Government accused of “kicking the can” after putting off decision on building attack submarines to 2028 — the latest chapter in a Labour record of hollowing out Britain’s defences while still pushing to sign away the very base we need to defend ourselves.
Britain is less safe today than it was two years ago, and Labour only has itself to blame. This government has spent well over a year trying to give away sovereignty of the Chagos Islands, including Diego Garcia, one of the only facilities on that side of the planet capable of servicing and resupplying Royal Navy and allied submarines, and then rent it back from a foreign government at the British taxpayer’s expense.
The treaty still hasn’t been ratified: it stalled in Parliament, was paused by the government itself in April 2026 after Washington turned hostile to the idea, and Prime Minister Andy Burnham has now said he wants to push it through regardless.
Meanwhile, according to reporting by The Telegraph, ministers have quietly shelved the decision on how many new attack submarines Britain will actually build, kicking it three years down the road to 2028. Strip away the slogans and the pattern is unmistakable: whether it’s giving away a base or failing to order the boats to use it, this is a government that cannot be trusted with Britain’s defences.
The pledge, and the retreat
Back in June 2025, then-Prime Minister Keir Starmer stood in front of workers at BAE Systems in Govan and announced, with characteristic fanfare, that Labour would build “up to 12” new nuclear-powered attack submarines as part of the AUKUS pact with the United States and Australia. It was billed as a centrepiece of the government’s strategic defence review, a signal, we were told, that Britain was finally serious about rebuilding its maritime power after years of underinvestment. Starmer has of course since resigned and been replaced by Andy Burnham, but the failures of his government’s defence policy have simply been inherited, unchanged, by his successor.
The Labour government promised that the exact number of hulls would be nailed down once its Defence Investment Plan (DIP) was published. That plan finally arrived in June this year, months late. But rather than settling the matter, ministers have now told Parliament the actual commitment on numbers won’t be made until 2028.
Defence Secretary Wes Streeting confirmed as much in a letter to his Conservative shadow, James Cartlidge, stating that the design phase is ongoing and the number of submarines will be confirmed before it concludes in 2028. He insisted that manufacturing capacity has been built to deliver a submarine every 18 months from the mid-2030s, and that delaying the numbers decision won’t push back in-service dates.
It is worth pausing on how thin this excuse really is. A government that has spent well over a year trying to negotiate away sovereign British territory apparently cannot find time to decide how many submarines it wants to build. Conservatives, unsurprisingly, are not convinced.
“Up to 12 Ferraris”
Cartlidge didn’t hold back, offering what may be the most memorable line of the row: he could say he wants to buy up to 12 Ferraris, but without the money to pay for them, he won’t get any. It’s a fair jab. A headline figure means nothing without a funded, committed order, and three years after the original announcement, Labour still can’t say how many boats it’s actually buying.
Cartlidge went further, branding the situation “a shambles” and accusing the government of needing three years just to decide how many submarines to buy, let alone start building any, at a time when global threats are rising.
He’s not alone in that assessment. Senior defence sources quoted by the Telegraph called the delay “disgraceful,” and said it summed up a government long on talk and short on action.
Lord West, the former First Sea Lord and Falklands veteran, was blunter still. He warned that failing to place the order quickly creates problems for shipyards and suppliers down the line, and that waiting until 2028 is simply too late. Submarines, he pointed out, are one of the key instruments of Britain’s maritime power, and he suggested the government has lost sight of just how important that power is to the nation.
Former Royal Navy commander Tom Sharpe was equally damning, calling this the same tired pattern that has left Britain short on submarines, frigates and destroyers in the first place: delay, prevaricate, slow the build rate, cut hull numbers, a tediously predictable exercise, repeated even now that the “peace dividend” is over.
Still trying to give away the base, while delaying the boats that need it
This is where Labour’s judgment on national security starts to look less like incompetence and more like a settled pattern of self-sabotage.
Consider the sequence. In May 2025, Keir Starmer signed an agreement to hand sovereignty of the Chagos Archipelago to Mauritius and lease back the Diego Garcia base, a facility that isn’t some minor outpost, but one of the very few places on that side of the globe capable of servicing, resupplying and maintaining nuclear submarines.
Under the deal as signed, Britain would pay Mauritius roughly $136 million a year, for the privilege of continuing to use what is currently unambiguously ours.
The treaty still hasn’t been ratified. Long before Donald Trump ever weighed in, campaigners had already thrown the deal into chaos. The Great British PAC, a grassroots campaign group, funded a High Court injunction in May 2025 that briefly halted the transfer altogether, and went on to back full judicial reviews brought by Chagossian claimants challenging the government’s failure to consult them. In December 2025, the group organised a worldwide ballot of Chagossians that led to the creation of a Chagossian government in exile, with Misley Mandarin elected interim First Minister to represent their opposition to the surrender. In Parliament, the Diego Garcia Military Base and British Indian Ocean Territory Bill was subjected to dozens of government amendments and faced cross-party opposition in the House of Lords, where peers from across the political spectrum raised objections to ratification. Only after all of that did President Trump intervene in January 2026, branding the deal an act of “total weakness,” and the UK government itself paused the process in April 2026 rather than press ahead without American support.
Andy Burnham has since said he wants to revive it. So Britain currently finds itself in the worst of both worlds, a government still actively trying to sign away sovereign territory and a strategically vital base, unable to say when or whether it will succeed, while simultaneously unable to commit to the number of submarines it needs to defend the interests that same base exists to protect.
Ministers dressed the original deal up as prudent diplomacy and a way of securing the base’s long-term future. The “Right” and Plenty of serious defence voices saw it for what it looked like, a strategic retreat, trading hard sovereign leverage for a diplomatic pat on the back, one so poorly judged that grassroots campaigners, the Chagossians themselves, cross-party peers, and eventually Britain’s closest ally all balked at it.
Now pair that with this submarine delay. Labour is still trying to give away one of the only facilities capable of properly supporting a submarine fleet east of Suez, and in the same breath, it can’t even commit to how many submarines it’s going to build to use it. Announce the big number. Delay the actual decision. Let the DIP slip for months. Then delay the DIP’s own follow-through by another three years. Meanwhile keep trying, on and off, to hand over the base itself. It is difficult to imagine a more chaotic way of managing Britain’s underwater deterrent.
Ask yourself plainly: if you set out, deliberately, to weaken Britain’s ability to defend itself and its allies in the Indian Ocean and beyond, what would you do differently? You would try to sign away the base that services the submarines. You would delay ordering the submarines themselves. You would let the shipyards sit idle while competitors elsewhere in the world, not least China, which has been rapidly expanding its own submarine fleet and has taken a close interest in exactly the waters Diego Garcia overlooks, get on with building theirs.
Labour ministers would no doubt call that an unfair and cynical reading of events. But when a government’s actions consistently leave Britain weaker rather than stronger in precisely the areas where a rising and assertive China is pushing hardest, it is a fair question for voters to ask whose interests, in practice, this government is actually serving.
The current five Astute-class submarines are ageing, with HMS Astute, the oldest, already 16 years into a 25-year design life. Every year of delay in ordering replacements is a year closer to a capability gap that Britain’s adversaries would be only too happy to exploit, from a base whose future this government still cannot secure.
The government’s defence
For its part, the Ministry of Defence insists nothing has really changed. A spokesman maintained the government’s ambition to build up to 12 of the new attack submarines remains in place, and argued that holding off on a precise number now won’t affect when the boats eventually enter service.
Forgive voters for finding that reassurance hard to swallow. This is a government that is still trying, against American objections and its own repeated delays, to sign away a strategically vital military base, and that months later couldn’t manage to say how many submarines it wants to build to defend the interests that base is meant to protect. Announcements without delivery, an unresolved treaty without a clear outcome, and defence policy that seems to move only in one direction: backwards. Britain deserves a government that builds up its security rather than fumbling it away.
