The harp of defense has reached Downing Street. First John Healey resigned as defense secretary. Within hours, Al Carnes, the minister of the armed forces, followed. Their charge: Keir Starmer had not spent enough on the military. The resignations came with Starmer weakened and Rachel Reeves trapped within her fiscal rules. Their audience was not just the residents of 10 and 11 Downing Street, but anyone who might soon follow. Accept the race, or declare yourself frivolous.
Starmer spent years treating defense orthodoxy as a certificate of political seriousness. NATO first. Spending. The generals calmed down. The press calmed down. Washington was pleased. The left could beat him; Work became secure for the empire. But a ratchet doesn’t stop because a prime minister thinks it has served its purpose, or a chancellor worries about the bill. She squeezes.
The proposed Defense Investment Plan would take military spending to 2.68 percent of GDP by 2030. Healey wanted 3 percent. NATO has already pushed the target to 3.5 percent for basic defense and 5 percent for defense and security by 2035. Yesterday’s test of seriousness becomes today’s national humiliation. The number increases. The plan goes after him.
The Strategic Defense Review was intended to provide that plan. It didn’t happen. It heralded a “new era of threat”, the “first NATO” and defense as an “engine for growth”. A serious strategy would start elsewhere: with threats, risks and costs; the most likely investments to reduce them; and value judged against alternatives. The review gave the rhetoric of seriousness. Did not provide the method.
The security case is weaker than the rhetoric. European NATO states already spend much more than Russia: $559 billion in 2025 versus Russia’s $190 billion. The United States is seeking military spending of $1.5 trillion a year. The problem is not a simple lack of money. It is what money buys, who controls it and whose strategy it serves.
Even the Ministry of Defense is not a safe place to pour money. The 2023-2033 equipment plan is already £17 billion in red. The F-35 program is worse. The National Audit Office found that the capability delivered for the £11 billion spent so far was a “disappointing return”; full lifetime cost can it goes to 70 billion pounds; The Ministry of Defense initially claimed it would be £18bn. Britain pays, but the aircraft’s software, upgrades and operational architecture are, in effect, controlled by the US. Even the Treasury, hardly an anti-militarist institution, is looking for greater control over the next generation fighter jet program with Japan and Italy. When the department seeking a blank check is treated by the Treasury as a procurement risk, voters should take notice.
A similar war is taking place across Europe. NATO and the EU are locked in a turf war on rearmament. The EU wants some of the new spending to build autonomous European capacity. NATO insists on a transatlantic market. Britain’s response is largely predetermined. “Nato first” is the polite name for buying high-priced addiction. The path is well trodden: Washington sets the strategic horizon, NATO provides the spending metrics, American contractors capture procurement, British ministers provide domestic legitimacy and the public foots the bill.
Hear who gets boosted. John Hutton, defense secretary under Gordon Brown, warned that Starmer’s credibility would be “hit” without more defense spending. He speaks from within the world that benefits from the harp. He is chairman and non-executive director of Pearson Engineering AND previously advised Bechtel and Lockheed Martin. Here is a face of the Atlanticist class project in miniature: the ministerial office, the defense contractor, American power and media authority woven into a voice of “national security” – an imperial dependency spoken with a British accent.
That relationship has a class character. Moving UK defense spending to 3.5 per cent of GDP it would cost around £36 billion more each year in today’s terms. Even a target of 3 per cent by 2029-30, alongside rising health spending, would mean deep cuts for vulnerable departments. Education, local government, social care, courts, prisons, police, transport: all parts of the state already thinned by austerity will be told to shrink further. Downing Street he said the quiet part out loud: initially the aid budget was cut to finance the armed forces; now other departments will face billions more in cuts.
Here is Starmerism in uniform: raid the poorest abroad, squeeze public investment at home and call for transfer security. It is no wonder that defensive rhetoric attracts the political-media class. It doesn’t raise people’s expectations. It puts them down on behalf of the ruling class. You cannot have safe housing, functioning courts, transport, social care or good schools. History has turned. The world is dangerous. Adults have entered the room. Buckle up and say hello.
Even the trade unions risk falling into the trap. Unite and GMB have the right to demand skilled labour, local supply chains and industrial capacity. But a labor movement cannot allow industrial strategy to narrow into a subcontracting field for the war economy. The question is not whether British workers get a share of militarization. It is whether public money builds sovereign capacity, civil stability and democratic control.
Not so in Belgium, where unions will march with the peace movement and social organizations this weekend under the banner “Welfare not War”. Britain needs the same rejection of the American war economy, but on its own terms: strong capability without Atlantic dependency; public investments that make the country safer, more sovereign and harder to coerce.
Britain faces real security threats. Some are external. Some are already here: climate disruption, cyberattacks, fragile supply chains, exposed infrastructure, racist massacres, far-right agitation after Henry Nowak’s assassination, and supported by the US. propaganda for anti-white persecution and civilizational decline. Addiction is not just about guns. It is also about the data systems through which the state sees, controls 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 clear: accept American dependence or take the blame for the insecurity.
A serious security strategy would ask what Britain needs to control to defend itself: airspace, energy, ports, undersea cables, food systems, logistics, government data, communications networks and the industrial base needed to support them. It would invest in hard skills where they reduce dependency: air defense, drones, secure public cloud infrastructure, resilient networks, in-house repair and manufacturing capacity. He would treat social cohesion as a condition of national stability. Instead, Britain is being told to buy more, faster, from the same imperial order that made it dependent.
Starmer thought defensive orthodoxy would protect him. He returned it. He accepted the premise that seriousness means militarization, dependence and cuts. Now the defense structure is asking him to follow the premise to its conclusion. Arpion has no final number. Just one more request.
(Further reading: Why John Healey had to resign)
