There is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth. Only three weeks ago, Sir Keir Starmer was considering delaying increasing the United Kingdom’s defence budget until the next decade. ‘Whitehall sources’, a catch-all term of varying reliability, said that the Prime Minister regarded the political costs of cutting public expenditure elsewhere as too great: accordingly, defence, which everyone professes to believe is important but few are willing to prioritise, would have to wait.
Now the mood music has changed. The Sunday Times reports that Starmer intends to overrule Rachel Reeves and the Treasury in their insistence on no additional expenditure. Instead, the Prime Minister will hold to his party’s manifesto commitment to ‘set out the path to spending 2.5 per cent of GDP on defence’. The latest iteration of the Whitehall source said:
Many now believe the world is currently more dangerous than during the Cold War
In the end, it’s the Prime Minister’s decision on national security… the defence and security review will still do what we needed to do.
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