I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve heard two things in recent months. Serving and retired military commanders, ministers and former ministers, strategists, advisers and MPs parrot the line that the defence of the country is the first duty of any government. They also complained that John Healey was too polite, too much of a Labour man to march over the road and demand the money that is needed.
This was only half right. The Defence Secretary has resigned with a devastating parting shot at Keir Starmer after the Prime Minister failed even to secure a derisory sum of money that he had demanded from the Treasury and the cabinet. In his resignation letter, Healey says ‘you have been unable, and the Treasury has been unwilling, to commit the resources that the nation needs to defend the country at this time of rising threats’.
Healey says he saw the settlement for the Defence Investment Plan (DIP) only on Monday and regards it as wholly inadequate. ‘Your DIP financial settlement … falls well short of what is required for defence and the country at this dangerous time.’ Given the psychodrama and personal insults which usually govern cabinet resignations, this is absolutely devastating – the most consequential issue on which anyone has resigned for years; far more so than when Michael Heseltine quit Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet over the Westland affair.
The Treasury risks looking like a branch of the Chamberlain government if anything like this comes to pass
‘We have worked to secure a Defence Investment Plan that does two things,’ Healey writes:
First, deal with the increasing operational demands on defence now and step up the SDR actions to meet the increasing threat. Second, set a clear path to meet the new Nato commitment you agreed to spend 3.5 per cent of GDP in 2035 through the next Spending Review.
As we have regularly discussed, I am certain that a headmark date for 3 per cent of GDP on defence in 2030 is what Britain must set. This commitment would have strong cross-party support. Other European allies are stepping up in this way.
Indeed they are but Reeves has flatly refused even to put 2030 in as the target. As Healey explains:
The extra support is backloaded when the pressure of operations and imperative to speed up readiness to fight is in the first two years and it rises to just 2.68 per cent of GDP in 2030, when we will reach 2.6 per cent next year with the investment we are already making.
At a time when Poland has raised its defence spending to 4.5 per cent of GDP and Germany is piling in tens of billions, this is totally risible. When Starmer effectively had a whipround at cabinet two weeks ago, urging departments to save 1 per cent from their capital budgets to fund defence spending, many ministers studied the floor. Ed Miliband continues to insist he won’t curb Net Zero spending.
Reeves and many Labour MPs, addicted to more welfare spending and things they think make them look good, don’t seem to comprehend the threats Britain faces from a revanchist Russia. Many credible analysts think that in the next two to four years, if the war in Ukraine ends, Vladimir Putin will turn his battle-hardened armies and Russian war economy on the Baltic states and reveal Nato’s ‘one for all and all for one’ Article 5 as a paper tiger.
Healey points out that Starmer gets this:
You spelled out the threats last week: “it is our intelligence assessment, and the assessment of other countries in NATO, that there could be an attack by Russia on NATO as soon as 2030.”
Quite.
The armed forces say they need £28 billion just to function at the level they are now – even before the new hi-tech kit imagined by the strategic defence review a year ago is purchased. Starmer argued for £18 billion and it has been reported that Rachel Reeves was prepared to fund £13.5 billion – less than half of what is required to keep our heads above water, let alone take the fight to a revanchist Russia. The Treasury risks looking like a branch of the Chamberlain government if anything like this comes to pass.
Healey concludes:
You know what defence needs … Without a DIP that meets the moment in this way, I am being forced to make decisions that would reduce the readiness of our forces and increase the risk to personnel on operations, and could make the country less safe.
He tells Starmer:
After explaining to you that I would not be able to accept a DIP settlement that does not give our Forces the resources they need, I am now left with no other option than to submit my resignation as your defence secretary.
The timing is devastating since Starmer is heading to the G7 summit on Monday, where he will have to face Donald Trump. A prime minister who was hailed even by political opponents for his deft handling of foreign affairs in his first year now looks finished because he has failed in the first task of any government. Clearly his party has no taste for war over welfare but as Roman military writer Vegetius wrote, the way to ‘Keep peace, prepare for war’.
Starmer has few options left. One would be to follow the advice of a former cabinet minister who has just texted me ‘If Keir Starmer has any authority left, he should fire Reeves’ and install a chancellor who is prepared to do what is needed to keep the country safe. I know of at least one person who has advised the PM’s senior team to do just that.
It was recently reported that if Andy Burnham becomes prime minister, he would keep Reeves as chancellor. That is now untenable. In the meantime, Healey has probably ensured he gets a job in a Burnham cabinet and solidified the view of many that he is one of the few ministers to emerge with any credit from this desultory failure of an administration. One former Starmer adviser has suggested to me that Healey could now be Burnham’s chancellor. A Labour strategist comments that Burnham should hand Healey his job back and the money to get it done. Conveniently, Burnham has just ditched his pledge to help the Waspi women, so that might create an opening.
Two other thoughts: do the service chiefs now don their uniforms and cross the road, threatening to quit unless they get the money? And who would now accept the MoD job? Someone suggested to me yesterday that Al Carns, the ambitious armed forces minister, should resign to raise his profile, but Healey’s action has rendered that pointless now. It’s hard to see how Carns could take the top job since anyone accepting this settlement or anything like it will be seen as a political cuck.
Comments