Starmer is leaving Burnham with a massive bill for defence. But why the war fever?
Submitted by
Joe Gill
on
Thu, 07/02/2026 - 10:28
There is a concerted campaign to prepare the public for war with Russia. Cutting back on essential spending in order to fund the army is the last thing the UK needs right now
Britain's Prime Minister Keir Starmer on a visit to a British army base in the west of England on 22 April 2025 (AFP)
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If you were to only listen to the BBC and read the Daily Telegraph, you might believe that Britain was facing an imminent invasion that only a full switch to a war economy could prevent.
We are apparently defenceless against attack by Vladimir Putin. Defence of the nation is the first job of government, the opinion makers say. The UK public is being psychologically prepared for war with Russia.
Outgoing Prime Minister Keir Starmer has always had the priorities of Nato and the military industrial lobby close to his heart. But that lobby’s mouthpieces in the media decided long ago that Starmer had failed to ramp up defence spending with enough hard cash. Because enough is never enough when it comes to the military.
"Putin will be laughing at Starmer’s pitiful defence plan," says a Telegraph opinion headline in response to Starmer’s latest plans for adding an extra £15bn ($20bn) to the Defence Investment Plan (DIP).
“We must hope that whoever leads the country in the coming years fully appreciates the scale of the threat our nation faces,” wrote Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, a chemical weapons expert and former army officer, and now defence consultant.
“The long-awaited defence investment plan places considerable emphasis on headline-grabbing drone capabilities, yet it fails to address the single most important requirement for delivering them: adequate funding,” he rails.
A week ago, he wrote: “[Andy] Burnham will be toast if he doesn’t give the Armed Forces what they need… If the Makerfield MP cannot provide the resources required to defend Britain, it will be time to find someone that can.”
Pay up Andy, or you are out – because what the military needs, it must get, or else.
These kinds of warnings are on something of a loop, day in, day out, in the British establishment media. For the right-wing political-media complex, there is no such thing as waste in defence spending, but every penny spent on supporting welfare is wasted.
UK military lobby never rests
Many of the military experts and former generals who are wheeled out to warn of Britain’s alleged woeful military spending – actually the sixth highest in the world – are themselves working for the military industrial complex.
John Healey, Starmer’s former defence secretary, resigned because he couldn’t get the government to agree to commit the vast sums that the UK armed forces and big arms companies wanted for new military hardware in the coming years.
Starmer's 'all guns, no butter' policy will cost him dearly
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They want five percent of GDP spent on the military, and they want massive cuts to welfare spending to pay for it. Spending five percent of national income on defence and national security in the UK would equal roughly £140bn ($185bn) to £150bn ($200bn) per year.
This figure represents a massive shift from historical norms. It is part of a Nato commitment made by the UK government to hit a 3.5 percent national security spending target by 2035, under pressure from US President Donald Trump, who has threatened to pull US troops out of Europe.
The latest statement from the government, released jointly by Starmer, Chancellor Rachel Reeves and Defence Secretary Dan Jarvis, says it will spend "nearly £300 billion in funding over next four years to transform the UK military with cutting edge equipment," rising to £80bn ($107bn) annually.
For the UK to reach 5 percent of GDP on weapons and "resilience" would mean starving the rest of the overall budget on the things that are vital to the nation, such as housing, transport, education and health. And yet, a recent poll shows that the majority in the UK oppose slashing support for disabled people to fund the army – instead, they back taxing the rich for it.
Is Britain under threat?
The UK, like other powers, is catching up with the military revolution that emerged in the 2020s, first in Nagorno-Karabakh, and most decisively in the Russia-Ukraine war. This revolution is defined by the rise of cheap, mass-produced autonomous drones, and artificial intelligence.
This shift has shattered traditional cost-exchange ratios, turning basic infantry into precision-strike forces, and exposed expensive heavy armour to low-cost, grenade-carrying drones. This new reality was also seen in the recent US-Israeli war on Iran, in the Gulf, and in Hezbollah’s tactics in Lebanon.
Iranian drones cost a fraction of air defences. How long can Gulf states last?
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But what is all this hullabaloo and drumbeat about a nation that must prepare for imminent war?
Is Britain at imminent threat of being attacked? This does not seem to be a question that the media asks; rather, the assumption is that Russia is coming for us.
If we look at the wars Britain has been involved in this century, all have been overseas military adventures as allies of the US, overthrowing Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, a 20-year failed war in Afghanistan, fighting Islamic State and al-Qaeda in Syria (both groups created in the wake of the invasion of Iraq), and aiding in Saudi Arabian and US attacks on Yemen.
The "War on Terror" morphed into wars against Middle East countries that posed no direct threat to the UK, including Iraq and Libya. Did these wars make the UK safer? The UK suffered a number of terror attacks related to our involvement in these regime change wars. In a word, no.
Hunting for enemies
In 2026, the main threat scenarios that British military planners focus on are Russia, Iran, North Korea and China.
UK military planners are preparing for conventional land warfare in the Arctic and Eastern Europe, as well as action to counter the so-called Russian "shadow fleets" of oil tankers and other vessels at sea. The UK navy recently raided an oil tanker carrying 700,000 barrels of Russian oil and sailing under a Cameroonian flag in the English Channel.
The UK has provided billions in military aid to Ukraine both before and since the full-scale invasion by Russia in 2022. This includes training, missile defence, ammunition, and special operations support for Ukrainian forces.
China is seen as a long-term “threat” due to its vast technological, economic and cyber capabilities, with the UK joining the Aukus nuclear submarine programme and other initiatives focused on China.
Let’s be clear: China has not started any wars in the last 45 years, and poses no direct military threat to the UK.
The UK, by contrast, has been involved in several wars against sovereign states in the Middle East in recent decades, and most recently aided Israel during its genocide in Gaza.
None of these "threats" – including Iran and North Korea – are an immediate danger to the people of the UK; rather, they challenge the UK’s strategic and economic interests as part of the western capitalist order with interests in Africa, the Middle East and Asia.
When we are told that we need to tighten our belts and cut back on vital investment to modernise a creaking British economy, with poorly performing infrastructure, underfunded schools and hospitals, we should push back and ask: why? Why are we investing tens of billions into preparation for more overseas wars?
Preparing for war
The most likely theatre for a major war is in Europe against Russia.
The UK is a member of Nato and under Article 5 must defend its allies if they are attacked. That extends to countries along Russia’s borders who joined Nato after 1999, from the Baltic states to Poland. But that does not include Ukraine, which is not a Nato member, and never will be if there is to be peace with Russia.
From Moscow’s perspective, Ukraine is merely a front for Nato, and it is already at war with the western bloc, which has provided vast military aid to Kyiv. As I write, Russia has launched a devastating wave of strikes against Kyiv, killing scores.
The UK should oppose Russian aggression, but that does not mean putting British troops in Ukraine – a plan frequently promoted by Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron.
Putin is a mercurial imperialist who, after 26 years in power and almost five years of a war that has cost hundreds of thousands of Russian lives, increasingly acts like an ageing paranoid dictator. With Ukrainian drones hitting Moscow, his time may be running out.
The UK has to ask itself seriously how best to bring an end to the Ukraine-Russia conflict, and to plan strategically for the day after Putin, however far away that may seem now.
Listening to the military lobbyists, a major war with Russia is now inevitable – or has already started – and Britain must move onto a war footing. This is war fever – of course war cannot be ruled out, but our rulers should seek to avoid it by all means, not run towards it.
Most of all, we should not sacrifice our society on the altar of war. The UK is domestically fragile, its social contract threadbare, its politics toxic, its government increasingly authoritarian, using anti-terror laws to arrest thousands of peaceful protesters, and journalists, while denying free trial rights to anti-war activists.
Cutting back on essential spending to prepare for more overseas wars is the very last thing we should be doing.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
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