I don’t blame Andy Burnham for being furious that Sir Keir Starmer is trying to rush through his ill-fated Defence Investment Plan before he leaves Downing Street.
The DIP was the trigger which finally doomed Starmer’s premiership, when the paucity of the financial settlement on offer pushed John Healey to resign as defence secretary.
Healey showed himself to be an honourable politician by his decision to resign over an insultingly small financial offer for his department a fortnight ago. That’s a test that many of his predecessors have failed, preferring to cling to office even while the military crumbles beneath their feet rather than to leave the top table entirely.
Given the Prime Minister’s dire approval ratings, plenty of people felt grateful to Healey for precipitating Starmer’s departure from office. Once the resignation became public, the end was inevitable.
But the former defence secretary’s gift to the nation is far greater than that. Prime ministers come and go – and this one sometimes seemed like he wasn’t sure which – but for many years the defence of the nation has been a poor relation when it comes to Westminster budget battles.
Every prime minister pays lip service to the heroes of our military, sombrely lays a wreath at the Cenotaph on Armistice Day, and thanks our troops at intermittent speeches on bases in Germany, the Baltics or here at home. But far too often, when crunch time comes in the budget negotiations, those good intentions are neglected in favour of protecting welfare spending or pump-priming the next big shiny infrastructure project.
If anything, the Army, Navy and RAF were the victims of their own ability and can-do culture: successive governments came to assume that, even if they weren’t given the right tools and headcount for the job, men and women in uniform would knuckle down and get it done anyway. They were taken for granted.
The effect of this was severe, both in blood and national security. Dozens of lives were lost in Iraq and Afghanistan because troops were deployed with light Snatch Land Rovers rather than the better-armoured vehicles necessary to protect against roadside IEDs. The cumulative impact of 30 years of this approach was no less dangerous for the nation as a whole. Skimping on defence spending denuded this country of the necessary forces and equipment to protect itself in a dangerous world.
Starmer himself, in the foreword to last year’s Strategic Defence Review (SDR), said that it amounted to “the hollowing out of our Armed Forces”. The three services, the kit they had available, the cutting edge drone and AI tech, and Britain’s domestic defence manufacturing capacity had all been neglected to the point that, with a land war raging in Europe, our ability to defend our home islands had fallen into doubt. With the United States having pulled the rug on the Nato security guarantees which have underpinned our safety since the 1940s, it’s now all the more important that we should be able to fend for ourselves.
The grim reality of this decline has been known to most people in the military and the defence sector for years. But the preference to ignore such an uncomfortable truth kept winning out – from the 2010 SDR which failed to even mention Russia as a threat, to the repeated decision in domestic political battles to prioritise almost any other activity of the state above its most fundamental duty of defending its people.
It is this scourge which Healey has created a rare opportunity to demolish once and for all. The seeds of Starmer’s political demise were sown through a hundred errors, but it was starving defence of the necessary funds to protect against existential threats which actually brought him down in the end.
For decades, defence has been treated as Whitehall’s whipping boy: a budget line which Downing Street and the Treasury believed it could squeeze and constrain as necessary, without consequence.
It turns out there are consequences if a defence secretary chooses to fight rather than submit. Not only is the Prime Minister out of a job, but the Chancellor – who had hoped to survive a change in leadership – is now under fire for driving Healey to the point of resignation.
Burnham knows that he must pass this new test on defence or risk his premiership going the same way as his predecessor’s. If he is to be our new prime minister, perhaps as soon as mid-July, then he must be allowed to make his own decisions on the funding of the military and the shape of public spending.
Starmer’s attempt to push through a DIP of his own before the Nato summit amounts to a shocking imposition. The convention is that outgoing prime ministers are not supposed to make big spending decisions, and for good reason. At best, it looks like a desperate last grasp at relevance – at worst, it looks like petty revenge on the man who stole his job.
If he couldn’t make the plan add up a fortnight ago, how will he do so in the dwindling fag-end of his time in Downing Street? Even if he changed tack completely, and dramatically increased the defence budget to the level required, what authority would such a decision have given the circumstances of its announcement?
If Starmer accepts he has to go, then he should go rather than lingering like a ghost at the feast. If Burnham is to lead, then he should be allowed to lead. Defence spending is finally being taken seriously instead of sidelined – it deserves better than this unseemly scuffle in extra time.
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