Sir Keir Starmer’s refusal to commit to a date to raise UK defence spending to three per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) cast a shadow over his otherwise bold plan to build up to 12 new attack submarines as part of the Government’s Strategic Defence Review.

Even as he told workers at a BAE shipyard in Glasgow that they should be proud of the work they do supporting Britain’s frontline troops, the Prime Minister would only commit to an “ambition” to reach that level of spending in the next Parliament, expected to run from 2029-2034.

By any measure, military top brass and industrialists should have been cock-a-hoop at the levels of spending set out after a period of underinvestment in defence that has seen the size of the UK army per capita shrink to its smallest since the Napoleonic Wars. That’s around the time Jane Austen was describing Pride and Prejudice’s fictional cad George Wickham defending the country in a redcoat.

Since World War Two, Britain’s defence spending has fallen after nearly every major international conflict it has been involved in was resolved. After the Suez Crisis, the breakup of the Soviet Union and the Iraq War, the outlay on defence as a proportion of GDP fell. Instead, there was cash for other things, or what Starmer referred to as the “peace dividend”.

That’s now vanished. Britain needs to be ready for the possibility that, in the event that the Ukraine war ends, Vladimir Putin could replenish his armed forces within two years and threaten other nations, a former head of the Army, Lord Dannatt, told the BBC on Monday.

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute

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