Adding to the current turmoil in UK politics is the issue of military spending. Last week, it cost Keir Starmer his defence minister, and it will likely help precipitate Andy Burnham’s arrival in Downing Street, which is now near-certain within months.
When he enters No 10, Burnham will be under considerable pressure to increase defence spending, but will also face plenty of opposition to that from those who feel the money would be better spent on social needs. How he responds will reveal whether Burnham intends to be a “more of the same” Labour government or is able to stimulate the new thinking on people’s security that is so badly needed.
Military spending is increasing across the world, and although the UK’s military budget is much smaller than those of the United States and China, it is still very much part of a cluster of middle-ranking states that includes Germany and India.
Yet there is an additional factor when it comes to the UK – like France, it still has delusions of imperial grandeur even half a century after the end of empire. As the Financial Times put it: “For decades, Britain has sought to maintain the military of a great power on the budget of a medium-sized one.”
Part of these delusions involves trying to maintain a global presence through costly aircraft carriers. Another is holding on to nuclear arsenals, which, in Britain’s case, consume close to a fifth of the entire military budget – likely rising to nearly a quarter in the next decade.
In short, the UK is trying to do much more than it can afford, a problem compounded by a grinding bureaucracy, frequent cost overruns and failures of new equipment. If Burnham becomes PM, he will therefore have plenty to wrestle with on defence spending, but two factors should overshadow all others: the West’s recent failed wars and the greatest single challenge facing everyone, accelerating climate breakdown. Confronting both is essential if the UK is to have a rational approach to international security, but neither is remotely given the space it deserves.
Take the failed wars. First came Afghanistan after 9/11 back in 2001, where the Taliban regime seemed defeated within months, but instead we got 20 years of conflict, ending with the US’s chaotic retreat from Kabul in 2021 and a resurgent Taliban taking power.
Then there was the war in Iraq, which started in 2003. The Saddam Hussein regime collapsed in a matter of weeks, and victory seemed in sight, but the conflict evolved into a complex interconfessional war that greatly increased Iran’s influence and lasted eight years.
In 2011, Franco-British involvement in the fall of Gaddafi in Libya left a deeply divided and unstable state that rapidly served as a channel for Islamist paramilitaries between the Middle East and the Sahel region of the Sahara. That helped boost years of insurgencies and political violence in Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, Chad, Nigeria and elsewhere, which continue and also link to the conflict in Somalia.
In parallel with that came the resurgence of the paramilitary ISIS, leading to the West’s 2014-2018 air war across Iraq and Syria, which killed more than 60,000 people, many of them non-combatants.
Other Western wars in which the UK has been variably involved include the ongoing disaster in Gaza. There, the Israeli military has destroyed towns and cities and left 75,000 people dead and at least 10,000 missing under the rubble, yet it cannot suppress Hamas. Neither can it bomb Hezbollah to defeat in southern Lebanon.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s regime in Washington has been forced to accept that the combined US/Israel war against Iran cannot be won and a negotiated settlement is the only way forward.
At the very least, all the political and military failures of recent decades support the view that if war is the answer, then it is a stupid question.
War also has little relevance to the second security challenge, that of global climate breakdown. The term ‘existential threat’ may be seriously overused, but climate breakdown is an exception; it really is a huge global challenge that requires an unprecedented intergovernmental collaboration.
The signs of climate stress are already clear, as is the recognition that we are approaching especially dangerous tipping points, such as the potentially catastrophic collapse of AMOC (Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation) – the vast system of ocean currents that underpins the regulation of our current global climate by moving heat from the south northwards.
While time is now short, it is still technically possible to move to the rapid decarbonisation of fossil carbon use and the UK, with all its wealth in renewable energy resources, could play a hugely important role.
Indeed, one of Burnham’s first acts in Downing Street should be to reallocate funding from defence to speed up the renewables transition, and bolster these efforts with funding obtained by getting serious about tax evasion and avoidance and increasing government borrowing. More generally, Burnham must accept that the neoliberal economic model cannot handle the change required, given that ‘intergovernmental collaboration’ is a dirty phrase.
Don’t hold your breath. But if Burnham did grasp that particular nettle, it would be the making of him as a prime minister.
