British politics in recent years has sometimes resembled waltz. Both main parties show little compromise in mirroring each other’s plans, stealing their opponents’ popular policies and playing down the differences which characterized the Corbyn years. So it was striking to see Labour’s reticence this week to sign up to Sunak’s much-vaunted plan to increase defense spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2030.
Both Keir Starmer and John Healey, the Shadow Defense Secretary, have invested a lot of time and effort over the past four years in trying to nullify the Tories’ traditional lead in this area. At the last election barely one in ten voters trusted their party on defense and national security; now polls suggest that Labor leads on this issue. Given the hard-won gains in this area, why not simply go along with Sunak’s announcement, rather than allow the likes of Grant Shapps to claim that their stance on defense amounts to one of ‘delay, disruption and obfuscation’?
For Labour, the answer is twofold. The first is that they simply do not believe the numbers stack up. As Healey told the House on Tuesday ‘If this 2030 plan had been in a Budget, it would have been independently checked, openly costed and fully funded. Where is the additional money coming from?’ The government says that the additional £75 billion needed to meet the 2.5 per cent target will be funded by slashing a total of 72,000 civil service jobs. Yet this was tried earlier in the 2015 defense review, which promised a Ministry of Defense (MoD) headcount reduction to 41,000, rather than the current number of 63,000.
The second is a reluctance to commit to plans of which they have seen very little detail. This is a common complaint among all opposition frontbenchers, who claim they cannot set out spending plans in detail, without first ‘opening up the books’. But given the level of classified information involved in defence, this seems like a fairer criticism – especially when one considers the MoD’s reluctance to publish even routine information like spending on existing contracts. Even the Tory-led, cross-party Commons Defense Select Committee noted in February how ‘key information that was readily available a decade ago is no longer published for reasons that are unclear.’
There may of course be good reasons to withhold such details – but it means it is difficult for opposition MPs to know what is going on in the department from the outside. Shapps mocked the opposition’s calls for yet another defense review, suggesting this was unnecessary after a glut of https://twitter.com/salisbot/status/1765023588686459338/photo/1 since 2015. But it is worth noting that the Ministry of Defense is already preparing for such a review, according to a parliamentary question just two weeks ago.
Labor feels confident it can therefore ignore being bounced into matching a spending commitment which they think lacks both detail and credibility. They are happy too to highlight the obvious tension between spending ministers and the Treasury when it comes to defence. Whereas Tom Tugendhat and Grant Shapps both issued public calls in the run-up to this week’s announcement, Healey – a former Financial Secretary – is keen to work with Rachel Reeves and the Shadow Treasury team to try to pick holes in the government’s announcement.
By sticking to their guns, Labor hope to show that they are the most credible of the two main parties when it comes to the nation’s defense.
