When will the UK spend more on defence?

The UK and European partners have had plenty of time to get to grips with the inevitable, that President Donald Trump will demand a substantial rise in defence spending. When he threw this demand at Europe the first time he served as president , the impact was like a fox entering a hen coop. Lots of fluttering wings and squawking, but in the end it worked. More Nato members met the minimum two per cent of GDP target for defence expenditure. Now Trump is back and the issue has become an even greater priority. Nearly three years into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, every member of the western alliance is fully aware that President Putin might turn his attention to Kremlin-perceived vulnerable parts of eastern Europe to pursue his hegemonic ambitions. Numerous current and past military chiefs have been warning that Europe is not prepared for a conventional war with Russia, at least not without the backing of the alliance’s only military superpower, the United States of America. Trump wants Europe to take on more responsibility for its own defence. This is not a new argument and, on the whole, the UK and Europe agree. However, there is a new ingredient which is stopping the majority of European members of Nato from raising their defence spending from the two per cent minimum to 2.5 per cent, or three per cent or even the five per cent of GDP which is what the new president would really like. The UK and its European allies are struggling with debt, inflation and an eternal battle to balance the books with diminishing funds. Right now, promises to raise defence spending are founded on genuinely wishful thinking but with no timeline in sight. Keir Starmer has said he wants to raise the GDP percentage to 2.5 per cent, but neither he nor his Chancellor Rachel Reeves has dared stipulate any sort of firm deadline. It certainly won’t be in the next two years. This is why ideas coming out of the European Union might seem to be attractive. The latest one , according to the Telegraph, would have the UK joining a £420 billion (500 billion euros) rearmament programme that would benefit all European armies, Britain’s included. The idea, proposed by Donald Tusk, the prime minister of Poland which currently hold’s the EU’s rotating presidency, would be “loosely based” on the European coronavirus recovery fund under which the European Commission borrowed 750 billion euros on the international markets to help EU countries worst hit by the pandemic. The debt was to be repaid across the board, without a set timeframe. The EU rearmament scheme which is unlikely to be met with much enthusiasm by the UK government, has coincided with a risky promise by Mark Rutte, Nato secretary-general, that if the US continued sending billions of dollars of weapons to Ukraine, Europe would pick up the tab. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Rutte told Reuters: that if the US maintained its weapons supplies to the Kyiv government, “then it is only fair that Europe will, in terms of the financial burden of those deliveries, pay the highest burden”. The UK has so far committed £12.8 billion for Ukraine, £7.8 billion of it in military support. If Trump’s pledge to bring the war to an end this year fails to materialise, the UK will face the prospect of a steeply rising bill, especially if Rutte’s proposal for Europe to pay for a proportion of American weapons deliveries is adopted by Nato. In the past, Labour governments have not shied away from spending on defence. It was, after all, the government of Tony Blair which decided to purchase two 65,000-tonne aircraft carriers which, to put it politely, have not performed since coming into service with total reliability and, of course, still don’t have as yet the full complement of 72 aircraft on board each one. The future of the UK’s defence spending and its role on the global stage are the subject of the latest strategic defence review, headed by Lord Robertson, former Labour defence secretary and ex-Nato secretary general. Defence reviews are supposed to be about assessing the country’s military and security requirements and capabilities for the next 15 years or so. They are not intended to be based on what cash is available. But, inevitably, it comes down to money. With Trump back in the White House, demanding ever larger burden-sharing from America’s Nato allies, the question of what the government can afford to spend on defence at a time of rising threats from Moscow has never been so challenging. Perhaps Lord Robertson should remind himself of what one of his predecessors achieved. When Denis Healey was Labour defence secretary for six years in the 1960s, Britain’s finances were in an equally poor state. He knew which expensive programmes to scrap, albeit generating political controversy, and by the end of his time Britain’s armed forces were in ruder health and focusing on the nation’s strategic and military strengths.