Sir Keir Starmer's £15bn defence investment plan will not be enough to prepare UK for war, ex-general asys
The Dip was meant to be published last year but was delayed by Whitehall wrangling over cash which eventually triggered the resignation of defence secretary John Healey.
Sir Keir Starmer’s long-delayed plan for military spending will not be enough to prepare the country for war, an expert who helped draw up the Government’s defence review warned, as the Prime Minister announced £15bn for the Armed Forces.
Sir Keir insisted that the UK would be ready to fight Russia by 2030, and claimed the funding would make the army “10 times more lethal”.
The Prime Minister acknowledged some other areas of Government spending would be slashed in order to fund defence, with road and energy projects scrapped to pay for the military.
Sir Keir said: “When the world is arming and aggression is rising, the best way to avoid war is to prepare for it.
“The best way to defend is to deter, to have the strength to make your adversaries think again before they act. And that is what we are doing.”
Annual defence spending will increase from £54bn when Labour came to power to £80bn by 2029, Sir Keir said.
The plan reversed the “corrosive hollowing out” of the armed forces, he said in a speech at a drone company in Berkshire.
However, General Sir Richard Barrons, a co-author of the 2025 Strategic Defence Review, said the plan was “not going to crack the issue” of properly funding the nation’s armed forces.
The Dip was meant to be published last year but was delayed by Whitehall wrangling over cash which eventually triggered the resignation of defence secretary John Healey.
Sir Richard said the fact of its publication counts as progress and there would be a “decent transformative element” to it.
“But it is still not going to crack the issue of, in order to defend the UK sufficiently well, sufficiently quickly, more has to be done sooner, and that requires more money than is currently on the table,” he said.
Sir Richard told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “We’re not keeping up with our allies, we’re certainly not keeping up with our enemies, and we know that the US is no longer going to come and save European security in the face of a Russian threat.
“So until we come to terms with the fact that we have to find more money for defence sooner, and yes, it will be at the cost of other things we like more, we are simply not going to be ready to defend this country properly.”
Mr Healey quit in protest at the Dip, which he warned would likely fall short of meeting Britain’s commitments to the Nato alliance, which has tasked all member states with hiking core defence spending to 3.5 per cent of national economic output by 2035.
Under new Defence Secretary Dan Jarvis, the Dip will now focus on ramping up the UK’s use of drones and autonomous weapons, funded by a £5bn investment, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) announced ahead of the Prime Minister’s speech.
He secured some extra money for the plan, taking the full settlement to £15bn – up from the £13.5bn offered to Mr Healey but short of the £28bn defence officials previously said was needed.
However, Sir Keir claimed this would be enough to fight Russia by 2030.
He said: “That’s because of the increase in defence spending that we put in place last year, announced last year, which was the single-biggest increase, sustained increase, since the 1980s, and the fact that this defence investment plan builds on that.
“And it’s not just the amount of money, it’s also the capabilities.
“We’ve learned a lot from Ukraine, actually also from Iran as well, about the capability that is needed in order to confront countries like Russia.
“That is exactly what is going on in Ukraine, so I am confident in that.”