Clive Lewis MP published this Tweet last night. I think he might have been reading some of what I have been saying here on defence, and a great many other issues:
Westminster may finally be about to have the argument it has spent 40 years avoiding.
If Andy Burnham returns to Parliament, the political class will know how to cover it. A leadership drama. Who is up, who is down, whether Keir Starmer can survive, whether Labour is once again turning inward. The familiar machinery of Westminster psychodrama will whirr into life.
That framing misses the larger point.
Burnham's possible return matters not because of what it says about Labour's leadership, but because of what it reveals about the British state: what it can still do, what it has forgotten how to do, and what kind of country it must become if it is serious about resilience.
Britain is finally having a more serious conversation about national security. The Strategic Defence Review, the pivot back towards Europe, the recognition that hybrid warfare turns citizens, infrastructure and civic institutions into part of the front line: all of it marks a real shift in how the state thinks about its own survival.
But at the centre of that conversation lies a question that the defence establishment, and most of Westminster, still does not want to answer. What kind of society do you need to be before resilience is possible?
Finland is now the model everyone cites. Comprehensive security. Whole-of-society defence. Civilian preparedness woven into military planning. British strategists admire the Finnish system and ask how it might be copied.
But the admiration stops short of the uncomfortable question: why does it work there?
The answer is not geography, or history, or some mysterious quality of Finnish national character. It is structural. Nearly 80% of Finns say they would defend their country if attacked. In Britain, the figure is closer to 33%.
That gap is not an accident. It exists because Finland has spent decades building a society in which people have a genuine stake in what they are being asked to defend. Energy is affordable. Housing is available. Public services function. Institutions command trust.
The Nordic welfare state is not a sentimental add-on to Finnish security policy. It is the foundation of it. You cannot ask people to defend a country that does not work for them.
Britain has spent 40 years building the opposite.
The privatisation of essentials, energy, water, transport and housing, transferred wealth upwards from households to shareholders while making the basics of everyday life more expensive.
The state, stripped of the tools to control costs at source, has been reduced to compensating after the fact. Out of every pound the Government spends on housing, 88p goes to subsidising private rents. Just 12p goes to building homes.
When energy prices spiked in 2022, the Government spent £40bn in a single winter cushioning the blow, not because it had a resilient energy system but because it lacked one.
Debt interest now consumes more than £100bn a year. Britain has the highest debt servicing costs in the G7: the compounding price of financing failure rather than eliminating it at source.
This is what bond market dependency actually looks like. It is not an abstract fiscal condition. It is the consequence of a state that has been stripped of the supply-side tools that would let it cure the problems it now pays, indefinitely, to manage.
And here is the paradox the Treasury refuses to confront. The countries that borrow most cheaply are often those that have retained the public investment model Britain abandoned. The spread between UK and Dutch borrowing costs has widened sharply, not because markets fear public investment, but because they have lost confidence in a model that borrows to subsidise private failure while never addressing its causes.
This is the connection Britain's defence debate is missing. The familiar framing, that social spending is what must be sacrificed to meet the NATO target, is not merely politically toxic. It is strategically illiterate.
Cutting the foundations of social cohesion to fund the hardware of national defence is self-defeating. You end up with planes and no pilots, submarines and no crew, an army that cannot recruit because the society it is meant to protect has stopped believing in itself.
I think Burnham understands this. That is why his programme is more interesting than the leadership gossip suggests.
What he has been building in Greater Manchester, public control of transport, expanded social housing, investment in the productive foundations of the city economy, is not a nostalgic rerun of postwar nationalisation. It is a proof of concept for a different kind of state.
The Bee Network is the most visible example, but the argument behind it travels. A state that can shape markets is not condemned to subsidise their failures. A state that produces affordable energy through public generation does not need to spend tens of billions cushioning every price shock. A state with a serious public housebuilding programme does not need housing benefit to rise endlessly in line with private rents.
A state that builds institutions people can see, use and trust begins to restore the civic confidence on which resilience depends.
The real constraint on Britain is not money. It is capacity: the workers, institutions, supply chains and public purpose needed to turn national will into national renewal.
Britain's tragedy is not that it has run out of money. It is that, after 40 years of hollowing out the state, it has made itself less able to act.
Burnham's critics will reach for the familiar warning. Borrow more, spend more, spook the gilt markets, repeat the Truss disaster. But this misunderstands both the problem and the opportunity.
Bond markets do not have ideological preferences. They have functional ones. They prefer clarity, credible revenue streams, productive investment and a state with a plan. What they punish is not public ambition but incoherence.
A properly designed productive state programme would not be a leap into fiscal fantasy. It would be an attempt to end the much costlier fantasy that Britain can keep borrowing to compensate for broken markets while refusing to repair them.
The defence conversation and the economic conversation need to become the same conversation.
Finland did not build national resilience by choosing between welfare and security. It built resilience by understanding that they are inseparable: that a country in which the basics work, where people trust one another and the institutions around them, is one that can face danger with something more than anxiety.
That is the deeper argument Burnham represents.
Westminster will be tempted to treat him as a leadership story. It should resist the temptation.
The question is not whether Burnham can return to Parliament. It is whether Britain can return to the idea that the state should make life work.
Because a country that cannot command the confidence of its people cannot truly defend itself.
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Lewis as PM with Burnham as deputy (in the fullness of time) .
Thanks for sharing this tweet. Reading it gives me a sense of hope.
That is what is missing in this country, a stake in the nation, to build something together for the benefit of the majority, to be proud of aiming for and creating a better future.
No wonder people are depressed, angry, hopeless. Look around.
Most jobs are meaningless, and the ones that aren’t are so target driven it sucks the soul out of any participation or influence.
We all need direction.
I wish I could move to Finland.
Get that man into the Cabinet now!
This relationship between the ruled/ruler the state/the citizen has been examined by Michael Hudson in ‘And Forgive us our Debts’ (2018). It is as old as humanity and started before the creation of money according to the late David Graeber with kindness and empathy.
The state creates the money debt placed on itself for the helping of the people and then a return debt obligation is placed on the people to uphold the State, observe its laws (including taxes) and thus the personal is brought together with the collective. It is reciprocal, it is natural except to those sick f**ks who like snake oil like Public Choice Theory who call this ‘self interest’.
How did puny man survive as a species without ‘self interest’ – sticking together, helping each other? Honestly……………
The politics of care are fundamental to democracy and keeping democracy going.
I hope Clive’s faith in Burnham is not misplaced. Hopefully Burnham has an inner Keynes somewhere!
I wonder how many in the Labour Cabinet, how many Ministers, how many Labour MPs, including the Chancellor and PM, are capable of even understanding what Clive Lewis has written, and if, by some miracle, they DO understand it, they are morally incapable of responding in any way other than to put their own, and then their party’s interest before those of the UK population?
That is the bind we are in.
But we can get out of it.
Mental note: will labour even consider Clive Lewis as a possible PM replacement, personally i doubt that, even if it could possibly save their hides, they are too welded into neoliberal stuff.
A very welcome piece. We cannot be a coherent, worthwhile nation while the agents of misrule dominate the conversation – the Farages, the Lowes, the Badenochs. We also need to clean the stables of Westminster of the donations, the bribes and the attachment to foreign powers be it Russia, Israel or the USA. It is the last of these I am concerned about with Burnham. Unlike Lewis, he is a member of Labour Friends of Israel. For many anti-Zionist Jews ( and there are a lot, many once members of Labour) this is an arm of the Zionist state, a malign influence, and the root of much of the recent legislation and policing of protest.
I think the takeover of Labour by its Friends of Israel is a major part of Labour’s problem.
Perhaps Clive Lewis does “get it”. I’m inclined to think so. Maybe he should be the next PM.
I guess there is a chance that Andy Burnham “gets it”. He has the advantage that he didn’t study PPE at Oxford. In fact he studied English at Fitzwilliam College in Cambridge, one of the more down to earth colleges. So at least he won’t be so indoctrinated by neoliberal derp. And his wife was born in the Netherlands and lived in Belgium, so perhaps he has a more European outlook.
Sadly Andy Burnham is not in parliament and so cannot, currently, stand for PM. Given the terrible state of Labour’s popularity it is by no means certain that, even with his personal following and charisma, he could win a by election.
Let’s stick with Clive Lewis for PM.
As an aside there was a BBC four documentary last night on Lapland – showing the Finnish way of education through play outside in mid winter for under sevens, and talking to young national service students.<p>
Clive Lewis seems almost a one-off in his willingness to think through and articulate economic and defence issues. On another planet from most nodding donkey Labour MPs. Not sure how Burnham is the answer – as Richard said. Hes got Iraqi blood on his hands, and I think he helped to begin the rot in NHS.<p>
To begin building a Finnish model in Britain would require a revolution in Labour thinking – which is what Lewis is outlining. Labour is an undemocratic authoritarian, possibly CIA/Mossad/MI5 -influenced entity, rather than a democratic membership party. <p>
It all looks impossible
I keep an eye on Clive Lewis; I like what I see and wonder how he manages to keep going there in LINO, it must be bleak.
This is a very insightful and well-argued piece, I hope it gets picked up by some of the media (I know, I wish). Does he read Funding the Future, or do great minds think alike? What matters is, he is another voice for care and reason.
Does he fully understand bond markets and the control Govt has over the cost of ‘borrowing’? Or is he avoiding saying anything that might associate him with MMT, at least for now?
He does read Funding the Future
An inspirational post that could have been written by you. (I skimmed the header and went back for a double take!) We live in hope.
As an aside, and recognising we need to be persuasive in many ways to win over a majority, Robert Reich’s latest blog ends with an argument that might appeal to those more naturally inclined to selfishness than most of your followers.
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/what-no-one-will-tell-you-about-the?utm_source=substack&publication_id=365422&post_id=196168203&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share&utm_campaign=email-share&triggerShare=true&isFreemail=true&r=trzk0&triedRedirect=true
Thank you Richard,et al, and whilst Clive Lewis is supportive of Burnham, the jaded cynic in me wonders whether Burnham is yet another ‘saviour’?
His path to PM isn’t at all clear, with or without Lewis, so may be, for the moment, irrelevant.
What an absolutely terrific post.
I can’t add anything but well well said.
Just been listening to Keir Starmer’s “crocodile tears” speech on the tv. So what has he been doing the last two years? Unfortunately my feeling on him is that he is a serial liar – says one thing but does the other; and I feel that this will be the pattern going forward
Just two pertinent points from his speech that chimed at me. He referenced his parents and sister, who is a poorly paid carer – I wonder what she thought when he was being gifted the £11K suit?
Also want to nationalise Scunthorpe steel to provide jobs and security (good!) but why was he so reluctant to similarly save Grangemouth facility in terms of refining/chemicals.
It will be interesting to see what happens with his plans when they clash with Rachel Reeves’s (pathetic) fiscal rules. I don’t see a robust and needed politics of care materialising from Starmers offering.
Overall too little too late, too neoliberal
Agreed
It was bland blather
Actually, I think Clive Lewis may have been watching Simon Reeves in Scandinavia, which was repeated on BBC2 last night. https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/m002cg5l/scandinavia-with-simon-reeve
Part of it was in Finland, where he was training with conscripts, among other things. Some of the officers made the point about believing your country is worth defending, quite forcefully.
Maybe
But the tone sounds like my framing
I have thought for a while Clive Lewis could be a good leader. The most encouraging thing is that he sees the neo-liberal era has passed its sell by date. I agree with his point about national cohesion. Russia uses hybrid warfare including use of social media and cyber warfare which requires a response. But I don’t think it is an either -or in that his social program means we don’t need hard military capability as well.
Finland’s geography and history IS also a feature. They lost a sixth of their territory to the USSR and almost all the people relocated. During the Cold War the Soviets could and did veto things like books published. Aexander Stubb , now their President, has a good Youtube video ‘why Mearsheimer is wrong’ about Russian motives.
I don’t think the chances of war with Russia-the only military threat to Europe unless we include the US-are high at present. But if Europe doesn’t have capable forces, we could become by-standers if Russia used military force in eastern Europe. As Tim Snyder suggests it is not about invasion but political dominance so that tanks aren’t required. And that situation would encourage the likes of AfD and other Fascist parties.
To cut this short, if undersea internet and power cables could be severed, the economy would be so badly damaged further resistance would be futile. Also we import half our food and energy. So we need naval forces.
Drones and missiles can be intercepted but better to be able to hit at their source. To conclude, I hope Lewis gets to be leader and we adapt his economic and social program.
OMG a sensible, thoughtful Labour MP making very good points.