As a Russian spy ship lurks on the edge of British waters, Defence Secretary John Healey had a message for Vladimir Putin: ‘We see you, we know what you’re doing and…we are ready.’ Unfortunately, the reality is that Britain isn’t quite as ready as it should be.
Defence Secretary John Healey had a message for Vladimir Putin: ‘We see you, we know what you’re doing’
Healey revealed during a Downing Street press conference this morning that the Yantar, currently just north of Scotland, has fired lasers at RAF planes attempting to monitor its activities. It marks the first time that a Russian ship has taken this kind of action against British forces. ‘We take it extremely seriously,’ Healey said.
This reminder of the threat facing Britain comes as the House of Commons defence select committee published a report on the UK’s contribution to European security, which is sharply critical of the government on several fronts. Its message is that Britain is far from ready to defend itself against any form of attack.
So can the Labour government keep Britain safe? Healey announced that the Ministry of Defence (MoD) is ramping up munitions and explosives production. His statement was a bid to reassure Brits – and send a message to our adversaries.
The headline ministers want to trumpet is the prospect of 13 new ‘factories of the future’ producing ‘energetics’ – the propellants, explosives and pyrotechnics which make ammunition work – and creating 1,000 jobs. Construction is expected to begin next year, but that is a long way from facilities actually producing munitions.
At best, this welcome step forward is a response to a small part of the defence committee’s critique. Today’s report acknowledges good intentions in June’s strategic defence review (SDR) but is quietly damning of the government’s inertia in doing rather than saying.
The MoD knows how to say the right thing: investment, equipment, munitions, capability, resilience
The SDR, says the committee, and the government’s national security strategy ‘set out ambitious goals but lack detail on prioritisation and capability trade-offs’. The ‘Nato first’ approach ‘is welcome but must be matched by delivery’. Britain’s defence industrial base ‘is not yet configured for sustained collective defence… [and] faces challenges in capacity, skills, innovation, procurement, and financing’; although the SDR and the defence industrial strategy set out a broad direction of travel, ‘implementation will be key’.
On homeland security and resilience, matters are worse. The committee found ‘little progress on the home defence programme’ and expressed dismay that the Defence Readiness Bill, which the SDR said would ‘provide the government with powers in reserve to mobilise Reserves and industry should crisis escalate into conflict’, has not even been drafted yet. MPs also saw no evidence of the ‘national conversation’ on defence and security referred to in the SDR, despite the Prime Minister talking of its importance.
Healey claims that ‘this is Britain leading from the front politically, militarily, industrially’. By contrast, a witness described to the defence committee ‘a great deal of anxiety [among allies] about the UK not providing the military, naval and air leadership that all of them felt the UK… should provide’, and that the small size of the armed forces, a lack of mass, was undermining that leadership. Who do you believe?
All of this comes down to an issue on which the government is deflecting, dissimulating and proclaiming what are close to outright falsehoods: defence expenditure. Ministers like to revel in the ‘biggest sustained increase in defence spending since the Cold War’ but let us be clear about the facts and their context.
Currently the UK spends 2.4 per cent of GDP on defence; the government expects this to rise to 2.6 per cent in 2027 – welcome but hardly game-changing – and previously announced an ‘ambition’ to increase this to 3 per cent during the next parliament. At the Nato summit in June, new spending targets were agreed under which member states would spend 5 per cent of GDP on defence and national security by 2035, 3.5 per cent on ‘core defence requirements’ and an additional 1.5 per cent on broader defence and security-related areas. Sir Keir Starmer ‘estimates’ that the UK will meet this target.
Strip away the rhetoric and the UK’s core defence expenditure will rise from 2.4 per cent of GDP to 3.5 per cent over the course of a decade. This means an increase from around £60 billion to something of the order of £90 billion. This is not from a blank sheet: in 2023, the National Audit Office (NAO) concluded that the MoD’s equipment plan for 2023-33 was ‘unaffordable’, with costs exceeding budget by £17 billion.
We also know from an NAO report this July that the MoD may have underestimated the whole-life cost of the F-35 strike aircraft programme by £14 billion. Nuclear programmes, including the Dreadnought-class submarines which will carry the strategic deterrent, will cost £10 billion more than predicted by the equipment plan. The MoD is haemorrhaging money simply to make ends meet.
Healey will point to huge spending figures, like £11 billion ‘to fund kit for our frontline forces’, which in abstract sound formidable. Without context, they are meaningless, but placed in context, it is obvious that they are already inadequate. Yet the MoD will not face reality. The Defence Secretary claims that ‘the government is delivering at pace on the recommendations in the review to keep the British people safe’, but the defence committee – with seven Labour MPs out of 11, remember – says the opposite.
The MoD knows how to say the right thing: investment, equipment, munitions, capability, resilience. But the government is moving painfully slowly. We are already subject to Russian sabotage, disruption and hybrid attacks – and not doing enough to combat the threat. ‘We see you, we know what you’re doing, we’re ready,’ Healey told Russia. Perhaps instead he should have said: ‘We do see, we do know – but we are not ready.’
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