LONDON — The United Kingdom will have to slash public sector spending to finance defense, causing “pain and great difficulty” for the ruling Labour Party, a former NATO chief and senior party official warned on Tuesday.
George Robertson — a former U.K. defence secretary who co-wrote last year’s Britain’s Strategic Defence Review and is now in the House of Lords — warned Labour MPs that Britain’s military spending promises and its NATO commitments must “come from domestic budgets.”
Speaking at the Defence Strategic Communications Conference in London, Robertson said there is “no other way” defense can be funded as there is “no money, no surplus money at all.”
This “is going to cause a problem for many of the Labour MPs,” he said, referencing needed cuts to overseas development, net zero climate goals and transport.
The U.K.’s high interest costs also rule out more borrowing. That “doesn’t seem to me to be the right way of doing it,” Robertson said, although he didn’t rule out the idea of a multilateral defense bank to provide low-cost defense loans as well as war bonds as ideas to help lessen the burden of defense spending.
Robertson laid out the scale of the challenge, noting that the U.K. would need an additional £36 billion a year to reach NATO’s new 2035 spending target of 3.5 percent of GDP on defense; it spent 2.4 percent of GDP on defense last year.
“When you consider that our total education budget is £95 billion, the Home Office budget is £20 billion, transport is £28 billion, and justice is £12 billion, you begin to realize that what we are committed to are eye-watering sums of money from the taxpayer in order to make the country safer than it is today, and to keep up with what NATO has said,” he said.
Deputy Prime Minster David Lammy told the BBC over the weekend that Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s promise for defense spending to reach 3 percent of GDP was “absolutely sacrosanct,” and that money “will be found” for new equipment and infrastructure.
However, Robertson stressed that Starmer hasn’t come clean about the costs of reaching that spending level, saying those pledges drive “logically and inevitably towards a conclusion that says: ‘And therefore we are going to spend money.’”
But with the rising threat from Russia, the U.K. has no option but to increase defense spending, he warned.
Some Labour Party members who are “of a pacifistic nature” must be persuaded to accept that “the only way to prevent war is by preparing for war,” he said.
“The public is still too sanguine about the threat, too comfortable in the way of life that we are leading at the present moment, and too oblivious to all of the signs that are actually there visibly in front of us, that we are in danger, and that we are under-prepared as well,” Robertson added.
While the political challenge of boosting military budgets is enormous, dodging the issue isn’t an option, he said.
“When the lights go out, when the hospitals close and the data centers melt without air conditioning, then the public will rightly say to all of us, all of us, why did you not do something before to sort this out?
“And, if we’re attacked with cruise and ballistic missiles when deterrents fail, will we stand in the ruins of our cities and our homes and our schools, and proudly say, well, we protected the fiscal rules?”