Defence is not about weapons, budgets, or protecting elite interests overseas. Defence is about protecting people. It is about ensuring people enjoy freedom from fear, including from physical threat, from poverty, from want, and from the social instability that erodes the fabric of a nation from within. By that definition, which is the only definition that actually serves the majority of British citizens, social security is not the enemy of defence: it is the foundation of it.
Consider what a serious defence requires. You need a fit population. You need people who are healthy, well-nourished, mentally resilient, educated, and able to serve.
You do not build that population by cutting the systems that feed children, heat homes, and provide security in times of illness and unemployment. You destroy it.
Cut social security, and you cut the recruitment pipeline for the armed forces themselves. You weaken national resilience precisely when you claim to be strengthening it.
The statistics make the scale of the real threat plain. 14.2 million people in the UK live in poverty. 4.5 million of those are children, which means 31% of children in this country live in poverty, and 3.6 million of those children go without heating, food, a secure home, or adequate clothing on a regular basis.
Britain is not primarily threatened by Iran. It is threatened by poverty, by inequality and by the political failure that allows 3.6 million children to suffer preventable deprivation in one of the wealthiest countries in the world. Robertson's neoliberal framework cannot see this because it fragments defence into a single military budget line, disconnected from the social infrastructure on which any genuine national resilience depends.
The economist John Maynard Keynes also understood something in the last century that Robertson has forgotten. Keynes managed the UK's economy during two World Wars. His principle was clear: in a time of national crisis, the burden of sacrifice must fall on those most able to bear it - who are the wealthy - and not on the poorest. To demand that the most vulnerable people in Britain pay for a defence strategy they will never benefit from, as Robertson is demanding, is not just unjust; it is economically irrational, strategically dangerous, and the precise opposite of what is required right now.
Social security and military defence are not in a political trade-off. They are mutually dependent. You cannot have one without the other. This video explains why Lord Robertson is dangerously wrong, why Britain's greatest threat comes from within, and what a defence strategy that actually defends people, rather than elite interests, would look like.
This is the audio version:
This is the transcript:
Lord George Robertson is a former Labour defence secretary. He's also a former Secretary General of NATO, the defence organisation for Europe, and he said in a recent speech that the Iran War is a wake-up call on defence spending and that social security is the problem stopping us from having a proper defence strategy in the UK. He even went on to claim that we cannot defend Britain with an expanding welfare budget, as he called it. But that is just wrong. It's dangerously wrong.
If we so badly misunderstand defence in the way that Lord George Robertson has done, we not only won't have a defence policy, we won't have a policy for tackling poverty in this country, and we won't have the security that people need to put them into the mindset that is required to ensure they want to defend this country. He will then end up weakening the very country he claims he wants to protect, and that is exactly what his prescription would deliver: a weaker UK
Let me be blunt about this. Britain is not primarily threatened by Iran. It's threatened by poverty, inequality and political failure at home. That is what is bringing this country down right now. Nothing that happens in the Middle East is going to do that unless the US continues to ensure we don't get oil supplies. But if we have some degree of stability around Iran, we are more threatened by what happens within our domestic economy than we are by any issue around international affairs, and if you don't understand that, you do not understand defence at all. Yet that misunderstanding, typified by the comments of Lord George Robertson, is now shaping public debate on defence.
Robertson's claim that the Iran war justifies higher defence spending is just wrong. There are four core failures in Robertson's thinking.
Firstly, he does not understand what defence is.
Secondly, he does not understand who is threatening in the UK at present.
Thirdly, he doesn't understand what a proper defence strategy requires.
And fourth, he doesn't understand the economics of defence.
All of those are significant failures in their own right. Put them together, and we are looking at a disaster if we were to follow his prescriptions. Let's talk about those issues.
What is defence all about? Defence is not, of course, the same as an offensive strategy in military terms. The Iranian war is offensive. Let's be clear. Israel and the USA attacked Iran, and everyone agrees they had no military justification for doing so because there was no immediate threat to them from the Iranians. This was not then a defensive action. That made it an illegal war, and there is no evidence that Iran is threatening the UK either. We cannot be party to illegal wars. We can only be a party to defence. This is the category error that George Robertson has put at the heart of his argument. He thinks the Iran war means that we have to spend more on what he calls defence, when this was not a defensive war. He's got everything wrong from the outset.
In my opinion, what defence actually is, is protecting people and their lives. It's freedom from fear that is the core objective of any defence policy. It's not about protecting British ethnicity or preserving systems of government in this country, or even preserving our territorial rights, and it's most certainly not about defending the failing economic models that we have in use in this country. It is about the need to defend the right of British people to live in coexistence with each other, and people in other nations, and it's all about delivering social stability. That is what defence is about, and my argument is that we are failing to defend people in the UK as a matter of fact, at present.
There are 14.2 million people living in poverty in the UK at present, according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, and they are considered to be the foremost experts on this subject. 4.5 million children are included in that total number, and that is 31% of all children living in poverty. Out of that 4.5 million children living in poverty, 3.6 million are suffering a lack of some essential need every single day, whether that be heating, or food, or the ability of their parents to be able to provide them with a secure environment in which they can be brought up, where essentials are provided, like clothing. This is the failure of our defence strategy at home.
There's always a home front when it comes to defence, and our defence strategy should be to ensure that everybody in this country lives free from fear. Social security in this context is not the problem that is preventing us from having a defence strategy. It is, in fact, the thing that we need to support to ensure that we do have a proper defence strategy here in the UK because social security is part of our defence infrastructure.
It reduces fear. It reduces instability. It reduces insecurity, and if it's done properly, it delivers people who are both fit and healthy and intelligent and mentally strong, and they are the people we need in our armed forces.
You cannot defend the country unless you ensure that we have a fit population, and that's precisely what our social security system is designed to do. Cut it, and you will weaken our national resilience, and you will weaken our defence systems. My point is that is the critical understanding that Lord George Robertson is lacking.
In this context, defence strategy is also primarily domestic. He's talking about the threat from Iran. There isn't a threat from Iran. Let's get real about this. Our focus must be on people and not the protection of overseas interests, which Keir Starmer has been talking about of late, as if it's our priority to defend those people who have chosen quite deliberately to live outside the UK, so they will not pay taxes here. We don't need to defend bases in Kuwait. We don't need to have aircraft carriers in the Pacific Ocean at this point in time. Geography alone is not what defines defence in the UK now, given that we are not a world power, something that both Keir Starmer and Lord George Robertson have forgotten. People and our society are the defence priorities that we should have.
The point is that there is a political blind spot about all of this. They assume that our defence is about defending elite structures that predominate in our society. They prioritise hierarchy, wealth and power. They ignore the lived reality of most people's lives, and they confuse our state and its defence with the interests of its governing class. That is strategically dangerous. Our armed forces are made up of ordinary people. The assumption of those who think that we are defending an elite is misplaced. Ordinary people will not fight these days to defend an elite, and it is from our poorer communities in the UK that our armed forces have always recruited the most personnel.
Social security cuts do therefore automatically undermine recruitment for our armed forces in this country because the people that we have are not healthy and fit enough to fight. This is a simple, straightforward statement of fact, and the fact that George Robertson attacks the systems that support the people who live in the communities from which the army, navy, and air force will wish to recruit indicates that he doesn't understand that this policy will directly undermine the people in those communities' willingness to serve their country.
At the same time, George Robertson does not understand the economic reality of warfare. Defence requires that real resources that could be used for other purposes be sacrificed to ensure that we have the army, navy, and air force that we desire. The insights on this issue all come from John Maynard Keynes. I keep on talking about his approach to the management of war, but he was a man who managed that for us in both the First and Second World Wars, and he did so successfully. His argument in 1940 was that the sacrifice that the Second World War was going to demand should fall on those most able to bear it. Robertson has reversed this logic in what he has had to say. His argument is that the burden of suffering at this moment to pay for our defence strategy must fall on those who are poorest in the UK. That makes no sense at all.
The poor cannot afford this additional sacrifice that he is demanding that they make. They will not be able to deliver as a consequence. Any change you make to them will weaken demand in our economy. It will reduce social stability. It will reduce our capacity to sustain defence, and it will leave the consumption of the wealthy untouched in a way that can only cause resentment and anger, and that will undermine our defence strategy, yet again. The fact is, the people who must make the sacrifice are those who can, and they are the wealthy. It's economically irrational and unjust to assume anything else.
The failure that George Robertson reveals is a failure to understand strategy itself. There is no coherent view of defence or the economy inside his thinking. His approach is dominated by neoliberal thinking, and that fragments our defence strategy. It is producing incoherence at the top levels of government because they are blind to the consequences of their actions and the impact that they are having upon ordinary people, who they demand to be compliant with the ideas that they put in place. They are, in fact, undermining the very credibility of government itself, and that is the absolute opposite of a coherent defence strategy.
Robertson's comments on defence are then fundamentally misframed. He would misallocate resources that our armed forces require. He would create more social division as a consequence. He would reduce national resilience. The real risks that we face are being ignored by him, and we would get weaker armed forces in practice as a consequence.
We would have a less willing population who would not answer the call to arms. There would be greater internal instability as a result of everything that he is saying. He would undermine the legitimacy of the state, and he would increase the UK's long-term insecurity as a consequence.
We need to change our approach to defence as a result.
Our defence policy needs to be designed around people.
It needs to be designed around the need to protect people.
It needs to start with social security as a consequence, because a sound social security system is the basis for the recruitment of the personnel that our armed forces require.
We have to think about that issue, and we have to shift the burden of paying for defence to those who can bear it.
We must focus on domestic resilience first, and we must reject incoherent, elite-driven narratives.
That's what I think can actually make our country secure. I believe that we don't have a trade-off between military spending and social security to make in this country. In fact, the two are mutually dependent upon each other, and if we are defending people, we shouldn't be worrying about institutions of power and what they're saying. We should instead be looking at how we can put power into our communities to ensure that people want to defend them.
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In summary, the real enemy is the neo-libtards who over 46 years have eroded the UK government’s capacity to act in a social capacity. The libtards tool was initially Thatcher and then once the framing had been set, subsequent governments (Underpants, B.Liar-war-monger, Broon, Cam-moron&Gidiot & then assorted village idiots) carried on the destruction.
Most UK institutions are now infested with libtards which makes it very difficult to turn things around. Indeed, the situation is similar to that in Hungary as Magyar attempts to get rid of the orban infestation.
As for enemies, I have it on good authority from my contacts that Iran discussed the UK recently – we are in a big bunker under Tehran:
“brother, where eactly is it this UK?”….”small island off the coast of Europe, cold wet & crap food”…. “& we are interested in it why?”… “we arn’t, it’s too insignificant and becoming poorer by the minute, best leave it alone, we will sell them our carpets, oil & gas, both of theirs is running out”.
Some numbers.
Total spending on social security in the UK is about £323 billion per year. That is about 10% of GDP, or about a quarter of government spending. Of that, more than half, about £178 billion, goes on pensions and other pensioner benefits. Another £145 billion goes on benefits for people of working age and children.
The total includes about £77 billion on disability benefits, and about £37 billion in housing benefits.
UK defence spending is about £80 billion per year, which is about 2.5% of GDP or about 6% of government spending.
Even accepting the false framework that public spending on one thing must either mean either tax raises or cuts elsewhere, the UK’s GDP is over £3,000 billion. True current defence budget is almost a rounding error.
There is *enormous* financial capacity in the UK to capture another percentage point or two of GDP to spend on defence, without passing on the burden to the old, the young, the poor, or the disabled.
On Tuesday my wife & I went to the Cinema to see ‘Mothers Pride’ which was filmed a few miles from where we live
There was an advert before the show for
https://www.bedbank.org.uk/
Now I doubt if the boy in the advert would be willing or able to put himself at risk for the defence of the UK when he reaches adulthood because of his experiences growing up in poverty.
So will Lord Robertson please have a look at the advert and think about it.
I went to the cinema recently with my family to see Project Hail Mary. There were 4 advertisements for the defense forces before the film.
[…] and to pursue a theme from this morning's video, defence could have been funded to the level that those inappropriately obsessed with the subject […]
The parasite class (Lords and kings) need to defend themselves and their stolen wealth against us.
Thanks all round for a really relevant article.
Might George Robertson, like Rachel Reeves and co, be similar in their unwillingness/inability to distinguish between resources, which include our citizens and their children, aka future citizens, and that tool to facilitate exchange,which is money?
Might G. R. be part of a politicians, main stream associates and the wealthy cartel who are working to increase “defence spending” without making the current tax set up transparent and equitable?
Why does G R choose to usesimplisitic, inappropriate binary thinking and not more
lrelevant and effective spectrum thinking?
”The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion but allow very lively debate within a context which is binary.” (From Noam Chomsky)
Wee Geordie is well remunerated by the American Defence Industry, being a “Senior Counsellor” to the Cohen Group, a US based consultancy (the founder, William Cohen, was Defense Sec. to Clinton), this among other such “consultancies”.
He is also well embedded, by virtue of family ties, with that fount of honest and unbiassed opinion, BBC Scotland.
He might be said, therefore, to have something of “a skin in the game” when it comes to spending on defence!
When I heard Robertson spouting his nasty right wing rhetoric I assumed he was compromised in some way and didn’t bother to check, so thanks for clarifiying this. Depressing that I was right….
Interesting article on The Guardian website today about ammonia pollution from Agriculture
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/apr/16/ammonia-pollution-hotspots-uk-pig-poultry-factory-farms
So………
We are facing a shortage of synthetic nitrogen fertiliser due to the war in The Gulf and this may well continue for some time. Plus of course the vulnerability will not go away.
The fertilizer is then used to grow chicken food. The resulting manure is then mismanaged so the nitrogen from the fertiliser used to grow it is then not only lost but becomes a pollutant.
Its the sort of situation – and there are many that anyone with an ounce of strategic sense would be trying to sort.
Agreed
A solution rich environment.
Pig shit – de-water (and capture ammonia) and push through a rotary kiln (pyrolysis). The pig shit is the source of the heat & the process is self sustaining. Outputs include useful heat (warm greenhouses?) and biochar with phosophrous. The reformed EU Fertiliser Regulation classes is as a legitimate ferti additive (I plead guilty to making sure it was included). Action by EU member states to e.g. process pig shit on site – zero. Ammonia – produced by the Haber-Bosch process – needs H2 – this could come from electrolysers – using surplus elec (which is now thrown away) in e.g. Scotland (& the water – hmmm rainy place Scotland). Whilst this may seem a techno nirvana – one needs political understanding and will – which in most countries is absent. Taking the Dutch as an example: the current pig-shit solution is to truck it 300kms. Ammonia? UK? the UK closed its last ferti production site even though it has all the ingredients needed to produce zero-carbon ferti.
Feel free to start laughing hysterically
Yes I was rather alarmed at what George Robertson said, although it chimes in with other commentators who think welfare spending is a problem. Although I think we do need to think more about defence spending – we cannot blame welfare spending for a lack of funds. Its a right wing, free market approach – used on Twitter by those who want to cut such expenditure. If someone from Mars looked at some of the posts they would come to the conclusion that the triple lock is the cause of all the UKs problems! Our welfare system is poorly organised and does not give sufficient support.
Regarding defence spending – although the Islamic Republic is run by a nasty bunch of people, it was not a military threat to us or the US. It is Israel which is the rogue terrorist state in the middle east. Back to defence spending – in the light of the Russian invasion of Ukraine the nature of warfare has changed. Is money spent on big aircraft carriers a sensible approach? I somehow doubt it.
What is needed in the UK is a fairer system of taxation, controls on earnings and limits on wealth. But we also need to change the way the economy is run – reducing our dependence on finance and investing in more sustainable and necessary parts of the economy.
To reiterate – hearing George Robertson and the cabal of free market commentators talk its like going back to the thirties when cuts were made to balance the books. So very stupid and short sighted!
I think a rather cruel case can be made for poverty being a driver for recruitment in much the same way that prison becomes a more attractive space than the outside world when you have nothing.
Agreed….said idiot is relying on those in precarity being desperate enough to enlist for ‘three square meals a day’ and training for a ‘trade’.
The MoD might make that kind of offer appealing to the most deprived areas of the country. The problem is that the military are likely to receive recruits with health issues resembling those their predecessors complained about in volunteers in 1914…
Robertson is currently employed by the Cohen Group, the Smiths Group, and Equilibrium Global, all of which have strong ties to the military industrial complex.
He is shilling for his paymasters.
He makes hammers and thinks we should use them
Yep… to build homes and hospitals.
Thank you, Matthew.
You beat me to it.
For Richard and readers: https://cohengroup.net/who-we-are/team/lord-george-robertson-0
I’m sure @BBC will point out that Robertson is an employed lobbyists for arms manufacturers – to provide the context , as they are required to do by their editorial guidelines.<p>
This lowers the tone from Richard’s telling analysis – but the grubby side has to be pointed out.<p>
Then there is the small matter of the sheer idiocy and waste within MOD spending. ‘Upgrading’ trident – breaks the non proliferation treaty , is utterly dependent on US – not under UK control. There is much mal functioning kit like sitting duck aircraft carriers with no planes or necessary escorts, armoured carriers costing £bns which cant be used because they poison the crew etc etc. There are stories of sheer corruption in the procurement system, and on and on.<p>
Its far from clear that even in his own terms Robertson has faced up to the changed face of warfare – masses of cheap drones and cyber rather than lumbering expensive kit – ships, missiles, aircraft – which just boosts profits of RR, Babcock, BEA systems etc.
Time to dust off and give a spin to “Masters of War” by Bob Dylan?
I’m glad you’ve gone for him in your inimitable style.
I was just hoping to bump into him in a corridor one day and have him up against the wall for his comments which I find unforgivable but also (it has to be said) very revealing. He’s a Thatcherite through and through as is much of his generation of New Labour politicians in that he simply gave up on society. It’s hard work you see.
Everything you mention has been learnt and discarded. If as Milan Kundera said ‘ The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting’, too many politicians have made a conscious and unforgiveable effort to forget. No wonder there is a feeling of going backwards.
I know that Singapore can often be a controversial topic in this blog, but their concept of “Total Defence” (Google it) addresses this very topic, tying it together with other issues such as supply chains and cybersecurity, which all need to be maintained and monitored to be robust enough to deal with disruptions. It’s not just about guns and planes.
What constitutes defence, should we not be clear on this before going further?
Would we be defending ourselves by assisting Israel and the US in their adventures in Iraq, “Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Palestine, Lebanon and Iran. What activities fall under the heading of “defence”?
And who decides what should be included and what excluded? A Reform PM, a Green PM would presumably have widely differing views and so how would a consistent defence policy emerge. As far as I know the PM and the Intelligence Services take the key decisions, not Parliament.
And what of Russia, China, North Korea; are we to assume, in setting a budget, that we need to have a military capability that will “defend” us against one or more of these super-powers? If so we won’t have room for any social spending.
And historically the MoD has not been able to control and properly account for past budgets.
There is no clarity and yet people like Robertson and other defence connected “experts” are constantly telling us that nothing is more important, that we must (we being those who rely upon the state) make sacrifices.
We have seen that the world’s greatest super-power has been forced to enter into dialogue with Iran, this after embarking upon an illegal war in unison with a country recently found to have committed plausible genocide. In doing so this axis has undermined the well being millions, the very thing that “defence” spending was supposed to protect.
We know from the 2007/08 financial meltdown and Covid that neoliberal financial/monetary theory simply cannot deal with existential issues and yet we continue to pretend that it can.
And our media? Well enough said.
Clearly, a rational and already proven successful response to Robertson’s dilemma about the claimed adverse effects of social security recipients on national defence, would be to use the missiles we aren’t currently firing at Iran, to bomb (using intelligence garnered from gov’t Palantir contracts) those poorer areas of the UK, like mine, targeting households drawing social security but not in employment. Battle-tested AI and weaponry is available from Israel, and has already been tested at two intensity levels, fast (Gaza) and slow (West Bank).
The UK government clearly has no principled objections to such a sheme otherwise it would be complaining in the international courts about its current use by Israel.
I know this is an outrageous comment, but it does seem to me to accord with current “British values”.
Just for the (surveillance) record, I do NOT advocate the bombing of impoverished British citizens, but I’m not convinced it would contravene the current UK government’s moral standards.
The relentless talk of impending war by today’s global political class angers me. They are trying to con us all into thinking that war is inevitable when it most clearly is not. Now is the time for all of us, and particularly the young, to stand up and say “No we will not answer any call to fight”. It is time for open, mass, peaceful defiance. Why should they fight? To “protect” a political economic system that has failed for decades to deliver for the many but have enriched obscenely the few. Similarly, why should the people stuff the pockets of the type of outfit that employs the political has been like George Robertson by having to pay more tax and lose what public services remain? As John Lennon sang once, it’s time for “Power to the People”!
Another great video Richard, thx
Interesting that Lord Robertson has joined The Cohen Group, again.
https://cohengroup.net/lord-george-robertson-has-rejoined-cohen-group
It’s difficult not to be cynical. This is one of the groups many aerospace & defense related boasts…
Business Development
“Assisted a US firm to secure $4 billion in sales of defense equipment to multiple countries in Central and South Europe and the GCC, working with local government and industry
No doubt they could update this statement soon to include a certain country in Northern Europe.
Thank you
Led by Donkeys
The man is an utter sh1t, sorry Prof if it lowers the tone but his behaviour and values are self-serving and disgusting, and thus he’s an utter sh1t.
Agreed
If only you had been invited to appear on any of the tv and radio news programmes which reported Robinson’s speech without any counter views – just accepting it was all true because his past roles make him an ‘expert who must be believed!
I do find all this talk of being invaded as rather puerile and obviously for other reasons than actual fear of invasion and being conquered.
There are few natural resources left in the UK, certainly not enough to be of any interest to any potential conquerer. The only strategic value I can think of is access to the Atlantic, but if that ever became a concern for the US, then they would just nuke the islands.
Logistically it would also be incredibly costly to invade us by even our nearest neighbours like France (historically an enemy many times), or Scandinavia (new viking raids?). Almost impossible for China – they would have to come over the North Pole, and Russia would need to conquer all of Northern Europe first to reach us.
We should definitely defend ourselves against cyber attacks and general messing about with important strategic bits (like undersea cables and powerlines from Europe), but if we publicly stopped meddling in other areas of the World, then over time historical animosity that arguably we deserved, would fade away and we would just be a small country on the edge of Europe to trade with. Does Portugal for example, fear a Russian or Chinese or Iranian invasion?
Unfortunately Robertson’s claim that we should increase defence spending by cutting social security (welfare benefits to right wing newspapers and think tanks) is a foretaste of the current and future attack lines against any progressive government, party or coalition.
Any reading of the mainstream newspapers will give a flavour and any discussion with most members of the public will reveal how far it has penetrated general thinking. Sadly many people have individual stories of benefit fraud of various kinds but lack authoritative figures of what the reality is. To fight these claims amongst our acquaintances we need facts, figures and persuasive arguments. Thanks to Richard and contributors for providing some of these. Would appreciate a video/ blog on how to counter the ‘ benefits out of control’ argument.
[…] isn’t simply about weapons, budgets, or protecting elite overseas interests,” Murphy observed. “True defence means safeguarding people’s freedom from fear—fear of violence, poverty, need, […]
I worked at a couple of functions which George Robertson attended many years ago. My impression of him was a strange wee wooden mannie who spoke in cliches, even in ‘conversation’. He had as much personality as Keir Starmer, which is to say, none. I think he also misses the point; people who live in poverty may well think ‘why should I care about this country when it never cared about me or mine?’.