LONDON — Keir Starmer’s government has been desperate to show it can be trusted with the public finances. But when it comes to boosting defense of the realm, it seems anything is possible.
The U.K. prime minister — facing pressure at home over a host of domestic issues — has signed Britain up to spending five percent of national income on defense by 2035.
The move, which came in advance of this month’s NATO summit, puts Britain in step with other allies, and followed a sudden announcement in February that Starmer’s government will hike defense spending at the expense of the country’s overseas aid budget.
The Ministry of Defence, along with the National Health Service, has been the big winner of recent fiscal statements — while other departments face a painful squeeze on their budgets.
Donald Trump’s demand that European countries find more money for defense has certainly focused minds in London. But Starmer was not exactly resistant to the idea.
Hoisting the Union Jack up high fits with his attempt to broaden the party’s appeal to middle England and socially conservative voters, particularly with populist right-winger Nigel Farage breathing down Starmer’s neck.
Not everyone in his governing Labour Party is convinced it’s the right set of priorities, however. The Treasury’s squeeze on other areas of spending, particularly welfare payments for disabled people, has them in a restive and rebellious mood.
The response? “People will need to get used to it,” said a Cabinet minister, granted anonymity like others in this piece to speak candidly. “The world has changed and it’s about keeping the country safe.”
Flying the flag
Starmer and his defense secretary, John Healey, leapt on the chance in opposition to link increased defense spending under Labour with jobs and growth.
The center-left party has historically been miles behind the Conservatives on the issue of defense and security.
But that gap has narrowed in recent years. Labour overtook their Tory rivals as most trusted on defense last year, after then-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak made an ill-fated decision to leave an international D-Day commemoration event for an election campaign interview.
Starmer made a conscious decision to put patriotism front and center in the run-up to the election, stamping the Union Jack on all leaflets and trumpeting the party’s selection of 14 ex-military candidates.
When the right-wing Daily Mail splashed its front page with “Starmer: UK nuclear deterrent is safe in my hands” during the campaign, Starmer’s top adviser, Morgan McSweeney, reportedly said: “If I could marry a front page it would be this one.”
Starmer’s supporters argue the move is not about trying to steal the Conservatives’ clothes and instead is about making a traditional Labour case for investment in the military, which Healey has pushed since he took over the brief five years ago.
A Labour tradition
After a series of high-profile reviews, Britain’s Ministry of Defense is now expected to turn its focus to rebuilding the country’s industrial base, particularly when it comes to manufacturing munitions and artillery.
A government aide, granted anonymity to speak freely, said their focus was on “re-shoring” defense manufacturing — also seen as a priority by NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte — and described this “a Keynesian and a left-wing thing to do.”
“We’re putting state money into manufacturing which will help sustain communities in those places,” the same person said.
Fred Thomas, a Labour MP elected last year who served in the armed forces, summed up the Labour defense agenda, arguing that “a safe, secure country” is a prerequisite for a fairer society.
He said defense jobs, “generally speaking, are high-quality, unionized, secure work that involves skills and career progression.”
In this argument for a more military-minded Labour, aides say there is a conscious effort to align with Labour heroes of the past.
Glen O’Hara, a historian of postwar Britain at Oxford Brookes University, said Starmer and McSweeney were evoking “a certain sort of patriotic Labour” embodied by post-World War II big beasts like Clement Attlee, Ernest Bevin and Denis Healey.
‘No small thing’
While Labour’s military turn might fit neatly with some of their political aims, it has taken on a surprising new prominence since Starmer entered Downing Street last year.
Boosting defense and security was conspicuously not one of Labour’s five pledges for government when it took power — and some now question why it appears to have been exalted above the party’s more traditional priorities.
Starmer’s visit to the White House earlier this year is seen as a particularly clarifying moment.
Although he had already pledged to spend more on defense, a person close to the decision said the British prime minister’s sudden decision to ramp up the Ministry of Defense budget at the expense of overseas aid was “all about the Trump visit.”
“He [Starmer] said to David [Lammy], I can’t go to America and be empty-handed. It was quite last-minute,” the person said.
The same Cabinet minister quoted at the top of this article confessed that even though they supported the move, it was “no small thing” to slash overseas aid, particularly given the work done by the last Labour government to prioritize international development.
Now defense spending will rise even further with the five percent pledge, in a move experts predict will eventually cost taxpayers an extra £40 billion a year — with no clear plans on how to pay for it.
As Starmer heralded the alliance’s new spending target at the NATO summit and grinned next to Trump in the leaders’ photo, he faced an open revolt back at home.
More than 100 Labour MPs threatened to derail his planned cuts to welfare, now partially dissuaded by hefty concessions ahead of a crucial vote due Tuesday.
Some made the contrast explicit. Disabled campaigners outside parliament held placards reading “welfare not warfare,” and veteran left-wing Labour MP Diane Abbott accused Starmer of “paying huge sums for an expansion of U.S. nuclear capacity at the same time as tightening austerity.”
Not all of the critique is coming from the far left, either. Former head of the Foreign Office Simon McDonald told Sky News “wrecking the rest of our economy for an enemy that isn’t winning the war it is fighting right now” — a reference to Russia — is something that needs to be “debated.”
Asked by POLITICO during the summit about the mismatch, Starmer replied: “The first duty of a prime minister is to keep the country safe. That sits above all other duties and I take it really seriously.”
He objected that the comparison was a “misdirection,” since money was not being directly taken from social security to pay for defense.
Luke Tryl, director of the polling think tank More in Common, said that while the public is generally supportive of investing in defense, “swapping [overseas development] spending for defense was easy — there’s not much more to cut.”
And for all Starmer’s efforts to stand tall on the international stage, he may not get much credit.
As Tryl highlighted: “People are still saying they can’t afford the weekly shop or get a [doctor’s] appointment and there are very high numbers of people still crossing the Channel.
“Ultimately, they want the domestic stuff sorted first.”
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