In a telling exchange on Radio 4 last week, during the furore following John Healey’s resignation, Debbie Abrahams, the Labour MP and chair of the work and pensions committee, was asked about funding for defence. She said that she supported the target of spending 3.5 per cent of GDP by 2035, but was unconvinced of the need to accelerate that rise and certainly not at the expense of what she later described, in a Facebook post, as ‘arbitrary cuts to social welfare’. She was, she told the BBC’s Evan Davis, an ‘evidenced-based politician’. Abrahams’s implication was that she did not accept that we needed to accelerate our spending on defence.
This is a misunderstanding that could prove catastrophic for Britain. Say what you like about the malign influence of Zack Polanski or Jeremy Corbyn, or about Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s systemic weakness, but the blame for miscommunicating the need for Britain to spend more on defence lies squarely, and fairly, with the Ministry of Defence. Starmer could barely scrape almost an accounting error of defence uplift, some £13bn over four years, one hundredth of the annual total UK government expenditure, which shows just how unconvinced his Cabinet were.
The military does not have a record of spending properly the money it is allocated. The Army’s Ajax vehicle is years late, massively over budget, and currently more dangerous to our soldiers than to our enemies. The Type 45 destroyer refurbishment project has had one ship tied-up alongside since 2017. The procurement of the RAF’s E-7 Wedgetail has been emblematic of many MOD projects: late, over-budget, and, programmatically, poorly managed. As Eliot Wilson noted: ‘The Ministry of Defence has mishandled so many acquisitions it is hard to know where to look.’
Then there is real doubt about whether any uplift will be spent on the right things. The £28bn the chiefs were demanding was to protect existing defence programmes; it is very unclear how much of that was for the re-equipment, even wholesale re-imagining, the Armed Forces require for the challenges revealed by the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. To give but one example, while the UK currently has some 8,000 drones in its arsenal, Russia and Ukraine are both looking to build around six million drones in 2026. The suspicion, no doubt unworthy, was that the uplift was more about saving current hobby-horses, all linked to the still powerful defence-industrial complex, the MOD’s famous ‘primes’ – all good employers of ex-senior officers – than in actually equipping our armed forces for the future.
Perhaps, if the government had said it was going to build the equivalent of the Chain Home station – so vital to the Battle of Britain, and voted-on in late 1936, outwith the normal spending cycle, and after Hitler’s occupation of the Rhineland and Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia, both in that year – then Starmer’s case might have been easier. But he didn’t, and that was despite the cogent and well-argued Strategic Defence Review, published in 2025.
Beyond budgets, there is the matter of trust and openness. Here the MOD has been woeful: unforthcoming with information, devoted to spin, often neglectful of democratic accountability, and less than straightforward with the Prime Minister and ministers as to the limits of our military capabilities. The tendency for a long time has been to over-promise, under-deliver, have the begging bowl out for more, and then to repeat that dismal cycle.
The tendency has been to over-promise, under-deliver, have the begging bowl out for more
During the Afghan campaign, from 2008-10, we had but one visit from the Commons defence committee in two years; by contrast, the US embassy in Kabul hosted a congressional delegation almost weekly. Sometimes, no doubt, this was a painful distraction, but the vital linkage between the people, the executive and the forces fighting their nation’s wars was maintained. Not so in the UK. With almost non-existent official visits, enterprising then MPs such as Adam Holloway and Patrick Mercer, who wanted to find out what was going on, were forced to travel independently.
The net effect was evident by 2010. Towards the end of my tour as the defence attaché in Kabul, during what turned-out to be the swansong visit from outgoing Labour ministers, a senior minister stated bluntly to a senior British general that the MOD were no longer trusted by the Labour party and that, when they got back to power, this would matter. That minister is now in the Cabinet, with many of his then colleagues, and with the glowering presence of Gordon Brown, victim of many a patronising MOD misbriefing while prime minister, as a senior adviser.
If we are to genuinely match the new defence challenges, then along with new weapon systems, organisations and concepts, we need a wholly reformed MOD. Perhaps we should even start there.
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