The Tories are still unserious

According to the Telegraph, Wes Streeting has promised to resign as Defence Secretary if Andy Burnham fails to plug a black hole in Britain’s planned military spending. Mr Streeting revealed he would quit the Government if the new Prime Minister did not find an extra £4.7bn for defence in his first Budget later this year.

Speaking to Times Radio, Mr Streeting said the Defence Investment Plan would be “fully funded” and that the cuts or tax rises needed to fund its plans would be for John Healey, the Chancellor, to set out at future fiscal events. Asked whether a failure to fulfil those spending plans would be a resigning issue, Mr Streeting replied: “It is. It is absolutely for me a matter of principle.”

It is unusual for politicians to speak in such candid and concrete terms, so I think we can safely assume Streeting has been told he will get the funding somehow. John Healey also sees it as a point of principle, having resigned from the Starmer administration on that basis. I guess we’ll find out soon enough.

For my part, I don’t think defence spending necessarily needs to rise. The total budget for Challenger 3 upgrade is £1.9bn for just 148 tanks, at a time when the value of Main Battle Tanks is in question, and when only half of them will be deployable at any one time. That kind of money would buy us two extra Type 26 frigates. Defence spending is all about opportunity cost. There are also some highly questionable drone procurement that require greater scrutiny.

But it would seem nobody is in the business of scrutinising defence spending. My own Tory MP has, for reasons that escape me, defended Ajax, while the slop right don’t have a defence spokesman or a policy between them. I checked Badenoch’s speech to confirm the Tory party position on defence. On June 15, 2026 she said “Our party’s position is that we should get to 3% by 2030, but as a minimum the funding must deliver the additional £28 billion over four years that the Chief of the Defence Staff has asked for”.

This where any respect I had for Badenoch evaporates. The party has not changed. She is correct to reject Net Zero because government by arbitrary targets is absolutely insane, but that goes for defence spending too. Moreover, the one thing you absolutely should not do is give the Chief of Defence Staff what they ask for. Here above all things, it requires a deep scepticism.

Politicians have grasped that we probably ought to invest something in our defence, and that we are behind the curve in drone technology, but there’s been absolutely no strategic thinking - thus the Defence Investment Plan runs the risk of being a corporate feeding frenzy, resulting in stockpiles of obsolete junk.

What is not sinking in is the new battlefield arithmetic, where the function of low cost drones is to drain your enemy’s bank account - as it is forced to deploy ever more expansive counter measures. The industry says it is working on low cost Counter-Unmanned Aerial Systems but still with a unit cost that would buy a seven bedroom house in Surrey. They’re not getting it.

Meanwhile the defence chiefs are eyeing up new toys for a peer conflict we will likely never fight, while still neglecting the surface fleet. For sure, we have new frigates on order but in a decades time we still won’t have a more than a dozen serviceable fighting ships. The very last thing we should do is throw more money at defence until there is a coherent doctrine. Moreover, defence procurement is downstream foreign policy - where current thinking is in similar state of incoherence.

Worse still, politicians on all sides are talking about developing sovereign capabilities and reindustrialisation. While that is a laudable aspiration, it also runs the risk of becoming a middle class job creation scheme that produces mediocre, expensive and useless kit. Especially so if politicians are simply taking the word of senior defence staff as to what we need rather that starting from first bases - as I have.

This kind of thinking is too important to be left the the armed forces because they’re too fond of their expensive toys and their fantasy battle formations, regardless of where they’re likely to be deployed. We should also be extremely sceptical since half the defence pundits and MoD advisors are also consultants to the defence industry. The revolving door is real.

What we need to see from the Tory party is a coherent outline of foreign policy *then* an outline of a defence posture. Only then should we be talking about how we fund it and by how much. Giving the top brass a blank cheque to spend on elaborate toys without political direction and strategic coherence is the height of stupidity. Supporting Streeting’s bid for more funding without venturing an alternative vision is more of the same uniparty managerialism - all predicated on the consensus to continue the Ukraine war to the last Ukrainian - even if it drags us into World War Three. It doesn’t occur to them that we might well end up with other defence problems.