With parliament back after the summer break, the debate around increasing Britain’s defence spending – so febrile just two months ago – is rearing its head again. On Wednesday, a voice no one knew the country needed chimed into the discussion. Taking to X, the Labour MP Diane Abbott intoned:
‘The imminent threat from Russia is a Nato fiction to justify their complete capitulation to Trump’s demands for more military spending. The increase should not go ahead.’
Doing nothing about Diane Abbott risks undermining Burnham’s authority on defence
It hardly needs stating that Abbott’s tweet was beyond stupid, not only for its ignorance but also for its naivety. Its eerie similarity to propaganda spouted by the Kremlin goes beyond the doomsday talk of ‘complete capitulation’: for one, branding the threat from Russia a ‘Nato fiction’ is a line of argument lifted straight out of Vladimir Putin’s playbook. Apart from that, framing the need to raise defence spending as something to be done purely to placate Donald Trump plays straight into the anti-Nato, perfidious West narrative that talking heads in Moscow love to peddle.
Abbott has now deleted her tweet and fallen curiously silent on the subject. Nevertheless, I’d love to know what she would consider to be a genuine threat from Russia. Clearly, Russian submarines creeping along the bottom of the North Sea close to critical infrastructure carrying energy and communication cables to Britain – as revealed by the government in April – weren’t. Neither was the arson attack on Keir Starmer’s home and car, carried out by two men under instructions from Moscow, last May.
The exploding DHL packages shipped across Europe in 2024, one of which detonated in Birmingham – linked to Russia – probably wouldn’t cut it in Abbott’s book either. So too has she seemingly ignored repeated warnings from Britain’s defence chiefs about the ways in which Moscow is out to wreak havoc on our lives. In 2025, when he was still defence secretary, John Healey revealed that Russia was conducting cyber attacks on Britain ‘daily’.
Just last week, the head of the Royal Navy, General Sir Gwyn Jenkins, warned that we could face potentially unavoidable ‘catastrophic events’ as the UK and its allies ‘struggle to contain’ Russia’s undersea capabilities. Added to this, after weeks of verbal threats emanating from the Kremlin about striking British military facilities, Putin teased on Wednesday when asked about this: ‘That’s a secret. A military secret.’
In the short time that Andy Burnham has been Prime Minister, he has been at pains to insist that under his leadership Britain will continue to support Ukraine ‘100 per cent’. Less than two weeks ago, he stood in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv to declare that ‘despite Russia’s outrageous threats to my country, we will continue our support for Ukraine’. Burnham’s decision to appoint Healey as Chancellor following his resignation specifically on the principle of not raising defence spending to 3 per cent of GDP fast enough has also widely been interpreted as a sign that Burnham is serious about the issue.
And yet it appears that Burnham and the Labour party are willing to let Abbott’s words – damaging as they are to the reputations of both – go unpunished. The government’s chief whip Anneliese Midgley reportedly views the matter as ‘closed’.
The trouble is that Abbott’s ill-informed pronouncement on defence was not a one-off. Less than a fortnight after Burnham hosted Ukraine’s president Zelensky on British soil for the first time in July, it emerged that, the month before, she had called Ukraine’s self-defence and its allied backing a ‘Nato campaign against Russia’. That revelation came just two days after Burnham readmitted Abbott to the Labour party following a probe into allegations of anti-Semitism. The weekend before she was readmitted to the party, she wrote an article in the Morning Star newspaper claiming that America started the war in Ukraine and called Nato’s leaders ‘born-again warmongers’.
Embarrassingly, at least two Nato allies have reportedly raised concerns with the government this week over Abbott’s comments. Ukrainian officials have also said that it is ‘unacceptable’ to claim that Russia’s aggression is a ‘fiction’.
Is the diplomatic fallout and reputational damage, not only to Burnham and Labour but also to Britain, of keeping Abbott in the party worth it to the Prime Minister? For all our sakes, I hope not. Doing nothing about Diane Abbott risks undermining Burnham’s authority on defence, security and Ukraine. The Tory MP Ben Obese-Jecty was right to say on Wednesday that Abbott was ‘playing the role of Putin’s useful idiot’. More than that, her comments have made her a national embarrassment.
Comments