The defence ratchet has reached Downing Street. First John Healey resigned as defence secretary. Within hours, Al Carns, the armed forces minister, followed. Their charge: Keir Starmer had failed to spend enough on the military. The resignations landed with Starmer weakened and Rachel Reeves trapped inside her own fiscal rules. Their audience was not only the residents of 10 and 11 Downing Street, but whoever may soon succeed them. Accept the ratchet, or be declared unserious.
Starmer spent years treating defence orthodoxy as a certificate of political seriousness. Nato first. Spending up. The generals reassured. The press pacified. Washington flattered. The left could be beaten with it; Labour made safe for empire. But a ratchet does not stop because a prime minister thinks it has served its purpose, or a chancellor worries about the bill. It tightens.
The proposed Defence Investment Plan would take military spending to 2.68 per cent of GDP by 2030. Healey wanted 3 per cent. NATO has already pushed the destination to 3.5 per cent on core defence and 5 per cent on defence and security by 2035. Yesterday’s proof of seriousness becomes today’s national humiliation. The number rises. The plan trails behind it.
The Strategic Defence Review was meant to supply that plan. It did not. It announced a “new era of threat”, “NATO first” and defence as an “engine for growth”. A serious strategy would begin elsewhere: with threats, risks and costs; the investments most likely to reduce them; and value judged against alternatives. The review gave the rhetoric of seriousness. It did not give the method.
The security case is weaker than the rhetoric. European Nato states already spend far more than Russia: $559bn in 2025 against Russia’s $190bn. The United States is seeking military spending of $1.5 trillion a year. The problem is not a simple shortage of money. It is what the money buys, who controls it and whose strategy it serves.
Nor is the Ministry of Defence a safe place to pour money. The 2023-2033 equipment plan is already £17bn in the red. The F-35 programme is worse. The National Audit Office found that the capability delivered for £11bn spent so far was a “disappointing return”; the full through-life cost may run to £70bn; the MoD initially claimed it would be £18bn. Britain pays, but the aircraft’s software, upgrades and operational architecture are, in effect, US-controlled. Even the Treasury, hardly an anti-militarist institution, is seeking greater control over the next-generation fighter jet programme with Japan and Italy. When the department demanding a blank cheque is treated by the Treasury as a procurement risk, voters should take note.
A similar struggle is taking place across Europe. Nato and the EU are locked in a turf war over rearmament. The EU wants some of the new spending to build autonomous European capacity. Nato insists on a transatlantic market. Britain’s answer is largely predetermined. “Nato first” is the polite name for buying dependency at a premium. The path is well-trodden: Washington sets the strategic horizon, Nato supplies the spending metric, US contractors capture the procurement, British ministers provide the domestic legitimacy and the public pays the bill.
Listen to who gets amplified. John Hutton, defence secretary under Gordon Brown, warned that Starmer’s credibility would be “shot” without more defence spending. He speaks from inside the world that benefits from the ratchet. He is and previously advised Bechtel and Lockheed Martin. Here is one face of the Atlanticist class project in miniature: ministerial office, defence contractor, US power and media authority woven into one voice of “national security” — an imperial dependency spoken in a British accent.
That relationship has a class character. Moving UK defence spending to 3.5 per cent of GDP would cost about £36bn more each year in today’s terms. Even a 3 per cent target by 2029-30, alongside rising health spending, would mean deep cuts to unprotected departments. Education, local government, social care, courts, prisons, policing, transport: all the parts of the state already thinned by austerity would be told to shrink further. Downing Street : first the aid budget was cut to fund the armed forces; now other departments will face cuts for billions more.
Here is Starmerism in uniform: raid the poorest abroad, squeeze public investment at home, and call the transfer security. No wonder defence rhetoric seduces the political-media class. It does not raise people’s expectations. It lowers them on behalf of the ruling class. You cannot have secure housing, functioning courts, transport, social care or decent schools. History has returned. The world is dangerous. The adults have entered the room. Tighten your belt and salute.
Even the unions risk being drawn into the trap. Unite and GMB are right to demand skilled jobs, domestic supply chains and industrial capacity. But a labour movement cannot let industrial strategy be narrowed to a subcontracting pitch for the war economy. The question is not whether British workers get a share of militarisation. It is whether public money builds sovereign capability, civilian resilience and democratic control.
Not so in Belgium, where unions will march with the peace movement and social organisations this weekend under the banner “Welfare not Warfare”. Britain needs the same refusal of the US war economy, but on its own terms: hard capability without Atlanticist dependence; public investment that makes the country safer, more sovereign and harder to coerce.
Britain does face real security threats. Some are external. Some are already here: climate breakdown, cyberattack, fragile supply chains, exposed infrastructure, racist pogrom, far-right agitation after the murder of Henry Nowak, and US-backed propaganda about anti-white persecution and civilisational decline. Dependency is not only a matter of weapons. It also concerns the data systems through which the state sees, polices and governs. When Sadiq Khan blocked a £50m Palantir contract with the Metropolitan Police, Mark Rowley warned of cuts to frontline services. The threat was obvious: accept American dependency, or take the blame for insecurity.
A serious security strategy would ask what Britain must control to defend itself: airspace, energy, ports, undersea cables, food systems, logistics, government data, communications networks and the industrial base needed to sustain them. It would invest in hard capabilities where they reduce dependency: air defence, drones, secure public cloud infrastructure, resilient grids, domestic repair and manufacturing capacity. It would treat social cohesion as a condition of national resilience. Instead, Britain is told to buy more, faster, from the same imperial order that made it dependent.
Starmer thought defence orthodoxy would protect him. It has turned on him. He accepted the premise that seriousness means militarisation, dependency and cuts. Now the defence establishment is demanding that he follow the premise to its conclusion. The ratchet has no final number. Only a next demand.
[Further reading: Why John Healey had to resign]
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