Big announcement. Big spending. Big numbers. That’s what the prime minister wants you to know.
But do the numbers stack up?
£59.8bn is the Ministry of Defence budget in the coming year. £59.8bn. It’s the lion’s share of military spending – which makes up 2.3% of our GDP.
And £13.4bn is how much more Sir Keir Starmer says it will cost to increase defence spending to the government’s new target of 2.5% of GDP.
Now that’s an enormous amount of public spending. Sums designed to impress Donald Trump. And it would require big big cuts elsewhere to achieve.
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If that is the scale of the increase.
Starmer has offered up one big cut to pay for it. Slashing the aid budget…
Currently, it’s due to be £13.7bn – 0.5% of national income. Starmer today said this would drop to 0.3% of national income.
But here’s the thing. That saves just short of £6bn. That leaves a big, big shortfall.
So what does the government say about this gap? Well quietly, the government effectively admit to some creative accounting in their use of the £13.4bn figure.
This £7.9bn apparent shortfall is the gap between what we pay now for defence today, and what it would have risen to anyway in 2027 because defence spending was pegged at 2.3% of GDP.
Now I wouldn’t ordinarily call that section an increase in spending, but it gets Keir Starmer that more impressive-sounding figure to brandish in front of Donald Trump.
Now Labour promised to raise international development in the manifesto, not cut it. Here’s why they’ve done it anyway – exclusive YouGov polling which shows the public backs it by a margin of more than two to one, with 62% saying they support a cut to aid to fund defence and just 25% opposing.
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Labour voters like it much less – 48% for, 38% against – but look at this – among voters who backed Reform last year, it’s a belter, with 93% in favour and 4% against.
But so much of the spending side of this actually remains a mystery.
For instance, Starmer said today that some intelligence and security spending would count towards the 2.5% NATO target from 2027. And the government won’t answer whether future payments for the Chagos islands might be part of it too. Do these truly qualify as military spending?
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If we’re being honest, once you start to prod, lots of bits of defence spending turn out to be pretty secret.
Government departments won’t actually give me a cash figure for how much the defence spending amounts to, once everything is included. I asked for a complete list of what does and doesn’t count towards our NATO 2.5% target – and the government refused to say.
Keir Starmer wants distractions from the big picture. He wants Donald Trump to understand we’re paying a lot more.
Let’s hope it does the trick in the White House later this week.
