Will John Healey fund the UK defense increases he previously demanded?

Finance ministries tend to clash with defense ministries over levels of defense spending. In the U.S., the Office of Management and Budget generally is skeptical of Department of War proposals for major spending increases. The British Treasury is no different.

Under Keir Starmer, the Treasury frustrated the Ministry of Defence’s efforts to come closer to NATO’s spending targets of 3.5 per cent of Gross Domestic Product by 2035. 

Instead, defense spending was to rise to 2.7 percent of GDP by 2030. The Minister of Defence posited that it should reach 3 per cent by then. The minister resigned over what he considered to be serious budget shortfalls, arguing that “the Treasury [is] unwilling to commit the resources that the nation needs to defend the country at this time of rising threats.”

That Minister of Defense was John Healey. He is now Chancellor of the Exchequer in the new Andy Burnham government. He now is in charge of the Treasury that he had so bitterly criticized only weeks earlier. Burnham has said all the right things about increasing defense spending, except actually committing to do so. He has gone no further than to assert that “we’ll set out more on defense in due course.”

Wes Streeting, who took over the Ministry of Defence when Burnham moved into 10 Downing Street, has likewise insisted that the U.K. would honor its international commitments. He has not indicated how the government would find the £15 billion (through 2029) that Starmer added to the budget just before he left office without identifying a source. Nor has he identified the source for an additional £2.3 billion that the........

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