Labour's breezy slogans won't buy peace

Times

02-06-2025

It begins, as these set-piece unveilings always do, with a CGI carrier task force skimming across a PowerPoint ocean. Labour's gleaming strategic defence review pledges to make Britain 'ten times more lethal' — breezy sloganeering from a team that's spent twelve months turning bullets into bullet points, while the world's villains got on with firing the real thing. Sir Keir talks of 'war-fighting readiness'; the Treasury mutters, sotto voce: 'but not just yet, old chap'.
Forgive us if we recognise the choreography. This review hasn't moved the dial: it's spun it in a full circle. Between us, we dragged our defence spending commitment to 2.5 per cent of GDP, only to watch Labour shelve the pledge, vanish into a year-long policy huddle, then re-emerge clutching a slightly dog-eared version of the plan we'd already put in motion. What's been dressed up as bold reform is, in truth, delay repackaged as discovery.
The £6 billion complex weapons deal with MBDA? Already signed. The £1.5 billion for BAE munitions? Already funded. Advanced targeting and data networks? Green-lit. A dozen Aukus submarines? Part of the 28 ships and boats announced by us in the last parliament.
But it's not just the reheated announcements — it's the structural fragility of what's now been offered. Defence reviews, like soufflés, tend to collapse without heat. They may launch fully funded, but are soon gnawed to bits by cost pressures. If this review meant business, the chancellor would have stamped '3% by 2030' — three by thirty — on the front page in block capitals. Instead, we're handed a blueprint that's hollow before it even hits the slipway.
If the goal was to send a message to Moscow, it should have been written in Sheffield steel and Devonport apprenticeships, not in a carousel of retweeted infographics. And while ministers claim fiscal prudence, they're preparing to spend billions handing back the Chagos Islands — a territorial carve-up that will warm every autocrat's heart. Worse, if that bill comes out of the defence budget, then they're quite literally cutting weapons to fund weakness.
Meanwhile, the world has changed gear. We've moved from postwar to prewar. Hypersonic missiles compress decision time to seconds. Quantum cyberattacks skip past timetables and Whitehall excuses. A government that waits for 'economic headroom' before making hard choices may find that deterrence isn't a direct debit you can pause. Either you pay up front, or you pay in blood.
This week could, and should, have been different. Commit to three by thirty. Publish an equipment plan that sustains the drumbeat of conventional munitions. Double down on sovereign capacity while building out allied platforms from Aukus to GCAP. And recognise the truth every chancellor since Gladstone should have known: that deterrence is cheaper than war.
Britain remains a nuclear-armed, cybercapable, globally deployed power. Our armed forces will do their duty. The question is whether His Majesty's Treasury will do theirs. Because in the end, it's simple: invest now and buy peace, or fumble down the back of the sofa when the storm has already broken.
And until that choice is made — properly, publicly, and with conviction — the only thing 'ten times more lethal' in this review is the gap between the rhetoric and the reality.