By 1935, as Nazi Germany grew ever stronger, Britain’s political classes faced an invidious choice. Rearming too quickly risked wrecking the economy. Moving too slowly could leave the country dangerously exposed.
The orthodox view, championed by Neville Chamberlain as Chancellor of the Exchequer and then Prime Minister, was committed to avoiding the dangers of inflation and excessive borrowing, an outlook underpinned by a horror at the prospect of another world war.
A small but growing body of heretics observed this with rising dismay. Driven by horror at the prospect of defeat, they insisted that caution itself was the danger.
In July 1936, Winston Churchill suggested that as much as 30% of industrial production capacity should be given over to arms manufacturing, under a proclamation of a “state of emergency”. If that meant sacrificing “a good deal of the comfort and smoothness of our ordinary life”, so be it.
To Chamberlain, this raised the specter of a bloated, coercive state, crowding out industry, wrecking trade and trampling cherished liberties. Even so, he recognized an unmistakable darkening of the global atmosphere.
Over the next three years, he raised defense spending from 2.5% of GNP in 1935 to 3.8% by 1937, and beyond. Borrowing and taxation breached orthodox limits. In March 1939, Hitler completed his conquest of Czechoslovakia, trashing the much-hailed deal Chamberlain had cut with him at Munich. The government finally agreed to create a Ministry of Supply, and to introduce conscription.
One by one, public figures who had resisted the push to rearm had found their fears of war, tyranny, and economic disaster overridden by the fear of defeat.
Today, the heirs of Chamberlain and of Churchill do not face the threat of land invasion. Nonetheless, in the face of growing geopolitical threats, they are beginning to worry once again about rebuilding Britain’s depleted military: about the cost of doing so, but also the risks of choosing not to.
In February 2024, the Starmer government began the process of lifting military spending to 2.5% of GDP by 2027, and has since talked (but not committed) to a target of 3% by 2029. This has not assuaged rising frustration at a perceived lack of urgency.
Even publication of the government’s Defence Investment Plan, which will put flesh on the bones of the government’s 2025 Strategic Defence Review (SDR), is currently months overdue, and no publication date has been given. This triggered a rare intervention by Lord George Robertson — former Labour Defence Secretary, ex-NATO Secretary General, and leader of the SDR — lambasting the government for “corrosive complacency”, describing the Treasury’s approach as “vandalism” and stating that the UK was “underprepared”, “underinsured”, and that its “national security and safety [are] in peril.”
Given the parlous state of the UK’s finances (the debt-to-GDP ratio is high at an anticipated 95% this year), Robertson suggested, increased defense spending will have to be funded by cuts elsewhere, mainly to the fast-rising welfare bill. However, such a reordering of priorities will need public buy-in. The prime minister has talked of making Britain’s security “a collective national endeavor”, which implies the sacrifice of comfort Churchill once called for.
Given historically low levels of trust in politics, fostering any such feeling will be forbiddingly difficult, especially given the Ministry of Defence’s deservedly poor reputation for slow, wasteful procurement.
The shift in public opinion in the 1930s from fear of war to fear of defeat suggests that focusing on nightmare scenarios may be more effective than appealing to national unity. The chair of the House of Commons defense select committee, the Labour MP Tan Dhesi, has called for “a coordinated effort to communicate with the public on the level of threat we face and what to expect in the event of conflict.”
In a report last November, his committee backed the SDR’s suggestion of “regular public briefings on attacks against the UK” — but lamented the government’s failure to act on this. (Media reports suggest ministers worry about stoking public anxiety.) As noted by a member of Parliament’s upper house this month: “The public remain blissfully unaware of the various threats and risks that the nation faces, let alone their urgency and scale.”
Echoing Churchill’s campaigns of the 1930s, a concerted push to restore Britain’s military capacity also implies a more coercive role for the state. The SDR recommended that the government take on reserve powers “to respond effectively in the event of escalation towards a war involving the UK or its allies”.
This would involve the power to mobilize industry and “private and commercial assets”, giving the state “ready access to private-sector infrastructure for operations”. However, this raises a question: how much of British industry is in foreign ownership, and what barriers might this present to any such state intervention? It also points to a rising European wariness of excessive reliance on contracts with US arms companies.
Perhaps the precedent from the 1930s that will both require the most political effort and deliver the greatest payoff lies in the reaffirmation of democracy as a reason to defend the country.
In the 1930s, democracy was seen as failing in its promises to improve ordinary people’s lives; autocracies appeared to have greater momentum. Then as now, this corroded confidence among moderates and bolstered domestic extremists, especially on the right. The risk of external attack by autocratic enemies and a nationally understood risk of defeat were crucial in compelling people to decide that democracy had to be defended.
Today, the British political class must persuade the public, and themselves, that however terrible the prospect of war, the defeat of democratic Europe would be even worse.
Phil Tinline is the author of The Death of Consensus: 100 Years of British Political Nightmares and Ghosts of Iron Mountain: The Hoax of the Century, Its Enduring Impact, and What It Reveals About America Today. A longer version of this article appeared in the Spring issue of Chatham House’s quarterly magazine, The World Today.
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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