Sir Keir Starmer came to office in July 2024 on a manifesto which played heavily on defence. The Labour party, it proclaimed, had an absolute commitment to the UK’s independent nuclear deterrent and, ‘as the party that founded Nato… [would] maintain our unshakeable commitment to the alliance’. It would also ‘apply a Nato test to major defence programmes to ensure we meet our obligations in full’. The party would conduct a Strategic Defence Review (SDR) within its first year of office, ‘set out the path to spending’ 2.5 per cent of GDP on defence and publish a Defence Industrial Strategy.

It is hard to overstate the degree to which Starmer’s government has fallen short of its lavish and tough-talking promises. The resignations of former defence secretary John Healey and armed forces minister Al Carns last Thursday over the Defence Investment Plan (DIP) brought what had been an increasingly tense and indefensible situation to a head. Although the DIP still has not been made public, it is very clear that the resources HM Treasury was willing to offer for defence are hopelessly inadequate in scale.

Labour knows what resources our armed forces need to defend the United Kingdom

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) estimated that it would need an additional £28 billion over the next four years to meet its commitments, make good capability gaps and begin to implement the SDR. The DIP is believed to represent somewhere between £10 billion and £13.5 billion – it is half of what the MoD requested. Healey knew Labour’s defence policies simply could not be delivered with that amount and walked out. No matter how often ministers bleat that they are providing ‘the highest sustained increase in defence spending since the Cold War’, the armed forces now face a financial crisis and cuts.

Yesterday, the Chief of the Defence Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton – allegedly placed on resignation watch himself – gave evidence to the House of Lords International Relations and Defence Committee on the implementation of the SDR. The committee is chaired by former defence secretary and Nato secretary general Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, who was also the lead author of the SDR.

Knighton told the committee that, unless more money was allocated to defence, the armed forces would be forced to cut back on training and therefore would be less prepared for a future conflict:

The thing that I’m most concerned about is the level of day-to-day activity funding, the resource departmental expenditure limit, because that funds operational activity and drives exercises and training. Those are the things that make sure the men and women of our Armed Forces are as ready as they can be with the equipment that they have got today, and without changes to the settlement… then those areas will come under pressure.

It is in the nature of senior serving military officers, for good or bad, to underplay risks and potential challenges and to use temperate, even euphemistic language. But it is not difficult to read between the lines of Knighton’s evidence. The professional head of the armed forces is ‘concerned about’ the activities ‘that make sure the men and women of our armed forces are as ready as they can be’ coming ‘under pressure’. This should be regarded as a big red flag.

The cost of training exercises has risen steeply, and Knighton mentioned that the price of aviation fuel, for example, has increased by 88 per cent in the past year. If the DIP does not receive additional resources, ‘we will have to dial back our activities and our exercise and operational activity,’ he told the committee. However, the Prime Minister has indicated clearly that there will be no more money and that he has ‘taken the decision to reallocate money from other departments’. Starmer has added that he will talk to the new Defence Secretary, former paratrooper Dan Jarvis, ‘about what we will spend that money on in terms of capability’.

‘That’ money. The existing, inadequate settlement which drove John Healey to resign.

It is hard to know what is worse, the yawning chasm between what the government promises and what it actually delivers, or the staggering indifference to the consequences for national security of its faint-hearted parsimony. The global situation is more dangerous than it has been since the second world war: there is a record number of conflicts ongoing, including a major land war in Europe. Earlier this month, Starmer said ‘it is our intelligence assessment… that there could be an attack by Russia on Nato as soon as 2030’.

At this time of acute danger, the government is pursuing a spending strategy which will leave our armed forces less, not more, prepared for a conflict. Ministers know this and the Chief of the Defence Staff reminded them in his remarks to the House of Lords committee. But Starmer is proceeding anyway, and gaslighting the electorate by saying the opposite.

The recklessness is astonishing, but let us now eliminate any last vestiges of doubt. Labour knows what resources our armed forces need to defend the United Kingdom. It knows, and has decided there are more pressing priorities. In his resignation speech in the House of Commons, Healey noted acidly, ‘Our adversaries do not follow timetables set by the Treasury’. The government has failed on defence, and there is no way back.