The British government is proving incapable of making the country’s defenses an urgent priority, even as Russia’s shadow warfare against Europe intensifies.
With the budget statement due on November 26, there is no sign that ministers plan any meaningful rise in defense spending. The issue goes undiscussed, as politicians and media focus on domestic priorities like welfare spending and the immigration crisis.
This week saw incidents that should focus minds at both ends of Europe. The sabotage of a major railway line in Poland was one of the most overt attacks yet in Russia’s ongoing campaign against European logistics and communications infrastructure. And in another dangerous escalation north of Britain, the Russian spy ship Yantar, which maps and menaces key underwater cables, has used lasers against the pilots of the RAF aircraft shadowing the vessel.
I was passed the news of the Yantar’s reckless behavior by a senior British officer stationed at a NATO facility I was visiting. He added, with an ironic smile, that the UK was taking the incident “extremely seriously”. Action — as yet unspecified — has only been promised if the Yantar enters the UK’s “wider waters”, a phrase whose vagueness is hopefully designed to leave Russian naval commanders in uncertainty (just as it has the British public).
The UK did its best to project an image of strength and resolve to its public over the incident, with PR-friendly images of Royal Navy frigates and RAF reconnaissance aircraft keeping a watchful eye on the latest Kremlin threat.
Yet on the same day that the Yantar incident was reported, November 19, the House of Commons Defence Committee released a report castigating the government’s multiple failures to meet promises on defense. Astonishingly, the report found the UK has no plan at all for homeland defense and warned, “Time is short.”
There is a bleak irony here: For many years, the UK played on its reputation as a defense and security heavyweight within NATO by chiding allies that failed to step up defense spending. Now, the committee says, the UK itself is moving at a “glacial” pace in making its own preparations.
The alliance’s front-line states needed no prompting, and even Germany and France plan transformative increases in military budgets. Britain, after a Strategic Defence Review (unironically subtitled, Making Britain safer: Secure at home, strong abroad) that laid out the threats and hinted at the incapacity to meet them, says it may raise spending by decimal points by the end of the decade.
Meanwhile, as the Commons committee noted, there is no plan at all for home defense.
That’s the result of a long-standing and comfortable assumption in the UK that if war happens, it will happen to somebody else a long way away; and furthermore, the UK will have a choice over whether to take part, and if it does, it will be able to rely on US military might as part of a coalition.
Those assumptions have now been upended. US commitment is in doubt, and Russia has been practicing hard at delivering attacks at ranges far beyond what most of the British public imagines.
But there has been no corresponding reassessment of priorities by the UK government. The Commons Defence Committee reminded us, for instance, that the country had “next to nothing” to defend against the kind of ultra-long-range missile attacks that Russia first practiced against Syria, and now delivers nightly against Ukraine.
This, of course, is hardly a new discovery for anybody who has been paying attention. It’s an emergency I described in detail in my 2024 book Who Will Defend Europe?
I had sincerely hoped that by the time the book’s paperback edition was published this year, something would have been done about this national emergency. Instead, according to unconfirmed but persistent suggestions from those in the know about government spending plans, even the half-promises of marginal increases in defense spending that the government has reluctantly made may not be met.
Those promises were already so insubstantial as to be practically irrelevant compared to the scale of the challenge — especially when you discount the proportion of the supposed increase that is made up of accounting fudges like reclassifying other expenditure as “defense”. Now, the indications are growing that the pattern of defense shrinkage of the last 30 years is set to continue.
In previous decades, the main criticism of successive British governments shrinking the armed forces while not reducing the demands placed on them was the failure to reconcile enduring global ambition with an unwillingness to pay for it.
Now the danger is even more immediate and fundamental.
On a study visit to Poland this month, colleagues and I saw how Europe is racing to fortify its eastern defenses amid daily cross-border provocations from Russia’s primary European ally, Belarus. The British government, meanwhile, appears comfortable with strategic complacency.
That’s a willful dereliction of the government’s primary responsibility to the nation, its society, and its citizens.
In their public statements, Defence Secretary John Healey and Prime Minister Keir Starmer seem to accept that the risks are fast-rising.
“It is my first duty as Prime Minister to keep our country safe,” Starmer said in April. “In an ever more dangerous world, increasing the resilience of our country so we can protect the British people, resist future shocks and bolster British interests, is vital.”
But the talk is not matched by action. The gap with NATO allies that are serious about defense is now widening fast as the UK accelerates backwards into defense irrelevance. If it has not done so already, NATO needs to wake up fast to the growing UK-shaped gap in its plans.
The refusal to meet an existential challenge to Europe is a betrayal not only of the UK itself and of its allies, but most of all of Ukraine, where men and women continue to bleed and die to buy precious time. For now, the British government seems willing still to squander that gift.
Keir Giles has provided analysis and foresight for governments worldwide on the Russian threat. An associate fellow with Chatham House and member of the Conflict Studies Research Centre, he is a regular commentator for UK and international media. His prescient books include ‘What Deters Russia’ and ‘Moscow Rules: What Drives Russia to Confront the West’.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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