KEIR Starmer’s pledge to ramp up defence spending in the UK to 5% of GDP by 2035 will make the country more insecure and won’t save the economy, a former adviser to the UN Secretary-General has said.
Over the past few months, the Prime Minister has been consistently turning up the dial on defence spending while confirming cuts to foreign aid as part of a “blueprint” to make Britain “safer and stronger”.
But Mark Seddon, who was a speechwriter and adviser to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, said he is “unconvinced” by Starmer’s plan, insisting the idea that spending more on weapons factories was going to make us more secure and save the economy is “for the birds”.
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Professor Julian Richards, who worked for GCHQ for nearly 20 years, also said Starmer’s approach was all about political “signalling”, when in fact it is “impossible” to say whether upping defence spending would enhance the UK’s security.
Having already pledged to increase defence spending to 2.5% of national income by 2027 through a cut to foreign aid in February, the Prime Minister then promised in June to make Britain “battle-ready” as he unveiled a defence review designed to counter threats from countries such as Russia.
Speaking at the BAE Systems shipyard in Glasgow, he promised to spend billions more on weapons factories, drones and submarines, even if it meant raiding the welfare or aid budget once more.
Later that month, the UK and its Nato allies agreed to increase spending on defence and related areas to 5% of GDP by 2035.
Starmer said his defence review was a “blueprint for making Britain safer and stronger” and would create an “armour-clad nation”.
But former Labour member Seddon, who also advised María Fernanda Espinosa when she was president of the UN General Assembly, said: “I think this has been a crisis management government and I think that it has sought to find a solace in defence spending as some kind of Keynesian demand-driven recovery plan, [suggesting] this is how we get back British industry.
“It’s moved very firmly away from traditional Keynesian economic policies to believe that militarisation can do all of this and get the industrial jobs that were lost back.
“I’m really not convinced.
“We’ve already announced that a lot of the weapons we’re going to be buying are from the US. We simply don’t have the capacity to build things like we used to, like Harrier jump jets, we now have to buy F-35s from the US.
“We’re promising to increase defence spending eventually to 5% which is a very substantial increase, and that can only mean major cuts in education, health spending, welfare spending, right across the board. That isn’t really being debated in any serious way, it seems to me.”
He added: “I think they [Labour] are making us more insecure.
“The idea that spending more on munitions factories is going to save the British economy and make us safer is for the birds.”
Richards (below), who now works as the director of the Centre for Security and Intelligence at Buckingham University, said he felt Starmer’s claim of making Britain safer was an “impossible calculation”.
“It’s difficult to say for each pound you spend on defence capability how much safety does that delivers us. I’d suggest it’s a totally impossible calculation. The same goes for foreign aid expenditure because that’s always been a difficult area to quantify in terms of its effect.
“I challenge anyone to say that what the Labour Party are doing makes us safer or not.”
He went on: “It’s very political. It’s about signalling.
“They’re trying to shape the Russian mindset by saying we’re prepared to do something that would have been politically impossible a short while ago.
“Starmer wants to be right at the helm of that robust signalling to Russia, so then he can quote himself as one of the leaders of the West.”
The boost to defence spending has come about amid a pledged reduction of the foreign aid budget from 2027 to 0.3% of gross national income – the lowest level in more than a quarter of a century.
European Nato members have also come under pressure from the US to spend more on defence, as Richards explained, America has for many years felt it has been “shouldering too much of the burden”.
However, Richards said he hoped the current approach by the UK Government would be temporary.
“One would hope what we’re doing at the moment is not permanent,” he said.
“We would hope that if in five or six years, the security situation is more stable, it may be the case [that] we could shuffle back to where we were and put a break on defence expenditure and put more back into foreign aid.”
Asked if this would be the last cut to foreign aid that we see from Labour, he said: “I certainly wouldn’t bet on it being the last.
“[But] I would hope that further cuts to the foreign aid budget would be politically more difficult than this first ripping off of the plaster. If it turns out this was just the beginning of a series of death by a thousand cuts, that could start to become politically very difficult.”
Starmer once lamented a Tory plan in 2021 to slash the UK’s aid budget to 0.5% of GNI, adding that investing in international aid was in Britain’s “national interest”.
But Seddon, who sat on Labour’s national executive committee for nearly a decade, said it was yet another area of policy where Starmer seemed happy to U-turn in the name of the “practicalities of office”.
In 2015, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development was adopted by all UN member states with 17 sustainable development goals at its heart, including zero hunger, clean water and sanitation and climate action.
Seddon, who was a Labour member for 45 years and was on the party’s national executive committee for nearly a decade, said Labour seemed to be “rowing back” on this commitment, adding that “tinkering” with foreign aid can have huge consequences.
“Foreign aid is not something to be tinkered with or got rid of altogether, it has major repercussions, whether it’s HIV programmes, drought, poverty, all of these things,” Seddon, who quit Labour after 45 years of membership two years ago, said.
He added: “Britain was a founding member of the UN and are supporters of the sustainable development goals we’re supposed to be getting to by 2030, to make the world a safer, better place. And we seem to be rowing back from all of that.
“I think what a lot of people find difficult to believe is this is from a Labour Party leader and Labour government. If you’d said to me, ‘Can you imagine any political party cutting or getting rid of foreign aid?’, I would never have said it would be the Labour Party.”
A Ministry of Defence spokesperson said: “Britain is entering a new era of warfighting readiness, driven by the biggest sustained boost in defence spending since the Cold War – rising to 2.6% of GDP by 2027, with an ambition of hitting 3% in the next Parliament.
“This government is not only strengthening national security but turning defence into a driver of economic growth, delivering on the Plan for Change.
"The Strategic Defence Review lays out major investment in UK defence industries - backing British manufacturing, innovation, and jobs, ensuring prosperity and security across every nation and region. The forthcoming Defence Industrial Strategy will build on these commitments.”
The FCDO has been approached for comment.
