Labour will leave Britain defenceless

The UK’s Labour government has finally published its Strategic Defence Review (SDR), setting out its defence strategy for the next decade. Anyone expecting it to provide a clear and convincing outline of how Britain will defend itself in the coming years will be deeply disappointed.

There is plenty of wonkish jargon about ‘step changes’, as well as bluster about making defence the ‘fundamental organising principle of government’. But all too often, there’s little beyond that.

Much of the review amounts to wishful thinking. In his introduction, prime minister Keir Starmer claims that in technology and tactics, the UK will form the ‘leading edge’ of innovation in NATO. That’s easy to say, but quite how it’s to be achieved on a budget that is a mere fraction of that of the US is unclear. Especially given the US, with access to Silicon Valley and Starlink satellites, is at the leading edge of innovation in NATO by a long way.

It all speaks to a lack of seriousness and urgency on the part of the government when it comes to defence. While Ukraine has spent the past 11 months continuing to resist the Russian invasion on Europe’s eastern fringe, the British government has spent the same amount of time producing a single report.

The British state’s complacent attitude towards the protection of its citizens from foreign attack is shared by other European powers. General Carsten Breuer, chief of defence in Germany, has warned that NATO should be ready to deal with a Russian nuclear attack in four years’ time. It does not seem to occur to Western Europe’s leaders that today’s wars are conducted rather more rapidly.

UK defence minister John Healey has tried at points to inject a bit more urgency into proceedings, even writing in the foreword to the SDR that UK arms innovation and procurement should be ‘measured in months, not years’. Yet at the same time, he also says he expects to see soldier numbers increase ‘in the next parliament’ – in other words, it might happen sometime between 2029 and 2034.

Similarly, the government has talked up raising defence spending, but has shied away from making any firm commitments beyond a pledge to increase expenditure from 2.3 per cent to 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2027. Indeed, earlier this year, Starmer declared ‘an ambition to spend three per cent of GDP on defence in the next parliament’. Again, that could mean any time between 2029 and 2034. And in the SW1 vocab, an ‘ambition’ falls short of a ‘pledge’ or ‘promise’, so don’t count on it actually happening.

It’s as if the gravity of the situation in which the UK now finds itself is yet to dawn on Westminster. We are over three years into the Kremlin’s bloody war in Ukraine. Russia is firing Iranian missiles, using North Korean troops and is being covertly supported by the Chinese Communist Party. There are suspicious fires and sudden poisonings in Britain and elsewhere. There are cyber attacks on NHS hospitals. And there have been ‘accidents’ cutting undersea power and telecommunications cables.

This ought to be a period of maximum vigilance, a period in which Britain prepares to better defend itself. Yet that’s not happening. Britain continues to lack the kit, the staff and the morale to mount any serious form of self-defence.

The army is down to little more than 70,000 soldiers, the smallest it has been for 300 years. There are now nearly as many pen-pushers (64,000 to be precise) working at the Ministry of Defence (MoD) as there are military personnel capable of defending the nation.

The navy is in an equally wretched state. Its four Vanguard-class submarines, which carry Trident ballistic missiles as a nuclear deterrent, are more than 30 years old and were headed toward the end of their planned lives back in 2018. They now require a lot more maintenance and repairs than they used to.

Meanwhile, the two much-vaunted Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers, launched in 2019, lack nuclear propulsion and are often under repair. The MoD has declared itself open to potentially retrofitting them with all-important catapults, which help fighter-jets gain enough airspeed and lift for take-off – which sounds like something that they should have been fitted with from the start. Despite these carriers being designed to be in service all the way up to 2069, their chances of surviving China’s DF-21D and DF-26 intermediate-range ballistic missiles, the world’s first ‘carrier killers’, seem limited.

As for the Royal Air Force, it is now little more than a skeleton service. Its management appears more concerned about meeting its diversity targets (it has even broken the law to try to do so), than it is about defending the nation’s skies.

Of course, most of these strategic, military weaknesses accrued under successive Conservative governments. But judging by the new SDR, the Labour government will do little to address them. At points, it seems as if the authors think that just repeating the word ‘warfighting’ over and over again amounts to a practical ability to engage in war.

The SDR is a mark of government that lacks any sense of reality. The review even asserts the ‘need to defend, protect, and enhance the resilience of the UK, its overseas territories and crown dependencies’. Given that the Chagos Islands are one such overseas territory, and that Starmer has just given them away and paid billions for the pleasure, the SDR’s claims bear little relation to facts on the ground.

There is no real assessment here of the parlous state of Britain’s defences. We don’t need half-baked talk of possible spending increases implemented years down the line. We need a realistic view of what we need as a nation to deter and reply to attacks, in whatever form those might take. We need military expertise and, above all, a steely determination to protect the nation’s citizenry.

On the evidence of this review, this government seems to lack both.

James Woudhuysen is visiting professor of forecasting and innovation at London South Bank University. He tweets at @jameswoudhuysen