Defence and foreign aid suffer from the same disease

What is it about the current crop of politicians that makes you think they should have more armed forces at their disposal?

Robert Jenrick has suggested that “In a more dangerous world, we need to significantly increase defence spending”. We shouldn’t tax or borrow any more, says Jenrick. Instead, we should direct half the aid budget to defence.

He will get no argument on the right that we should spend less on foreign aid but defence is just as much of a money pit unless you have a clear idea what additional defence spending is for. Since we’re not presently at war with anyone, and it’s not in our interests to start one, I’m not sure defence is a better use of our money.

Though one could very easily get misty eyed about the state of the RAF, having a cabinet full of cold war jet models, the current RAF is about what it should be for a mid ranking small island state.

If I were to expand it at all, I’d be looking at increasing the numbers of Boeing P-8 Poseidons, but not by many, and maybe reverse the decision to retire the C-130 Hercules, but otherwise the current order of battle looks right. I might prefer a larger surface fleet to play a more active role in the defence of global shipping but that’s every bit as much national vanity as foreign aid. We made our decision on what would chew up the navy budget when we ordered two massive aircraft carriers.

The problem for Mr Jenrick is that even if we did expand the surface fleet we’d struggle to crew additional ships. The armed services have recruitment and retention problems across the board and any additional funding is going to have to improve the pay offer and do something about overall conditions.

In any event, raiding the foreign aid budget does not release huge sums to play with. About £3.7bn - nearly a third of the entire budget (as of 2022) is spent on hosting refugees in Britain. If the Tories want to get that figure down they’ll have to make good on their promise to stop the small boats. Meanwhile, we’re pouring hundreds of millions into Ukraine, and I don’t see either party looking to cut our support for the war on Russia.

All the same, there is still the need to ask questions about foreign aid. Foreign aid has long been a slush fund for the international NGOcracy with the spurious justification of enhancing our global soft power, and meeting our international obligations. There is no real measure of effectiveness and no tangible national interest is served by it. If we deleted half a dozen recipient countries from spending priorities, would it make even the slightest difference? There would no doubt be a wave of umbrage from British academia but nobody else would complain.

Ultimately foreign aid fails to provide value because foreign aid is (or should be) an instrument of foreign policy, only we don’t have a coherent foreign policy to speak of, and our foreign policy goals are determined by our commitment to UN Sustainable Development Goals. Any concept of national interest was binned more than decade ago. The FCDO sees a large part of its role as promoting equality and LGBT rights abroad. As such, there is no cure for what ails the FCDO. It is yet another captured institution run as a nationalised NGO.

I’m not opposed to foreign aid as a policy instrument in that it can be used to serve our wider foreign policy goals - which should be geared to trade, national security and curbing migration, but as it stands it serves only the vanity of our political class. That’s not going to change under David Lammy who will no doubt look to resurrect DfID. The political class as a whole thinks aid is a charitable moral obligation.

That, though is precisely the reason it won’t be any better spent on defence being that defence is also an instrument of foreign policy. With a political class that drifts from one Current Thing to the next, doling out cash on a whim, there is no possibility of a sustained, coherent foreign policy. On a more churlish note, I wonder why we’re even bothering with national defence when our south coast is invaded daily with the aid of refugee NGOs, the RNLI and the Border Force.

As much as anything, there’s no reason to believe more money would be usefully spent on defence. Somehow, we’re spending £2bn on a mere fourteen new Chinooks. For context, more than 7000 UH-1 Hueys were used in Vietnam. In naval spending terms, a billion pounds just about buys you a destroyer, but with none of the necessary weapons to make it useful. Everyone says we need to fix military procurement but we haven’t solved that one in eighty years of trying. Britain’s “proud aviation heritage” is the story of expensive, inferior flops. If we allocated half the aid budget to defence, it would be swallowed whole, resulting in only marginal improvements to fighting capability.

I would argue that defence spending is about right for what we’ve become, and there’s no value in expanding the army lest our politicians commit is to yet more pointless interventionist conflicts which result in us having to take in more refugees. I do not want our current crop of politicians having access to military means.

One supposes that it’s also worth reminding ourselves that Britain happens to be broke. Nearly one in five council leaders in England now say they are likely to declare bankruptcy in the next year or so. For as long as the establishment is fixated on “leading on the world stage” in the “fight against poverty and climate change” and other such trite slogans, the very last thing we should do is give them more of our money to play with.

Ultimately we can’t expect coherent foreign policy from a moribund political class that’s stuck in a pre-2016 intellectual stasis. We cannot expect the establishment to act in the national interest when it barely comprehends the concept of nations, except as a tax base with which to fund their vanities.

When it comes to defence and foreign policy, much of the debate is an exchange of meaningless tropes founded on decades old assumptions about who and what we are, and our place in the world. It starts on the base assumption that we are a wealthy, powerful country when neither is especially true now.

As a country, we’re deeply fragmented, drowning in debt, politically dysfunctional, and can barely call ourselves a democracy. When we’re allowing Islamists to preach jihad on our streets and flying the trans flag from our public buildings, we’re not exactly in a position to export our values to the world, or tell anyone else how to run their affairs. Charity begins at home, and so does good governance.