Burnham will face similar spending difficulties if he enters Downing Street, and has already acknowledged the need to cut other departmental funding to plug gaps. He and his team see DSRB as a worthwhile way to help inject more money into rearmament, according to the same two allies.
However, Starmer and Chancellor Rachel Reeves have long been cool on the idea and have so far resisted overtures from Ottawa to join when the bank is founded at the NATO gathering.
Gordon Brown, the former prime minister who Starmer has brought back as his global finance envoy, has been in discussions with Carney, but the Treasury now appears to be focused on merging the DSRB with the U.K.’s Multilateral Defence Mechanism with Finland and the Netherlands.
Reeves told the Commons this week: “We are … working closely with Canada on how we can bring the MDM and DSRB together so we can have one model that helps us better fund defense in our country and across Europe.”
Supporters of the bank say such a merger would delay it beyond the Ankara summit.
One MP familiar with the discussions said, “these things are working on completely different timescales,” and that DSRB is “ready to go,” whereas “there is no detail on MDM at all, so it’s impossible to talk about merging without stalling DSRB.”