Starmer is an odd bloke: rarely willing to promote a policy on its own merits**, preferring to invoke (or invent) some supposed side-benefits and focus on them. "Net zero" and renewables? No mention of zero-what these days; it's all "growth & jobs", "cheaper energy" (yeah, right), "home-grown / less threat from Putin" and "energy security" (always the last refuge of a scoundrel) instead.
Now we have his Defence *aspirations* (or whatever 3% of GDP at some unspecified future date should be termed), and we're to think of them as Military Keynsianism: "a defence dividend for the British people, using this moment to drive jobs and investment throughout the country, providing local opportunities, skilled work, community pride".
It is, I suppose, just possible that a round of additional defence contracts - if such can be conjured out of Reeves' Treasury plans - will result in some of those things. But if, as so often, it all descends into pork-barrel politics - e.g. Gordon Brown's risible aircraft carriers, oft discussed here - does anything worthwhile come out from the defence point of view? Much as I'd like to think it would, I have me doubts as they say.
PS: what's a "10-times more lethal army", pray?
ND
UPDATE: quite a good Graun / Martin Kettle piece today, here: Why is defence such a hard sell for Starmer? (Did he, or the headline writer, read my post before posing that question??)
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** By contrast, his recent immigration policy statement was promoted on the back of it being "right - because it is fair, and because it is what I believe in", Boris Johnson's opening of the immigration floodgates being a "squalid chapter". Heady stuff. Farage concentrates the mind wonderfully.
41 comments:
I repeat an earlier point. His older boy is now old enough to join the army. Come on, Sir Kleir, have the lad set an example!
Footnote 2 : Page 12
Where ‘lethality’ refers to the combat power (disruptive and destructive force) of the Armed Forces.
Given the language immediately below it, "sub-threshold", "hybrid warfare", "kinetic", then I'd assume we're about to see SOE v2.0, especially given that the SBU, usually described as "Ukrainian Intelligence", appears to have gone decidedly kinetic.
We do get "UK warfighting delivered by an empowered and adaptive workforce" - sounds delightful - there's a slight oddity;
"Overall, we envisage an increase in the total number of Regular personnel when funding allows. This includes a small uplift in Army Regulars as a priority."
Small uplift?
Followed by wibble about increasing the Reserves - when funding allows, natch - by 20%.
I'm not sure how seriously to take the published document.
Anyway, the following thought occurs about the document;
The RM have been reconfigured - Littoral Response Group - and the Green Dagger exercise was late 2021.
Watchkeeper - bit of a balls-up, nine years late - but got canned last year.
The BBC started broadcasting SAS Rogue Heroes in 2022.
I doubt if the three authors have really thought of anything new. And Fiona Hill is a Yank.
In the long term, military strength is a reflection of industrial strength. Pity about that ...
Labour are not a serious political party (not that many thought they were)!
Ukraine damaged or destroyed perhaps a dozen or more Russian military aircraft with nothing more than a shipping container on a truck, some drones it got from Temu or somewhere (or maybe 3D printed on some $10,000 equipment available in high-end retailers) and some hand grenades or similar light ordnance. Oh, and maybe some 4G mobile phone modules you can order from Radio Spares.
Stupendous levels of industrial capacity and capability? Hardly.
A "defence dividend"...? I'm old enough to remember the fall of the Iron Curtain and the excitement about the forthcoming "peace dividend".
Maybe that's the answer - a monthly-rotating policy that alternates between warlike and peaceful and thus delivers a regular dividend! Triples all round!
I see - and the motors, phone modules etc were made in Ukraine? They were almost certainly made in the world's leading manufacturing nation.
I assume somewhere in the various EU treaties is "thou shalt privatise everything".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exolum_Pipeline_System
In May 2012 the Government of the United Kingdom announced plans to sell all or part of the GPSS and legislation to enable it to do so was included in the Energy Act 2013. On 20 March 2015, the GPSS was acquired by Spanish oil network operator CLH for £82 million. The MoD also signed a contract with CLH for the military to continue to be supplied with fuel via the GPSS. It was stated that over the next ten years the MoD would pay £237 million for the use of the system. MoD had previously paid nothing for the use of the GPSS and also gained from the surplus of income over expenditure that OPA used to generate from running the GPSS."
Remember folks,
You can't believe a word this bloke says.
I have images of his Tweets about
1. Protecting free speech on Twitter (oh yeah)
2. Protecting Pensioners (oh yeah)
3. Protecting farming (oh yeah)
As his former SPAD noted, he cannot stop lying
As noted. Personality disordered. Perfect for the job.
We're fucked.
Never mind Hermer the Harmer.
Defence? Can't defend our borders. Which is his FIRST job. Next. Topping himself, -please God
Someone elsewhere put up these two charts, showing military spending in 2021 and 2024 respectively. One immediate thought is that it doesn't take PPP into account - pretty sure Russia had a lot more troops and kit than the UK in 2021 despite less spend.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-top-10-countries-by-military-spending/
What really struck me was that the UK 2021 spend at $68bn was greater than Russia's at $66bn. If Vlad had a cunning long-term plan to restore the Soviet Union, it certainly wasn't showing up in the spending figures.
By 2024 the Russian spend had more than doubled ($149bn) as they realised it was poo or bust. The UKs had leapt to $82bn, almost as much as India's $86bn - and Ukraine's had come out of nowhere to $65bn, the Russian level of just three years before.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/breaking-down-global-military-spending-by-country-in-2024/
SIM modules could be manufactured anywhere, including the U.K., with its electronics manufacturing base worth £53bn+ in sales, spread across more than 6,000 companies (https://thedatacity.com/rtics/electronics-manufacturing-rtic0067/). Most likely module supplier is Thales, based in France with supply chain operations spread over 50 countries, including the U.K. Highly unlikely to be China, given the defence-adjacent or outright military grade of the IoT or mobile phone interfaces incorporated into the drone specification. China has been edged out of these markets in the west, for fairly obvious reasons.
Fractional horsepower electric motors could also come from anywhere. Including leading U.K. suppliers like Parvalux Electric Motors Ltd., Lynch Motor Company, Equipmake, amongst many others.
What’s in the other 17trn roubles or approximately $170bn allocated to “security”, making up 41% of all Russian government expenditure, the content of which is deemed classified and not disclosed by the Russian government, please?
(https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-hikes-national-defence-spending-by-23-2025-2024-09-30/)
"The total state spending on defence and security will amount to 17 trillion roubles, or almost 41% of total expenditure."
"Defence spending will rise to 13.5 trillion roubles"
"State spending on national security, a separate item from national defence, which also includes financing of the military and security agencies, will amount to 3.5 trillion roubles"
13.5 + 3.5 = ??
"The total state spending on defence and security will amount to 17 trillion roubles, or almost 41% of total expenditure. "
I hope that answers your question.
It’s pretty impressive the way The Kremlin interacts with The Demokracy on here.
It’s like listening in on the Hotline.
Well, not really. It looks like Russia is hiding military-related expenditure at least equivalent to, if not nearly 20% higher than, the declared defence budget in the unspecified “security” budget. So you weren’t really making an apples-to-apples comparison originally. It’s like saying that I stuck rigidly to my 1,500 calorie diet today. Oh, except for the Big Mac Meal, supersized, with regular Coca Cola I had for lunch.
Spotted 😂😂
"Security" 3.5trn, "Defence" 13.5 trn. Where are you finding extra spending on weapons (or security) from? You might want to tell Reuters (or the Pentagon).
If only we knew what all that $170bn was spent on. It could be anything, like the Bit in the Middle in Aldi. You never know what you might find in there. “Classified” expenditure does allow those parroting Russian talking points to make any argument that they like about what it is or what it isn’t. Maybe it is all just a load of heavily discounted kitchen gadgets used for inscrutable purposes on unusual vegetables.
A neat slide from "what about the hidden spend?" to "what did the declared spend buy?". Haven't a clue, but if you know, there are some chaps at Vauxhall Bridge who'd love to have that information. Take the Oreshnik for example - very fast missile that just seems to have a kinetic payload - do they have lots, or was the one that demolished an arms plant, like Hitler's Parachute Division that took Crete, "the only one"? No idea.
What’s most vexing is, there’s lots of demand, almost insatiably so, for genuine, authentic dialogue between people in the west and Russians. And it’s not like Russia cannot do skilful, meaningful, compelling and competent communications. The state news agency TASS, for example, is exceptional and has unrivalled professionalism in covering and providing Russian state-provided information. It is my go-to resource for foreign affairs, especially for English language coverage of news items not normally given much attention in the west.
But the kinds of winged monkey numpties who take it upon themselves to try to portray “the Russian position” that we have the misfortune to stumble upon here, it’s hard to believe they are representing, or trying to represent, the same thing. Half-truths, evasion, specious and inaccurate points raised, or even outright lies, all said in the kind of unconvincing attempts at influencing that we normally only see recreated and directed at the naïvest of of contestants hailing from Essex on Love Island. All using the same communication plan and message design that we’ve literally been treated to since the 1950’s, like it still cuts the mustard.
Real Russians, aiming to present the Russian state perspective, to a sophisticated media-savvy audience in the wider world, don’t act anywhere near so dumb. Where the dichotomy comes from between these two groups, well, lots of theories, but we can only guess at the real reasons.
Clive - by way of mirror-image, you find the same embarrassingly bad "defence" of all manner of "western" positions. The average US rightwing blogger offers arguments so fact-free & dumb, it'd almost make you a leftist.
Ditto the climate debate. The scope for intelligent skepticism in the matter of western "climate policy" is great. But the rubbish that passes for much of policy-skepticism is depressing.
Dunno why I'm limiting it to major issues because, let's face it, we are bombarded from all sides by garbage! There is no longer any appeal to a public court of certified rationality such as the universities might once have provided. Such a thing doesn't hold any appeal, apparently: "this is my truth ..!"; and that's an end to it.
Meghan Markle doth bestride the narrow world like a Colossus.
UPDATE: quite a good Graun / Martin Kettle piece today Why is defence such a hard sell for Starmer? (Did he, or the headline writer, read my post before posing that question??)
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jun/05/labour-defence-keir-starmer-polls-liberal-democratic-governments
Poor old Starmer, he doesn't have many options, even fewer good ones and no money either. As said submarines are a good Keynesian make work scheme for oop north. Hardly likely to make them in Littlehampton, no votes there.
It was not supposed to be like this, brilliant new tech would bring shiny new factories and offices. Children would trip happily to school learning calculus and Jane Austen Studies (sufficient for anyone). Consulting and marketing jobs would abound and the dollars, Euros, Yen and Yuan would roll in to HMG coffers.
Hasn't worked out like this. Nor for France, Germany etc and not for Sweden or Denmark and not for Russia. Even the USA is looking shaky economically. The scientists have failed to find fantastic energy sources in a test tube, thinkers have got fed up wasting time on physics and joined the psychologists, literature wonks and dogs bodies over in woke studies - the new source of academic chairs and funding for old rope. Pharmacology and biosciences seem good but ill people are poor people so funding is always a problem. Lots of brains but little money.
As for defence being a hard sell. Sorry to say but conventional defence gear is mainly old fashioned unreliable junk with little or no spillover into anything saleable in civil markets. Only saleable with a bribe or lend lease desperation. I very much doubt Parvalux make motors for 4 prop drones, you get them from eBay. Similarly Thales, ring them up for a few dozen fibre optic tranceivers - forgeddit, look for repurposed telecom gear available from the usual. A backdoor route from the West - too much bureaucracy and political fear and leaks to be reliable.
Anyway, a good firework display but will it make any difference? Probably not.
"Nick Drew said...
UPDATE: quite a good Graun / Martin Kettle piece today Why is defence such a hard sell for Starmer? (Did he, or the headline writer, read my post before posing that question??)"
Nick - the fact that no-one believes a word he says might play in to that... question is, when do Labour pull the rope as he leads them into the abyss.
Hell for 4 more years. But at the end, no fake Conservatives and no vile and vicious Labour. May both parties rot in hell. Meanwhile, the Lib Dems can simply carry on their endless circle jerk...
The Trumpsters have stopped funding research on an AIDS vaccine on the trivial grounds that forty years of research have cost a bloody fortune and achieved nothing.
On those grounds they could take an axe to almost all cancer research and all Alzheimer's research - the decades roll by, careers are made, taxpayers' money is lavished, and all you get is unsuccessful studies, some honest, some bent.
Then again, fundamental physics has been entirely stuck since the seventies and still we waste the talents of bright young men by funding it.
So in some ways I'm glad to see the success of drone warfare or of fracking for gas: at least some new developments work even if they are more engineering than science.
Then there's epidemiology, Climate Science, and other expensive habits, apparently fraudulent all the way down. I can remember how keen I was on science at fourteen; I could weep.
People would pay good money to see MM astride, well, anyone. An AI prompt there, maybe?
"dearieme
The Trumpsters have stopped funding research on an AIDS vaccine on the trivial grounds that forty years of research have cost a bloody fortune and achieved nothing."
The extent of TDS amazes me. US politics (as does most of the West) needed a bomb under it
No, no, no, they all cry. Not THAT bomb. Must have been why SO many Americans voted for him. And we can pretend ther
"fundamental physics has been entirely stuck since the seventies and still we waste the talents of bright young men by funding it"
Steve Hsu at Chicago said that nearly all his top physics students end up heading for Wall St/private equity, partly because there are few research places being funded, and partly for the dollars.
(finger trouble) .. the Abraham Accords were done by Obama (destroyed Syria and Lebanon), improving matters for proles (of course, reversed by Dementiac) and now, taking on DEI and Big Pharma. Really.
Well, yes, it is quite good. Once you've stripped the Guardianista wibble out of it.
Which unfortunately means it actually fails to answer the bloody question.
Patently, above, mentions the Peace Dividend from back in the early '90s. What a load of undiluted shite that was. Wishful thinking dialled up to eleventy.
One primary problem (Labour are merely the worst offender here, but they are several lengths ahead of the field) is that the political "class" spent an awful long time - nearly thirty years, a generational timescale - insulting and vilifying the very group that was most likely to join the bloody Forces in the first damn place.
A second issue is with SDR's - almost purely a "we're being serious" mask by now - that they've become like waiting for a number nine bus, there'll be another one along in a minute. Further, given the mindset, they've always focused on cutting and rationalising. Why join the Army if your preferred Regiment no longer exists by the time you've passed Basic? Why join the Navy if the ship no longer exists?
The Review does at least mention a specific (related) issue, almost in passing; Integrated Air and Missile Defence (IAMD) in the RAF section, where they mention the RN's Type 45. We've got six, the initial sizing was for 12 back in 2000.
Draw a line from roughly the Frisians to the Faroes. It'll be around 1,200km long. Divide by the number of Type 45s = 200km. Minor technical hitch - the Aster 30's maximum range is given as 120km. So we'd need ten hulls just to defend the east coast - and nothing else. No other branch has any other air defence capability that comes close. In reality, we've only got four hulls, 48 missiles each, as two are earmarked for the CSGs.
Kettle doesn't come close to this problem - although he does latch onto an isolationist US, which the Review doesn't.
The Review mainly concentrates on NATO commitments as the priority, ignoring the issue of actually defending the UK first. Indo-Pacific interests, beyond the Kiwis and Ozzies, is merely code for licking the US' ring.
Twelve new subs - most likely down to AUSUK anyway, so that'd be Johnson, is pure theatre. If they get built at all, we'd be lucky to get three.
re AIDs
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2025/jun/05/breakthrough-in-search-for-hiv-cure-leaves-researchers-overwhelmed
(admittedly we'd all be rich if we had a quid for every disease breakthrough story)
If it does lead to a cure even more reason to abandon futile vaccine research. If.
Interesting question has just occurred to me - are we in the UK going to bankrupt ourselves* with military spending as the USSR did trying to keep up with the USA?
* yes, I know we can print our own currency, but so could the Soviet Union
There’s a comment on that article that suggests Russia would need to be opposed in the baltics by 1200 tanks. 500 planes. 200 attack helicopters and 100,000 soldiers. Just to make them think twice. Or they could easily invade.
The argument is based on the US 3rd corp size.
It seems a dumb argument. History has already shown us that Putin, at the very peak of his military power, could not take Kiev. Could not even take his week one objectives. Not even against a non-nato country. That had, at best, Soviet era kit.
Not even when the west was experiencing its largest combined debts since 1929. Covid and the sub prime and euro crisis. With Russia supplying the west for its must have energy, with cheap gas, coal and oil.
Even with every possible advantage. And the enemy at every possible disadvantage, Russia has advanced about as far, in all this time, as the Germans did into Poland, on the first day of September 1939.
I doubt Putin would try on another nation.
Even the Chinese must have been completely reworking their ready-to-go invasion plans. With many more ..’but what if the USA does do …” etc.
"Anonymous has left a new comment on the post '"Military Keynsianism" - Starmer's defence pitch':
Interesting question has just occurred to me - are we in the UK going to bankrupt ourselves* with military spending as the USSR did trying to keep up with the USA?"
We're doing that anyway! Do keep up!!! 😉😉
Reeves just pulled another £15 Billion out of the black hole as a bribe to Northern voters. Now in full Viv Nicholson mode (maybe that's for older readers!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RLMWlT_mck
Witness overjoyed press ganged workers whooping with joy and punching the area.
Oh. By "all over the UK", she means "everywhere except the South West of England".
Russia's heading South, if anywhere, not West. Her initial Empire was built by kicking the Ottomans.
There are no NATO members East and South of Turkey. Georgia (there's form there), Armenia, Azerbaijan and then Iran, then Saudi. Tehran is only about 120km from the Caspian coast. The Kazakh's might want to be getting a bit jittery as well.
Russia is largely a resource extraction economy. And that's where all the oil is.
Turkey's a NATO member, plus signed up to the Montreux Convention.
Why give them an excuse to re-open the strait to warships?
Turkey is a NATO member who've been illegally occupying Northern Cyprus since their 1974 invasion, but it seems to be bad form to wonder why we didn't sanction them a l'outrance for the last 51 years.
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