hostility towards various foreign countries including our own.
I think we should do all we can to avoid getting into any conflict with them.
@Colonel Smithers
https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2025/02/27/has-starmer-lost-the-plot-on-defence/comment-page-1/#comment-1008524
Fa***e used to be a Cadet.
(Content warning)
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/03231/farage_ccf_3231720k.jpg
You could get banned for that 🙂
Thank you.
So was I.
“we only have one stable world power now, which is China”
Having worked in China and retained contacts there I am not so sure they are as stable as they appear. Their banking system is in a huge mess because of the over-extension of credit in the provinces which funded so much of the property development there which in turn had funded local services. I have former students who are talking about “getting out”. Another, who works for a public fund, told me “it feels like our economy is collapsing”.
“Full employment”
Are they for real? According to their own figures we have 1.7 million unemployed and they and the Right wing press keep talking about all these “economically inactive people”.
The thing I am more tied of than anything else is all the lies.