Andy Burnham’s Downing Street welcomed NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte this week for a first face-to-face meeting on defence, and the Prime Minister still could not bring himself to commit Britain to a firm timetable for the 3 per cent of GDP defence spending target that his own Chancellor once treated as non-negotiable.
The two men met on Wednesday at RAL Space in Didcot, Oxfordshire, with Rutte due to praise the UK’s record on defence spending, which is projected to reach around 2.7 per cent of GDP by 2027.
Burnham told Rutte it was “critical” for Britain to show its commitment to NATO. Warm words, but words are all Downing Street has offered so far on the interim 3 per cent target that allies, defence hawks and Chancellor John Healey himself demanded when he was Defence Secretary.
That contradiction is becoming difficult to ignore. Healey quit as Defence Secretary rather than accept delay on reaching 3 per cent. He is now the man in charge of the Treasury, tasked with finding the money, or the excuses, for a Prime Minister who has spent the past fortnight talking about “social security” rather than national security.
Pressed by Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch at Prime Minister’s Questions last week, Burnham insisted defence spending “can’t come at the expense of social security” and refused to be “forced to choose between the two.” He pushed the decision on hitting 3 per cent into the spring spending review, offering only the distant, NATO-mandated 3.5 per cent by 2035 as a fallback pledge. It is the language of a Prime Minister managing his own party rather than levelling with the country about the cost of deterrence.
A Movement Divided, A Government Adrift
Burnham’s hedging has not gone unnoticed inside his own movement. Unite general secretary Sharon Graham has broken with the welfare-first framing coming out of Number 10, calling for a firm commitment to 3 per cent by 2030 and warning that Britain has been “running our hand across our mouth in defence for ages.” She has told Politico she is in direct contact with defence employers who are weighing whether to keep jobs and investment in Britain at all, hardly a vote of confidence in the Government’s drift.
Against her stands University and College Union general secretary Jo Grady, who used this year’s TUC Congress to push a “Wages Not Weapons” motion, arguing that money spent on defence contracts is money not spent on schools, housing and the NHS. The motion has now been reiterated at TUC Congress in successive years, exposing a Labour movement that remains split down the middle on whether Britain should properly arm itself.
Into that vacuum stepped Defence Secretary Wes Streeting, who insisted the Government would not “wave the white flag” and pointed to reindustrialisation and British defence procurement as proof of intent. It was a robust defence of the policy, delivered, tellingly, by the Defence Secretary rather than the Prime Minister, who has largely let his Cabinet colleagues do the explaining while he keeps his own options open.
The Bill Is Coming Due
None of this changes the arithmetic facing Healey ahead of the Autumn Budget: thinner fiscal headroom, higher borrowing costs and rising inflation, against a backdrop of continuing Russian aggression against Ukraine and a NATO Secretary-General who has now visited Britain to apply pressure in person. Britain’s defence industry, from ISR drone programmes to the beyond-line-of-sight anti-armour work being developed with MBDA and Thales, has the capacity to deliver, provided ministers are prepared to commission and fund it at scale.
What Britain does not have is clarity from its own Prime Minister. Burnham can continue to frame the choice between defence and welfare as an act of political conscience. Allies watching Russia’s war on Ukraine, and British firms deciding where to base their production lines, are entitled to wonder whether it is simply an act of avoidance.
Image: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
