In April 2024, when Grant Shapps (who was then the defence secretary) announced that the UK was going to spend an extra £75bn on defence, the shadow defence secretary John Healey pointed out that this figure was arrived at by some decidedly dodgy maths. The Sunak government had cooked up the number by pretending that defence spending would otherwise not have changed at all between 2024 and 2030, and added up the difference between that (impossible) scenario and its plan to spend 2.5 per cent of GDP on defence by the end of the decade. It was a plan to spend more, but the figure was grossly overstated. Healey rightly told the Commons the £75bn was a “fake figure”.
Healey – now the Defence Secretary – was a little quieter on the maths of Keir Starmer’s announcement from Downing Street yesterday that defence spending would benefit from “an increase of £13.4bn year on year compared to where we are today”. This isn’t as grotesque a maths crime as the previous government’s claim, but it uses the same trick. Technically, we will be spending £13.4bn more on defence than we are today, but the decision the government has made is to spend an extra 0.2 per cent of GDP, which at that point will probably mean an extra £6bn of spending per year.
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