Only death of Brits would get UK to ‘wake up’ on defence

Former defence secretary Penny Mordaunt has suggested that only the death of serving British soldiers would get the Prime Minister to “wake up” and fund extra defence spending. 

In an interview with City AM, the senior Tory figure said the current government’s spending plans for defence were “out of kilter” with reality given immediate threats posed by the Iran war and other cyber attacks from Chinese state-backed hackers. 

Spending on defence is slated to hit 3.5 per cent of GDP by 2035 from its current level of around 2.3 per cent. Sir Keir Starmer said the government needed to know “where the money’s coming from” before full funding plans to reach the target could be unveiled. 

Mordaunt urged the government to publish the long-awaited Defence Investment Plan “very swiftly”, which will lay out funding for procurement and other military projects over the next 10 years. 

When she was pressed on what it would take for the government to solve funding for defence spending, Mordaunt suggested that drastic events leading to the loss of British lives would prompt the government to take more urgent action. 

“If [Starmer]’s not going to do that in these circumstances when our armed forces personnel are in harm’s way, when one of our sovereign bases has been under attack, and we’ve been very limited in what we can do to defend ourselves, what is it going to take?

“I think that it will only be on, all current evidence, large numbers of our armed forces or British citizens being killed,” she said. 

“I do think that is the only thing that is going to wake up this government and get the Prime Minister to deliver on what he said he’s going to do.”

Last week, the Prime Minister appeared to suggest he was stepping in to resolve a tussle between the Treasury and the Ministry of Defence over funding plans. 

While serving in the previous Conservative government, Mordaunt saw defence spending fall to just below two per cent as a share of GDP in 2018. 

She defended Tory governments’ record “in trying to reshape what was a complete mess of programs that didn’t make any sense” but admitted not enough had been done to strengthen cyber security, energy security and other critical infrastructure. 

Mordaunt also said that, in the 2019 leadership race after Theresa May’s resignation, she backed Jeremy Hunt to become Prime Minister over Boris Johnson on his promise to raise defence spending to three per cent. 

She suggested that Hunt was unable to commit to his promise after he became Chancellor in 2019 as he struggled to persuade Rishi Sunak to hand defence a substantial increase in investment. 

“Even in a crisis like this, we still don’t see the government coming forward and saying, ‘right, we’re going to turn on the taps and modernise’,” she said. 

Voters don’t want taxes to fund defence spending

Starmer could face some political problems in persuading voters to stomach deep spending cuts across other major areas including health, welfare and education, or substantial tax hikes in order to get funding for defence to be higher. 

The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) has said that the UK would have to spend roughly £40bn more in today’s money on defence in order to get spending up to the Nato target of 3.5 per cent. 

Both the OBR and Nato have suggested that UK expenditure was lagging behind the curve in plans for sustained increases in defence investment.

A poll of 1,000 Brits suggested that more than half (66 per cent) believed there should be higher defence spending. 

Around a quarter (26 per cent) said overseas aid spending should be cut while a fifth said they would increase taxes on businesses and 14 per cent said they would reduce welfare benefits. 

Just seven per cent of respondents in the poll by Team Lewis, a marketing and communications agency, said taxes on individuals should be raised while a smaller portion said they would reduce spending on areas such as transport or policing. 

Mordaunt argued that the British public  were more “situationally aware” given recent conflicts and that it was prepared to give the government “full encourage to move everything aside and actually really double down on defence”.