Social care. AI. Elon Musk. The Rotherham gangs row. The impact of the Budget on employment. Hospital waiting lists. Perilous and deathly illegal migration across the Channel. Donald Trump. The challenges coming out swinging for Keir Starmer in 2025 are many and obvious. But there is another which matters most. It is about our survival as an independent democracy. Starmer’s response will settle how he will be judged by history. This spring it may cause him a political fight fiercer than any he has faced yet. The issue is rearmament.
With Trump now pushing for an unrealistic 5 per cent of GDP defence target for Nato members and our own strategic defence review reporting later this month, it is an issue that can’t be put off for much longer.
There will be, of course, a hubbub of protest from progressives who want any money to be spent on the NHS, schools, welfare, social care instead – in the noble left tradition of ploughshares-not-swords. But the first duty of a Labour government is to keep the nation safe. And these are dangerous times. They are days for Major Attlee, not for George Lansbury.
Russia is on a war footing and Britain is in range of other enemies around the world. Nato will reportedly soon issue a warning that we are vulnerable to ballistic missile attacks and must increase our spending on defences. But we have barely noticed the threat. The British Army has not enough ammunition to fight for three days. It has nothing like enough soldiers. A House of Lords report last year concluded that its size was “inadequate”, adding that it “cannot, as currently constituted, make the expected troop contribution to Nato. We therefore question whether the British Army is prepared to meet the growing threat posed by Russia to European security.”
After the Tory years, Labour has also been left with armed forces lacking proper medical support, sufficient missile defences, or any real protection against chemical and biological attacks. The accommodation for those who do serve is at times appalling. Recruitment is in crisis. All of that is before we even think about the necessary new investment in cyber, drones, space and “kill webs”, networks of communication systems and weapons.
Russia is winning in Ukraine and will not stop there. But, as one senior Labour figure puts it, “The immediate threat is not tanks rolling across the Polish border. It is to the undersea cables on which we completely depend.” For context, here is the defence commentator Edward Lucas describing the UK’s 60 or so seabed cables, which provides around 99 per cent of the population’s internet traffic, plus a few vital gas and electricity interconnectors: “a full-scale attack would leave us deaf, blind, numb, cold, broke, angry – and defeated.”
As Torcuil Crichton, the Labour MP for Na h-Eileanan an Iar, will argue soon in a Westminster debate, the front line is now the north Atlantic. Russian and Chinese ships cutting cables in the Baltic have not been trying to provoke. They have been practising – for us. Crichton tells me: “There has been more Russian activity in our waters in the last three years than at any time since the Cold War.”
There are two obvious responses to all this. The first is that I am being hysterical or sabre-rattling. Many half-assume, half-hope that a Trump deal will be done to partition Ukraine, and the Russian threat will recede quickly again, and we can go back to the peace dividend years. The second response is that I am not sabre-rattling. But what I say is pointless – Labour understands the threat, but will do nothing because there is no money and no immediate electoral pressure.
On the “hysteria” response: Putin has been very clear about his hostility not just to Ukraine but to the Baltic states, Poland, Finland and other close allies of ours. Advancing on the battlefront, he would insist on a deal with Trump which would leave rump Ukraine defenceless, chaotic and with a brief life ahead.
Putin knows, probably better than we do, just how vulnerable his irritating offshore European island enemy – Britain – is. He can jolt and disrupt ordinary life here very easily, without triggering full-blown nuclear war. To that, we have little deterrent. If you think Donald Trump is coming to our rescue then you, not I, are the loon. Meanwhile, further away, the Chinese are approximately building the equivalent of the entire French Navy every four years.
On the “they won’t act” response, it’s true that defence observers have been frustrated by the Starmer government’s apparent lack of urgency. A review, at some point in the spring, before a further Treasury review, to get us to “a pathway”, to get to defence spending of 2.5 per cent of GDP at, um, some point… good grief.
But things are moving faster than generally understood. George Robertson’s strategic defence review will probably report to ministers later this month, with a hard contractual deadline of February 14. It has been a huge and speedy operation – looking at 25 different defence propositions, with more than 800 submissions, analysed with the help of AI and groups of eminent experts.
The defence secretary John Healey, an old friend of Robertson’s, is ready for some radical decisions and basic truths about the importance of our industrial strength and missile vulnerability. On the spending he is a Treasury loyalist, though the reviewers have already been closely in touch with Starmer, his chief of staff Morgan McSweeney, the Chancellor Rachel Reeves, and the chief secretary, Darren Jones, about the money needed. In 2024, the UK spent 2.3 per cent of GDP on defence, a respectable Nato figure. The trouble is that a fifth of that goes on the nuclear deterrent, leaving 1.6 per cent of GDP for everything else. That is not enough to plug the gaps left after the Tory years, fulfil our Nato commitments in Europe and protect our northern seas and cables. Furthermore, delivering on the commitment to raise spending to 2.5 per cent will cost about £15bn more a year.
In Downing Street, they recognise that a big pivot towards defence is inevitable, and might give Labour a renewed sense of purpose, as a security government, that it has lacked so far. That is particularly the case with the second Trump presidency. At a time when the president-elect is calling for European Nato members to raise spending to 3 per cent or above, a British government cutting back capability would find itself in a ferocious diplomatic war with Washington. Any chance of Starmer fending off Elon Musk by appealing directly to Trump would have gone.
So what is Reeves to do? Starmer has ensured the Robertson defence reports in public, before her Treasury-led comprehensive spending review, which might seek to reopen it, begins.
To the extent that Robertson recommends capital investment, perhaps some of the strain can be taken by further borrowing. There is, I’m told, some “headroom” for that. But rebuilding an army with “mass” – the troops and equipment that provide combat power – including proper reserve forces, requires current spending. It’s hard to see where that money comes from. Ministers could look at some version of what the Germans did after 9/11, putting a levy on all insurance policies. The Russian Ambassador told me recently he thought the British economy was simply too weak for us to be able to rearm.
The most dramatic move would be to break those election promises on tax: one can, just about, imagine Starmer telling the country in the bleakest terms that he has no alternative, and perhaps even the Chancellor resigning with honour to allow this to happen. Given what the Conservatives and Reform have said about defence, there might not be much immediate political opposition. The No 10 view is that this would be a huge risk. They support Reeves as the politician who took the personal hit of a big tax-raising budget – the biggest for 40 years – and expanded the borrowing envelope as well. But right now, we are left internal agreement on the need for higher defence spending and no obvious means of funding it.
Robertson, a former secretary general of Nato as well as a shrewd former defence secretary, is going to have to play fast, deft politics. A review which offered the UK the prospect of an effective missile defence shield, and which played on patriotic enthusiasm for the army, would be popular. Press lobbying on the missile defence question, easy for the public to understand and genuinely urgent, is already underway.
But what of those aircraft carriers, which seem like giant, under-equipped targets bobbing around on distant oceans – if indeed they can get that far? Isn’t this the moment for Britain to finally discard its post-imperial fantasy of being a global military power, and sensibly pull back to defend our coasts and local seas? Trump seems to believe Europe is not his problem; if so, by the same token, perhaps the South China Sea is not ours.
This is a struggle which will wrack Labour. What follows – how far and how fast Starmer goes – will ultimately be decided by the depth of public fear about the dangerous world all around us. If people really believe this is the late 1930s replayed, then almost anything is possible. But those who argue that, being conservative, lazy, and timid, the country will need to wait until a more immediate crisis comes upon us – the banking system going black, or a major city losing power – are arguing for “too late”, a counsel of despair. This, 2025, is the moment.
Putin’s regime is a determined and relentless danger to Europe, including us, and this is not a time for sentimentality or false reassurance. He means it. Do we?
Like almost everyone reading this, I have spent my entire life without ever feeling politically scared. That’s a piece of extraordinary, privileged good fortune – a gleam of bright light – that Britons of earlier times, or Europeans through much of the previous century, would struggle to credit. Despite our juddering economy and dispirited national mood, that bright, background freedom from fear is the single thing we must, at all costs, pass on to the next generation. Does the Starmer government understand just how big the choice now is?
[See also: Trump, Lenin and the world-revolutionary moment]
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