Labour’s new defence plan is a recipe for appeasement
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To give credit where it’s due, Sir Keir Starmer has become proficient at defying the baser instincts of his own party’s Left-wing.
Whether on NHS privatisation, student tuition fees or support for Israel, the Labour leader has created numerous dividing lines between himself and the rump of Jeremy Corbyn supporters who have maintained their party memberships only to give themselves something to complain about.
The latest red rag to the Left-wing bull is Starmer’s commitment to spending 2.5 per cent of GDP on defence “as soon as resources allow that to happen”.
That caveat is important, however: I intend to buy a private jet as soon as resources allow that to happen, but I wouldn’t advise my family to hold their breath. Committing to something on the basis that it won’t happen unless you can afford it is good economics and even better politics, but it allows our political leaders to wriggle out of promises at the stroke of an accountant’s pen.
Starmer seems to care naught about the tensions at grassroots level – or even in his parliamentary party – that will inevitably bubble to the surface after he is prime minister. He has been an MP for less than a decade, but he knows the Labour Party well enough to recognise that the tensions between Left and Right, between virtuous socialism and pragmatic progressivism is a constant presence, one with which he will have to be adept at handling.
Winning elections helps; Tony Blair would have faced even greater protests from his party had he not been quite so adept at securing landslide majorities and sticking it to the Conservative enemy. But it’s only been a handful of years – a blink of an eye in political terms – since the far-Left held sway in the party and the leader was systematically dismantling the whole raison d’être that underpinned Britain’s nuclear deterrent by publicly insisting he would never retaliate with Trident if the country came under attack. Such a betrayal would have justified – even demanded – Corbyn’s forced removal from the leadership. Instead, his party gave him a standing ovation.
We can therefore agree that Starmer is a politician of a different hue from his predecessor; to claim otherwise would be futile and dishonest. But his party remains, in large part, the same collection of malcontents who enthusiastically brandished the Palestinian flag on the conference floor, who demand that British firms boycott Israel and who remain deeply sceptical about Britain’s various overseas military commitments.
This is the context in which Starmer must seek to increase defence spending, and to do so while more “progressive” causes – schools, hospitals and local government – compete for much needed cash.
Yet this is only part of the challenge facing any Labour government. With international tensions rising, with no end in sight to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Nato coming under pressure to spread its resources ever wider, 2.5 per cent of GDP is hardly going to cut it when it comes to defence. In previous eras, when the threats to the West were more easily understood – partly because they were more easily perceived – defence spending far outstripped the two per cent of national GDP to which Nato members are now committed.
Defence of the realm demands the highest priority because in its absence there is no NHS, no infrastructure, no Britain to prioritise for spending. In the last century, governments had a habit of surrendering to complacency and wishful thinking, imagining that other nations were as peace-seeking as we were and trimming defence spending accordingly, only to have to raise it drastically when the threats appeared on the horizon, coming in this direction.
No one surveying the current international situation would conclude that we are heading into an era of peace and prosperity. So what are we doing about that? More importantly, what will Labour, if it is in government, do about that?
Significantly higher spending on defence than the 2.5 per cent Starmer has identified will be needed if we are to meet and defeat the military threats of the next decade. The Labour leader has proved he can win almost any argument he chooses to have within his own ranks. The question is whether he has the skills and the inclination to persuade his party – and, more importantly, the country – that a doubling of defence spending may not only be preferable, but absolutely imperative.
