Starmer Defense Plan Gives Successor Tools to Fight UK’s Threats

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(Bloomberg) — Prime Minister Keir Starmer said he was confident his likely successor, Andy Burnham, would maintain the UK’s commitment to defense, as he laid out plans to invest £15 billion ($20 billion) to modernize the British military. 

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Starmer said the character of modern warfare was “changing before our eyes,” as he detailed proposals for new drones and artificial intelligence programs as part of the country’s long-delayed Defense Investment Plan. The blueprint will increase military spending to almost £80 billion a year by 2029.

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That includes some £5 billion of funding for drones and autonomous weapons over the next four years, the country’s largest bet to date on the technology. Starmer said the plan would increase defense spending to 2.7% of economic output by 2030, although that’s short of the the 3% sought by former Defense Secretary John Healey. 

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“The best way to avoid war is to prepare for it; the best way to defend is to deter,” Starmer said Tuesday in a speech in Berkshire, near London on Tuesday. The plan would “make the British people safer by driving a generational transformation of our armed forces,” he said. 

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Starmer is seeking to shore up his legacy by plowing cash into defense, just eight days after announcing that he’s stepping down as Labour leader and prime minister. The premier has repeatedly trumpeted “the biggest sustained increase in defense spending since the end of the Cold War” with expenditure due to rise to 2.6% of economic output next year. He’ll now take the document to a NATO summit next week.

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“This plan represents our best judgment of what the country needs to meet this moment and it is a platform on which I know my successor will build,” Starmer said. That successor is likely to be Burnham, the former Greater Manchester mayor who returned to the House of Commons last week and is so far the only candidate to succeed the premier.

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But the military blueprint has proven controversial. It was supposed to be published in the fall, but was repeatedly delayed amid intense wrangling between the Treasury and Healey, who was seeking to plug a £28 billion gap. When just £13.5 billion was made available, he quit earlier this month slamming a draft plan that he said fell short of “the resources that the nation needs to defend the country at this time of rising threats.”  

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However, Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves said in her own remarks Tuesday that defense had been a “defining pillar” of Starmer’s leadership. “His absolute moral clarity in the face of the threats that we face as a nation will go down as part of his legacy,” she said.

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Healey’s successor, Dan Jarvis, ultimately managed to extract an extra £1.5 billion from Britain’s finance department, and is due to spell out more details of the plan in the House of Commons later on Tuesday.

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“I have seen him make tough decisions, and always with conviction and assurance,” Jarvis said of Starmer. 

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Britain’s promise to NATO also includes getting wider spending on security — including critical infrastructure and energy security — to 5%. Tuesday’s plan will get such expenditure up to 4.2% by the end of the decade, Starmer said.