A rare and pointed intervention from one of Labour’s own elder statesmen has exposed the widening gap between Sir Keir Starmer’s rhetoric on national security and the financial machinery required to deliver it. Lord George Robertson, the former Nato secretary-general and architect of the government’s strategic defence review, has accused ministers of a “corrosive complacency” towards the armed forces at a moment when, in his judgment, Britain is “under attack” and drifting “in peril”.
His criticism, unusual in its bluntness from a Labour peer who served as defence secretary under Sir Tony Blair, has crystallised a problem the government has so far struggled to resolve: how to finance a defence posture that keeps expanding even as the Treasury tightens its grip on departmental budgets.
What Robertson’s intervention revealed
Robertson’s central charge is not that Starmer lacks conviction on defence, but that conviction has not been matched by money. The prime minister, he conceded this week, has “talked a strong game”, yet “the wherewithal to make this happen was absent”. That assessment has been publicly endorsed by General Sir Richard Barrons, his co-author on the review.
Downing Street moved swiftly to push back. Officials insisted on Tuesday that the government was already “delivering” the review’s recommendations and was “finalising” the accompanying ten-year defence investment plan (DIP) that will set out how the reforms are to be paid for. Yet the document, originally expected months ago, remains confined to a narrow circle of senior figures. Ministers outside that circle, including some within the defence secretary John Healey’s own team, are said to have little visibility over its progress. Healey himself declined last Friday to guarantee publication before parliament’s summer recess.
Why the sums no longer add up
When Robertson and Barrons drafted the review, published last June, they worked under instructions to operate within “the budgetary context of a transition to 2.5 per cent of GDP”. That ceiling has since been overtaken by events.
Pressure from US President Donald Trump for Nato members to spend more, combined with a deteriorating strategic environment, prompted Starmer to commit to lifting defence spending to 3 per cent of GDP by the end of the next parliament, and to 3.5 per cent on “core defence” by 2035. At the Munich Security Conference in February, the prime minister acknowledged bluntly that Britain would “have to spend more faster”. How that acceleration will be funded has yet to be explained.
The arithmetic is unforgiving. Defence officials identify a £28bn shortfall in the ministry’s budget over the coming four years, a gap that exists before any account is taken of the review’s ambitions to modernise the forces through drones, artificial intelligence and other emerging capabilities. Since the review landed, the bill has grown further. Iran’s threats against British bases have fuelled calls for a significant expansion of homeland air and missile defences — a capability experts say would cost considerably more than the £1bn earmarked in the review. A proposed Anglo-French naval mission to safeguard shipping in the Strait of Hormuz once hostilities with Iran subside would impose additional demands on the Royal Navy.
Ministers point out that Labour has already authorised “the largest sustained increase in defence spending since the cold war”, including an extra £5bn for the military last year. In January, however, Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton, head of the armed forces, warned that without further funding the military would be forced to trim parts of its programme to implement the review. His remarks, which reportedly unsettled some ministers, were quietly welcomed within the services.
The Whitehall stand-off
Behind the public sparring sits an entrenched bureaucratic dispute. The Treasury, under Chancellor Rachel Reeves, is reluctant to release additional funds to a department that some of its officials regard as a poor steward of public money — a view reinforced by long-running procurement failures such as the Ajax armoured vehicle programme, which ran badly over budget and behind schedule. Defence officials counter that wider Whitehall processes themselves inflate the cost of major equipment projects, while acknowledging the ministry’s uneven record on delivery. To demonstrate fiscal discipline, the MoD is now searching for roughly £3.5bn of savings within its existing budget, according to people familiar with the exercise.
Other departments accuse Number 10 of failing to break the deadlock. Tax rises and additional borrowing are firmly resisted by the Treasury, while many Labour MPs are reluctant to see funds redirected from health, education or welfare towards the military.
The divisions are spilling into open politics. Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader, argued on Tuesday that a growing welfare bill was crowding out spending on national security and that the country needed to “spend more money on defence”. More striking was the reaction from within Labour itself. Tan Dhesi, who chairs the Commons defence committee, described Robertson’s remarks as a “damning” verdict on the government and singled out the Treasury as a “blocker”, accusing its ministers of “trying to avoid accountability” by declining to appear before his committee to discuss the delayed investment plan. The postponement, he said, “grows of more concern every day”.
Downing Street offered only that the DIP would be published “as soon as possible”. The decision on where the trade-offs will ultimately fall rests with Starmer himself, who, as first lord of the Treasury, must reconcile a defence policy whose ambitions keep rising with a fiscal framework that shows little sign of loosening.
