Sitting on defence

When the sun sets on the Starmer premiership, it will be clear that its descent began when it caved to elements of the Parliamentary Labour Party on welfare reform. Caught up in the conditions faced by constituents and the moral convictions of party members, some parliamentarians seemingly face considerable difficulty taking tough decisions about strategically prioritising spending in our increasingly zero-sum political economy. The leadership’s resulting legitimacy crisis means it cannot challenge or persuade them otherwise.

But if the welfare rebellion was the beginning of the end, then the impasse on the Defence Investment Plan must surely mark the end itself. All the seeds for the latest situation were sown when the party lapsed back into a comfort zone of welfarism and compensatory redistributive policies that no longer have a material basis. Starmer’s authority and Cabinet collective responsibility have been shot away to such an extent that no sensible conversation about the order of political priorities can be orchestrated within the governing party at large. The concerning news of a Defence Investment Plan amounting to significantly less than what is required lays bare the problem.

If this impasse concerned any other area of government then it might be survivable for Starmer and Reeves, but the stakes of defence spending are so great that the decisions involved are out of all scale with those faced by other departments. Security also has a special significance for this government, representing a self-imposed measuring stick for its success. I have written before for Renewal about how defence, security and resilience have the potential to underpin a project of national reconstruction for Labour. Only last week Sir Keir Starmer was still presenting security as the ‘first duty’ of government, a principle that once anchored Labour’s ‘Plan for Change’. In opposition, Rachel Reeves cited the political philosopher Bernard Williams, suggesting that how a government guarantees security is nothing less than the ‘first political question’.

The explosive resignation letters from John Healey and Al Carns yesterday expose the failure of this government to adequately answer that question. The centrality of security to Labour’s story in opposition and government set a bar that its leadership has not met. The defence challenge being the most important confronting our island nation given the significant threats and vulnerabilities it faces from Russia and other adversaries, this failure is surely fatal for the future of Starmer and Reeves and the cautious mode of political and economic tinkering they have come to represent.

The situation partly owes to a convenient compromise in Labour thinking rapidly coming unstuck. In opposition and in government, the security Labour promised was to be achieved not only by investment in defence, but by making the country more socially and economically resilient. Suspending some of the compromises usually required in this space, such an approach is undoubtedly necessitated by the nature of national security in a world of hybrid warfare incorporating multiple domains of social and economic life. However, this meant that the potential tension of defence with other spending priorities was circumnavigated through a rhetorical pitch that rightly presented security and resilience as tethered to upstream factors like a strong welfare state, and, further downstream, the defence opportunity as justified by potential growth and economic dynamism. 

By virtue of this, expenditure in areas like social security and energy security can be framed as being in the name of some kind of broad notion of defence. Meanwhile, the reindustrialisation, rearmament and investment in critical national infrastructure necessary to power and protect Britain in a more dangerous world is demanded in part because it would drive development of business innovation and skilled jobs up and down the country. There is truth to each of these positions, but the lack of fiscal room and the immediate threat posed on our doorstep by Russia mean that it is no longer possible to fudge the issue. It is now time to have the difficult conversation about precisely what gives to ramp up spending on defence directly as an end itself, whatever the ancillary conditions and consequences. However, unable or unwilling to compel Cabinet ministers to cede ground in other domains, Downing Street and the Treasury appear to have ducked the mission laid out in the Strategic Defence Review last year.

These decisions are of a different order to those in other domains of government because the Defence Investment Plan impasse concerns the spending needed to prepare the country materially and technologically to deter, defend and where required wage war. This in turn sets the demand signals that the industrial base is desperate for in order to direct production towards the military means needed to protect the nation. It is telling that in anonymous briefings yesterday Treasury sources were posing this spending against investment in schools and hospitals, and then again today against investment in ‘growth’, as if defence is just one bucket among others rather than the fundamental function of how we secure ourselves against existential threats. Starmer’s lack of authority, Reeves’s capture by Treasury orthodoxy, and their party’s reluctance to prioritise have combined to weaken our resolve at a time where Russia is watching and waiting, building its own military and industrial base ready for all-out war with NATO and subthreshold aggressions in the meantime.

As such, the Healey and Carns resignations expose the failure of the current leadership to prioritise that ‘first political question’ over other competing interests and demands, and surely hastens a change in both Number 10 and the Treasury. Stability and safety in a dangerous world were the current regime’s argument for remaining in power, but Healey and Carns have widened the path that leads inevitably to an alternative. 

As it stands there are considerable risks in being perceived by the public to select a new Prime Minister by means of a ballot of members, and a coronation of a new leader by their existing elected representatives may be a better option. In that case, there is only one likely candidate and that is Andy Burnham. In the context of a by-election where local issues provide a cipher for his vision for national government, defence does not get much of a look in amongst talk of buses, beer and business rates, and there is potential for a smallness of vision here that may not translate well to managing matters of state. However, Burnham and his outriders have shown openness to explore innovative financing models for defence in the spirit of past examples like war bonds. The bigger problem confronting this putative governing project is the temptation to drift towards an insipid centre-left politics that in satisfying the ethical impulses of the PLP and electoral temptation to pursue Green voters, remains mired in the same stasis as the party finds itself in now – unable to articulate who and what must make way for the imperatives of a new national interest.

One thing that a potential Burnham premiership could do to shore up the party’s position on defence and find a way out of the current mess would be to bring Healey and Carns back into the fold and take on board the very serious arguments raised in their resignation letters. If there is a leadership election in the intervening period, then it would be in the interests of the country as a whole to have a candidate run on a clear defence ticket. Even if they only had an outside chance of prevailing, this would force into the conversation a defence perspective and a clear consideration of the trade-offs demanded by the country’s protection and projection of power at home and abroad.

The danger remains that defence will not occupy a central place in the debate about Labour’s future, and the party will luxuriate in gently and agreeably discussing other more palatable terrain. With so much at stake, this will mean the opportunity for a course correction is not taken, and the party of power will persist in a state of unpreparedness to escape its comfort zone and confront this generational challenge. Our enemies will be paying close attention, and the clock is ticking.

Frederick Harry Pitts is a contributing editor of Renewal and Deputy Director of the Centre for the Public Understanding of Defence & Security. He is Head of Humanities & Social Sciences at the University of Exeter’s Cornwall Campus and an Associate Professor in Political Economy & the Future of Work.