Keir Starmer is a moralising hypocrite

Cutting welfare while committing to 5% defence spending is bad for British people

Less than a year in to his premiership, Keir Starmer is in trouble. Increasing defence spending may become a lightning rod to British voters who feel their welfare is under assault by Labour cuts. A reminder that foreign policy always starts and ends at home.

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is at the NATO Summit in the Netherlands ready to sign up to a more than doubling of total defence spending to 5% of GDP by 2035. All the signs are that he didn’t want to do this. The Strategic Defence Review, published just three weeks ago pledged an increase to 3% of GDP at an unspecified point in the future. Under pressure from Trump, he has now massively raised the target, without consulting the British public.

And herein lies a major problem.

He’s pushing an unfunded bumper pay rise for the defence industry at the same time he is cutting benefits for ordinary Britons.

While he presses the flesh at the NATO Summit, Starmer is facing a major revolt at home about cuts of personal independence payments (PIP) for disabled people. This proposed cut would save a meagre £5bn per year from the apparently ballooning welfare budget.

Labour Members of Parliament have broken ranks en masse – so far 120 and rising - to table an amendment that will be voted on in parliament next week, which would effectively kill the cut to PIP. That follows an embarrassing U-turn in May, in which the planned cut to winter fuel payments for old people was largely reversed.

The Labour backbenchers smell blood in the water and if the PIP cut falls, then it will become increasingly difficult for the government to make further welfare cuts during the remainder of this parliament, which runs to 2029.

Yet, the glaring truth will remain that boosting defence spending to 5% will still require massive cuts to public services.

So, the government will scrabble around trying to fill the fiscal ‘black hole’ but will struggle to do so, as every proposal will come up against fierce resistance in Parliament. That, of course, is the sign of a healthy democracy.

But it will inevitably mean hefty tax rises and the growth in government borrowing. Even before this announcement, government repayment of debt interest was set to rise from 104.5 bn p.a. in 2024/25 (3.7% of GDP) to over £130bn by 2029/30.

For the first time since the Ukraine war started, Britain’s leading independent TV station expressed disquiet about ‘shoveling more’ cash into an inefficient and wasteful defence sector. Kevin Maguire, a staunchly pro-Labour Associate Editor at the Daily Mirror lambasted Keir Starmer’s handling of the matter during his regular slot on Good Morning Britain on the morning of 24 June. He was backed up by host, Suzanna Reid, who questioned the need for even more spending on defence if that means cuts to welfare payments.

Maguire even claimed that the (in my view wholly unrealistic) objective of Ukraine reclaiming the territory it has lost would offer at best a pyrrhic victory, a rare public admission that clinging to the notion of victory at all costs is unrealistic.

The cold reality is that Britain can’t afford to increase defence spending to 5% in peacetime.

If UK GDP were to increase by an average of 1% over the coming decade, defence spending would almost hit £150bn per year by 2035, an increase of over £84bn per year, using the NATO definition of defence spending.

Any government attempting deliver the scale of cuts to public services needed to fill this fiscal hole will face political suicide.

Starmer has insisted there is a ‘clear moral case’ for reform to a welfare system that he claims is broken, but he has not made that case for why it is broken. The UK welfare bill is huge, but Britain is in the middle of the OECD pack on social spending, compared to, say, the Nordic countries.

Many British citizens will consider that Starmer is selling them out by lecturing them on the need to make sacrifices while pressing the flesh in Holland for a whopping increase in defence spending. They can’t and won’t see the welfare system is broken; instead, they will increasingly consider that by cutting welfare payments, their sense of security is being undermined, making them feel less safe.

Like the worst type of gauche Gucci socialist, the Prime Minister is a moralising hypocrite, lecturing citizens from on high while living a life of unimaginable privilege.

5% might not seem a huge amount, after all, as it equates to UK military spending in the early 1980s when Britain went to war to reclaim the Falkland Islands. Russia spends around 7% of its GDP on defence, while for Ukraine the figure is around 34%. However, both countries consider the war to be an existential issue.

The war in Ukraine is not an existential issue for Britain. Only a fantasist would believe that Russia is about to invade the UK or has plans to do so in the future.

True to form, and desperate to keep the gravy train of war chugging forward, Zelensky has been in the Hague complaining that the increase in defence spending is too slow, as Russia plans to invade us next.

Russia isn’t going to invade us next.

Indeed, I consider Zelensky a far bigger existential threat to Britain than Russia. In his bid to cling to power, he wants to drag the whole of Europe into the mire with him.

We must resist that at every turn. There is no hope for UK state-run media the BBC to open a critical debate on the folly of UK government policy, but I hope that after Kevin Maguire’s outburst, the independent UK mainstream media starts to challenge the government more often on its idiotic approach.

This episode serves as a reminder that foreign policy is always driven by domestic political interests: the need to maintain the integrity of the state, the need to keep citizens safe and the need to drive prosperity for the benefit of all.

If boosting our defence spending to 5% means paying Zelensky to maintain a disgruntled army of over one million and oversee a system built on grift on an industrial scale, then let’s strike for peace now.

Even in a future peace, Ukraine will be vanishingly irrelevant to UK core strategic interests. Britain’s territorial integrity has never depended on Ukraine, it is so small economically that it adds little value to the UK economy and an end to war will make British people safer.

If Starmer continues to duck this blinding reality, then he may increasingly find his tenure in 10 Downing Street less safe, as his premiership comes under attack from members of his own party.